Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

The Spectator

Interview: Paul Durcan on poetry and art

Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper. Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’. He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence: ‘All together elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ miles and miles of golden moss/ Silently and very fast.’ We’re here to talk about Durcan’s 22nd collection of poetry Praise In Which I Live and Move And Have My Being, but the conversation has strayed to a time when the naive 19-year-old poet arrived in London in search of

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: George Orwell

The Orwell Prize was awarded this week, which gives cause to consider Orwell himself. Biographer D.J. Taylor tries to delineate the myths that have arisen around Orwell in the film above, but can provide only an impression. Lack of evidence is, of course, a major problem. Orwell’s archive, though extensive, seems incomplete, and no recording of him survives, not even of his voice. He remains a tantalising figure. The body of Orwell’s writing proves similarly problematic. It is far from consistent philosophically or stylistically, and veers with equal brilliance between prophesy and paranoia. This is not altogether surprising. Much of Orwell’s work was reportage or a fictionalised account of the world around

Thursday

Steven Mcgregor

A writer’s vanity

‘Jordan’s fourth biography, that’s vanity.  Only writers are subjected to this kind of inquisition about how their work reaches the viewer,’ quipped a panelist at a recent Birkbeck University event on self-publishing. Someone had mentioned the pejorative, ‘vanity press’ and the room of writers stirred. All were seated in neat rows in a wood paneled lecture hall off Russell Square. Appropriate given that Virginia Woolf, who once lived two blocks away, self-published. Previously, this was known as private publishing. According to Alison Baverstock, another panelist and authority on self-publishing, the Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, James Joyce, all covered the initial cost of bringing their work to market, at

Emily Rhodes

Travelling tales

I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip. Trying to fit everything you will need for the next six months inside something small enough to go on your back should be a liberating experience, but I found it alarming to say the least. As well as a scant assortment of clothes, I remember squeezing in all sorts of odd things like quick-drying trousers, a clothes line, a sink

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Mary Killen

The journalist and author Mary Killen is in the limelight this week. In addition to writing the Dear Mary column in the Spectator every week, she has written a self-help book about the loving Queen. How the Queen Can Make You Happy will be published on 1 June. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The William stories by Richmal Crompton and the The Passion Flower Hotel, which turned out to be secretly written not by a schoolgirl but by Roger Longrigg the father of Fan Longrigg, the singer and producer of The Land of Sometimes a charming 2012 CD to inspire musical participation in children,

Toby Young Toby Young

Allan Bloom: Prophet of Doom

Allan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with the following sentence: ‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’ In the twenty-five years that have passed since the book’s publication, that belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. It’s not simply true of American universities, it’s true of British universities as well. Indeed, this all-encompassing relativism — which Bloom says is regarded as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free society’ — is shared by the educated and uneducated alike. The only people in contemporary Britain

Tuesday

John Bryant

Coe’s lordly challenge

Britain can look back with pride and nostalgia to the great Olympic Games of the past.  London in 1908, and the so-called ‘austerity Games’ of 1948, were great triumphs. Against the odds of time and money, these were Games to savour — etched in the memory with flickering black-and-white images of hope.  This is the third time that London has held the Games (no other city can match this) but London has bid for them only once — for the 2012 Games. The Olympics of 1908 and 1948 came to London because no-one else wanted them. Bizarrely, and this may tell us much about Britain’s sporting and class-bound heritage, all

David Blackburn

Waterstones re-enters the digital age

Well, that was a turn up for the books. The expectation was that Waterstones would join forces with Barnes and Noble to compete in the digital market; it was almost a certainty. But, those predictions were dashed yesterday when Waterstones announced that it is going to get into bed with the digital devil itself: Amazon. The two companies have agreed a deal that will allow Waterstones to sell Amazon Kindle e-readers in its stores for the first time, while also offering free Wi-Fi in store as part of an extensive store upgrade funded by the company’s new owner, the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. Precise details of the deal have not

Monday

David Blackburn

Voices of the Taliban

Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets or on scraps of paper. You might expect the poems to be reactionary or propagandistic — and, for sure, there is blood and thunder. But reviewers also talk of empathy, aesthetic sensibility and the familiar worries of young men in love. Michael Semple, the EU’s former representative in Afghanistan, said: ‘This is an essential work.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Bumper issues

It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels and lax waste disposal, Roberts says, an aquatic catastrophe looms. The Sunday Times gave Roberts a rave review (£). A man named Brian Schofield wrote: ‘There isn’t much optimism in Roberts’s conclusions regarding climate change and the oceans, just a declaration that “there is a less dismal future ahead if we quickly wean society off

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

A lord of thin air

It is easy, especially if one is not American, to feel ambivalent about the fictions of John Updike. The immaculate clarity of his prose style, the precision of his vocabulary, the tenderness underlying his Wasp comedies of manners, the puckish wit rising above a sorrowful temperament — none of these can be gainsaid. But the ways in which his novels seemed to raise the banality of fornication to some remote altitude of meaning, his efforts to imbue the quandaries of adultery and cuckoldry with transcendent significance, can seem relentless and overdone. Updike at times resembles those fanatical sexologists who gathered around Alfred Kinsey interrogating Americans about the minutiae of their

Ian Thomson

Life imitates art

The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible. I’ll go further: he’s perfectly revolting.’ How could my wife not like Steptoe? The series had been a hit from the moment it was launched in 1962 and drew audiences of over 20 million. Ray Galton and his co-writer Alan Simpson combined a seaside postcard sauciness with the cockney menace of Harold Pinter (only with

Penelope Lively

Ladies, you don’t want to go back there

In 2009 a magazine survey found that many women in their twenties wanted to stay at home baking while their husbands went out to work: ‘I’d love to be a captive wife.’ Jessica Mann’s thoughtful and emphatic book is a riposte to this, an overview of the Fifties, which she calls a polemic and a personal memoir, winding together fact and opinion with her own experience of being, first a teenager and then a young woman at that time. The result is a richly readable and persuasive piece of work. I found myself reverently ticking the notes I took (‘Yes! Yes!’) while being reminded of aspects of those days I

Michael Paraskos

Cracks in the landscape

Sartre tried to prove that hell is other people by locking three strangers in a room for eternity and watching them torture each other. Similarly Will Cohu seems determined to show that hell is our own families. What is remarkable is that Cohu’s family members were not a collection of horrific monsters. On the contrary, they appear normal and often likeable people. They are almost disturbingly typical of many middle-class families with children who, like Cohu himself, were born in the 1960s. The names and places might change, but the characters and events are surprisingly familiar. The Wolf Pit opens with an evocation of the North Yorkshire moors that is

Peter Parker

Photo finish

Christopher Isherwood kept diaries almost all his life. The first extant one dates from 1917, when he was 12, and like most schoolboys he used it more to measure than record his days: ‘Work in morning, walk in afternoon. In choir. More work. Nothing special.’ At Cambridge, however, inspired by the W.N.P. Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man, he began keeping a more detailed and reflective record of his experiences. Fragmentary diaries survive from the years 1928 to 1938, but the four volumes of Isherwood’s published diaries begin with his arrival in America in January 1939 and end in 1983, three years before his death. One volume, ‘reconstructed’ by

William Leith

Who needs money?

I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader — and, sometimes, the anti-leader — of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Both have written brilliant books about the history of money. As you’d expect, Brown thinks that money, in its various forms, has made the world a prosperous and interesting place, and Graeber thinks that money has divided the world into two tribes — a

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: Prep-school passions

In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood  (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s masterpiece, which, though not popular, attracted the admiration of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, J.R. Ackerley, John Betjeman, Philip Toynbee, C.P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Frank Tuohy and Alan Sillitoe. According to Elizabeth Bowen, he was ‘the most neglected writer of his generation’. Explaining the title to his friend Michael Redgrave, Green (pictured above) said: ‘The theme is unequivocally that of the conditioning of a homosexual and the foreshadowing of his future love pattern.’ The novel is about a young boy’s idealistic adoration of an unresponsive older boy in

Friday

David Blackburn

Meeting Shin Dong-hyuk

‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’ You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming human. He is the only person born in a North Korean concentration camp to have escaped to the West. He was 23 when he fled. Ten years before, he betrayed his mother and older brother’s escape plans to a camp guard in the hope of winning favour. He was pleased when they were executed, pleased

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Carlos Fuentes

The late Carlos Fuentes was a fluent English speaker — the product of being the son of a diplomat and his own careers in international academia and diplomacy. Here he is talking with Charlie Rose in February 2011. The interview captures the sense of how important politics was to Fuentes and the other writers of ‘El Boom’. The conversation is almost exclusively about politics past, present and future, touching on the drugs war, Cuba and U decline. Reference is also made to Garcia Marquez and his disagreements with Fuentes over the politics of the recent past. It is also fascinating, from the usually self-absorbed European perspective, to watch the two Americas sparring.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Audiobooks: the insomniac’s dream

I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding off being his mellifluous Yorkshire tones relating a Peter Cook one-liner from 1963. I’m talking audiobooks, of course. There’s a nebulous point somewhere sleeping and wakefulness, a state where insomnia still reigns but you’re too tired actually to turn the light on and read. The solution? An audiobook. You get the hypnotic effect of a