Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

William Osborne

A dirty, weaselly word

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?   I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Samantha Brick

Journalist and former TV producer, Samantha Brick was recently castigated for her Daily Mail article suggesting that some might be intimidated by her good looks. But since we’re always game at Shelf Life, we invited her to reveal which books she would read during solitary confinement, where she wouldn’t like to find herself with Patrick Bateman and what she used to read under the covers. Samantha Brick has a personal website. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Lots of ex-pats-who-have-relocated-to-France type memoirs. I’ve just negotiated a deal to write my own warts’n’all version of living the French ‘dream’, so I thought I really ought to read the others

Tuesday

Michael Henderson

The alternative Olympic song book

The song list drawn up for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is a disgrace. Surely everybody knows that by now, but then what can you expect when the selection is made by a pair of disc jockeys? There is nothing that reflects our nation’s love affair with the sea, no acknowledgement of our bawdy humour, no hymn or carol, no G and S, and the brass band appears somewhat bathetically only in the theme tune to Coronation Street. You could pop into any snug bar in the kingdom, and find a pair of sozzled old topers who could run up a better list. The obsession with pop music

J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Clive Aslet

Et in arcadia ego

The economy is in tatters, Europe in turmoil — but don’t worry: there is an antidote to the prevailing angst, and it’s provided by this book. It could be read simply as a close look at an undemonstrative corner of the English countryside, informed by the special understanding of a landowner, Jason Gathorne-Hardy, and an artist, Tessa Newcomb. But really it offers a philosophy. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin,’ said Voltaire. And that’s just what author and illustrator do here, both practically and imaginatively.   Each of the monthly chapters opens with a paragraph of ‘garden notes’, compiled from the diaries of working gardeners. So much for the practical side.

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Charles Cotton’s rebellion

Stanzas from ‘The Retirement’ Farewell thou busy world, and may We never meet again: Here I can eat, and sleep, and pray, And do more good in one short day, Than he who his whole age out-wears Upon thy most conspicuous theatres, Where nought but vice and vanity do reign. Good God! how sweet are all things here! How beautiful the fields appear! How cleanly do we feed and lie! Lord! what good hours do we keep! How quietly we sleep! What peace! what unanimity! How innocent from the lewd fashion, Is all our business, all our conversation! Oh my beloved rocks! that rise To awe the earth and brave

Anna Baddeley

Across the literary pages: Alastair Campbell’s Burden of Power

The publishing juggernaut that is Alastair Campbell’s diaries rumbles on, with the arrival of the fourth instalment, Burden of Power: The Countdown to Iraq. The 752-page volume covers the most tumultuous part of Blair’s premiership, taking readers from 9/11 to Campbell’s resignation two years later.   This is the sort of book whose reviews are so predictable, there’s not really any point in reading them. In fact, you could probably write your own without reading the book: ‘Those looking for revelations about Iraq will be disappointed … We don’t find out anything about Blair/Brown we didn’t know already … The prose is plain at best: Alastair Campbell is no stylist

Saturday

Frank Field

Enoch Powell as a Parliamentarian

A new collection of essays and reminisces, called Enoch at 100, has been published to mark Enoch Powell’s centenary. In this piece, Frank Field recalls his affection and admiration for his fellow parliamentarian.   When I joined the House in 1979, Enoch Powell was firmly established as one of the greatest political figures in the Commons. Whilst admired he was also feared and herein lay the strength of his parliamentary presence and its weakness. As a schoolboy I was already aware of Enoch and there were three aspects of his political life that had already impressed themselves on my mind by the time I entered the House. There was first,

Lewis Jones

Bookends: One for the road

Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety. In The Juice (Bloomsbury, £14.99), his third collection of wine columns (most of them for House & Garden and the Wall Street Journal), he exhibits a similar mix of qualities, contriving to be both jaded and puppyish, sometimes simultaneously, as when he boasts of his ‘Bad to the Beaune’ T-shirt. Like the character in the film Sideways, McInerney deplores what he calls the ‘ripe, fruity, oaky, over-manipulated Frankenwine’ that has been typical of so much New World production, and loves the subtle yet earthy charm of pinot noir, above all

Charlotte Moore

Welsh wizardry

After Brock is a slightly eccentric rite-of-passage novel rooted firmly in the Marches. In September 2009, we are told, an 18-year-old boy called Nat Kempsey disappeared for five days into the Berwyn mountains, on the Welsh side of the border. Paul Binding is at all times specific about time, place and names; the story has an air of veracity which carries the reader with it even when the dialogue seems forced and the coincidences improbable. Nat, recovering from his mountain ordeal in the bedroom above his father’s kite shop in Leominster, tells his story to a more-than-averagely alert reporter from the local newspaper. It soon becomes evident that the story

Justin Marozzi

Travails with Auntie

He’s the Housewives’ Favourite, the Voice of Middle England on Radio 2, one moment discussing the perils of your other half leaving the gas on, the next slipping on an Elvis Costello track to liven up your lunch. Bit of a cheeky chappie, affable, engaging, amusing, doesn’t appear to take himself too seriously. We like that in a broadcaster. Self-important windbags James Naughtie, Nick Robinson and John Simpson, do please take note. Jeremy discusses neighbours who keep sofas and old cars in their garden, no-fault dismissal, how a tragic car crash shattered one family’s lives and breastfeeding three-year olds, the show’s website declares of his latest programme. This is the

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

There’s something about Mary

I like books which have their own linguistic microclimate. Fictional first-person narratives are where you tend to find these.  The moment you step inside a good one, you enter a distinctive country as encountered by the narrator, using his or her limited vocabulary. It’s the very constrictedness of the vocabulary that makes the story gripping: it forces you to live inside the narrator’s mind. Blinkered fictional characters created by unblinkered authors can make for surprisingly illuminating books.   How about this for a microclimate to step into? this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand. in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one

Mark Ashurst

Never go back

Doctor Livingstone is said to have found the swamps of Elephant Marsh impenetrable. Ellis Hock has no such trouble. A long flight, hired car and motorcycle taxi carry the kindly American across the Malawian hinterland, where the Shire river feeds the Zambezi at its border with Mozambique. Lured by the ‘green glow’ of memory, Hock returns gratefully to the cluster of mud huts where, in the bright dawn of Independence, he spent four years as a graduate volunteer in the US Peace Corps. Now 62, every day of Hock’s adult life — as the nattily dressed owner of a menswear store in small-town Massachussetts — has been freighted with nostalgia.

Ian Thomson

Man smart

Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average of three million bunches of ‘green gold’ a year. Harry Belafonte’s greatest hit, ‘The Banana Boat Song’, was sung by Port Antonio dock workers at the break of daylight when their shift was over. You know the song. The workers are tired and they want the day’s banana haul to be tallied and paid for: ‘Come, Mister Tally Man, tally me banana.’ Belafonte, an American of Jamaican heritage, understood the poverty of Caribbean life. Born in Harlem in 1927, he

David Gilmour

Humanity on the scrapheap

One night a few years ago in Washington DC, Katherine Boo tripped over an ‘unabridged dictionary’, broke three ribs, punctured a lung and, as she lay on the floor unable to reach a telephone, ‘arrived at a certain clarity’ about her future. With most people — certainly those like Boo with a history of wretched health — the clarity would have taken the form of some assuasive advice: ‘Take it easy,’ ‘Don’t push yourself,’ ‘Find something less difficult to write about.’ For Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has written mainly about poverty in the US, clarity suggested the opposite. If she was going to be felled by an unabridged dictionary, she

Allan Massie

Give me excess of it

There is a joke about a retired colonel whose aberrant behaviour had him referred to a psychoanalyst. He emerged from the session fuming. ‘Damn fool says I’m in love with my umbrella. Bloody nonsense.’ Long pause, then: ‘I’m fond of it of course.’ Quite so, and likewise while people may not actually fall in love with their iPhone, 18 out of 200 students surveyed at Stanford University admitted to ‘patting’ the little thing. They may be as uncomfortable without it as an alcoholic in need of a drink before opening time. The Fix is a fascinating and at times alarming study of addiction. Damian Thompson writes with the authority of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A tough broad

When the modern reader thinks of Lillian Hellman, if he or she thinks of her at all, the image that presents itself is likely to be of a wizened old doll marooned in a gigantic mink coat, a still bigger hairdo — and wreathed in the smoke emanating not only from a cigarette but from her smouldering pants. Her enemy Mary McCarthy said in a 1979 television interview that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the” ’. That memorable zinger — and the lawsuit that followed, still ongoing at the time of Hellman’s death — all but did for her reputation. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about the golden

Friday

Anna Baddeley

The Spectrum – the week in books

Up: BAD HABITS 500K to spare? Four pages of calfskin, 1,300 year old manuscript could be yours in the Sotheby’s summer sale next month. In De Laude Virginitatis [In Praise of Virginity], Anglo-Saxon cleric Aldhelm advises the nuns of Barking Abbey to avoid garments which might ‘set off’ the body and ‘nourish the fires of sexual anticipation.’ But call off the Slutwalk: given this is the first known text aimed exclusively at a female readership, the proto-feminist bishop is doing it for the sisters. Up: PUPPY LOVE Hands up who wants to see a video of Somerset Maugham cuddling puppies? The footage is especially poignant in light of the notorious

J P O'Malley

Interview: Jorie Graham’s poetry

Possessing a meticulously detailed and layered style, as well as having an exceptional ability to describe nature, Jorie Graham’s poetry is primarily concerned with how we can relate our internal consciousness to the exterior natural world we inhabit. In 1996, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, earned Graham the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She is currently the Boylston professor of poetry at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book, Place will be her twelfth collection to date. She spoke to the Spectator about why poetry needs to be reclaimed to the oral tradition, how technology is corrupting our imagination, and why her work is laced with contradictions and paradoxes.

Thursday

Nigel Jones

War of the world

Of the writing of books on the Second World War, and the reading public’s appetite for them, seemingly, there is no end. And the past few months have seen a particularly rich crop from some of our finest and most senior historians of the conflict; their books representing the considered summation of their thoughts on the worst disaster humankind has yet to experience.   Of the quartet under review, David Edgerton’s Britain’s War Machine offers the boldest revisionist argument that seeks to overturn some of our most treasured assumptions about Britain’s role in the war. Until Edgerton detonated his grenade our lazy assumption was that Britain — particularly in that