Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Eliza Griswold and the clash of civilisations

Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves on a couple of dollars a day — that’s to say nothing of the millions of unemployed vagrants. The government oscillates between inertia and rapacity, so competing religious organisations have emerged in its place. But while religious communities provide legal services and schools, they can also incite sectarian violence as Nigerians contest their country’s dwindling

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

‘Oh yes, Dracula,’ said a colleague. ‘Two splendid bits at either end, and 200 boring pages in the middle.’ It was exaggeration, but only slight. Dracula sags in the middle, but that is a reflection of the knockout opening and conclusion. Film adaptations have the luxury of cutting out the fat to concentrate on Jonathan Harker’s torment at the hands of the Count and the exploits of the League, while also emphasising important plot details like flesh, flesh and flesh.   This is a year for literary anniversaries. Lawrence Durrell is in danger of being lost to posterity, and Dickens remains inimitable. But while you might struggle to identify the essential

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Inside books: Long live the classics!

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The reason for the panic is thus: the great majority of classic works of literature are old — think Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes — and, therefore, out of copyright. That means that anyone who has the time and inclination can publish Dickens online and nobody can come after them screaming copyright theft. So an eBook

David Blackburn

Would you like these books on your shelves?

Penguin has launched a new design for the Penguin English Library. The press blurb says, ‘Each cover is a crafted gem, they’ll look and feel lovely in your hands.’ And they do. Steal into a bookshop in the next couple of days and hold one. The covers are individual and relevant to the book — Far From the Madding Crowd has a symmetrical series of bees set against a honeyed background — and the paper, though very thin, has a smooth lacquer that makes your fingers slide over the pages. The problem is the spines. The blurb says: ‘with a distinctive evolution of the famous Penguin orange spines they’ll striking

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Rachel Johnson

Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having a famous brother. 1) What are you reading at the moment? The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, Frances Osborne’s Park Lane, just finished Philip Gould’s When I Die. Off the record – Fifty Shades of Grey. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton.

David Blackburn

The Spectator’s review of Dracula, 1897

It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree. Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those who’ve been locked in an eerie for the past decade, has proved wildly popular. Vampires also remain popular in academic circles. The Times Higher Education reports that numerous professors convened for a Stoker centenary conference, where they lamented the modern assault on the gothic tradition. They condemned the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on vampire stories,

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Tales from the publishing world

An elderly woman receives a phone call from a once eminent publishing house. The nice man on the phone tells her that his company is going to reprint her deceased father’s books. Wonderful news, she says — delighted that her old man is not quite dead and buried yet. Hope for us, she thinks. The publisher adds that they want a party to mark this important literary event, a proper knees up with champagne and canapés. She’s all for this. What generosity, she thinks. Then they say that want to make a small contribution to the party costs, maybe fifty quid. Traditional publishers are in extremis. Print continues to collapse; eBook sales

The Spectator

Before Sontag became a parody

When an unpublished diary or book of letters from a celebrated writer comes to the attention of the reading public nowadays, there is often a sense that a game is being played between two parties. Writers — being the megalomaniacs they invariably are — dream of grandiosity and world domination, therefore these documents are predominately contrived from the moment pen goes to paper. They are for potential posterity, and a legacy, rather than any truthful insights. The readers readily take part in this charade, hoping to catch their idols off guard in the process. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Diaries 1964-1980 ostensibly plays along in the aforementioned game, but

Monday

David Blackburn

Birthday present from the Bard

St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in the United States, Britain, Germany and Ireland. This massive undertaking is laudable, even though the selection of books is wholly unimaginative. Martina Cole, Audrey Niffenegger and Bernard Cornwell may not need more readers, but their best-selling pot-boilers might get more people reading. Like all the best things in life, one book leads to another. There are readings

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Facing death

Man has conquered his inhibitions to talk about everything other than his own demise. Death is, famously, the last taboo — and, judging by many of the reviews of Philip Gould’s When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, we are no closer to breaking it. The novelist Justin Cartwright describes himself as ‘racked with doubt’ about the correct response of the reviewer of a book that charts a man’s preparations for death from oesophageal cancer. He goes on to ask seven questions on that theme and gets no closer to an answer. Meanwhile, the author Richard Holloway admits (£) to being ‘disturbed by the desperation with which we have become a

Saturday

Conrad Black

The American way of justice

Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster. Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote,

Michael Howard

A law unto itself

One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse: May there always, to add their variety, Be some rather Odd Fish at The House. Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot of such fish in living memory, not least in the Senior Common Room. In my time there was Robin Dundas, with his prurient interest in undergraduates’ sex lives; there was a law don who gave his tutorials in the small hours because he was too busy teaching elsewhere during the day; a sad philosopher whose

Robert Chandler

Ultimate issues

In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when Mandelstam read out his notorious ‘Epigram’ about Stalin; and was Mandelstam a ‘master’? Pasternak sidestepped these questions by saying that it was essential that he and Stalin meet: they needed to ‘speak about ultimate issues, about life and death’. This was in 1934, not long before Mandelstam’s first arrest. Over a quarter of these essays,

Charlotte Moore

Cry freedom

Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the savage civil war of 1971. Philip Hensher has drawn on memory and history — family history and ‘real’ history. Historical characters, notably Sheik Mujib, the courageous and civilised Bangladeshi leader, mingle with semi- and wholly fictional ones. The joins are seamless. Finishing the book, I was startled to realise that Hensher, an Englishman, had written

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

In Blair’s shadow

An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for three quid and found it contained just 85 pages. This one, by Alwyn W. Turner, has only 72 pages, but it’s a penny cheaper at £2.99. I read it in less time than it takes to bake a potato. Turner’s theme is the agony of the British left. In 1992, Labour’s shock defeat at the polls plunged the party into despair and gave the modernisers a mandate to do whatever was necessary to win power. Turner’s plan is to revive

John Preston

One that got away | 21 April 2012

There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However, it’s their crudity that makes them so powerful. One shows a young boy being suspended over a coal fire, a rope round his wrists, a chain round his ankles and a hook through his abdomen. The boy is Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a North Korean labour camp ever to have escaped from one. Shin’s first memory is of being taken to see an execution aged four. He watched a man having his mouth stuffed full of pebbles

Sara Maitland

The calls of the wild

This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has spent the past 40 years recording natural noises — individual species, but more importantly, perhaps, whole habitats and therefore the relationship of the different sounds within specific environments. He has recorded over 15,000 different topographies, and is recognised as a global expert. However — and this is his point — at least half of these ‘soundscapes’ no longer exist; their ancient music has been corroded, thinned out or even silenced by human background din, as well as by the exploitation

Justin Cartwright

Road to ruins

This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’. At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and

D J-Taylor

Nowhere to go but down

I am just old enough to remember the terrific fuss that was made about the first Scots literary renaissance when it kicked into gear in the early 1980s. Inaugurated by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), whipped up into a movement by Gray, Agnes Owens and James Kelman’s Lean Tales (1985), and sent on a downward spiral by the latter’s Booker-winning How Late It Was How Late (1994), its distinguishing features were Glasgie patois, the conviction that everything was Mrs Thatcher’s fault, and a colossal amount of swearing. If you knew the meaning of the word ‘fuck’, a critic once wearily suggested, then about 10 per cent of Kelman’s work was already

Matthew Dennison

Bookends: Tilling tales

Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The latter was the more damaging admission. Lucia is an egotist of monstrous proportions, ruthlessly selfish and staggering in her snobbery. But she is also a life force and, in her flawed but thrusting glory, profoundly life-enhancing. Since her debut in 1920, Lucia has inspired her fair share of loathing — and a corresponding degree of ardour. That ardour stimulated Tom Holt’s two Lucia sequels in the mid-Eighties, and now the second of Guy Fraser-Sampson’s Lucia forays, Lucia on Holiday (Elliott & Thompson, £7.99). Holt’s Lucia novels worked by over-emphasising the