Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Alan Judd

Mission accomplished

Two shots killed Osama bin Laden, one in his chest and one in his left eye. ‘Two taps’ is standard practice for close-quarter shootings — firing twice takes virtually no longer than firing once and you increase (without quite doubling) your chance of an instant kill. He was in his top-floor bedroom, in the dark, and his killers wore night-vision goggles. He died 15 minutes after the first sounds of attack — the roaring of helicopters, the crash-landing of one outside the compound, the blowing of a steel door in the wall. During those fateful 15 minutes he waited with one of his wives in the pitch black of that

Friday

The Spectator

Interview: Jackie Kay’s voice

T.S. Eliot once commented that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality, Reality, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of short-stories, explores the thin line that separates art and the supposed real world. In these 15 stories, 14 of which are written in an intimate first-person voice, Kay brings the reader on a journey with the lonely and dispossessed, as they try and comprehend their own perceived reality. In Mini Me, we follow ─ in a phonetic Scottish dialect ─ Patricia, a middle-aged woman who battles with her weekly dietary schedule; In Hadassah, Kay retells the biblical story of Esther in a modern setting, through the broken English of a prostitute who

David Blackburn

The art of Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of such dark children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, died on Tuesday. Sendak, though hugely popular, always alienated a section of the American public because his books did not conform to their view of childhood. His stories were fantastical, but he insisted that he never lied to children – his grotesque scenes were infused, he said, with reality and fundamental truth. In the video above, he explains that his books were inspired by the memory of what his childhood was like – a mess of vague signals and misunderstandings, a world where poverty created dreams of sensual

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Rainy day reading

I am beginning to lose my patience with the weather. I suspect I am not alone in feeling utterly dispirited by this endless onslaught of rain. We have just come out of the wettest April on record, and still the rain falls … It’s too terrible for words. Except that nothing is too terrible for words. Words do rather a good job of getting things right. So I have turned to words – to written words – to seek advice and find inspiration in the dreadful wet weather. The weather is so deeply ingrained into the English psyche that it is no real surprise to find its presence equally pronounced

Fleur Macdonald

We need to talk about Jacob, and his dad

No matter what anyone might say, no one ever really likes other people’s children. Now, it seems, we’re not even sure if we like our own. Culturally, children became a cause for concern during the seventies. It seemed the fruits of the loins of baby boomers had been spoiled rotten. Spates of possessed brats wreaked havoc in books and on screens. But all that was needed back then was a visit from the local exorcist and a quick mop up of green bile. Nowadays, scary kids are harder to spot. They’re usually apathetic, withdrawn and speak in monosyllables. In other words, you can never be sure whether you’re living with a potential/practicing

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Wanting more than a family history

It’s a dangerous business: rereading books you loved first time round. I found myself with some time on my hands last week and so returned to The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal’s award winning family history, told through an elaborate collection of netsuke, which he inherited from his great uncle. The book was published to fevered critical acclaim. There is evidence of this on the copy I bought last week. The inside and back covers are crammed with luminaries gushing superlatives. It is masterpiece, everyone said. I agreed with them then, but, having taken a more leisurely second read, I’m not so sure. De Waal’s book is certainly

David Blackburn

Thick as thieves

There is honour among thieves. Richard Foreman’s reinvention of A.J. Raffles is underscored by morality of sorts. The exploitative rich are robbed, habitual criminals are caught, and men of true nobility triumph — or at least do not suffer the indignity of having their baubles snaffled by our silver-tongued felons. At the centre of Richard Foreman’s three-storied omnibus is the close and criminal relationship between Raffles and Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders. Raffles, for those of who do not know him, is a debonair rogue — a sparkling bon vivant with penchants for cricket and larceny. He is known as ‘the amateur cracksman’, which is misleading because he is an astonishingly expert

Tuesday

David Blackburn

State of the nation | 8 May 2012

Three clichés walk onto a stage and start telling bad jokes. Welcome to Love, Love, Love, the newish play by Mike Bartlett, playing at the Royal Court until 3rd June. It is 1967, on the night of the first global TV show, when the Beatles sang All You Need is Love. Still reading? Here are the characters. Henry is Jimmy Porter, but 10 years out of date. His younger brother Kenneth, a self-absorbed Oxonian, has pitched camp on his sofa for the summer. Henry is planning a date with Sandra, a tarty waif, also down from Oxford. While Henry’s out buying fish and chips, Sonia and Kenny get stoned, cop-off

Fleur Macdonald

The importance of sex

Last time I made an off the cuff comment calling a book chick lit, I realised the skill involved in making an apology sound genuine, rehabilitating an entire literary genre and standing one’s ground in the space of 140 characters. Why do women bristle at the term chick lit? Why do they forget that a literary rendering of the search for Mr. Right isn’t an affront to the feminist dream nor does it preclude sharp social commentary, a racy plot and some great lines? Jane Austen didn’t look down her nose at it. So I didn’t roll my eyes on seeing The Book of Summers: the pastels, swirly font and the fey title.

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 7 May 2012

Hilary Mantel dominates the bank holiday books pages. Bring Up The Bodies, the sequel to the Booker winning Wolf Hall, will be published this Thursday, and the acclaim has already begun. Mantel has been interviewed for the Telegraph by the renowned Tudor historian Thomas Penn. They talked of history and fiction, very carefully and very slowly: Penn says that Mantel speaks in ‘perfect paragraphs’. The Telegraph also carries an extract from Bring Up The Bodies. It has the searing pace and all the subtleties that characterised Wolf Hall. Cromwell travels to see Katherine of Aragon, and the two speak of the king’s latest woman problem, in this case Anne Boleyn’s

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Ruchir Sharma, and future economic miracles

You know the script by now: the world’s economy is being built by the BRICs. It has been the standard analysis for more than a decade, but flailing western countries have come to place evermore trust in the enterprise of Brazil, Russia, India and China. But have expectations become excessive? Ruchir Sharma, author of a new book called Breakout Nations, believes so. He argues that the last decade was exceptional and that we need to recalibrate our approach to emerging markets. He identifies a number of nations which are ripe to breakout in the next few years, including Indonesia and Nigeria. His economic case is compelling, but its political underpinnings

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Toni Morrison

What is with Toni Morrison? The Nobel laureate returned to fray this week with Home – a typically bleak novella, according to Daisy Dunn’s review. Morrison has forged a sparkling career in grim territory. Why? Simple, she says in the interview above, the black novelists of the ‘60s were predominantly men writing ‘revolutionary books’ that offered a ‘positive, racially uplifting rhetoric’. Complacency became the enemy as prejudice waned. ‘No one’s going to remember that it wasn’t always beautiful,’ she says. So here we are, being reminded of when things and people were ugly.

Thursday

Mark Mason

The perfect non-fiction book

I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect non-fiction book has already been written. In 1955. And once a year ever since then, for that matter. And yes, every year it does hit the top of the bestseller lists. It’s the Guinness Book of Records. When I wrote novels, publishers used to assuage my worries about a lack of reviews by pointing out

Daisy Dunn

Down the rabbit hole

In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During her training a woman had told the young, bilingual agent, ‘We girls have an advantage over the men. We can always carry items – messages and the like – where no gentleman will ever see them. You might call it inside information.’ Heeding her advice, the spy (Marian is her natural name) takes a pair

Polly Toynbee

They’re all in it together

However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult of leadership in hock to overmighty media oligarchs, all ominously suggestive of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. When a Tory tells the story, it’s far more compelling than any left-winger. Mount was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1982 to 1984 and a director of the then most influential Tory think-tank,

Margaret Drabble

The usual suspects | 3 May 2012

It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and admirer Philip Larkin. Naturally I was intrigued to know what she meant. Pym’s publishing history is well known: between 1950 and 1961 she published six  highly praised novels, and then ran up against a solid rock of refusals. Jonathan Cape dropped her, and she was told her work was out of fashion. Puzzled and down-hearted,

Justin Cartwright

Putting the fun in fundamentalism

Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition: this is a novel about jihad in south-east Asia, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim ladyboy. Mo’s perversity and boldness apply in equal measure to his hero/heroine. In the person of Snooky, né Ahmed, the katoey, or ladyboy, from the Malay south who has moved to Bhuddist Bangkok, a film critic and an

Lewis Jones

Femmes du monde

At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed author of The Collaborator, The Interpreter and French Lessons — such neglect must surely be deliberate. The term was new to me, and the best I could manage was ‘assembled piece’, which in the context seems to be just a pretentious way of saying ‘book’. So I looked it up, as Kaplan probably hoped her

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Pure gold

Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she likes it. After writing hit after hit with her first husband Gerry Goffin in the early 1960s, and selling 25 million copies of her second solo album, Tapestry, in the early 1970s, she has enjoyed a steady rather than stellar career, which has given her time to bring up four children and go back to

Sophia Waugh

Family get together 

Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those books that anyone who claims to be a reader must know. His second novel, A Spot of Bother, did not receive the same acclaim, perhaps partly because the subject was a man in mid-life crisis who convinces himself he is dying. It too was wonderful, though — funny, perceptive and moving. His latest book, The