Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Saul David’s greatest British generals

Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim. Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move. ‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Wrongful arrest

A publishing bidding war began the moment that Amanda Knox walked free. Photogenic, sexually adventurous, naive, wrongfully imprisoned — it’s guaranteed to be a blockbuster to match The Count of Montecristo and The Shawshank Redemption, only its contents will be factual. The book was bought last night by Harper Collins for $4 million. First-hand accounts of wrongful imprisonment are quite rare, especially when one considers how much coverage miscarriages of justice receive in the press. The most famous book of the genre is Papillon, published by Henri Charrière in 1969. It was recommended by Kwasi Kwarteng MP in our Bookbenchers feature last year, and I chanced upon a copy (translated from

Thursday

David Blackburn

The turbulent priest | 16 February 2012

The Queen rarely intervenes in public life. It is a mark of the vehemence of the recent attacks on the Church of England that she has leapt to its defence, characterising it as the guardian of people of all faiths and none. The storm of words between secularists and establishmentarians will intensify tomorrow when the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, publishes his defence of faith, We Don’t Do God: The Marginalisation of Public Faith. It’s a strident book , especially as Carey was more ridiculed than revered as a liberal primate. Freddy Gray has interviewed Lord Carey in the latest issue of the Spectator, and Lord Carey summarised his points: ‘What I am getting at is that

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Special bookshops

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly 200 comments. If you’ve not yet looked at the photos, you’re in for a treat. These bookshops are beautiful, breathtaking, almost miraculous places. And the astonishing amount of buzz created around the post reassures me that I’m not alone in thinking this. Evidently, I’m just one of several thousand bookshop-lovers. And these people aren’t the

David Blackburn

A cruel wilderness

I should not like this book, but I do. Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child has an unpromising start. Mabel, a nervy wreck of a woman, decides that her loveless life is not worth living. She strides out into the Alaskan wastes seeking a quiet death. It is a cliché worn thin by bad television drama, and it gets worse. Mabel fails to die, of course, and she returns to the log cabin which she shares — ‘live together’ would connote more intimacy than exists between them — with her withered husband, Jack. They then co-exist in silence for the next 50 pages. It was a slog for them; and it

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Mary Quant

This week’s Shelf Lifer, Mary Quant (pictured here in 1960s), invented both the mini-skirt and hot pants. If that weren’t enough, she later claimed to have invented the duvet cover. She tells us which part of the Bible she would take into solitary confinement and which character in Little Women gets her going. Her autobiography is out tomorrow. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton – My father disapproved as it was fashionably thought to be bad English. 2) Has a book ever made you cry and if so which one?   Many books and most of all those by Amelia Ann Stiggins. 3) You

David Blackburn

The problems with prizes

Inspired by Tessa Hadley’s point about the importance of literary prizes, and itched by guilt at not have given some of them due attention, I did some research. It seems that all must have prizes. There are numerous literary awards in Britain. The Society of Authors offers 9. English Pen runs 4. The Authors’ Club has 3. While Commonwealth Writers limits itself to 2. Then there are the host of individual prizes: the two James Tait Black awards, the Galaxies, the Costas, the Duff Cooper, the Hawthornden etc., etc., etc. Tessa Hadley convinces of the need to recognise short stories — and that existing short fiction prizes are inadequate. But the odds are against

Tuesday

Tessa Hadley

Short stories deserve a prize

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not

David Blackburn

Looking at love

This blog believes that Valentine’s Day should be abolished, so prepare for disappointment if you’re looking for praise of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s sugared bleats.   If you haven’t read it yet, Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Married Love, is beguiling. Each story presents a stereotype of love, delves into it and turns out a fresh perspective. The book begins with precious student Lottie ruining the family breakfast by announcing her engagement to her hoary tutor — the soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Edgar. We then follow Lottie over 15 years of loveless marriage, sexual diffidence and wasted youth, before reaching the ironic conclusion that it was the woman she supplanted who had made Edgar so attractive in the first place. Lottie’s idiocy is

Monday

David Blackburn

Back again, old sport

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers: ‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of

Jacques Testard

Master of his brief

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Nathan Englander’s third book since his unanimously praised 1999 debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. With this latest collection, Englander comfirms his place as a master of the short story form, staking a place for himself as an heir to the traditions of Raymond Carver — whose famous story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ he pays tribute to in his title story — and of the great Jewish storytellers Isaak Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Brought up in an East Coast Jewish Orthodox community, Englander turned secular while at Binghamton University in the

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 13 February 2012

Spring is around the corner, and new books are flying onto the shelves. The work of those Austro-Hungarians who followed in the wake of Franz Kafka is back in fashion. Stefan Zweig’s fiction is available in a new edition, as are the letters of his contemporary, Joseph Roth. A critical reappraisal of Roth is gathering pace. Writing in the pages, Philip Hensher has declared Roth’s The Radetzky March to be ‘a masterpiece of controlled, worldly irony which maintains a studious detachment.’ William Boyd took (£) a slightly different line in the Sunday Times: ‘In Roth’s work you have the same calm resignation in the face of the world’s vulgarities and

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

Menace, mystery and decadence

It is fitting that Charles Dickens’s bicentenary coincides with Lawrence Durrell’s centenary, for the two novelists have crucial resemblances: both of them are triumphant in the intensity and power of their writing, but capable of calamitous lapses of taste; both of them are riotous comedians who sometimes plunge into hopeless melodrama. It is true that Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Durrell foisted on the structure of The Alexandria Quartet (reprinted, with a new introduction by Jan Morris) has no more part in Martin Chuzzlewit than the ludicrous sexual obsessions derived from Sade and Henry Miller which sully Durrell’s plot. But Dickens in certain moods was, as Angus Wilson said of

Rory Stewart

Real and imagined danger

What was the Cold War? For Professor John Lewis Gaddes, it was a conflict between two incompatible systems, democracy and communism, each with a different vision of liberty and human purpose. The result was a potential third world war, in which we risked being crushed by dictators or destroyed by nuclear weapons. And the US saved us. ‘The world,’ he writes, ‘I am quite sure, is a better place for the conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distraction and moral compromises, the Cold War was a necessary contest.’ Andrew Alexander disagrees. And

Allan Massie

Storm in a wastepaper basket

‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus,’ came the cry from the dock. The speaker was the veteran right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras, found guilty of treason in 1945 for his support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It wasn’t of course that, and yet there is a sense in which Maurras spoke the truth. The Dreyfus case had divided France half a century before Maurras was put on trial in Lyon. The division between what Piers Paul Read, in this masterly and eminently balanced account of the Affair, calls ‘the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire’ had never been closed. The end of the Third Republic and its replacement by

Charlotte Moore

Intrigue and foreboding

In 2009, Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada’s masterpiece about civilian resistance to Nazism, appeared in English for the first time. Now A Small Circus, Fallada’s literary breakthrough, makes its English debut.  Both novels are admirably translated by Michael Hofmann. The earlier novel will be of deep interest to the many admirers of Alone in Berlin. Once again, Fallada shows an uncanny prescience in his ability to interpret contemporary political developments through the lives of ordinary Germans. A Small Circus is based on real events that took place in 1929 in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, lightly fictionalised by Fallada as Altholm.  Farmers, incensed by a punitive ruling from the tax office, hold a

Jonathan Keates

A holy terror

In the summer of 1520, Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of his protégé, the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, to Cardinal Bibbiena, an influential figure at the court of Pope Leo X. The testimonial carried some weight, for Michelangelo was by now Italy’s most admired sculptor, with what are nowadays called ‘signature achievements’ such as the David, the Pietà and the Dying Slave to his credit. Seven years earlier, what is more, he had completed the magisterial decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, among the most ambitious  projects in the history of painting, for Pope Julius II. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find

Patrick Skene-Catling

Time to sit and stare

Hermitic, oneiric withdrawal from responsibilities and threats is the most effective way of alleviating the pangs of middle age, suggests Marcus Berkmann. In his fifties, he is a frank and eloquent expert on ageing, by turns indignantly curmudgeonly and philosophically resigned. He is observant and witty, but there were moments when he reminded me of complaints in Punch of neighbours who failed to return borrowed lawnmowers — perhaps my fault, rather than his. He recommends a shed of one’s own as a refuge in which to escape from stressful reality. ‘If I had a garden,’ he writes, ‘I would have a shed. In fact the main reason for getting a

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Frank exchange of views

Solomon Kugel is morbidly obsessed with death: his own, and that of those he loves, including his wife Bree and his only son Jonah. He spends his idle hours writing down possible last words in a notebook, and contemplating the undignified and senseless extinctions that await him around every corner. His outlook is not helped by his therapist, Professor Jove, who is convinced that hope is the cause of all human suffering and works hard to extinguish it; nor by his brother-in-law, the unsubtly named evolutionary biologist Pinkus Stephenor — a professional optimist whose latest book is You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All The Time.

Lee Langley

Bookends: Short and sweet

Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and Susannah Clapp were friends, and over the years, postcards from Carter arrived from wherever her travels took her. They could be quirky, surreal — from America a huge chicken swallowing a truck; the Statue of Liberty drowning in a lake. Others were greetings, scribbled comments, hand-drawn cartoons. Fourteen are scattered through Susannah Clapp’s A Card from Angela Carter (Bloomsbury, £10): black-and-white reproductions evoking experiences riotous with colour,  charting the progress of a turbulent life that ended too soon. Carter died of lung cancer in 1992 aged 51. She had loved