Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Pigeons, pros and amateurs

A flurry of new reviews of Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English has landed in recent days, coinciding with a new edition of the book. Kelman’s debut divides opinion. Lewis Jones thinks it ‘miraculous’. Catherine Nixey thinks (£) that it’s ‘exuberant’ but ‘miss-steps’ occasionally. And I found that a pigeon is a less than engaging narrator, even if its appearances are sparse. Reading the book made me recall the story of Kingsley Amis throwing a copy of his son Martin’s book, Money, across the room in frustration, and I wondered how the old devil might have dispatched of Kelman’s opus. All of which brings me to this piece by Alex Gallix about the death of literature.

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

A left-wing writer conservatives should enjoy

I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on the right and left (and not only in the US). Instead he has concentrated on why ordinary working and middle class Americans do so badly when Wall Street is thriving and have to bail it out when it fails. Since 2008 events have justified him with a vengeance. He is also a dazzling writer: honest,

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Joan Collins

This week’s Shelf Lifer is the indefatigable Joan Collins. She tells us which literary character she’d pick to share a bed with and exactly how many self-help books she’s written. What are you reading at the moment? Frank Sinatra: The Boudoir Singer by Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter As a child, what did you read under the covers? Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? Yes, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist when Bill Sikes murders Nancy because it’s the most harrowing description of a murder that I’ve ever read You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year

Matthew Richardson

Interview: Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid’s A Scattering — a collection of poems written in honour of his dead wife, the actress Lucinda Gane — won the 2009 Costa Award. Reid will be reading selected poems from that collection at the South Bank Centre later this month, as part of the forthcoming exhibition examining attitudes to death and grief. Here, Reid talks to Matthew Richardson about his poetry in general. Looking back over the collections excerpted in your new Selected Poems, has your career panned out as you hoped? I don’t think the younger me had any clear expectations. A few vague hopes, possibly, but nothing so definite as to leave the older me

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Hatchet Job of the Year

You may remember that 2012 will see the launch of a new literary award. On Tuesday 7th February, the Coach and Horses in Soho will host our friends The Omnivore’s Hatchet Job of the Year. The aim is to reinvigorate literary criticism by rewarding the ‘angriest, funniest, most trenchant’ book review of 2011. The aim is not to celebrate malice, but to challenge the deference that pollutes so much of Britain’s cultural debate. The shortlist, released today, reflects that objective:   1) Mary Beard on Rome by Robert Hughes, Guardian 2) Geoff Dyer on The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, New York Times 3) Camilla Long on With the Kisses of His

David Blackburn

Exemplary popular history

Few non-fiction writers’ books fly off the shelves as fast as Tom Holland’s. He’s a renaissance man — an overused phrase, but merited in his case. He began professional life translating ancient classics for Radio 4 and is best known for his histories of the ancient world: Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium. This back catalogue has created the impression that Holland is a classicist; in fact, he studied English as an undergraduate and was studying for a PhD on Byron before leaving for London in his mid twenties. The breadth of his learning and its grounding in literature make his books so accessible — and his after dinner speeches so

Paul Torday

The Expenses Scandal: a Morality Play for our time

Morality plays began in the Middle Ages. They were intended to explain Christian precepts and encourage a mostly illiterate audience to lead a Godly life. Typically, they describe the progress of an Everyman who falls into temptation and then is redeemed. In modern times it’s our newspapers who stage our morality plays. The press coverage of the expenses scandal in 2009 and 2010 was certainly strong on MPs falling into temptation. There wasn’t much about redemption, though. I recently wrote a novella about the subject of guilt, and its corrosive effects on memory and personality, and I decided to use the expenses scandal as the locus for these ideas. As

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Milton’s blindness

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light denied, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies; God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: literary parlour games

Last Thursday saw a major publishing event in Britain: the release of The Art of Fielding, the debut novel by American Chad Harbach. The book has been received with rapture in the States: the phrase ‘Great American Novel’ is being whispered and Harbach is routinely compared to Jonathan Franzen, the literati’s present infatuation. The comparison has migrated across the Atlantic. Mike Atherton, former England cricket captain and award winning sports columnist, wrote last week (£): ‘[Harbach] wears his learning more lightly than Franzen (although learned types will recognise all kinds of literary references) has a sharper feel for the rhythm of language on the page and is more content to let the

Sunday

Jerry Hayes

A splendid life of crime

Let me nail my colours clearly to the mast: I would prefer to eat my own spleen, or listen to a Gordon Brown speech, than read the memoirs of a barrister/politician. The remaindered lists are groaning under these unsellable, unreadable, dusty monuments to over-inflated egos. They should be pulped and moulded into bed pans.  However, Ivan Lawrence’s splendid book, My Life of Crime — out in paperback later this month — is very much the exception. Ivan, a distinguished QC and formerly a high-profile MP, lives life to the full and this book is brimful of classy anecdotes and well worth the read. Ivan and I have been friends for

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The heart of Hemingway

A new biography of ‘Papa’ has deeply impressed Sam Leith, although its thoroughness — like its subject — ‘teeters on nuts’ Hemingway’s Boat is just what it sounds like. It takes as its conceit — and it’s a good one — that writing about Hemingway’s boat Pilar (now up on blocks in Cuba) is a way of getting at deep things about the man. Pilar was there all the second half of his life and may have been the only friend he never fell out with. Fishing was more than a recreation for Hemingway: it was at the centre, this book plausibly suggests, of his being in the world. Paul

Dan Jones

When treason was the last resort

One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the English crown. He had been invited to England by a group of barons who wished to replace King John as punishment for repudiating the terms of Magna Carta. The war Louis waged, although ultimately unsuccessful, was a damned near thing. Sean McGlynn’s new book calls this England’s ‘forgotten invasion’, although in recent years Hollywood has

Eric Weinberger

Lake Michigan days

It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and third base, taking ground balls hit at, near, or even away from them, scooping them up, throwing to first base for the out: something the shortstop does six or more times in a game. Besides the catcher, who largely stays put, it is the most demanding field position in baseball, and if you’re going to

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book

Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go at it. By my reckoning Tales from an Actor’s Life (Robson Press, £14.99) is Steven Berkoff’s third volume of autobiographical writings, although I might have missed one or two others along the way. This one, though, is a little out of the ordinary. Written in the third person — he refers throughout to ‘the young actor’ — it tells a number of stories of his formative years ‘in the business’, of auditions failed, of rep tours endured, of disastrous productions walked out of, and of lessons learned, usually far too

Philip Womack

Questioning tales

Tessa Hadley’s previous book, The London Train, was one of the best novels of last year, though overlooked by prize committees. It concerned the gently disentangling lives of a pair of middle-class couples, and found its strengths in numinous revelations of the everyday. These short stories (all previously printed in magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker) explore, with a questioning intelligence, a mostly similar territory. Here people try to shore up their lives as best they can in the face of vicissitudes. They do so by reaching out to others, often in the face of convention; and by trying to square life with the worlds that they create

Ian Thomson

Still roughing it

We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and (at New York’s JFK) funeral parlours. Some travel writers, desperate to simulate the hardship of Victorian travel, have imposed artificial difficulties on themselves. The late Eighties saw a glut of such daft titles as Hang-Gliding to Borneo and To Bognor on a Rhinoceros. In every case, however, it would have been quicker to take the

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The truest man of letters

In 1969 an author in his early thirties published his first book. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters won the Duff Cooper prize, delighted the reading public, introduced them to the name of John Gross, and marked the beginning of what would be an illustrious and fascinating literary career. It ended with his death on 10 January 2011, a great sorrow for the many people who loved and admired John. A year ago, copious tributes were paid to this remarkable man, as writer, editor, critic, friend, which I wished I had joined in. He was the best-read man in the country, said Victoria Glendinning, or for Craig

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

A book for boys

If Time Magazine declared 2011 the year of the protester, then it seems quite fitting that, in a public vote, the  Galaxy Book Awards crowned Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman their book of the year. Touted as a modern day feminist call-to-arms, it is also the memoirs of a former music journalist turned Times commentator professional tweeter (hashtag commentweeter). It’s sort of a roughed up version of Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée but funnier and relocated to the messy days of the late seventies, as if S de B had dumped her drain of a boyfriend and had plonked herself next to you at a party, triple shot of gin and

Daisy Dunn

The original Nutcracker

The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all.   Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a generation later. Even if he had lived to see it set to Tchaikovsky’s magical score, he’d have found his own credit severely diminished. For in fact it was the more established and popular author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale that was, and still is, popularly recognised as the ballet’s main source of inspiration. The

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Tolkien edition

Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary. In 1961, for instance, the judges rejected Robert Frost and E.M. Forster for being too old, and Lawrence Durrell for his ‘monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was overlooked because his prose amounted to ‘a general monotony’. What on earth would they have made of Umberto Eco?  The same panel blocked J.R.R.