Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Friday

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Graham Greene

A slight change of form this week, here is a news obituary of Graham Greene (apologies for the disturbance early in the film). Greene’s reclusiveness might, I suppose, be key to the art of fiction. Piers Paul Read says that Greene’s privacy was essential if he was to continue observing the world, as writers should. On the other hand, Greene’s outspoken politics made him visible even when in solitude. The clip asks the fatuous but infectious question, is he a great writer? Auberon Waugh says yes. Anthony Burgess says no. Read says yes, but only as a novelist of doubt. Personally, I’ve always been struck that Greene wrote both the

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

A.N. Wilson’s books of the year

Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer is one of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic, with an understanding of the human heart has produced this masterpiece. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read of anyone: it captures the tragedy of Palmer’s life, and brings out the shimmering glory, the iridescent secrets of his Shoreham phase. Matthew Sturgis’s When in Rome: 2,000 Years of Roman Sightseeing is a totally original way of writing about the inexhaustible subject of Rome. Each chapter represents a different era of taste, from ancient to modern

Mark Mason

Giving up on a book

Hate to get all Peter Mandelson on you, but I’ve decided I’m a fighter not a quitter. When it comes to books, that is. I hate giving up on them. No matter how dense the prose, how teakish the characters, how convoluted the structure, I have to plough on to the bitter endpage. And sometime it is bitter; you finish the book as unimpressed as you were at page 20, thinking ‘there go a few hours of my life I’ll never get back’. But often you warm to the book, feeling glad you persisted. Those are the experiences that inspire, that make you a plougher. Is it the right way

Wednesday

Charlotte Moore

Charlotte Moore’s books of the year

Jane Shilling’s The Stranger in the Mirror is an essay on what happens to the narrative arc of a woman’s life when she reaches middle age. It is as deeply felt as it is witty and elegant. Henry’s Demons, by father and son Patrick and Henry Cockburn, provides the most compelling insight into schizophrenia that I’ve come across. As Good as God, As Clever as the Devil would have appalled its subject, the intellectually gifted, sexually tormented wife of the Victorian Archbishop Benson, but Rodney Bolt mines a rich archival vein and transcends gossip. First published in 1946, We Are Besieged, Barbara Fitzgerald’s charming novel of an Anglo-Irish family in

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer is on this week’s Shelf Life. He lets us know what practical gift he’d give a lover for Christmas (apart from his latest bestseller Only Time Will Tell) and what spotting the Labour Manifesto on someone’s shelf might make him do… 1) What are you reading at the moment? Boomerang by Michael Lewis   2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Ian Fleming   3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Erich Maria Remarque   4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Jeffrey Sachs interview: The Price of Civilization

The Occupy camp outside St Paul’s received an eminent visitor last night. The economist Jeffrey Sachs dropped by to meet the London branch of the movement that is ‘changing American debate’. Sachs sees Occupy as an expression of the frustration at inequality and unfairness that is the subject of his latest book, The Price of Civilization.   In 260 pages of fluent prose, Sachs describes the cynicism that has overcome what he calls ‘my America’. In a grubby office at the LSE, he tells me: ‘I grew up in the era of John and Robert Kennedy and they brought a lot of purpose to public life and lot of idealism,

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s books of the year

The most nourishing book I have read this year is Armand d’Angour’s The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience. The author teaches classics at Jesus College, Oxford. He plays the piano beautifully, and also the cello, can talk fluently on art and literature and so is the ideal person to write this book, which ranges across the whole flow of culture. We all know that the ancient Greeks were the first to do many things, but d’Angour examines the underlying question: what did they think about novelty and why, given their conservatism in so many areas of conduct, did they regard it as desirable? His

Monday

Anna Baddeley

Dauntless into the future

Gentleman shopkeeper James Daunt has given a cringeworthy interview to the Independent where he calls Amazon ‘a ruthless, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the manger of “Quills ‘R’ Us” had said something similar about William Caxton in 1476. Poor James Daunt. He clearly had a certain degree of business acumen to set up his successful mini-chain of London bookshops, but since taking over Waterstone’s he has yet to prove he knows what he’s doing. His only real achievement so far is to get rid of that notorious three-for-two. If I were a Waterstone’s bookseller reading the Independent interview online, my next click would be straight

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: Great reputations

The poet Christopher Logue has died aged 85. The obituaries make for fascinating reading. For instance, did you know that the author of War Music also edited Pseuds’ Corner and collated the True Stories column in Private Eye? Or that he was an occasional actor? Aren’t some people almost too blessed? Perhaps, but Logue’s beginnings were difficult. He joined the Black Watch in 1944 and was court martialled during a fractious tour of Palestine in 1946; he was imprisoned. Determined to write, he travelled to Paris in the early ‘50s, where he fell in with the expat writers’ crowd: that band of artistic Anglo-Saxons who fled the suffocating British Isles after the war. His career

Saturday

Stoker Devonshire

A new chapter

 ‘Dear Heywood, I hear Mollie is leaving at the end of next week, in which case so am I. Yours ever, Nancy.’ So wrote my ever-direct aunt, Nancy Mitford, to her employer Heywood Hill, the founder of the famous Mayfair bookshop, on 17 May 1944. Whether or not Nancy’s threat had some effect, she continued to work at the shop for another year. Here I should declare a strong interest in the fate of independent bookshops. I am the proud owner of a modest chunk of Heywood Hill, which is currently celebrating its 75th year. Not a bad milestone for any business. But can bookshops really survive in a retail

Lewis Jones

Bookends: No joke being a comedian

Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph, £20) is unusual. Rob Brydon’s success came quite late, with Marion and Geoff in 2001, when he was 35, after an ‘era of terrible job after terrible job’, and it makes a happy ending to his book, which is otherwise a gently amusing account of his long and gruelling Kampf. Born a Jones in Swansea, into a milieu of Sugar Puffs, Roy of the Rovers and discouraging teachers (‘You think you’re very funny, don’t you?’), he gave his first stand-up performance aged 14, with a routine pirated from The Two

Patrick Skene-Catling

A serenely contented writer

Beaming Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, D.Litt. (Oxon), Mark Twain medallist and co-founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club (1881-1975), personified a rare oxymoron: he was a serenely contented writer. Shortly before the Queen awarded him a knighthood and the Queen Mother, a devoted fan, wrote a letter congratulating him, Madame Tussaud’s sent an artist from London to the final Wodehouse home, in Remsenburg, Long Island, to measure him for waxwork portrayal, which, up to that time, he said, was ‘the supreme honour’. He wrote his first short story at the age of five (the first of more than 300) and at 93 took the half-completed manuscript of his 97th book,

Charles Glass

The original special relationship

Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court of Louis XVI. Josephine Baker captured that sentiment with her theme song, ‘J’ai deux amours/Mon pays et Paris.’ And more Americans than Rick Blaine in Casablanca have mused from afar, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Just how many Americans had Paris before Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris crowd becomes clear in David McCullough’s delightful panorama of American life in Paris during the 19th century. Allen’s film

Anthony Daniels

Government health warning

Few men are prepared to die for the right of others to say what they strongly disagree with; and most people’s faith in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse. Secretly most men would like their ideas (which they naturally believe to be correct) to rule absolutely and forever. Of this company is James Gilligan. He is a professor of psychiatry at New York University and would like to see the Republican Party in the United States disappear from the face of the earth. His argument for this consummation so devoutly to be wished is as follows: the death rate from homicide and

Michela Wrong

Not for sissies

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday. Writing a travel book

Caroline Moore

Entry to the sacred grove

Some readers may wonder if we need this book. Surely, the argument might go, one can summon up potted ‘lives’ on the internet, while serious biographies take book form. And how can even 294 lives of novelists offer, as the cover to this book claims, ‘a comprehensive history of the English novel’? Reason not the need: this book celebrates enjoyment. And it is itself hugely enjoyable. Few, if any, of those Wikipedia entries are well written, let alone witty; most current literary biographies weigh in at around 800 pages: Sutherland’s brief lives display the soul of wit — whose essence is to encompass the unexpected. There is a difficult balancing

Mark Mason

The Ritz in the Blitz

‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour to tell tales of the human dramas the hotels hosted during the second world war. It’s surely the variety of people gathered together in one place that explains the fascination held by the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge’s et al. The good, the bad and the clinically barking all share the same address for a night,

Colin Amery

Amazing grace

It was in 1814 that the Benedictine monks arrived in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset from Douai in Flanders where, in 1606, they had established an exiled, but English, monastic house. They were forced to leave the Continent in 1795 after revolutionary France had declared war on England. They wandered a bit until they finally bought a decent house built in 1700 and a farmhouse with 21 acres at Downside. This book tells a complicated saga of the building of the present abbey and school that will enthral those readers fascinated by the morphology of the Gothic Revival. But it could appeal equally to those gripped by the ultra-montane tendencies in the

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: Shakespeare’s women

Gordon Bottomley, Georgian poet with an unpoetic name, wrote a play called King Lear’s Wife with which he hoped to inspire a poetic revival in the theatre. It might be interesting to see it revived — though most 19th- and 20th-century verse-dramas proved forgettable. Nevertheless, he surely happened on an interesting subject, though one which L. C. Knights, among others, would have deplored.  In a famous essay, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, he poured scorn on the practice of treating Shakespearean characters as if they were real people with an anterior life beyond the play. Yet surely it is tempting to do so. When Lady Macbeth says she would

Andrew McKie

S is for Speculative

Margaret Atwood has written 20 novels, of which three (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) are science fiction. Indeed, the first— and far the best of them — won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain’s chief prize for books in the genre. She has, however, long resisted any description of her work as science fiction, for which she was mildly upbraided by Ursula K. Le Guin a couple of years ago. Le Guin wrote that Atwood’s distinction between her own novels, which she maintains feature things which are possible, and may even have happened already, and SF, in which things happen that aren’t