Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

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.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Books, sales and the avuncular tendency

The same question arises every year: what on earth to buy my uncle for Christmas? Crisis was averted in 2011 by the admirable Mark Forsyth, whose book The Etymologicon (Icon) is a jaunty stroll through idiomatic English, guaranteed to tickle the avuncular tendency. The Etymologicon was the sale of the season, so popular that bookshops could not supply public demand. All hands were at the printing presses as emergency runs were produced; the books were then apparently hand-delivered by Icon’s staff to bookshops desperate to profit from the public’s fever. Exact figures are not yet available, but it seems that more than 50,000 copies have been sold. Icon’s Philip Cotterell told

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: New Year reading resolutions

Amazon reported that Christmas Day was the ‘biggest ever day for Kindle downloads’. Evidently, this year, many people are going to begin to read eBooks. Shaking off the doom-and-gloom that a seller of printed books inevitably feels at such a prospect, I can’t help but notice the nice timing. All these people are trying out a new way of reading for a new year. Falling into a habit of reading isn’t such a bad thing. (Far better to be the habit of reading a certain format, genre, or author, than to be out of the habit of reading altogether.) But sometimes it doesn’t hurt to shake things up a bit.

Peter Robins

In and out of copyright

New Year’s Eve, among its other distinctions, is the date when copyright terms tend to expire: with the beginning of each new year, at least in this country, the public domain gets a little larger. In 2012, this has had a couple of effects in the world of digital bookchat. One was a flurry of insulting tweets directed at Stephen Joyce, who has policed quotation of his grandfather James’s work with more vigour than many scholars would like. Since the elder Joyce died in 1941, and copyright expires in most places 70 years after the death of the author, the younger Joyce has now lost his grip on Dubliners, Ulysses

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Paul Torday

This week, Paul Torday tells us about his fear of appearing on the stage, and reveals what he’d put on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. His new novel, The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall, is published today. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? I used to read the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, with the wonderful Pauline Baynes illustrations. My two favourites were The Horse and his Boy, and The Silver Chair. 2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? I can’t think of any book that has made me cry. I cry every Christmas when they screen The Railway Children

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

Looking into the well-read future

E-books can be a strange, parochial beast. As any Kindle-user will know, the content of the Kindle store often varies wildly in terms of design and reading experience. Classics suffer especially from this. A lot of out-of-copyright classics have been digitized by volunteers and are available free, but devoid of any notes, substantial chapter headings and basic page formatting. Even worse, output from some of the big publishing houses proves little better. Pages are inadequately formatted, the type isn’t adjustable; and infuriating gaps exist between paragraphs, while the font often renders sentences unintelligible. But there are some saints among the throng of sinners. Scouting around for my fill of Dickens

David Blackburn

Girls behaving badly

Tessa Hadley is an underrated contemporary novelist; perhaps that will change in time. Her latest collection of short stories, Married Love, was serialised in the New Yorker last autumn. The stories I read there were hugely enjoyable though unsparing insights into the private and often loveless lives of others. Their content confirmed my suspicion that Hadley was invoking Marie Stopes’ Married Love, the infamous and innocent account of what she thought married life ought to be, first published in 1921. It’s a provocative echo for a woman to have sounded in 2012. The vapid obsession with the scions of the Rothschilds continues. Hannah Rothschild has gone in search of her lost and

Sunday

David Blackburn

The wisdom of age

Devout readers of the Spectator will know Marcus Berkmann well. He is a regular book reviewer and writes a column about music that no one else listens to — he admits as much in public, and does so without a shade of embarrassment. He views the horrendous prospect of ageing in the same breezy manner. His new book, A Shed of One’s Own, regards the inevitable march of age and concludes that we mustn’t worry about it. What you’ve lost in physique (assuming you ever had it), you’ve gained immeasurably in knowledge. The key is to use that nous for the greater good. The publishers declare that Berkmann has mastered midlife

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Mavericks need not apply

Philip Hensher gives a critical insider’s view of the Creative Writing industry It has always been a challenge to get a novel or poem published. Twenty years ago, I went about it in the traditional way. I read a hell of a lot of books. I did a couple of literary degrees. I got an interestingly peculiar but rather gruelling job. I wrote a novel or two in the evenings or on holiday. Then I met a literary agent at a drinks party and he took one on and sold it to Hamish Hamilton — and has possibly regretted it ever since. The traditional way has, in the last few

David Crane

Ugly old Europe

There are moments and places in history that one would have paid good money to avoid, and wartime Lisbon was one of them. For those rich enough to afford the Pan Am flying ‘Clipper’ to New York it at least offered a route of escape, but for those thousands of refugees from Nazi Europe left waiting for months or years before they could beg or borrow a passage to America or Palestine it was more likely to be just one last chance to savour old Europe at its unlovable, venal, extortionate and anti-Semitic best. Not that there was anything narrowly discriminatory in Lisbon’s attitude to its refugees — the Cidade

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Who’s the real monster?

‘The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the film-maker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of decency.’ Thus decreed Wes Craven, that maestro of horror who gave us, among other gems, The Last House on the Left (1972), in which a girl is forced to urinate on herself by a gang of rapists. And on some level, he is obviously right. But as Jason Zinoman points out in his deft study of the rise of New Horror — that is, horror movies of the late 1960s and 1970s, which were more realistic, and so a hell

Jane Brown

The shape of things to come | 31 December 2011

I opened Futurescapes with anticipation, knowing Tim Richardson to be a forceful commentator, and landscape architects to be in dire need of an articulate champion. The mixed marriage of ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’ has always been an unfortunate union, blessed by the founding of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, whilst Britain followed suit in 1929. Landscape architects found their feet with the 1951 Festival of Britain and the new towns of the Sixties, when they became early converts to ‘globalism’ holding international conferences. They rode the first ecological wave of the Seventies and then followed the money to the Middle and Far East. They are an adaptable profession,

William Leith

The Devil in the mirror

As a kid growing up in Scotland in the 1950s, Dennis O’Donnell was aware of ‘loonies’, and the men in white coats who were supposed to take them away. Then, as a student, he became one of the men in white coats. At first, he thought he’d find himself in a world of Beckettian absurdity and insight. But it was grim. One man believed he was the King of Egypt. Another man smoked rolled-up bits of lavatory paper. One poor soul spent his time waiting for a visit from his daughter, who never came. When a patient died, O’Donnell was on hand to carry out official procedure: ‘Orifices have to

Jane Ridley

Crusader on the attack

Why have we forgotten John Bright? In his day he was a massive political celebrity. He could command audiences of 150,000, delivering thrilling impromptu speeches night after night. Perhaps, as Bill Cash suggests, Bright’s eclipse has to do with the decline of conviction politics and public alienation from parliament. Or perhaps, as the novelist Anthony Trollope remarked, the trouble with Bright was that he didn’t actually create anything — he spent a lifetime attacking evils: ‘It was his work to cut down forest trees, and he had nothing to do with the subsequent cultivation of the land’. Bright was a Quaker, the son of a self-made businessman who established a