Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Ed Howker

… in the battle for London

Charlatan, fornicator, liar, inebriate, pugilist, Marxist, anti-Semite; Ken Livingstone has been called many things but never a writer. Actually, that’s a shame because his words following the 2005 London bombings were brilliantly defiant; perhaps the most powerful speech by a British politician in the last decade. He can be witty — the former leader of the Greater London Council abolished by Margaret Thatcher began his speech accepting the Mayoralty with the words: ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago …’ Even Tony Blair, who effectively forced Livingstone to leave the Labour party in order to stand, eventually admitted his misjudgment. Livingstone’s election in 2000

Mark Mason

Opening salvos …

When a man is tired of Johnson, he’s liable to vote for Livingstone. Boris has decided to head Londoners off at the pass by writing a book about them, or rather about 18 of their famed predecessors. From Boudica and Alfred the Great, through Shakespeare and Robert Hooke to Winston Churchill and Keith Richards, we meet people who shaped the city of their birth and/or residence. The stories of both the subjects and the city are brilliantly told. It just so happens that, in passing, we learn such facts as ‘London’s buses are carrying more people than at any time in history’. When Boris visits the Midland Grand Hotel he

Juliet Townsend

Children’s Books: Myth and magic

It was the second week of term and my grandson’s birthday. He had just started at primary school and the only alternative to social suicide seemed to be to invite the whole class to his party. With a few old friends that made a total of 30. They ran yelling in various enjoyably noisy games up and down the church hall, then they departed, and my daughter was left confronting a table groaning with 30 presents, some of them embarrassingly expensive. How do you give 30 presents to one five-year-old? The same problem comes up every Christmas, and the answer, it seems to me, is books. It may not be

Philip Hensher

Pure and simple

It might be that the stage musical is now pretty well over as a form. Certainly, the gloomy parade of ‘juke-box’ musicals through the West End doesn’t give one much hope for the future. It is difficult to pick out a worst offender, but the Ben Elton We Will Rock You, confected from the Queen catalogue, is as bad as any. Its premise, of taking the work of a curious-looking, homosexual, Parsi, excessive genius like Freddie Mercury and turning it into an idiotic story about two clean-cut stage-school kids Putting the Show on Right Now says something truly terrible about the musical: it says that it can only deal with

Friday

Anna Baddeley

Where do you like to do it?

I’ll never forget my first piece of secondary school Maths homework. Our hapless teacher, fresh out of training college and anxious to be liked, instructed us to decorate the front page of our exercise books with the slogan: “Maths is Fun!” Even the dimmest wits among us could see she was up to something. If Maths really were fun, then surely it could stand up for itself, without us copying out this patronising propaganda in felt-tip bubble writing. Instead, by starting off on the defensive, the well-intentioned Miss Purkiss ended up exposing her total lack of belief in her own subject. (I need hardly add that, out of a class

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Pricey pap

Do you fancy yourself as an edgy literary type? Have you got a thing for Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn Monroe by Norman Mailer and Bert Stern, could be the Christmas present for you. The handsome photo-book is a combination of Mailer’s cool prose and some of the most ‘revealing, intimate’ shots of Marilyn ever taken. (Revealing and intimate, in this context, means Monroe’s nipples can be seen.) All this at a time when Marilyn chic is back, what with the new biopic starring Michelle Williams. What’s not to like? Well, there’s the outrageous price: $1000 (about 650 quid).  And as Natasha Vargas-Cooper over at Book Forum puts it, ‘Divorced from the

David Blackburn

The art of fiction | 25 November 2011

What to do if you want to write a novel, but can’t find a plot (in the broadest sense of the term) around which to frame your ideas? Give up, is Margaret Atwood’s stark advice. There is no formula, she says, no easy answer to writing fiction. Most people have a creative spark, but not everyone has the intellect to discipline it. You either have it or you don’t. So much for the truism that everyone has at least one novel in them.

Thursday

David Blackburn

The craze for political language

Well, at least Ed’s won something. The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen Ed Miliband’s ‘squeezed middle’ as the word of the year. It beat off competition from the hopeful ‘Arab Spring’, the dully functional ‘phonehacking’ and the abominable ‘Hacktivism’. It is a remarkably political list, no doubt reflecting the interesting times in which we live. Indeed, the fashion for political language is strong at present: ‘big society’ took the same award last year. What next? Even now, a conscientious special advisor is scribbling away in the bowels of Whitehall, unwittingly close to lexicographical immortality. In related news, libraries are a growing issue at Westminster. The Bookseller reports that the Culture, Media and

Mark Mason

Music while you write

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury. A couple of thoughts about him, one related to reading, the other to writing. Reading first. I’ve just finished Lesley-Ann Jones’s brilliant biography of the singer (Freddie Mercury, The Definitive Biography), and have been thinking that it’s exactly the sort of tribute Mercury himself would have wanted. Gloriously populist, never taking itself too seriously, but nonetheless full of perceptive and moving insights into the contradictions and flaws of a truly charismatic star. Jones’s status as a showbiz journalist who knew Mercury means there are lots of fascinating details. The trademark mike stand came about when a normal one fell

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

In Defence of the White Middle-class Middle-aged Male Reviewer

The Guardian currently seems to be embarking on more crusades to save literature than Salman Rushdie’s Twitter account. Last week’s post by blogger Sam Jordison was no exception. He asked whether book reviews are “bland, boring and formulaic”. Fresh from judging Not the Booker (a Guardian online award designed to champion independent publishers and celebrate the vox blogerati), he should really have had something interesting to say. Instead Jordison committed many of the sins which crop up in book reviews. He offered a couple of cute observations, hesitated a few suggestions, registered bemusement and skilfully evaded reaching any kind of conclusion with a hexacolonic crescendo of rhetorical questions (as painful as it

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Amanda Craig

Amanda Craig tells us what she would title her memoirs, which book reduces her to tears and the 19th century literary heart throb her husband most looks like.  1) What are you reading at the moment? I always read several books at once, so it’s Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis biography (review), Julia Jones’s A Ravelled Flag (children’s review), Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (fun) and Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate (fun.) 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Almost everything, because if a book isn’t worth reading under the covers it isn’t worth reading at all. The kind of book people read in

Nicholas Lezard

Book of the Month: Pea-soupers and opium dens

As part of our book of the month coverage, here is Nicholas Lezard’s review of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, taken from the current issue of the Spectator. You can read other posts on the book here. So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence beyond Sherlock Holmes’s word, and if you look at Holmes’s behaviour in ‘The Final Problem’ you can see an almost classic case of paranoia — brought on, no doubt, by a heavy cocaine binge. Michael Dibdin, in his The Last Sherlock Holmes

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Drinking to the ‘remarkable’ survival of the Tory party

The Centre for Policy Studies hosted a party for Robin Harris earlier this evening, in honour of the publication of his one volume history of the Conservatives. Andrew Gimson reviewed the book in a recent issue of the Spectator and described it as ‘a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship’, plenty of eminent Tories agree. The CPS’ cramped offices were graced by Lord Lamont, Spectator select committee chairman of the year and Thatcher’s one time PPS John Whittingdale, and rising backbencher Jesse Norman — to name but a few. A smattering of ministers and government aides had also braved the thickening night to attend Harris’ shin-dig. One wonders what these

David Blackburn

A lot of bad sex

It’s that time of the year again: prepare for bad sex, courtesy of the Literary Review. The Bad Sex Awards will be held, wait for it, at the In and Out Club on 6 December. The list is still open, and readers can still nominate worthy candidate by contacting the Literary Review. At present, though, 12 authors from around the world will compete for the prize. Some luminaries who ought to have known better are among the condemned. Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 has been included, as has Stephen King’s 11.22.63. The Guardian has reproduced this excruciating passage from King’s book: ‘”She said, “Don’t make me wait, I’ve had enough of that,”

Matthew Richardson

Becoming great

Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period of inventiveness to the later years of solemnity. More importantly, however, it fleshes out a career many will only know through Reid’s recent work.    The early poems are an acquired taste. The reader can feel, in the words of a later poem, as if they are “in a land / whose language I do not understand / but from which I could bring back / some wisdom, some purloined knack” (‘Insofar’). Personally, I’m a sucker for its trippy, psychedelic

Jacques Testard

Recognisably Houellebecq

Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English.   In this latest offering by French literature’s preeminent provocateur, we follow the career of Jed Martin, a successful artist with no ambition to be one. Struggling to make sense of his growing fame after breaking up with ‘one of the five most beautiful women in Paris’, a leggy Russian blonde named Olga, Martin befriends the novelist Michel Houellebecq — a depressed,

Monday

Anna Baddeley

Laying it on thick

If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now be forever tainted by spin. Even more devastating, however, was the revelation that a carefully positioned copy of Literary Review will appear on M’s desk in the new Bond film. “For your highbrows only!” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday, in the kind of headline that gives punning a bad name. The scandal, it transpired, was

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Writers’ lives, pt 2

The second part of our critical roundup of the ten most-talked-about literary biographies. Read part 1 here. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester This admirable attempt to resurrect the queen of regency romance doesn’t really meet its objective. When publishers are looking for quotes for the paperback, Daisy Goodwin’s ‘solid and well-researched’ (Sunday Times) will probably have to do. Rachel Cooke’s Observer review was the most damning: ‘What, I wonder, is the point of this book? Who is it for? According to its jacket, Jennifer Kloester is “the foremost expert on Heyer” (as if the world’s universities were crammed with her competitors, all of them writing PhDs on

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: To be a poet

The Times has invited (£) everyone aged 16 and under to enter its Young Poet of the Year competition. The winning entry will be published in the newspaper. The Times also suggests (£) that competitors record YouTube videos of themselves declaiming their poems; selected entries will then be posted on the Times’ website. Inspiration is always hard to find, so the Times’ literary team has chosen (£) 30 poems that ‘everyone should know’. It’s a thoroughly predictable list. Who, for instance, doesn’t know ‘If’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Funeral Blues, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ or ‘Jabberwocky’ (pictured)? But that’s a minor quibble about what is a very good cause. The list

Saturday

Martin Jacomb

High-class fraud

You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is. Most frauds are quite dull affairs, and some are never uncovered. A few, however, are spectacular. The scale of loss, or the glamour of the perpetrator, or the failure of the ‘system’ to spot and prevent the crookery, may contribute to make a good story. One case, almost within living memory, which has all of these elements, was that of Gerard Lee Bevan. He was born in 1869 into a highly respected City banking family. The Bevans were among the founders of Barclays and continued to be involved in the management of the bank until