Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

Before Dickens was a Victorian

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.   With a father constantly dodging the debt-collectors, Dickens’s childhood was the very definition of unstable. The book makes much of the trauma of John Dickens being jailed in Marshalsea for debt with the young Charles forced to earn his keep by working at Warren’s blacking factory. The experience might have been brief, but the impact on

Monday

Austen Saunders

Reader’s review: Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller

Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the Metro by chance (or is it?) Nicholas finds himself falling in love with one of them. He is introduced to their ‘aunt’, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a living symbol of Russia’s Soviet past (with all its ambiguities). Nicholas is happy, but deep down knows that all is not as it seems…

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine and author of biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin – who claims to have written the definitive life of Steve Jobs. Though he never read it, the late Apple co-founder authorised this biography and was interviewed by Isaacson over forty times. Are there any big revelations? Not really. He didn’t like Bill Gates. He refused

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages: murder edition

There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and trials for that paper. Stephen Robinson reviewed the book for the Sunday Times (£) and observes that Follain ‘has produced an excellent account of the tragedy and the very Italian drama that followed.’ That ‘very Italian drama’ is one of wild incompetence, brazen conspiracy theories and wrongful arrests, coloured by the titillating mixture of promiscuity,

Sunday

Fleur Macdonald

Sex and the Polis

Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers marked something of a departure for the hugely successful American novelist, better known for magical realist holiday fodder like Practical Magic or The Story Sisters. Her latest novel plunges us into 70AD, into the midst of Jewish resistance to the Roman siege of Masala, and into the lives of four women who meet in the dovecot used for processing the manure needed for ye-olde fertiliser. When the Romans finally manage to prise the fort open, they find 2,000 defiants dead; the only survivor, from whose account this whole story stems, is Josephus – once a Jewish freedom fighter, now a Roman emissary – and he’s hardly

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson

Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and his almost puppyish desire to please, have contributed to a popularity that other, more guarded performers can only envy. His memoir, May I Have Your Attention, Please? (Century, £18.99), has barrelled straight into the top ten bestsellers list. It has loads of energy and some good stories. But Corden is only 33. He simply hasn’t

Michela Wrong

Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by Susan Williams

When I was a Reuters trainee, long hours were spent in Fleet Street pubs absorbing the folklore of journalism from seasoned veterans. One popular story concerned the hapless correspondent sent to verify that Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations, had safely landed at Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia on his way to talks with separatist Congolese leader Moise Tshombe. A plane landed, the police confirmed it was the UN secretary general, the hack duly filed his story. Trouble was, the disembarking white man was someone else. Hammarskjöld was dead, killed as his DC-6 crashed on night-time approach to Ndola. Rival reporters, drinking at a nearby hotel, heard the news

Ferdinand Mount

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, 1941-56, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck

The die was miscast from the start, more’s the pity. As we reach the halfway point in this massy four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett, I cannot stifle a small sigh or whimper, of the type exhaled by one of those Beckett characters buried up to their necks. And there is no one to blame but the author of the letters. For it was Beckett himself who in his letter of 18 March, 1985, gave his blessing to Martha Fehsenfeld ‘to edit my correspondence in the sense agreed on, i.e. its reduction to those passages only having bearing on my work’. So the tussle began and continued long

Nicholas Lezard

Low Life: One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point by Jeremy Clarke

Some may question whether a review of a columnist’s work in the magazine in which that columnist’s work appears can ever be impartial. It can, and not just because this particular magazine is, as far as I recall, honest about this kind of thing. It’s because it’s in my interests to be hard on Jeremy Clarke. I write what you may describe as the equivalent column for your anti-matter counterpart, the New Statesman; moreover, I am engaged in the business of bunching my selected columns into a book, rather as he has done here. One does not want to encourage the competition. Furthermore, I knew Clarke’s predecessor, the late Jeffrey

Juliet Townsend

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester

Those of us who have spent an embarrassing number of hours immersed in the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer have learned to live dangerously. We have been overturned in high perch phaetons, held up innumerable times by highwaymen, been kidnapped and spirited across the Channel, lost several fortunes at Faro or Bassett and have even witnessed and survived every moment of the Battle of Waterloo. The same cannot be said of the author, whose life was somewhat less eventful. Heyer was a creature of habit and for many years followed a regular annual routine: two novels published, one detective story and one Regency romance, a summer holiday in the same

Carey Schofield

Pakistan: A Personal History by Imran Khan

Imran Khan’s Pakistan: A Personal History describes his journey from playboy cricketer through believer and charity worker to politician. His story is interwoven with highlights from Pakistan’s history. At times he seems to conflate his own destiny with that of Pakistan, and at others to be writing a beguilingly honest personal account. Khan describes how youthful hedonism eventually gave way to faith. His cricketing life led him to realise that talent and dedication were no guarantee of success. In the end, he says, it comes down to luck. ‘Over the years I began to ask myself the question — could what we call luck actually be the will of God?’

Daisy Dunn

The Thread by Victoria Hislop

Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most of the characters have some connection to the textile industry, and while for some this is booming, for others it remains a labour of love. The most fascinating element of the book develops out of the history of Thessaloniki itself. Historically, the city has an impressive heritage at stake. Tracing her foundation back to the

Grey Gowrie

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality. For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography

Peter Jay

The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs

Half a century ago J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society changed the political consciousness of a generation in the English- speaking world and beyond. It vividly re-established in the minds of civilised men and women the paradox of private affluence in a sea of public neediness — for which, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, Cato reported by Sallust had a name in his description of ancient Rome: ‘publice egestas, privatim opulentia’ (public poverty, private opulence). From this premise he made the case for the mixed economy, one in which the genius and power of market forces is balanced and harnessed by effective government in promoting public goods and correcting market failures

David Crane

An intemperate zone

Two years before the outbreak of the first world war, a Royal Navy officer, addressing an Admiralty enquiry into the disturbing question of lower-deck commissions, ventured the cautionary opinion that it took three generations to make a gentleman. It is hard to know exactly what he meant by that endlessly morphing concept, but if it bore any resemblance to the historical compound of avarice, bad faith, dynastic ambition and family selfishness that dominates the pages of Adam Nicolson’s dazzling narrative, then the one consoling mercy is that it has always taken a good deal less than three to unmake one. There are gleams of humanity, courage and honour to be

Friday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson | 28 October 2011

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and his almost puppyish desire to please, have contributed to a popularity that other, more guarded performers can only envy. His memoir, May I Have Your Attention, Please?, has barrelled straight into the top

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and neurological evolution. What are the critics saying? Most reviews have been ecstatic. The Economist called it ‘magisterial’, the New York Times thought it ‘supremely important’, while David Runciman told Guardian readers it was a ‘brilliant, mind-altering book’. In his Financial Times review, Clive Cookson said although it was too long, and potentially too gruesome for

David Blackburn

The art of fiction

<a href= “http://vimeo.com/30774612” _fcksavedurl= “http://vimeo.com/30774612″>NBCC Reads at Center for Fiction: On the Comic Novel</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2300381″>NBCC</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>. America’s National Book Critics Circle discussed the comic novel last week. Here is a video of their discussion, which ranged from Tom Jones to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Interesting to note Beth Gutcheon’s observation that so many of the novels mentioned are first novels. Gutcheon argues that this is because the authors released so much hoarded anger and were never able to replenish those creative forces, which seems reasonable enough. But perhaps there’s an alternative explanation to exhausting catharsis? Catharsis is also a theme of this interview with

Thursday

David Blackburn

How the British came to love Picasso

Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne. In honour of that history, next year Tate Britain and the English National Ballet will collaborate on a Picasso exhibition, examining his influence on British artists and his relationship with the British public. Judging by the preview, which was held this morning in the studio Picasso used on Floral Street in Covent Garden, the show merits a visit.

Mark Mason

Back to the future | 27 October 2011

Something truly incredible has happened in a village near me. A new bookshop has opened. I know – staggering, isn’t it? But I promise you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even been inside. It’s called the Open Road Bookshop, in Stoke by Nayland, close to the Suffolk/Essex border. Pretty little place (both the shop and the village). Sells secondhand books. That’s it – just books. No café, no multimedia community info-hub, no sideline in pottery or bric-a-brac. Admittedly the owner, Dave Charleston, has done things rather well. Plenty of books, covering just about every subject you could think of, and they’re beautifully displayed (cricket ball as a bookend