Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Blackburn

A tale of church and state

Last Saturday, Phillip Pullman addressed library campaigners at a convention in London and declared war on the “stupidity” of nationwide library closures. Pullman’s presence brought the Church of England to mind, merely as a counter-point to his often very public atheism. How has the established church responded to the end of community libraries and the education services they provide? As part of a wider national picture, Anglican priests have, at the suggestion of their parishioners, offered help to campaigners in Bolton, where 5 libraries are to close, and in Brent, where 6 libraries are to close. Letters have been written on the vicarage’s headed paper; petitions have been signed; and

Wednesday

David Blackburn

In the literary news today

There was no catch because no one wanted out. The late Joseph Heller has been in the news today. The auction of letters he wrote to an American academic in the ‘70s has revealed that he “enjoyed” the war, which may come as a surprise to those who thought Yossarian, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy, was a proxy for Heller, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy. This story raises an old contention: that characters can be engendered simply in a writer’s mind’s eye and are not necessarily derived from either the quick or the dead. This was a major bugbear of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell,

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Empire by Jeremy Paxman

“We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?” asks Jeremy Paxman in Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, the tie-in book to his forthcoming TV series. Paxman’s aim is to look at how the empire shaped Britain, tracing its influence in everything from to the food we eat and the sports we play, to the way we travel and the way we trade. What are the critics saying? Reviewers eager to stick their knives into a wistful paean for colonialism, or a guilt-ridden apologia, were disappointed. Paxman’s book – as you would hope from a BBC

Ali Negyal

In search of Captain Scott

David Wilson’s The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott opens with a jolting reminder that even on Antarctica, the past’s another country. Captain Scott’s crew on the Terra Nova expedition (1910-13) were susceptible to sailor’s hoary superstitions. They searched for the root of all bad luck on their voyage; the ‘Jonah’. The consensus settled on the camera as the evil eye. It’s appropriate, then, that the photographs collected in this volume — carelessly filed away and recently rediscovered — are suggestive of a hard-bitten timelessness. The story of Captain Scott and his men has worn smooth by retelling. With the centenary of his and four men’s deaths approaching, it is an apt

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Legend of the Patriotic Drinker

This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That’s from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine, the Emergence of a World Industry 1840-1914. This seems hard to believe until one recalls how little governments spent on anything back in the late-Victorian era. Nevertheless, there you have it: boozers kept Britain afloat then just as drinkers and smokers do more than their bit to fund the government these days. Even so: 36%!

David Blackburn

Mr Darcy versus Maxim de Winter

Who’s it to be? Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s blabbering shopaholic? Or Old Big ‘Ead in David Peace’s The Damned Utd? The list of 25 titles that are to be given away on World Book Night (23rd April 2012) was unveiled in Waterstone’s Piccadilly shop last night. They are 25 varied books, with a mixture of established classics and cult non-fiction. There are victims and villans, sages and fools, and lovers and mothers. Meanwhile, Colin Firth and Laurence Olivier are jostling to be Leading Man, as Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy goes head-to-head with Daphne du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter.  The reference to cinema doubles as a criticism of the list: there’s plenty on it that you won’t have read, but nothing of which you haven’t heard. And

Anna Baddeley

Briefing Note: Paperback non-fiction

With one eye on as yet empty Christmas stockings and the other on cold winter’s nights, here is a short list of essential non-fiction titles recently released in paperback. 1) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee This “biography” of cancer by a New York oncologist whisks readers from the first documented appearance of the disease to modern day battles to find a cure. What the critics thought: Alexander Linklater, Observer: “[A] great and beautiful book … The notion of “popular science” doesn’t come close to describing this achievement. It is literature” Jervoise Andreyev, Spectator: “This is a book about the past not the future. Lots of talk about phenomenal

Colin Bateman

The comforts of fiction

I’m hoping that when Daniel Craig steps out as Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he will do for journalists what he did for Speedos in Casino Royale: make them (almost) fashionable. Blomkvist, Steig Larrson’s crusading reporter, is already a poster boy for old school journalism and may inspire a new generation of wannabee hacks. When I was an aspiring journalist, Woodward and Bernstein were all the rage. But, enthralling as Watergate was, All the President’s Men ultimately adds up to a lot of phone calls. I craved greater excitement and I drew my inspiration from a reporter who was every bit as driven as Woodstein, but

Monday

Anna Baddeley

The best of Barnes?

It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over the 2011 Man Booker Prize. No one will remember that X said her five-year-old could have come up with a better shortlist, or that Y told X to stop being such an elitist snob. And I worry that readers coming to Barnes afresh, assuming The Sense of an Ending to be his best book, will

David Blackburn

Across the Murakami pages

It was a quiet weekend on the literary front. The Sundays bristled with reviews, most of them about Murakami’s 1Q84. The voluminous novel has already acquired the sobriquet ‘epic masterpiece’ and breathless weekend reviewers have conferred more epithets on it: read Anthony Cummins in the Telegraph, although he sounds a note of caution, urging the reader not to “think too hard” about “this mammoth shaggy dog story”. Cummins also says that this is perhaps a publishing event masquerading as a literary event, which qualifies his enthusiasm a little more. The chorus of gentle criticism builds in the Sunday Times, where Robert Collins notes (£) that the worlds of 1Q84 are

Saturday

Philip Hensher

1Q84: Book One and Book Two by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin Harvill

Haruki Murakami’s latest tale of good and evil has a thrilling, broad sweep, but the delicacy of his early work is missing, says Philip Hensher  The scale of the celebrity of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is impossible to convey. From 1987, when his enchanted love story Norwegian Wood sold millions, he has been a huge presence in Japan. From the 1990s onwards, he has moved from being a cult favourite abroad to a general bestseller. His extravagant stories, especially Dance Dance Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and (probably his best and most influential book) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle introduce the fantastic into contemporary Japanese society,

Samuel Brittan

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker

It has become a cliché that the great increase in material wealth over the centuries has not been accompanied by any corresponding moral advance. Human nature, it is said, remains the same — with the implication that much of it is pretty nasty. Here, however, comes a leading evolutionary biologist, Stephen Pinker, to claim that human violence has decreased over the millennia and centuries. He is in a good position to make that claim, having previously got into trouble with the Left by showing that we are ‘hard wired’ for much of our behaviour and that it is not all due to environmental influences. In this 800-page book, which encompasses

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis’s first book on the current financial crisis, The Big Short (2010), was both a bestseller and a hit with most reviewers — but not with me. I felt Lewis had strained but failed to recapture the voice of Liar’s Poker (1989), the wonderfully entertaining account of his own career as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman that broke the mould for writing about the follies of the money world. The problem, I felt, was that the people he chose to write about — a selection of sociopathic hedge-fund geeks who bet that the tottering trillion-dollar edifice of US mortgage-related paper would collapse, as it duly did — just weren’t

Masha Karp

Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia by Luke Harding

‘For you Russia is closed’. One can imagine the satisfaction with which a border control official pronounced these words to the Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding,  who had just flown back to Moscow after a visit to London last February. Harding, who had been covering Russia for nearly four years, became the first foreign journalist to be expelled from the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Later, after an international row at governmental level, he was allowed back, but soon felt it was best to leave for good. His new book Mafia State deals with many aspects of Russian life, from the Russian-Georgian war to the rise of the

Richard Davenporthines

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume I, 1907-1922 by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon

There was a time when every alpha-male tyro author had to read Hemingway. He was an amalgam of Stephen Crane, François Mauriac and Errol Flynn, roistering war reporter, existential swaggerer and sexual aggressor, and a superb prose stylist to boot. When in 1978 Bruce Chatwin identified the literary masters whom an aspirant novelist should emulate, he recommended Chekhov, Maupassant, Flaubert and Turgenev for their piercing concision and stylistic richness, ‘and among the Americans, early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway and Carson McCullers’. It is a good list for non-fiction writers as well as novelists. The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) — both drawing on experiences that

William Leith

Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

In the second world war, Joseph Heller was an American airman based in Corsica. He flew 60 missions over Italy and the south of France. He was the guy who pressed the button to release the bombs. Sometimes, he was terrified; at one point, he had a kind of existential crisis at the thought that the Germans were trying to kill him. Many years later, he wrote Catch-22, a brilliant novel about Yossarian, a terrified American airman in the throes of an existential crisis. Catch-22 was published 50 years ago, and here are two books to commemorate the anniversary — a long one by a Texan biographer, and a short

Andro Linklater

To the Ends of the Earth by T.M. Devine

When Scotland’s rugby team landed in Invercargill for the World Cup, they were greeted by a piper in full Highland fig and a cheering crowd of more than 500 New Zealanders, bedecked in tartan and waving St Andrew flags. The significance of both welcome and dress went beyond sport or nationality. Two important currents of modern life were at work, the ancient ability of the British empire to create societies in its own image, and the new power of the heritage industry to invent the past. Together they have made it necessary to update the old formula, ‘history is written by the winners,’ with the qualification, ‘but heritage is created

Anne Chisholm

Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford by Leslie Brody

Has the Mitford saga delighted us long enough? Some 17 non-fiction books about the family, mostly by its own members, have now been published; the first, in 1960, was Jessica Mitford’s memoir Hons and Rebels,  and the latest is this biography. In between there have been four fat books of letters, five individual biographies (the first of Unity, the fascist one, in 1977, then two each of Nancy, the writer and Diana Mosley, the other fascist one), two group biographies and five more autobiographies: a sequel from Jessica, and two each from Diana and Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the youngest of the sisters and the only one still

Mark Mason

Bookends: Circling the Square Mile

You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more time, The City of London by Nicholas Kenyon (Thames & Hudson, £40) is as comprehensive a photographic record of London’s financial centre as you could wish for. If a building is impressive or important, or has been either of those things in the last 2,000 years, it’s here, together with details of its design, construction and role in the capital’s history. There are also maps and illustrations, working together to tell the story of how this small plot of land became a magnet for the world’s bean-counters. It’s not just

John Preston

What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis

The start of What Am I Still Doing Here? finds Roger Lewis in a state of deep gloom. But then so does the middle of the book — and indeed the end. This, of course, is just as it should be. The last thing one wants from a professional curmudgeon is brimming red-cheeked jollity, and I’m delighted to be able to report there’s nothing like that here. There are, however, all kinds of other pleasures. In some respects, this comes as a surprise. If happiness writes white — as every creative writing student is told — you might think that churning discontent should come in a similarly unvarying shade of