Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

David Blackburn

A scribbling spat

The prognosis is grave for the Booker Prize, say more than a few literary commentators in response to the news that a cabal of publishers, authors and agents plan to establish a “well-funded prize” that would have a “different set of priorities” to the Booker. For different “set of priorities”, read “high-brow”; the prize may also be open to American authors. Spokesman for the nascent Literature Prize, Andrew Kidd, told the Bookseller that the prize would: ‘establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence…For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize’s administrator and this year’s judges

Anna Baddeley

Briefing Note: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California. Who is Michael Lewis? A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short. Does he have any insights? This is more a collage of colourful reportage than a book

Mark Mason

In praise of the footnote

What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is

Wednesday

David Blackburn

In response to the Guardian’s top 10 novels on farming

Over at Guardian Books, Irish playwright Belinda McKeon has picked her top 10 farming novels. Here’s her list: 1. Stoner by John Williams 2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh 3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans 5. That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern 6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff 7. Foster by Claire Keegan 8. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons 9. God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin 10. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer    It’s a provocative list and there are some notable exceptions, especially as numbers 2, 3 and

David Blackburn

Wisden’s voyage into cricket’s future

Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, cricket is India’s first faith – or so the cliché says. Wisden, the cricket Bible, announced earlier this week that is to launch an Indian edition. I’m surprised that Wisden does not already have a sub-continent edition, given that money-spinning cricket innovations such as the Indian Premier League have accompanied the region’s boisterous economic expansion. You might think that Wisden is arriving at this party somewhat more than fashionably late. Wisden and its publisher (and owner) Bloomsbury, however, exude confidence. Their press release notes, in the easy tones of a latter day Nabob, that the “local market for information on cricket in India is highly fragmented”. They plan to “unify the fragmented

Tuesday

Anna Baddeley

Briefing note: Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. Her background is journalism rather than academia. She’s married to the author Michael Frayn. What’s the deal with this biography? Tomalin’s book claims to offer a concise, rounded portrait of the man and his work. She doesn’t hold back from making judgments on his tricky personal life (in 1990 she published

Johnnie Kerr

A most unlikely hero

What is it about George Smiley that makes him translate so well onto the screen? The man doesn’t fight, he doesn’t gamble, and he barely seems to notice women (apart from the wife who continually cuckolds him) — in fact the only hobby that appears to brighten him up a bit is a homely interest in old books. For a spy novel this is not what you might call ‘a winning formula’ — although, of course, clearly it is. Actually, John le Carré invention of Smiley as the ‘anti-Bond’ was a conception near to genius, a literary masterstroke that proved spies didn’t have to dodge bullets to be thrilling. But

Monday

The Spectator

Online poetry competition

Thank you to all those readers who entered our online poetry competition last week. There were lots of novel, witty and entertaining entries on the ostensibly mundane subject of ‘games’. The winner is ‘hc18’, who should contact dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk to claim their bottle of champagne. Here is the winning entry: ‘The sweat, the fear, the aching limbs, the scowling face of Mr. Symms. The pain, the tears, the shrieks and howls. the muck, the grime, those sweaty towels. Running round the pitch in rain. “You’ve done it once, get to it again!” Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, Mud on your face and grit in your eye… How I miss those

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 10 October 2011

Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel laureate, is the toast of the literary world at present. He was a near ubiquitous presence in the weekend’s books pages. Philip Hensher has written a profile in the Telegraph that says anything and everything you need to know about the enigmatic Swedish poet. ‘Tomas Transtromer was by profession a psychologist who worked with criminals, drug addicts and in prisons. He published small amounts of poetry over the years, much of which reflects an interest in nature and in a kind of imagistic approach to the natural world. In 1990, Transtromer suffered a major stroke which made it impossible for him to speak in public. However, he

Sunday

Jerry Hayes

Better than his party

I have been awaiting a definitive biography of Nick Clegg for a while. And while I’m not entirely sure whether Chris Bowers’ Nick Clegg, The Biography quite gets there, don’t let me discourage you. This is an excellent book and a fascinating insight into the man. The trouble is that most of us who enjoy reading about our leaders have been used to being thrown great hunks of red meat scandal, vile gossip and an undertone that the subject is far more of a shit than we had dared imagine. We then toddle off to bed, sleeping soundly in the reassurance that our hero has feet of clay like the

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The Brilliance in the Room

It is difficult to conceive of a writer more passionately loved by his audience than Dickens was. It went on for a very long time, too. We learn from the historian David Kynaston that, immediately after the second world war, Dickens was one of the five most borrowed authors from public libraries. My grandmother was probably a typical reader of Dickens: she left school at 14 before the first world war, yet had a cheap set of Dickens in the house (I think it was a promotional giveaway by the Daily Express at some point in the 1930s.) I have the set — the typeface and the acid paper nearly

Andrew Gimson

Work in progress

At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers and hold seminars on the symbolism of the Boris bike, or the duel between Boris and George Osborne for the Tory leadership. Very soon the American and Chinese universities would insist on getting involved, and would buy up some of the best people. A young man from the University of Hull came to interview me

Richard Davenporthines

Well-lived

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. ‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a Guards officer at Pirbright camp, under a troop sergeant with terrifying powers of verbal demolition, well on his way into the pants of girls. One of Horne’s fellow cadets —heir to a dukedom — went to an Oxford cinema where he ‘partially lost his virtue’ to the ruthlessly roaming hands of ‘two beefy Land Girls

James Mather

The radical imperialist

In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. A militia of several hundred barristers, equipped with muskets but doubtful aim, assembled to guard the Middle Temple.  At the 11th hour they were spared by the intervention of the army, whose firing into the crowd quelled the mayhem.                       Sir William Jones — soon to be appointed a judge of the

John Laughland

Deeply perplexing

This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only 49 returned to France. The book’s whimsical but ultimately uninformative title belies a book which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling. The first 150 pages deal with the women’s Resistance activities — attending secret meetings, arranging safe passage to the free zone, running clandestine printing presses. The

Cressida Connolly

Refreshingly outspoken

She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . This is what Diana Athill has to say about interviews written by Lynn Barber, and it’s a pretty apt description of her own writing. As is well known, Athill was an esteemed publishing editor throughout her working life (John Updike,

Anita Brookner

A mystery unsolved

This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. It features Simon Serailler, the author’s usual protagonist, investigating a cold case of a missing teenager who was last seen waiting at a bus stop some 16 years previously, and whose skeleton was found when heavy rain washed down sludge and rubble from a neighbouring hillside. But it also has a secondary theme — rather more serious than its ostensible subject — that of assisted suicide. Hypochondriacs are warned. What is examined, in admirable detail, somewhat overshadows the police procedural which is

Andrew Taylor

The play of patterns

Labels mislead. In the taxonomy of literature, both James Sallis and Agatha Christie are often described as crime writers. True, they have in common the fact that their stories tend to include the occasional murder, but there the resemblance ends. Sallis’s outlook is closer to that of Samuel Beckett, whom he cites as one of his influences; and his characters are more Pozzo than Poirot. Sallis’s novels have gradually attracted a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic; No Exit Press, a small British publisher, has resolutely championed his work for the last 15 years. Now there are signs that his books may at last reach the wider audience

Sophia Waugh

Bookends: Getting it perfect

There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect (Fig Tree, £18.99). And the idea is a good one. Cloake has done all the hard work — read all the top cookery writers, tried out their versions, and then picked the best, or ‘Perfect’ one. So you have 68 ‘perfect’ recipes. The title is meant to be comforting, or encouraging, but it could be a little

Friday

Sophia Waugh

Bookends: Getting it perfect | 7 October 2011

Sophia Waugh has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect. And the idea is a good one. Cloake has done all the hard work — read all the top cookery writers, tried out their versions, and then picked the best, or ‘Perfect’ one. So you