Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Fleur Macdonald

Saints and Winners

Edna O’Brien (pictured here on the right with Margaret Drabble in 1972), the grand dame of Irish literature, has just won the The Frank O’Connor prize for her latest collection of short stories Saints and Sinners. Established in 2005, the €35,000 prize is run by the Munster Literature Centre as part of the Cork International Short Story festival. Beating off competition from Colm Tóibín, former winner Yiyun Li, Valerie Trueblood and debut authors Alexander MacLeod and Suzanne Rivecca, the eighty year old veteran was absolutely delighted on winning the largest prize given to short fiction, calling it “wonderful, lovely!” One of the judges, poet Thomas McCarthy, crowned O’Brien, an author who

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

Across the literary pages | 19 September 2011

One of the literary excitements of this week, The Fear Index by Robert Harris, showed that the journalist and novelist continues to mine both the ancient and modern world for inspiration.  His latest thriller revolves around a mad scientist who’s created a beast he can’t control. So far, so Shelley, but this monster is unmistakably of the moment: a computer program designed to monitor fear in money markets for a hugely profitable hedge fund. His tale tips into gothic when the soulless monster switches and starts to track fear in the mind of its master. Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times (£) raved about the up-dating of a timeless classic: ‘Robert

Austen Saunders

Fun Times

Shakespeare and Milton: unsurpassable in the English canon. Milton’s mature poetry stands for perfection, Shakespeare’s for a wholeness of vision verging on the truly religious. Their examples cannot be rivalled, only followed. Dickens chose to follow Shakespeare. And now D. J. Taylor trails Dickens. Derby Day is a story about—wait for it—the Derby. A spectacular race-horse by the name of Tiberius has fallen into the hands of Mr Davenant who lives quietly in Lincolnshire. Soon he is not living quite so quietly. A brash young man from London begins to take a professional interest in Mr Davenant’s debts – and an even keener interest in his horse. Safebreakers, disgraced military

Saturday

Carol Sarler

Feel the pain

There’s a passage in Willy Russell’s wonderful novel, The Wrong Boy, which could almost be funny — except, wisely, Russell doesn’t play it for laughs. The book chronicles a childhood blighted by adult misunderstanding, and describes an instance of it in which zealous ‘educationalists’ observe that the Boy’s artwork is harshly, relentlessly black: echo and evidence, all agree, of a darkness in the child’s soul. The truth, had the evangelical minds been open to it, was both simpler and easier to mend. The Boy was a shrimp of a kid, easily elbowed aside. So when the school crayons were put out, the coloured ones were promptly snaffled, leaving him with

Jonathan Bate

The art of enchantment

Edward Burne-Jones was the archetypal literary-minded Victorian. Born in 1833, the son of a Birmingham picture-framer and gilder, he developed a taste for the Romantic poets while at school. Then, whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, he found a lifelong friend in William Morris. The university was supposed to be their route towards holy orders, but together they converted to the religion of art for art’s sake. Another student friend, Archibald MacLaren, gave Burne-Jones his first artistic break by asking him to provide illustrations for a collection of stories called The Fairy Family. Why did the Victorians spend so much time away with the fairies? Though Fiona MacCarthy’s subtitle is ‘Edward

Lewis Jones

Call of Valhalla

In an appendix to this powerfully poetic and beautifully produced little book, A.S. Byatt explains that when Canongate invited her to write a myth, she knew immediately which one to choose: the myth of the Icelandic sagas and Wagner’s operas — ‘Ragnarök: the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed.’ When she began, she realised that she was writing for her childhood self, and the way she thought about the world when she first encountered the myth in her mother’s old copy of Asgard and the Gods, acquired as a crib for exams in Old Icelandic and Ancient Norse: ‘a solid volume,

John De-Falbe

Memories in a world of forgetting

It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about a week. Funder’s point of entry is Ruth, who, some 60 years later as a very old lady in Australia, receives in the post a copy of Toller’s auto-biography, I Was A German, with some manuscript amendments made by him in the week before he died, in 1939. Despite the gap in time and place,

Anthony Cummins

Slightly strained

An escaped convict who took part in a slave-ship mutiny and a Liverpudlian banker hungry for land in a north-eastern pit village are the main characters of this novel set in 1767, which is a sequel to Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth’s excellent, Booker-sharing yarn about the slave trade (it and The English Patient won in 1992). The convict, Sullivan, is an Irish fiddler who slips out of Newgate and makes for Durham, where he hopes to find the family of Billy Blair, a dead shipmate and fellow mutineer. In the earlier book, Sullivan and Blair rose up against their captain as, en route to the Caribbean, he prepared to toss

Douglas Hurd

No rules to waive

Kwasi Kwarteng is a young Tory MP and it is right and proper that he should begin his analysis of the British Empire with a quotation from Disraeli. The fact that he is of Ghanaian origin shows merely that we live in an unpredictable world: In the European nations there is confidence in this country …. While they know we can enforce our policy at the same time they know that our Empire is an Empire of liberty, truth and justice. Kwarteng finds it remarkable that Disraeli said nothing about democracy or economics. This would indeed be strange if he had been either a democrat or a believer in free

Ian Thomson

Dark days in the Dale

One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds. Published in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaicans and other West Indians resident in Britain. Throughout, Hinds is haunted by the ‘race disturbances’ that swept Britain in 1958. Tensions erupted first in Nottingham then, more grievously, in west London. White youths (‘Teddy Boys’ to the tabloid press) beat up blacks and Asians in Shepherd’s Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale between the factories of Wood Lane and the newly claimed

Alan Judd

The human factor | 17 September 2011

Accounts of the secret world usually fall into one of two camps, the authoritative or the popular.  The authoritative — such as Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s of MI6 — are officially sanctioned, based on the file record and reliable. They are incomplete because, inevitably, there are episodes the authors are not (yet) permitted to publish, and Jeffery’s ends anyway in 1949. The popular accounts, which invariably claim to be complete and uncensored — and never are — tend to be drawn partly from the National Archive, partly from anonymous retired officials and partly from other popular accounts, some by disaffected former employees. Truths, half-truths, speculations and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A good man in a crisis

It’s debatable whether politicians of the Left or the Right are better at handling the public finances. But we do seem to learn more about economics under a Labour government. Alistair Darling’s memoir chronicles his turbulent years at the Treasury as he watched the world slithering into a financial volcano. Though the material is extremely dramatic, Darling’s sober, measured prose doesn’t quite suit the story’s explosive theatricality. He was haunted by the Northern Rock crisis of 2007 and the global impact of TV images showing panicking investors queuing up to withdraw all their cash. That, he determined, must never happen again. More than once, as the crisis swept the world,

Byron Rogers

Nobody turns up

This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title, which on the spine is How to Disappear but then itself does, for the centre of its frontispiece is A Memoir for Misfits. A dedication follows, ‘To my old friend Pedro Friedeberg whom I’ve never met’. Just three pages in, and every fuse in the brains of the respectable matrons who meet to talk about books will have blown over the Bristol Cream. And that is before they have even started reading. What about? Oh, snobbery and sodomy, erections and

Mark Mason

Bookends | 17 September 2011

One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein (Reaktion Books, £9.99). The Perignon tale is in there, along with many more lively and engaging stories from the history of sparkling wine (which, Epstein assures us, goes back much further than those three short centuries). We learn that the term ‘Champagne Charlie’ originated with Charles Heidsieck, that

Friday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Beaded bubbles

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein. The Perignon tale is in there, along with many more lively and engaging stories from the history of sparkling wine (which, Epstein assures us, goes back

Thursday

Matthew Richardson

The importance of plot

As literary fly-on-the-wall moments go, it would be hard to beat. John Banville – the most austerely mannered stylist in the language, the archbishop of literary fiction – hands his publisher the typescript of his latest. Then he springs the surprise: by the way, it’s a crime novel. Plot, character, the lot. One would forgive the publishing exec for falling horizontal from the shock.   The only possible hint of such an inclination had been with Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence. And it’s a faint one at that. Narrated by a murderer from his cell, the book is more Proust than Poirot with its prissily exact narrator and

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

A Death in Summer – review round up

Benjamin Black – aka John Banville – is back for another round of detective fun with A Death in Summer. Does the crossover magic work for a fifth outing?   In the Guardian, Mark Lawson admires the way Black’s hero, Quirke, alludes to heroes of the detective genre: “He is known only by his surname (Dexter’s Morse), is an alcoholic chainsmoker (Rankin’s Rebus), loves poetry (P.D. James’s Dalgleish), has a difficult relationship with a daughter (Mankell’s Wallander) and has difficulty in sustaining relationships (everyone’s everyone).” What such allusion amounts to, Lawson claims, is ‘a respect for the form in which he has chosen to work.” On which note, Lawson adds:

Tuesday

Paul Abbott

Of Masters and men

The President of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron MP, has spent the last few weeks pre-empting Sir John Vickers’ report on banking reform. Tough legislation to split up the banks must now be passed “before the next election”, he insists: it is “right for the country”, and “must happen as soon as possible”. Reading Masters of Nothing – the new book from Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi on the banking crisis – the ex-NUS officer may have found some unlikely allies in the new crop of Conservative MPs. Although there is still a debate about the timing of reform, Masters of Nothing is an authoritative and scathing critique of financial

Monday

David Blackburn

Writing 9/11

September 11 2011, another day that will live in infamy. Cataclysmic events invariably cause a deluge of fiction, some of it great. The Easter Rising, The Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, The Charge of the Light Brigade, the sinking of the Titanic, all have inspired tomes and novellas. And who could forget Lord Flashart’s contempt for the “endless poetry” of the First World War.  So it’s curious that comparatively few novels have been written about 9/11. The BBC has produced this graph to illustrate the disparity between fiction and non-fiction; just 164 novels on the subject:  Some of the books included do not exactly concern 9/11. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is more

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 12 September 2011

After a short break in service, normal posting will now resume on the books blog. The Booker shortlist has been announced and there is no room for Alan Hollinghurst, Sebastian Barry, D.J. Taylor or Patrick McGuiness. Here are the books that superseded them: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie  Patrick de Witt, The Sisters Brothers Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English A D Miller, Snowdrops Christopher Hitchens ponders writing and language in the ten years after 9/11. ‘Especially over the course of the last 10 years, the word “martyr” has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: a cold