Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bookends: Spirit of place

A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly published collections of articles, which makes At the Yeoman’s House (Enitharmon £15) especially welcome. It’s an autobiographical meditation on an ancient dwelling-house set in flint-strewn fields: Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, where Blythe lives. He inherited it from the artist John Nash, and now investigates its history in an enjoyably oblique and fragmentary fashion. In Cobbett’s definition a yeoman was above a farmer but lower than a gentleman, and Bottengoms has never been grand. It began when ‘a man roofed in a spring and dwelt beside it’, and in

Alexander Chancellor

After America: Get Ready For Armageddon by Mark Steyn

There are people sent to depress us, and prominent among them is Mark Steyn, whose speciality is apocalyptic predictions. Following his bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which was about the collapse of all of the Western world with the exception of the United States, he is now predicting the collapse of the US as well, leaving the entire ‘free world’, as it used to be called, at the mercy of those great enemies of freedom, China and Islam. He writes: There will be no ‘new world order’, only a world without order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest

Anthony Cummins

The ripple effect

Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her hip. Her daughter, Rose, personal assistant to the once-eminent historian Lord Peters, is meant to be in Manchester to help her employer give a talk on Walpole. When Rose bails out, Peters turns to his own daughter, Marion, an interior designer in hock to the bank. At the pre-talk lunch, she has the good fortune, so it seems, to meet a venture capitalist, who offers her a gig doing up luxury flats. Less fortunate is her married lover, Jeremy, whose

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses by Paul Koudounaris

In one Capuchin monastery in Sicily, the so-called Palermo Catacombs, locals used to buy a niche where their mummified corpse would one day stand erect, clothed and on display to visitors, the way we might now buy a burial plot. Would-be purchasers would pay a visit to select their niche and stand in it to make sure it fitted. Indeed, by way of voluntary penance, some would remain there for hours, contemplating their end. At the same time, in the early 17th century, a related order of nuns in Rome, the Sepolta Vive or Buried Alive sisters, would sleep in coffins and hail each other with the observation: ‘Remember sister,

Ian Sansom

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jonathan Franzen. David Foster Wallace. Jeffrey Eugenides. Giant, slow-moving, serious writers, notching up about a novel per decade, all with their sights set on The Big One, The Beast, The Great American Novel. Wallace pulled it off, undoubtedly, with Infinite Jest in 1996, before ending it all by suicide in 2008 — a tragic loss. Franzen laid claim to fame — and earned himself the cover of Time magazine — with The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). And now Eugenides, after The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), makes another attempt at literary immortality with The Marriage Plot. And fair play to him, he throws absolutely everything at it. In

Richard Davenporthines

AfterWord edited by Dale Salwak

‘Conjuring the Literary Dead’ is the sub-title of this outlandish, sometimes beguiling book. Its editor, Dale Salwak, coaxed 19 writers — of the status of Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Jay Parini and Alan Sillitoe — to write essays in which they imagine speaking to dead authors who intrigue them. The resulting chapters are often inquisitive, macabre and teasing, but occasionally flat or laborious. ‘Perhaps all writing is motivated, deep down,’ Margaret Attwood suggests in an introductory survey, ‘by a fear of and fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.’ Francis King more

Ian Thomson

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, had appreciated their transformation. The author’s own mother, Nicola Fuller, was disquieted to find herself as a character in that ‘awful book’ (as she refers to it today). Was she really that flaky and drunk? Or was that how others perceived her? Most writers make life more interesting than it is; I suspect that Alexandra Fuller is among them. In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness she returns to the Africa

Cressida Connolly

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett. At her finest, (in which category I’d put The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Lighthousekeeping) there is no one to match her. The title of this memoir comes from the mouth of Mrs Winterson of Accrington, Lancs, the author’s adoptive

Jane Brown

William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Patricia Reed

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’. It is pertinent to follow with a quote from Merlin James’s introductory essay on Nicholson’s ‘Painting and Experience’,

Andrew Rosenheim

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

America has always idolised its entrepreneurs, even when it has proved a thankless task — if you can glamorise Bill Gates, you can glamorise anyone. Especially Steve Jobs, whose death from pancreatic cancer has been greeted as the loss of Mammon’s Messiah. Is any of this justified? Well, yes and no. Jobs did as much as anyone, with the possible exception of Gates, to bring digital change into the mainstream, and this makes his biography as much a history of a digital revolution as a personal story. It’s this fittingly binary quality that makes Walter Isaacson’s biography so worthwhile, since Jobs himself emerges from it as an unattractive, even repellent

Eric Christiansen

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others edited by Tim Heald

Richard Cobb had many good friends, among them Hugh Trevor-Roper, who kept letters, and so made this selection possible. There must be many more letters, since the author was an inveterate correspondent at least from the 1930s. The wartime ones would be of greater historical interest than these, which are nearly all post-1967, many of them concerned with the essentially piddling subjects of university politics, pupils and personalities. Of course, these are foie gras and the sound of trumpets to persons connected with such things at Oxford and Cambridge, but the admirable publisher must be aiming at a larger audience than that, ignoring Cobb’s own repeated assertion that ‘nothing ever

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know. Only by consulting Richard Bradford’s bibliography would you know that in 1982 Martin Amis published a book — subtitled ‘An Addict’s Guide’ — on how to win at Space Invaders, and that he (presumably) hasn’t let it come back into print. An entire book! That seems to me worthy at least of a paragraph in the body of a 400-odd-page writer’s biography. It tells you something, doesn’t it? I mean, apart from the fact that Martin Amis once liked Space Invaders, which is amusing if not crucial. Anything a writer disowns is of interest: particularly if it’s a

Friday

David Blackburn

Eugenides: I’m more Hillbilly than Mr Greek

Don’t believe the pseuds. You don’t have to be clever to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. The novel is his first since the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex in 2002 and on one level it is terribly, terribly clever. The central character goes to university, where she studies the intricate marriage plots common to many nineteenth century novels before becoming embroiled in an intricate marriage plot of her own. Eugenides plays with form and reveals his characters through the books they read. Like I said, it’s clever. I’m much too ill-read and ill-bred to appreciate Eugenides’ dazzling literary range, which, I’m told by wiser owls than me, surpasses that of

The Spectator

November poetry competition

The votes are in and the decision is made. The winner of last month’s poetry competition is Sam Gwynn, for this entry on the theme of ‘dirt’: If dirt is bad, then so are we and so is history, For all of us were dirty once, as dirty as can be. Our milieu was the tillage where we bent and harrowed clods And out of dirt we made our dirty dwellings and our gods. Soon enough we had a language full of many dirty words As common terms for intercourse and blasphemies and turds. We aired our dirty laundry for our tribal mates to view; It really didn’t matter much, for they

David Blackburn

The art of fiction | 4 November 2011

Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and draw a graph with multiple lines, each representing a major character in a book. One is up at a particular moment, driving another down in consequence. Such an approach might make some pupils relate to the densely plotted novels so beloved of the education system.

Thursday

Anna Baddeley

Twenty-first century Pelican

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too. It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism would make a wonderful ironic present. Then it occurred to me: isn’t it sad we don’t have an equivalent to Pelican today. For the ignorant among you, Pelican was the non-fiction arm of Penguin’s great project to deliver cheap, intelligent books to the masses. It was set up in

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: The bother of embargoes

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the book world. Last week there were a few bookish grunts of dissatisfaction when Terry Pratchett beat Martina Cole to the Number One slot. Pratchett’s Snuff sold 31,904 copies and Cole’s The Faithless only 31,136, yet there were cries of foul play. This was because some bookshops had broken the embargo on Cole’s book and sold it

Scott Jordan-Harris

A new kind of classic

The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by William Joyce is just such a discovery and, if it can be considered a book, it is the best book about books since Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. Joyce is both a brilliant children’s author and a computer animator skilled enough to have worked on Pixar films, and here

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Literary pornography, with Will Self

The Gallery at Foyles hosted the launch of the latest issue of Granta earlier this evening. The magazine teems with illustrations by the Chapman brothers, which gives away the theme: horror. Contributors Will Self and Mark Doty were the guests of honour and they discussed their essays. Self spoke of the nature of blood in Dracula, and Doty of Walt Whitman’s correspondence with Bram Stoker, which was apparently all about repressed homosexuality – who’d have of guessed? Perhaps it was the dramatic subject matter, but conversation soon moved onto Self’s illness, which was fascinating. He is afflicted by Polycythaemia, a rare blood disease, and he disclosed that he is being bled as a treatment.

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Michael Arditti

The charming novelist Michael Arditti kindly offered to answer a few questions for Shelf Life, the new feature where we ask literary people impertinent questions about their reading habits. He also posed for a photo in a rather debonair fashion on his sedan chair with his bookshelf in the background. He mentioned that he does — and always has done — most of his work in bed. That explains answer number six then. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Oliver Twist  3) Has a book ever