Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Day by day through someone else’s life

Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story? Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story? I ask because among readers of a reactionary cast of mind (among whom I sometimes count myself) an assumption has arisen that ‘the book’, the physical book, that satisfying lump of a thing you can hold in your hands, is the ideal, the Platonic ‘form’, the ultimate reality; while all

Philip Hensher

Day of reckoning | 3 September 2011

No one could say that we didn’t have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President’s daily intelligence brief was headed ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’ Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former National Security Adviser at the White House, Sandy Berger, would on four separate occasions in 2002 and 2003 abstract official top secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his socks. (Because of Berger, we now don’t know what these warnings consisted of). There were any number of commentators, too, who saw exactly

Ian Thomson

A dancer’s progress

In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was ten and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond, and had ‘tea business’ to attend downtown. First we checked into the Taj Hotel. On the waterfront, beggar children with lurid wounds and deformities were shaking tins at passers-by. The poverty unsettled me. The Taj was swank, I could see that, but outside all was dirt and destitution. (At a cinema nearby, jarringly, Carry on Loving was being advertised as the comedy ‘fillum’ sensation of the year.) Over dinner, my parents explained that Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan,

Simon Baker

Friendships resurrected

A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is, however, perhaps the very terseness of the Bible that has caused at least as much ink as blood to be spilled in its cause; had it spelled the answer out, for instance, medieval scholars could never have whiled away so many jaw-droppingly fatuous hours in wondering how many angels could dance on the head of

Anne Applebaum

Thus do empires end

‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of the principal actors. ‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and

Peter Oborne

The enemy within | 3 September 2011

The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. As head of Pakistan’s special forces, Alavi found himself in a bitter struggle against influential military opponents in the Pakistan army. They favoured secret deals, paying large sums to the Taleban leader Baitullah Mehsud so that his supporters should not target the army. Alavi was by contrast desperate to attack the Taleban, and made no secret of this when on a visit

Dot Wordsworth

Little lists for word lovers

In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. The metaphor was taken from the street in Soho, later occupied by the film industry, once the place for dealers in antique, or imitation-antique furniture. Among Fowler’s examples of Wardour Street English were anent,

John Preston

Bookends | 3 September 2011

Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps and floaters’. This ensures that in Flesh and Bones (Heinemann, £18.99) you get plenty of authentic sounding detail with your gore. So when a human hand is found sticking out of a drum full of asphalt at the local speedway track, Reichs carefully includes plenty of stuff about how to extract the body — start with a power saw, then move on to an air hammer — and about the drum itself: ‘the size of the drum suggested a 35-gallon capacity.’ But there’s plenty more to Reichs than just insider

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

Quiz: A Bookerful of Hatchet Jobs

The Booker Prize longlist is perennially accused of pandering to the masses and to publishing publicity departments in particular. Heaven forbid the award might encourage reading or even book-buying. This year highbrow eyebrows shot up even further at the inclusion of titles so obscure they made current front-runner DJ Taylor, put forward for Derby Day, look like, well, Thackeray. Even the efforts by more famous nominees have been deemed under-par.   We wonder if this disregard for critical opinion could have something to do with the fact that Booker chairwoman Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 and now departure lounge novelist, is no stranger to bad reviews herself.   Can

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The original philosopher

As The Hemlock Cup is released in paperback, Daisy Dunn engages in some Socratic Dialogue with its author, historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes I get the impression from your book that Socrates must have been quite aware of his own eccentricity, or oddness.  Do you think he knew he was doomed from the start? In a way that’s a level of knowledge of Socrates I don’t think I could have, even having studied him for ten years. Our problem is we don’t have any of his words, so it’s a case of jigsaw-puzzling. I think what is certain, from all accounts, is that he doesn’t seem to have cared about

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The death of books?

“The death of books has been greatly exaggerated,” says novelist Lloyd Shepherd in the Guardian. He has written a detailed statistical analysis of the long-term trends in the trade and presents a positive outlook, perhaps too positive. His case hinges on two standout facts. Book sales in the UK have increased by 42 per cent over the last ten years and UK publishing sales have increased by 36 per cent during the same period. The industry yielded £1.7 billion last year. “Why the gloom?” Shepherd asks. The answer, it seems, is simple. As this blog illustrated here and here, retailers haven’t been able to compete with Amazon on either price or overheads. Amazon’s

David Blackburn

A million ways to read a book

“Dickens with magic! How much better can it get!” “Don’t be put off by the slightly old-fashioned style or by the dire films that have been made! This is a really exciting, rip-roaring adventure. Funny, scarry, brilliant book.” “Tremendously rich, delectably slow in pace, and packed to the binding with much to make you think.” “I loved the strange yet compelling world created in this book. It was one of those ones that I slowed down towards the end because I didn’t want it to finish.” Odd though it may seem, those superlatives are for the same book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It has been nominated

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Noddy in trouble

It seemed wrong, somehow, to include a story about the travails of Chorion, the company that owns Mr Men, Noddy, Poirot and Raymond Chandler, in the round-up of the weekend’s literary pages. But the news that the firm is close to entering administration made its way into both the Sunday Times and the Telegraph. Were it not for the boom of interest around Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table, Chorion might have been the leading literary story of the weekend. The outlook is pretty bleak. The Bookseller reports that Chorion has debts of £70m, annual interest payments of £35m and £16m of earnings, according to its annual accounts. The

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 30 August 2011

Robert McCrum profiles Michael Ondaatje to coincide with the publication of Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table. ‘The eyes of Michael Ondaatje, prize-winning author of The English Patient, are a baffling window on the inner man: the brilliant, pale sapphires of a witty Dutch burgher set in a 68-year-old Tamil frame. As he says of himself and his work, “I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.” An interview with Ondaatje is a playful compendium of anecdote, on-the-hoof cultural criticism and crafty conversational shape-shifting. “Charm” is a dangerous word, but an hour or two with Michael Ondaatje is a beguiling experience. The more you look,

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

In a class of his own | 27 August 2011

Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School captures the hilarity and pathos of an eccentric headmaster and the unusual establishment he founded in Kensington in the Thirties. A.N.Wilson introduces us to his funny, peculiar world There are two sorts of school stories. Much the most popular, of course, are those that observe the drama of school life through the prism of the pupils’ imagination. Malory Towers, the Chalet School adventures, Jennings and Darbishire, Harry Potter, Billy Bunter all belong to this addictive genre. My father, who was born in 1902, used to say that the essential thing to realise about such books is that they are really about class; that

Mark Mason

Bookends | 27 August 2011

‘Owl?’ said Pooh. ‘What’s a biography?’ ‘A biography,’ replied Owl, ‘is an Important Book. Such as an Interested Person might read. Anyone who is interested in the real-life toys which inspired you and Piglet and the others, for instance, might be tempted to read The Life and Times of Winnie the Pooh by Shirley Harrison.’ ‘Is that the one you said was published by Remember When at nineteen pounds ninety-nine?’ asked Pooh. ‘The very same,’ answered Owl. Then he fixed Pooh with a Meaningful Stare. ‘But — and I say this with regret — it is a temptation they should probably resist.’ Pooh looked sad. ‘Really?’ Owl nodded. ‘It is

Jane Ridley

The call of the wild | 27 August 2011

Christopher Ondaatje is best known as a member of the great and the good and a generous patron of the arts, notably the National Portrait Gallery. The pieces collected in this book give glimpses of another, quite different life as a traveller and writer. Ondaatje’s family were long-established Dutch tea planters in Ceylon. In 1947 Christopher was sent to Blundell’s School in the West Country, a ‘sallow, thin, frightened’ 13-year-old; transplanted from the ‘carefree wilderness life’ of his father’s tea plantation, he was lonely and bullied. He had been banished from the Garden of Eden. Independence for Ceylon came in 1948, and his father’s descent into alcoholism and debt followed

Sarah Burton

Art for ransom

These two books make mutually illuminating and surprisingly contrasting companions, given the similarity of their subjects. Both are written by those with hands-on experience in the field of art preservation and security. Sandy Nairne was Director of Programmes at the Tate Gallery in 1994 when two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner were stolen while on loan to an exhibition in Frankfurt, and was a key player in their eventual recovery. When Anthony Amore became Security Director at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2005, he immediately picked up the threads of the investigation into the theft of three Rembrandts and other works which had been stolen from the

Ian Thomson

Tallinn tales

During the Twenties and Thirties, the Estonian capital of Tallinn was known to be a centre for espionage, infiltrated by White Russian intriguers bent on blocking Bolshevik access to north-west Europe. Graham Greene first visited in the spring of 1934  — ‘for no reason’, he writes in his memoir Ways of Escape, ‘except escape to somewhere new’. He spent many happy hours in Tallinn, he records, ‘when I was not vainly seeking a brothel’. (The brothel had been recommended to him by Baroness Budberg, a Russian-Estonian exile living in London and mistress of, among others, H. G.Wells.) Though Greene failed to find the brothel, he did conceive of a film

Kathy Oshaughnessy

In the land of doublespeak

An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. So compelling, in fact, that at times one feels he can’t bear to leave anything out, and the plot is accordingly tweaked. But even if there’s the odd creak, this first and Booker-longlisted novel is a wonderfully good read, giving one a convincing taste of how it might be to