Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Paul Binding

The father of songs

‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ ‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born probably a generation before Homer, who never once mentions him — is eminently a lover. His grief at his wife Eurydice’s death (generally ascribed to snake-bite) drove him to the Underworld itself, to find her and bring her back. His love for her made him accept the harsh injunction never to look at her during

Jonathan Mirsky

Ignorance is bliss

This novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan Koonchung, brought up in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it. He sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles China today, but with two creepy additional elements: an entire month, during 2011, has vanished from most written records, and almost everyone feels happy all the time. In addition to not missing the vanished month, people no longer remember the Maoist persecutions, the 1959-1961 famine in which 45 million starved to death, and the Tiananmen killings. Chen, the novel’s central character, who has spent most of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but

Sara Wheeler

A new world in the making

Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended up writing a meditation on the nature of democracy that remains in print after 160 years. In this latest addition to the fertile field of Tocquevillian studies, Arthur Kaledin analyses the Frenchman’s character and thought before, during and after his nine-month tour around the still partially formed USA. De Tocqueville set off in 1831 in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Both were 25, and they had a high old time, travelling as widely as they could: the

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: The Jazz Baroness

She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her she was already known as the Jazz Baroness. By the age of 40, Nica had devoted herself to jazz and freed herself from the restrictive obligations of two illustrious banking dynasties. A generous Rothschild trust fund enabled her to live comfortably as an informal Lady Bountiful, nurturing her many needy friends among the jazz musicians

Friday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends: A Jazz baroness

Patrick Skene Catling has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her she was already known as the Jazz Baroness. By the age of 40, Nica had devoted herself to jazz and freed herself from the restrictive obligations of two illustrious banking dynasties. A

Thursday

David Blackburn

The end of an era | 18 August 2011

I entered the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth in search of warmth. I had been camped on Dartmoor for a couple of nights, taking part in a cadet weekend, back in the days when I believed the army might be my vocation. Dartmouth is several miles from the Dartmoor National Park and a section of 13 year old boys dreaming of being men marched off the park onto the quiet road that led to Totnes and then followed the broadening line of the river Dart to the sea. This being England in the height of summer, the rain was falling horizontally. After 10 miles or so of this relentless tempest, the

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Anatomy of a blockbuster

Behind fashion as usual, I’ve finally read One Day, the runaway success by David Nicholls. To be honest, I was slightly underwhelmed by the time I finished it. The combination of too much hype and the excruciating plot contrivance in the closing pages left me unsatisfied – irritated even. But, I’m largely nit-picking. It’s an extraordinary achievement to have created so much public affection with a book, especially one so slight. One Day is good clean fun; it’s not Madame Bovary. Its success, I think, lies is Nicholls’ adept use of set pieces to drive both plot and character, and his brilliance with dialogue. The two often combine: the scene of

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

A hatful of facts about…the Edinburgh International Book Festival

1) The Edinburgh Book Festival has begun in earnest this week. The festival is one of the lengthiest in the country, running from 13-29 of August. The festival was originally launched in 1983 and staged every two years before becoming a yearly feature in 1997. The Book festival links in with the other festivals in Edinburgh – the Jazz festival, International festival, the Art festival, the Fringe, the Film festival and the Edinburgh Mela – and is thus able to claim to be part of ‘the biggest and best arts festival in the world.’ 2) Many of the UK’s best known authors are due on the festival stage this year.

Monday

Daisy Dunn

A Very Special Relationship…

It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter.   The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least across the Atlantic Ocean. Marking out the paths of convoys used to supply Britain even before this date, these carefully placed pins acquired even greater significance when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Charter in a secret meeting aboard the USS Augusta on 14 August 1941. With a document of more symbolic than tangible immediate effect,

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 15 August 2011

Tristram Hunt reviews his parliamentary colleague Kwasi Kwarteng’s book, Ghosts of Empire. ‘Ghosts of Empire marks a return to traditional, Tory scepticism shorn of ideology and purpose. There is little rhyme or rhythm to this history; it is a tale of chaps doings things and then other things happening, mostly to foreigners. Which is both its strength and weakness. Holding together his chronicle on the end of empire in Iraq, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Burma and Hong Kong is Kwarteng’s thesis of “anarchic individualism”. In essence, there was too much autonomy given to imperial agents on the ground. “Officials often developed one line of policy only for successors to overturn it

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Laughing by the book

Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules (Faber & Faber, £14.99) by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was at Cambridge with the Pythons and the Goodies, co-wrote the Doctor series in the 1970s and Yes, Minister in the 1980s, and has since carved out a career directing comedy films in Hollywood, some of them funnier than others. But as Rule 138 (of 150) states, ‘Nobody knows how the audience will react to any

Joanna Kavenna

Heroes of the Ice Age

In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even at times suicidal, they scattered ‘firsts’ and ‘furthests’ across the ice: the furthest south of Scott’s expedition of 1901-04, Shackleton’s furthest south of 1909, Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole in 1911. Robert Peary’s claim that he reached the North Pole in 1909 was later disputed, so it may well have been Amundsen who first

Alexander Chancellor

The scandal that inspired La Dolce Vita

At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of the sea at Torvaianica, a fishing village close to the capital. She is lying face down in the sand, wearing all her clothes apart from her shoes, her skirt, her stockings and her suspender belt, all of which are missing. She appears to have drowned. But why? Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Or

Patrick Skene-Catling

A well-told lie

Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old boy’s journey, alone among 600 passengers in an Orient Line ship, from Colombo to London in 1954 by way of Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar. The boy’s first name is the same as the author’s, and the circumstances are depicted so realistically one feels as though the two Michaels’ points of view are identical. The

Allan Massie

The country of criticism

Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully, to defend the urban heritage, takes its name from him. Cockburn, intensely sociable, was however never happier than when able to retire to his rural retreat on the slopes of the Pentland Hills. Miller himself, academic and journalist, founder of the London Review of Books, is a hard man to pin down. He is a

Christopher Howse

Low life and high style

In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from anything else Kerridge had perfected a line in second-hand clothes — a short sheepskin coat, a brown Dunn’s suit, pastel shirts — that fitted his own style: out of fashion and down at heel. After a busy decade in the 1980s we began to hear little from Kerridge. Had his star burnt out? In 1984, a slice of Roy Kerridge’s life in the 1970s appeared in The Lone Conformist. But he had travelled the same road 20 years earlier, and

John Spurling

Deeper into Mervyn Peake

The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47. Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, appeared in 1959, but its comparative brevity, the scrappiness of its construction and the unsteadiness of Peake’s grasp of

Ed Smith

Delightfully not cricket

Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising, hilarious things. Like a champion batsman, CrickiLeaks raises its game when the challenge is greatest. Consider the difficulty of taking on Geoff Boycott. Every cricket fan has heard dozens of decent imitations of Boycott’s thick Yorkshire accent and self-confident manner. How could a satirist put anything new into Boycott’s mouth? Here’s how: I first met

Hugo Williams

The short life of Tara Browne

I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously ‘blew his mind out in a car’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, the one that begins ‘I read the news today oh boy/ About a lucky man who made the grade’. (He was similarly elegised in ‘Death of a Socialite’ by The Pretty Things.) I knew Tara well during the Paris phase of his brief trajectory and

Lewis Jones

What is it about Stieg Larsson?

Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in Sweden the first of the series was published under that prize-winningly awful title. The Millennium Trilogy is an improvement, but hardly has the ring of a hit. Nonetheless, it has sold millions of copies and inspired a global cult. The sales are due entirely, I should think, to the infinitely sexier titles Larsson’s publisher came