Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

Almost great

Following our recent piece on the critical response to Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower, here is the Book Blog’s review by Matthew Richardson. Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in Tower, is ostensibly a book about Mumbai. It feeds from the sprawl and bustle of that maturing city, meditating on the riches of commercial development but, more compellingly, articulating its human cost.   The novel concentrates on the occupants of a ramshackle complex, Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society. As part of a swathe of redevelopment, a goonish property tycoon, Dharmen Shah, offers the occupants a heady sum to vacate and allow him to mothball the place.

David Blackburn

The life and times of Lord Rees-Mogg

William Lord Rees-Mogg is an institution. The former editor of the Times is renowned, revered and, I’m afraid, ridiculed in equal measure. His weekly column in the Times has always been outspoken, sometimes to its detriment. In the aftermath of the Tory collapse in 1997, he argued that the party need a dextrous and popular leader to counter Tony Blair’s affable charisma. It was an astute observation, especially given what the Tories contrived thereafter. But his recommendation that Alan Clark be appointed met with derision. Thereafter, famous Clubland wits, among whom Ress-Mogg walked, dubbed him ‘Mystic Mogg’. Even, if not especially, Mogg’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch was not above puncturing his

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Last Man In Tower — the critical reaction

How do you top a Booker winner? With difficulty, one imagines. But, in Last Man in Tower, has Aravind Adiga done his best with an impossible brief?   In the Guardian, Alex Clark argues that, while the novel ‘can tend slightly towards the schematic’, it has a ‘broader and more forgiving feel than The White Tiger’, though Adiga’s ‘anger at the India he describes…remains undimmed.’ The novel has ‘a gentler comic tone that finds affection as well as despair in poking fun at its characters’ pretensions and frailties.’ Overall, he presents ‘a picture that is as compelling as it is complex to decipher.’   Ceri Radford, in the Telegraph, finds

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 11 July 2011

A long lost book of tributes to Byron has surfaced at a Church bazaar. The Guardian reports: ‘Inscribed “to the immortal and illustrious fame of Lord Byron, the first poet of the age in which he lived”, the memorial book contains accolades to the writer by famous figures of the day, from the American author Washington Irving to the Irish poet Tom Moore and future president of the US Martin Van Buren. It was placed at Byron’s family vault in Nottinghamshire where the poet’s body was buried after its return from Greece in 1824, and was filled with eulogies from more than 800 people by 1834.’ The Telegraph’s Helen Brown

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: Scourge of New Labour

Like all politicians, Bob Marshall-Andrews is fond of quoting himself, and Off Message (Profile Books, £16.99) includes a generous selection of his speeches and articles on such topics as Tony Blair’s messianic warmongering and David Blunkett’s plans for a police state. Less typically, perhaps, he is almost as generous in his quotation of others, such as Simon Hoggart, who has called him ‘a cross between Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher’. As Labour MP for Medway from 1997 to 2010, Marshall-Andrews regularly inflicted, with his catapult and teeth, and skills as a criminal silk, embarrassment, pain, humiliation and damage on ‘one of the most authoritarian regimes in British history’,

Philip Hensher

Flouting all those pieties

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think

Paul Johnson

Sense and magnanimity

People see William Rees-Mogg as an archetypal member of the Establishment. But this is not quite true. His father’s family had been modest landowners for centuries, but his mother was Irish-American and Mogg was baptised a Catholic. His religion has brought him such happiness as he has enjoyed, including a long and comfortable marriage, but it also had a direct effect on his education. The family school was Charterhouse, but Mogg sat for the Eton scholarship and did well. Lord Quickswood, the Provost, vetoed him on religious grounds. He was the former Lord Hugh Cecil MP, leader of the Ultra-Tory anti-Home-Rulers, a gang known as the Hughligans. The veto was

Jane Brown

Bella vistas

Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in horror, ‘Oh! Not another book about my mother!’ These two titles on Italian gardens may provoke a similar reaction, for there has been a recent run of revisiting via Charles Latham’s vintage Country Life photographs, Edith Wharton’s Edwardian musings and Georgina Masson’s 1961 classic, now revived. Many moons ago when I went to Sissinghurst to ask Nigel Nicolson (late of this parish) if I could write about his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he raised his hands, and eyebrows, in

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Witness for the prosecution

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar. In doing so he

Jane Ridley

The gay Lambeth way

Archbishop Edward Benson was the ideal of a Victorian churchman. Stern and unbending, he was a brilliant Cambridge scholar and a dreamily beautiful youth. Older men fell over themselves to promote him, and he climbed effortlessly from one plum post to the next, rising almost inevitably to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As Rodney Bolt shows in this fine book, Archbishop Benson’s domestic life was less than perfect. When he was 23, Benson chose an 11-year old girl named Mary Sidgwick to become his wife. She was his second cousin, and when she was 12 (which was at that time the age of consent) he proposed to her. They married when

Michela Wrong

Lucky miss

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name. His father, they said, was a brilliant economist who grew up herding goats in western Kenya, then won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he fell in love with a white woman. ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. Nothing my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.’ My boy, I thought on finishing this book, you have no idea how lucky you were. Sociologists may worry about the impact absent fathers are having on

Simon Baker

The man who came to dinner

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a

Hywel Williams

Ghosts of the Teutonic Knights

Do the trees of East Prussia still whisper in German when the wind blows in from the Baltic and across the featureless plain? The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky thought so when he visited in the 1960s. But keen ears, and a very long historical reach, are surely now needed in order to detect that particular susurration. A little over two million Germans lived here in 1940. Now there are just 10,000 ‘of German descent’. Eight centuries ago members of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, snobbish and aristocratic virgins almost to a man, arrived here from Acre to start that great Crusade of the North which was the counterpart to

Justin Marozzi

Ways of escape

When I compiled a list of the top dozen travel writers of the past century for an American magazine the other day, it required some effort not to come up with an entirely British cast. Freya Stark, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jan Morris were musts. So too were V. S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron, still writing up a storm, and the Ibn-Battutah-mad Tim Mackintosh-Smith for a younger generation. Although there was no space for Byron, Bell, Thesiger or Chatwin, no great legerdemain was needed to squeeze in the brilliant Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage, the Irishwoman Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn from

Alexander Larman

The other man’s grass . . .

Hundreds of thousands of hardy souls are preparing for a few nights under canvas this summer, often facing sunburn or trench foot while giddily jumping up and down in a muddy field as bands maul their better-known hits. And yet, for most of these people, camping is something that they wouldn’t dream of doing except at music festivals, despite its convenience, lack of cost, green credentials and genuine sense of excitement and adventure. This dichotomy, among many others, is explored with intelligence and wit in Matthew de Abaitua’s treatise on the values and social impact of camping. Subtitled ‘the history and practice of sleeping under the stars’, the book is

Friday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: Scourge of New Labour | 8 July 2011

Lewis Jones has written this week’s Bookends column in the latest issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Like all politicians, Bob Marshall-Andrews is fond of quoting himself, and Off Message includes a generous selection of his speeches and articles on such topics as Tony Blair’s messianic warmongering and David Blunkett’s plans for a police state. Less typically, perhaps, he is almost as generous in his quotation of others, such as Simon Hoggart, who has called him ‘a cross between Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher’. As Labour MP for Medway from 1997 to 2010, Marshall-Andrews regularly inflicted, with his catapult and teeth, and

David Blackburn

From the archives: Knowing Mervyn Peake

Continuing our series of posts marking Mervyn Peake’s centenary, here is a piece written by Peake’s friend, Rodney Ackland, after the former’s untimely death in November 1968. Thit and thefuther by Rodney Ackland, The Spectator, 20th December 1968 Any reader who has once been lost to the world in the stone fields and labyrinths of Gormenghast lies all around us, silent and invisible, yet casting sometimes, from its other dimension, shadows – refractions of darkness and Gormenghast light – which, effecting subtle changes in the shapes, the colours of all familiar things, enhance them with that quality of strangeness lacking which, beauty, as Walter Pater once hinted, is strictly for

Thursday

Dr Ian-Mortimer

Great historical writing? It is not about the past

As far back as Lucky Jim, if not further, historians and writers of historical fiction have been at each others’ throats. The Historical Writers Association (HWA) was formed in October 2010 with the unique selling point that it is the only historical organisation open to both historians and historical novelists. Other organisations such as the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association are strictly for writers and teachers of non-fiction. It is obvious that many writers have something to gain here. For many years, historical fiction has been viewed as intellectually unsatisfactory, dependent on the archetypes of sex, fantasy, war or crime mystery to attract readers. Despite several historical novels

David Blackburn

Frank Dikötter wins the Samuel Johnson Prize

Frank Dikötter’s history of Mao’s great famine took the Samuel Johnson prize last. The prize is the most prestigious non-fiction award in Britain, carrying a cheque for £20,000. It also gets an hour long special on BBC2’s The Culture Show, worth its weight in pixels to publishers of challenging and largely unmarketable books. The programme airs tonight. The general consensus is that Dikötter is a worthy winner, who succeeded in finding new seams from that very well mined area of research on Mao’s pig-headed ignorance. As Jasper Becker wrote in his Spectator review of Dikötter’s book, ‘In a brilliant work, backed by painstaking research, Professor Frank Dikötter, has trawled through

Wednesday

David Blackburn

From the archives – the genius of Mervyn Peake

It is Mervyn Peake’s centenary this week and there have been parties thrown in his honour across the country. Gormenghast lours over this revelry, as if a still breathing creation has outgrown its dead creator. This seems only natural: Anthony Burgess once described the Gormenghast trilogy as one of the ‘most important works of the imagination to come out of this age’. It is the archetypal cult classic that has obtained a permanent eminence. Yet it was not always so. The books were noticed when first printed, but without ceremony. Indeed, the Spectator did not review a single one of the trilogy when they were released. The magazine reviewed the