Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

Lambs sent to the most evil slaughter

Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey. You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews.  How long did the process take, and how did the book develop? It was quite a long process in getting my father-in-law, Wolfram, to talk about the War. He never spoke about his time in the Third Reich and during the whole Hitler period. I always wondered what he did, but that’s not really a question you

Monday

Austen Saunders

A man of parts, who liked a party

Once upon a time there was a future. H.G. Wells had seen it. Apparently it was going to be naked. Well that’s certainly the impression one gets from the dollops of sex folded into David Lodge’s novel on Wells’ life, A Man of Parts. I call the book a novel because it’s called one on the cover. But in reality I think Lodge has managed to out-Hamlet Hamlet and given us a new mixed genre perhaps best described as historico-biographical-novelistic-political-critical-gossip.  ‘Nearly everything that happens in this narrative,’ we are told in a short preface, ‘is based on factual sources’. Once you tuck in, however, it’s left to you to chew

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 27 June 2011

The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Alan Hollingshurst’s The Stranger’s Child. And Hari Kunzru reviews the novel for the Guardian.   ‘As an accounting with class and history, Hollinghurst’s novel will inevitably be compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It is at its strongest when teasing out nuances of social behaviour: Paul Bryant, the shy bank clerk, is so concerned to behave appropriately with his employer’s family that as he walks home after spending time in their company, “the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face”. The fashionable decorator, Mrs Riley, makes Daphne uncomfortable by observing

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Reading in the Age of Distraction

A good column by Johann Hari on the distractions – many of them wonderful but distractions nonetheless – of the wired age and how that has changed his ability to just sit down and read a bloody book: In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down

Lewis Jones

Bookends: Venice improper

Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to write one about the Lido. The subject might be thought too insubstantial for a book of its own, and so it proves: excluding its index and appendices, The Venice Lido (Somerset Books, £6.95) runs to a modest 132 pages of generously sized print. But what this monograph lacks in volume it makes up for in warmth, charm and eccentric scholarship. Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to write one about the Lido. The subject might be thought

Interconnect

Correction | 25 June 2011

The title of John Mole’s poem, printed in last week’s issue, should have been ‘The Whole Thing’, and the lines ‘But it was after dinner/ So I let it go’ should have been italicised (being an alleged quotation from Winston Churchill). We apologise for these errors. The title of John Mole’s poem, printed in last week’s issue, should have been ‘The Whole Thing’, and the lines ‘But it was after dinner/ So I let it go’ should have been italicised (being an alleged quotation from Winston Churchill). We apologise for these errors.

Ian Thomson

City of miracles

In the autumn of 1984, after an unexplained fall, I found myself in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disorientated. I had been found sprawled on the floor of my flat on Via Salaria; the police suspected an intruder, yet nothing apparently was stolen. Bloody handprints covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. I was 23 and newly arrived in Rome to work as a journalist and teach. Later, I regained consciousness outside a latrine on the sixth floor of San Giovanni hospital. A group of nuns with elaborate bird-like coifs swished past, each bearing a carafe of white wine. So I was in paradise —

Allan Massie

Coolness under fire

The early 19th century was the age of the dandy, and the essence of dandyism was cool self-control. The dandy shunned displays of feeling. There is feeling a-plenty in both these books; yet they may fairly be described as novels which bear the characteristics of dandyism. Though not short of action — something the dandies deprecated — they are cool, elegant and laconic. Stella Tillyard is known as a historian of 18th- and early 19th-century aristocratic and royal life. Tides of War is her first novel, and a very accomplished one. It moves easily between domestic and political scenes in London and Norfolk, and the Peninsula, where Wellington’s army, with

Edward King

Empty lines on a CV

The intern is everywhere, slowly but surely, infiltrating every office on the planet. But while the internship is now ubiquitous, having become the standard first rung on most career ladders and the most frequent stepping stone between education and a career, it remains a largely unexamined and unregulated sector. Somewhere between an apprenticeship and a temp job, the internship resists easy definition and is understood more in terms of social cachet than actual responsibilities. Having had his fair share of directionless and underpaid internships between various degrees at Stanford and Cambridge, Ross Perlin, a researcher in linguistics, decided that the phenomenon deserved closer scrutiny. The result is Intern Nation, an

Simon Courtauld

Art and the raging bull

In these days of growing concern at the methods of factory farming and the welfare of the animals which are raised and killed for our consumption, it is instructive to compare the life of domestic beef cattle with that of a Spanish fighting bull. The cattle may have less than two years of life in cramped conditions, while the toro bravo roams free and unmolested on pasture for five years. Alexander Fiske- Harrison makes the comparison succinctly: ‘Five years on free-release and then the arena, or 18 months in prison and then the electric chair’. He maintains (there is some evidence for this, to do with beta-endorphins) that the fighting

Justin Cartwright

Mumbai and Mammon

This is a state of the nation novel or more accurately a state of Mumbai novel. Behind the tale of a struggle by a developer to acquire, for flashy redevelopment,  the three towers of the lower-middle-class, crumbling Vishram Co-operative Housing Society, lies a colourful and ambitious novel about the changing standards and habits of the citizens of Mumbai, poisoned as much by the rocketing wealth all around, as by the foul air and excrement-laden byways. (Adiga mentions shit and its stench time and again.) On the one side of the divide is a group of friends and neighbours who live in Tower A of the Society. The most respected of

Paul Johnson

Heroic long-suffering

English patriotism was still a force in 1914. On the first day of the war, my mother’s three brothers, and my father and his two brothers, all joined up together, in the Artists’ Rifles. On the first day of the second world war, which I remember well, there were some similarities, but they were superficial. Again, my elder brother joined immediately. But the mood was resignation, not enthusiasm. There was no rejoicing, no talk of a new and better world: just a despairing attempt to preserve what was left of an unsatisfactory old one. The truth is, the Great War knocked the stuffing out of the British. They have never

James Walton

When more is less

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors. In James’s novel, the middle-aged

William Feaver

The English El Greco

Talk about ‘enemies of promise’. Talk about ‘enemies of promise’. In the March 1942 number of Horizon magazine there appeared what could be a heartfelt illustration of the whinger’s conceit propagated by Horizon’s editor, Cyril Connolly, to the effect that life stifles artistic ambitions. Plate 2, ‘Dreamer in Landscape’ by John Craxton, is a pen-and-wash drawing of horny plants breathing down the neck of a dozing boy. How very Craxton. Not yet 20 and already well-versed in overgrown styling and poetic self-pity. For decades Craxton lived with the fact that early promise guarantees nothing. What in his salad days denoted a growing confidence — the tidied airs, the recurrence of

Richard Davenporthines

A haze of artifice

Auden said: ‘The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. Auden said: ‘The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow poets.’ Certainly Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, which was first published in 1947,

Friday

Lewis Jones

Bookends: Venice improper | 24 June 2011

Lewis Jones has written this week’s Bookend in the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to write one about the Lido. The subject might be thought too insubstantial for a book of its own, and so it proves: excluding its index and appendices, The Venice Lido runs to a modest 132 pages of generously sized print. But what this monograph lacks in volume it makes up for in warmth, charm and eccentric scholarship. The ten-mile sandbank that is the Lido (from litus, ‘shore’) was first settled by refugees

Peter Robins

Link-blog: of pencils, Nabokov and the politics of David Mamet

What’s the best sort of pencil to read with? Nabokov proposes the smiley-face emoticon, in a 1969 interview. It is possible to have a multi-format e-reader, but only with some awkward hacking. What’s fine and not fine in antiquarian booksellers’ descriptions. David Mamet is on the right now, but where exactly was he before? There is something to be said for reading aloud. Even bad prose can have its pleasures.

Thursday

Matthew Richardson

A hatful of facts about…the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize

1) The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize has a turbulent history. The prize came into being after the NCR prize fell into disrepute. Originally kept afloat courtesy of an anonymous donor, the BBC began sponsoring the prize in 2002 through its new channel BBC Four. This year, as part of the BBC’s Year of Books, a special show will be aired exploring each of the six shortlisted writers for 2011 and announcing the winner. 2) The prize has the biggest victory pot of any non-fiction prize in the UK, with prize money of £20,000. Such a heady sum, however, still falls well short of its competition in the fiction prize stakes:

David Blackburn

Unlocking potential

It is the newest and most exclusive literary club: those authors who have sold 1 million books on Kindle. At present, the club numbers just eight members: Lee Child, James Patterson, Steig Larsson, Charlaine Harris, Michael Connelly, Nora Roberts and Suzanne Collins. Those established names have just been joined by John Locke – a former insurance broker from Kentucky turned self-published author, rather than the seventeenth century political philosopher. Locke writes particularly crass bodice rippers. Here’s a choice extract to quicken your pulse: “She was smarter than me, and I hate when that happens. There was but one thing to do: seize the initiative. I played the trump card God

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

Killed like animals

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift’s ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the ‘war on terror’. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss. The novel centres around the death of Tom Luxton, a soldier in Iraq, and the effect it has on his elder brother, Jack. But Tom’s death is merely the trigger for a Proustian excess of memory, as Jack begins revisiting ‘all the things that had once been dead and buried’ including his mother’s death, his father’s suicide and