Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Honor Clerk

Ransacking the world

Something in the air is arousing an interest in collectors and collections — both private and public — of which the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes and The Children’s Book are perhaps the most visible recent examples. Something in the air is arousing an interest in collectors and collections — both private and public — of which the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes and The Children’s Book are perhaps the most visible recent examples. Jacqueline Yallop’s book is firmly in this vein, deploying an astonishing breadth of research to reveal, in a blend of narrative, contextual history, museology and biography, some of the forgotten stories that

Charlotte Moore

The nature of evil

Simon Baron-Cohen has spent 30 years researching the way our brains work. His study of autism led to The Essential Difference, which asked, ‘Are you an empathiser or a systemiser?’ The book was highly influential; its ‘male-brain’ and ‘female-brain’ definitions have entered common parlance. In Zero Degrees of Empathy he aims to move examination of the nature of evil ‘out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science.’ Will this project also prove persuasive? ‘Extremes of evil are typically relegated to the unanalysable,’ he says, but they shouldn’t be. Evil, he believes, is best understood as absence of empathy. We are all situated at some point on

Friday

Fay Maschler

Bookends: The voice of the lobster | 20 May 2011

Fay Maschler has written the Bookend column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: In existence for over 250 millions years, lobsters come in two distinct varieties, ‘clawed and clawless’. Human predators tend to the flawed and clueless as they overfish and — since lobsters must be cooked live — kill them heartlessly. Part of ‘the Edible Series’, dedicated to the global history of one type of ingredient, Lobster by Elisabeth Townsend considers the creature that inspired mosaic artists in ancient Pompeii, reclined like a cardinal in still life paintings, gave Salvador Dali a telephone handle, fed the indigent poor and later the spoiled rich

The Spectator

An appeal to polemical readers

It is fifty years since the publication of Catch-22. The Spectator Book Club will be running a series of pieces on the book and we hope that readers will lead the debate, as part of our reader’s review feature. Catch-22 is a book you either love or hate. So, we want to publish two polemics (a genre that may suit some of you!): one for, the other against. The word limit is six hundred words and the deadline for submissions is Thursday 30 June. The selected pieces will then be run together on Friday 1 July. All submissions should be sent to dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk. For ease of reference, this

Thursday

Fleur Macdonald

The Smarty Pant-iad

Reviewers this week flexed their intellectual muscles as they got to grips with clever clogs Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel.  His roman-a-clef At Last was a double boon: the perfect opportunity not only to indulge in a spot of sordid literary gossip but also to parade their mastery of the Literae Humaniores. And in numbers as mighty as the Achaeans swarming on Trojan plains, they did both. Caroline Moore in the Telegraph tried to trump the account of childhood rape – which  almost became banal when trotted out in every single review – with this biographical anecdote: “He turned up to sit his Oxford finals armed with the shaft of

Wednesday

David Blackburn

And the winner is…

A few intrepid writers from the Right braved the lion’s den of the left-wing Orwell Prize last night, dominated as it was by hordes of hacks from the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman. One of these brave souls even won an award. ConservativeHome’s Graeme Archer, whose quietly angry and deeply considered blog-posts took the prestigious Orwell Blog Prize. Archer’s original subject matter, written in prose as robust as granite, rebuffed strong opposition from the growing cacophony from the left-wing blogosphere. Indeed, his victory defies the popular belief that the day of independent right-wing blogging has passed. Jenni Russell won the journalist of the year award for her work on the Sunday

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Turning political writing into an art

The Orwell Prize will be awarded this evening and one of the following books will win: Death to the Dictator!, Afsaneh Moqadem Afsaneh Moqadem’s Death to the Dictator! is the fashionable choice for the award. Written by an Iranian dissident using a pseudonym to protect his anonymity, Death to the Dictator! is a fictionalisation of the failed Iranian revolution of 2009. The book opens with faceless security operatives dumping Mohsen Abbaspour’s tortured body at a roundabout on the outskirts of a town. Moqadem weaves an intricate yarn. He examines the character of tyranny, recalling Solzenitsyn and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, particularly the scenes between Captain Merrick and Hari Kumar in

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 16 May 2011

As part of the Guardian’s SF weekend, Iain M Banks says that the genre is not for dabblers. ‘The point is that science fiction is a dialogue, a process. All writing is, in a sense; a writer will read something – perhaps something quite famous, even a classic – and think “But what if it had been done this way instead . . . ?” And, standing on the shoulders of that particular giant, write something initially similar but developmentally different, so that the field evolves and further twists and turns are added to how stories are told as well as to the expectations and the knowledge of pre-existing literary

Saturday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Unbalanced chorus

Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that she is under surveillance by the military. She maintains that she can ‘see the reality of the web of synchronicity in my life’. Showing off her special jewellery that ‘helps balance the chakras’, she reveals that ‘because I had a high metabolism and moved around a lot, I had no real [weight] problem until I was about 50’. Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that she is under surveillance by the military. She maintains that she can

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Redefining the war

There are more than 100,000 American and Allied troops in Afghanistan. That is, there are more than 1,000 troops for every suspected al-Qa’eda ‘operative’. Not for the first time in Afghanistan means, ways and ends appear to be out of kilter. There are more Nato troops than are needed to combat al-Qa’eda but not enough to build a proper, ordinary country. No wonder Afghanistan has become a grimly expensive halfway house — neither wholly occupied, nor treated with a light touch. Tim Bird and Alex Marshall’s brisk, broad survey of the war is drily un- impressed by American strategy. It is sub- titled ‘How the West Lost its Way’, and

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The villain as hero

Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. When they reach adult estate, most writers prefer their early work to be forgotten. But publishers have long ferreted about to unearth the juvenilia of anyone with half a name.Though the reading public has never been so easily conned, such works are appreciated mainly by scholars of an author’s entire ouevre, wanting to trace early influences. So, if you could buy only one book this week, would it be The Doll, which contains a dozen very early short stories by Daphne du Maurier, and one rather

Adam Nicolson

Enchanting waters

This is a book which is sometimes so private that reading it seems very nearly like an act of invasiveness. There is nothing salacious or rude in it, but its tone of voice is whispered, intimate, as though the reader were an interloper, a clumsy stumbler into the most secret thoughts of the author. Its occasion is a walk down the River Ouse in Sussex, from its source in the High Weald to the sea at Newhaven, but its substance is only marginally to do with that simple and very ordinary bit of geography. The river becomes the thinnest of wire coat-hangers on which almost anything can be hung. The

James Walton

Freudian slip

At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. The first three, now called the Some Hope trilogy, took Patrick from an upper-class childhood where he was raped by his father from the age of five, through his understandably drug-addicted youth and on to the nervous beginnings of recovery at 30. Somehow, though, the result was a joy to read: full of dazzling phrase-making, terrific black comedy and stirringly vicious satire on the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Precious little warmth

There’s something wrong with these diaries. There’s something wrong with these diaries. This is not to disparage the scholarly efforts of their editor, Dr Catterall, nor the skill with which he seems to have pruned the original papers (twice the length) into the greatest coherence achievable, nor his helpful contextualisation and calmly rational explanatory notes. Nor is it to question the importance for modern historians of the whole painstaking enterprise, to observe that the general reader will plough onward from summit, to cabinet, to dinner party, to pheasant shoot, to bilateral meeting, with a half-formed question growing in his mind. Who was Harold Macmillan writing all this for? For himself?

John Gimlette

The mark of cane

Sugar transformed our world. From its origins in New Guinea, this tall sappy grass initially made slow progress around the globe. It reached India in 500 BC, and then travelled harmlessly to Persia, arriving 1,000 years later. But, in the early 15th century, it reached Europe, and suddenly everything changed. Sugar would become the catalyst for the greatest and most rapacious expansion that humankind has ever seen. Europeans couldn’t get enough of it, and were soon rearranging the world. No longer was foreign adventure a matter of pilfering and persecution; by the early 1600s, the newly emerging seapowers were competing for land. Huge tracts of South America and the Caribbean

Carey Schofield

Imperfect working order

The publication of Pakistan: A Hard Country could not be more timely. International attention has been focused on Pakistan since the Americans killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Being in the spotlight generally means trouble for this country that has been bedevilled by war and political drama for over three decades. Foreigners announce goodwill and arrive with generous aid, but Pakistanis are frequently left feeling bruised, as the outsiders become ever more bewildered by the workings of this beguiling and maddening place. Anatol Lieven originally planned to call his book ‘How Pakistan Works’. It would have been a good title, since this is exactly what he tries to explain. The

Friday

Mark Mason

Bookend: Unbalanced chorus

Mark Mason has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for reader’s of this blog. Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that she is under surveillance by the military. She maintains that she can ‘see the reality of the web of synchronicity in my life’. Showing off her special jewellery that ‘helps balance the chakras’, she reveals that ‘because I had a high metabolism and moved around a lot, I had no real [weight] problem until I was about 50’. Past-life experiences figure heavily. She was a ‘harem girl in

Rhys Tranter

A treat from the Beats

A collection of Beat luminaries: Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert La Vigne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti standing in front of City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco 1956. Courtesy of the Third Coast Festival, here Ferlinghetti takes listeners on an eerie poetic tour of San Francisco.

Thursday

Austen Saunders

Aspirin for our spiritual hangover

Contemporary poetry (to misquote Blackadder), is a lot like sex. Tons of it about, but I just don’t get it. So I was a little nervous when I gave Apocrypha a go. But I’m happy to say I quite liked it (I seem to remember the same thing about sex, come to think of it). Apocrypha is an entertaining collection of poems about those twilit zones of the modern imagination where the sacred meets the mundane. It’s about the experience of living with religious stories we no longer believe in literally, but which we can’t forget. Its best poems drop biblically named characters into the less glamorous corners of the

Wednesday

Rhys Tranter

Being with Beckett

I’ll never cease to be amazed by the wealth of material freely available on Youtube. I chanced upon the above clip, a nine-minute excerpt from a documentary where a number of Samuel Beckett’s friends and colleagues are interviewed. The first, lengthy part of the clip begins with Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the original French production of Waiting for Godot. Martin, who is no longer with us, shares his astonishment and enthusiasm for the role, while giving insight into some elements of his performance. Production designer Jocelyn Herbert is next, discussing nights out with Beckett, friends and colleagues. A number of their favourite haunts are mentioned, accompanied by images