Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Jon Walker

The King James Bible: a reading sensation

The publication of the King James Bible was not only a watershed moment in the history of publishing; it also had a decisive impact on the history of reading. In 1611, the Bible was already the exemplary book. It was not only the source of authoritative content; it was the model for how to read other books. The apparatus that makes it possible to divide a written text into its constituent elements and examine them separately – chapter and section headings, footnotes and cross-references, and so on – originates with Biblical scholarship, and the King James Bible made these tools available to a mass audience for the first time. Subsequent

Tuesday

David Blackburn

In her own words

As I wrote before the Easter break, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is a captivating novel. Reviewers are clamouring at its brilliance, but I agree with Will Blythe of the New York Times that it is ‘unclassifiably elaborate’. You should believe the hype, but I can’t quite say why. Here is Egan in conversation with Steve Bertrand. (She describes her methods and the life of the book, but she also reveals some of Kindle’s shortcomings.)

Peter From-Maidstone

Reader’s Review: Delightfully mean, but not a meaningful delight

Reader’s Review is a new feature here on the Spectator Book Club, and one which is rather self-explanatory. The idea is that, perhaps every fortnight or so, we shall publish a book review by a reader of the website. The first, below, of P.J. O’Rourke’s Don’t Vote…, is by Coffee House regular Peter from Maidstone (his online pseudonym, of course). Our gratitude goes out to him. If you would like to contribute a review yourself, then just email Pete Hoskin (phoskin @ spectator.co.uk) for details. I wouldn’t normally read, let alone buy, a book with a beaming American on the dust jacket, especially an American wearing a blue blazer. But

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Pleasant surprises

The death of the book has been much exaggerated, it seems. Figures released recently by the Publishers Association show a marked increase in sales of digital books, with total consumer sales rocketing up 318 per cent since 2009. However, there’s no need to dismantle the bookshelves just yet. The digital slice of the book market still stands at only 6 per cent. Kindles et al might have the upper hand storage-wise; but, on this evidence, good old print and paper has some more puff in it yet. Beryl Bainbridge, for instance, remains a publishing sensation. Her uncompleted novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, is due for release on

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 9 May 2011

Sir V.S Naipaul is the subject of this month’s Literary Review interview, conducted by Patrick Marnham on this occassion. ‘LR: You went to see a fortune teller in West Africa on your recent journey. What did you ask him? VSN: Oh, I always ask them a few specific questions. Will I own a house of my own one day? Will I find emotional satisfaction with someone? Will there be a book next year? Next year … For me that is always a sign of life. But I pay no attention whatever to the replies. I’ve never had any wish to penetrate the personal future. The bigger future is always interesting,

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Winnie-the-Pooh’s gender confusion

Children’s literature is sexist, has too many male heroes and represents the “symbolic annihilation of women”, according to a deranged woman writing in the latest edition of my favourite journal, “Gender And Society”. Janice McCabe singles out poor Winnie-the-Pooh for particular scorn, although she also has a go at that misogynistic bastard, Peter Rabbit. But hang on – who is to say that Winnie is a boy? Those delicate, if hazy, line drawings of the creature show no genitals whatsoever, so far as I can discern, and Winnie was a popular name for girls in Edwardian times. Indeed, as a child I always imagined Winnie was a girl, or at

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: To a tee

Sporting literature is a strange old business, often underrated by those who don’t like sport and overrated by those who do. In particular, a warm glow hovers over the reputation of golf writing, which has attained an eminence the unsung litterateurs of snooker and darts can only envy. Golf Stories (Everyman’s Library, £10.99), edited by the American journalist Charles McGrath, arrives as a small and beautifully appointed hardback, as certain of itself as any book can be. Primarily aimed at a US readership, it includes many of the usual suspects: Stephen Leacock, with a slightly weary piece of New Yorkerish whimsy; John Updike’s frequently anthologised ‘Farrell’s Caddie’; the famed golfing

Jonathan Sumption

Setting the world to rights

Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie. Their work brought them into contact with a remarkable group of men, who populate the pages of Philipp Blom’s quirky and original book: the economist and journalist Raynal, who never quite shook off his Jesuit origins; the mass of obscurer contributors to the Encyclopédie; the moody

Penelope Lively

The choppy sea of family life

This is a lovely book. Judy Golding writes of her father —indeed of both her parents — with candour, humour and great insight and perception This is a lovely book. Judy Golding writes of her father —indeed of both her parents — with candour, humour and great insight and perception. More than that, here is an exemplary memoir of childhood, not remorselessly chronological, but drawing on the jumbled past to give an account of what it was like to be a child in an unusual family. She describes an intense marriage, which was devoted and intermittently stormy. She sees herself and her brother David as always taking second place, especially

D J-Taylor

Doomed to disillusion

The Forgotten Waltz is one of those densely recapitulative novels that seek to interpret emotional crack-up from the angle of its ground-down aftermath. At the same time, it is not really a book about hindsight. Sometimes extending information to the reader and sometimes deliberately covering its tracks, sometimes inviting sympathy for its characters and sometimes implying that sympathy only gets in the way of knowledge, it offers the enticing spectacle of a heroine determined to decode the human acrostics that strew her path while darkly conscious that most of her judgments are either horribly provisional or downright inchoate. Everything kicks into gear back in the early 2000s, down by the

Michela Wrong

Fear and loathing in the Congo

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. When the UN peacekeepers made contact — and there was always a risk they would run into Rwandan rebels with very different priorities — his job was to persuade twitchy,

Charlotte Hobson

The Russian connection

It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch. It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch. I began it on the train; barely had I started before my involuntary yelps of hilarity were causing alarm amongst my fellow passengers. An elderly man moved to another seat after I came upon Batuman’s description of the time she found herself judging an adolescent boys’ leg contest in Hungary. Fortunately, perhaps, I arrived at my station before

A.N. Wilson

When wailing is appropriate

This is a strange exercise. It is a commonplace book of quotations from great authors, assembled by the philosopher A. C. Grayling. The extracts from the great books, how- ever, are provided without attribution. Furthermore, they are arranged in numbered ‘verses’, like the divisions of the ‘texts’ in the Bible. The Bible was thus divided for ease of reference when the Rabbis and the Christian Church — in separate exercises, obviously — decided which books should appear in the canon of Scripture. Why Grayling has numbered his collection of quotations is anyone’s guess. The title is slightly cringeworthy. Those who call the Bible ‘the Good Book’ are likely to be

John De-Falbe

Captain courageous

The sum of hard biographical facts about Captain Cook never increases, nor is it expected to. It is the same with Shakespeare. J. C. Beaglehole’s Life of Captain James Cook (1974), which Frank McLynn quotes often, contains most of what is known about Cook’s family life and origins. As the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he belonged to a class that was unlikely to leave any record of his childhood. He was clever, and went to live with a Quaker family in Whitby where he worked in the shop. He went to sea in the collier trade at the advanced age of 17, and transferred to the Royal Navy

Friday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: To a tee | 6 May 2011

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. Sporting literature is a strange old business, often underrated by those who don’t like sport and overrated by those who do. In particular, a warm glow hovers over the reputation of golf writing, which has attained an eminence the unsung litterateurs of snooker and darts can only envy. Golf Stories, edited by the American journalist Charles McGrath, arrives as a small and beautifully appointed hardback, as certain of itself as any book can be. Primarily aimed at a US readership, it includes many of the usual suspects: Stephen

Thursday

David Blackburn

May book of the month

Historical fiction has been a staple of the reading public for more than a century. Fashions change and there are eras when these novels are more fictitious than historical. The current fashion sees history trump fiction, particularly in the realm of real crime. Colquhoun’s new novel, Mr Briggs’ Hat, is the story of the first murder on Britain’s railways, a whodunit that sent Victorian Britain into paroxysms of fear. You can read her introduction to the book, its themes and its place in the canon of British crime writing here. It is a deft exposition of sensationalism, charting Victorian Britain’s furtive delight in transgression and its concerns about the price

Kate Colquhoun

Historical sensation

During the summer of 1864 the British newspaper-reading public was gripped by reports of the first ever murder on their railways. First came descriptions of the discovery of a bloody railway carriage and the battered body of an elderly, respected City man. Police posters on street corners across the land screamed bloody murder. A crushed hat, found in the compartment but not belonging to the victim, was the only clue. Shock was quickly followed by widespread anxiety. Fear began to radiate along the length of every train and, as the reaction of the public grew more febrile, some considered arming themselves and others wondered if they should make out their

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Fear and loathing at the inkwell

“It sometimes makes me wretch, just the thought of writing,” said an author whose book launch I attended last night. This was not said in jest as part of a routine of good natured badinage, or as a novel sales pitch. He meant it. “There’s a moment of deep anxiety. A quandary. A kind of self-loathing brought about by sudden self awareness: the realisation that what I’m writing is absurd and that I can’t improve on it. It’s the fear of failure. At that point I get the nausea.” It’s a common complaint: some writers just hate putting pen to paper. And because so few authors have immutable deadlines, many

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Dirty old man

Essentially, Alan Bennett’s new book is about its title: Smut. Here the National Treasure reads extracts from this duet of sly and unseemly stories.