Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Bookends: The last laugh

In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), the 45 stagiaires who labour in Ferran Adria’s kitchen for a season in the hope of sharing in the magic. Ferran, you see, is no mere cook. With him, ‘hot turns into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air’. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough

Philip Hensher

Great among the nations

The King James Bible, while uniting the English-speaking world, gave birth to centuries of radicalism and Dissent. On its 400th anniversary, Philip Hensher examines the translation’s legacy Considered as a book, the Bible is far too long. Its characterisation is not all it should be: its hero, God, seems totally inconsistent, varying from a prankster with a bizarre sense of humour (Job) to a sensible dispenser of advice. You can’t help feeling that it is really rather patchy in quality: some of it is wonderfully entertaining, such as the Acts of the Apostles and the two Books of Kings, but some of it doesn’t seem to be interested in entertaining

Claudia FitzHerbert

Cuckoo in the nest

Caradoc King, the well-known literary agent, was adopted in 1948 as a baby into a family of three girls, shortly joined by a fourth, presided over by a difficult, unhappy mother and her feebly adoring husband. He grew up unaware of the adoption and has never discovered its motive. His adoptive mother, Jill, the moving spirit behind every family decision, may have simply longed for a boy. If so, she was singularly ill-prepared for standard boyish delinquencies. Young Carodoc liked playing with matches, embroidering the truth, and inspecting — in a spirit of scientific enquiry — the private parts of his younger sister. This memoir describes King’s upbringing in a

Mark Mason

The wisdom of youth

‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. ‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. Fortunately P. Y. Betts, briefly a novelist in the 1930s, was 50 years later persuaded to do just that. Even more fortunately, her memories, now republished, are golddust. Betts was born in Wandsworth in 1909, meaning that many of the ‘people who say goodbye’ were saying hello to the trenches. Also, several of her childhood friends died of now treatable diseases. Today’s publishers would at this point scream ‘misery memoir’, others would retaliate that people back

Sebastian Smee

Whatever next?

Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Lovely to look at, the town is too small and insecure to be thought of as adult. In fact, it’s uncomfortably adolescent — a skittish concoction of class tension, shifting demographics and unwitting self-sabotage. The novel is full of unexpected turns. It’s also brilliant, sustained and weirdly captivating.

Colin Amery

Rather in the lurch

Will it ever end? The romantic interest in the architecture, history and life lived in the country house is as alive today as it was in 1978, when Mark Girouard wrote his seminal Life in the English Country House. There are now some three million members of the National Trust — guardians of the flame of country-house life that still just flickers in its teashops. The path to an instant peerage is along the passages of the imaginary Downton Abbey, and feudal splendour is still the dream destination of hedge-fund millionaires. How much is the dream driven by aesthetics, how much by nostalgia and how much by a fascination with

Richard Davenporthines

Kill or cure

Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Scorching dismissals and mordant discomforting truths have been flowing ever since from the novelist, Oscar-winning scriptwriter, playwright, classicist and critic, who will turn 80 later this year. Some of his most enduring work only began to appear in 2001, when Raphael published the earliest extracts from the working notebooks that he began

Fiona Maddocks

Hungarian rhapsody

Time was, or perhaps still is, though my friends long ago learned to behave, that a cutesy gift to musical acquaintances was a long, narrow notepad with the words ‘Chopin Liszt’ printed at the top and decorated with clefs and notes, free-floating and unplayable without a stave to anchor them. Stories from a Book of Liszts by John Spurling, read by Jonathan Keeble and Jilly Bond; piano played by János Balázs (Chrome Audio, 3CDs, 3hrs 16mins, £ 17.99, www.chromemedia.co.uk) Time was, or perhaps still is, though my friends long ago learned to behave, that a cutesy gift to musical acquaintances was a long, narrow notepad with the words ‘Chopin Liszt’

Catherine Nixey

A choice of first novels

Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door to tell him his son has just died of tuberculosis in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea. Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of

Friday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Bookends: The last laugh | 8 April 2011

Melanie McDonagh has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, the 45 stagiaires who labour in Ferran Adria’s kitchen for a season in the hope of sharing in the magic. Ferran, you see, is no mere cook. With him, ‘hot turns into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air’.

Matthew Richardson

Unashamedly high-brow

Montaigne has acquired new followers, thanks to Sarah Bakewell’s award winning biography. This has inspired a breath of enthusiasm in the form; the essay is back in vogue.  Writing in the FT, Carl Wilkinson reviews recent efforts from Hanif Kureishi and Alaa Al Aswany. He also mentions the foundation of Notting Hill Editions, an imprint with a brief ‘devoted to the best in essayistic nonfiction writing’. Lucasta Miller, Notting Hill Editions’ editorial director, explained this new venture to me: ‘Newspaper articles have got shorter and shorter, and more and more driven by an “instant comment” agenda…In the 19th century the periodical press offered scope for the long, considered essay –

Thursday

David Blackburn

A riot act

Jonathan Coe is surprised by his eminence. ‘I’m just a comic Agatha Christie,’ he says. Coe was at the Guardian last night in King’s Cross – the newspaper’s book club has been reading What A Carve Up, Coe’s satire of the Thatcher years. Coe understands the book’s continued popularity and relevance. ‘The political mood has not changed in that time, arguably it’s got worse.’ He welcomes the book’s success; but regrets that society has not rejected the apostles of greed and laments that even the Labour party now dallies with the filthy rich. Coe conceived of writing a political-satire-cum-social-panorama in the mid-eighties, but took several years to complete the project.

David Blackburn

Book of the Month

Tessa Hadley’s The London Train is the dark horse in the race for the Orange prize for women fiction writers. And it is this month’s Spectator book of the month. The novel has an understated, almost kitchen sink quality to it. Austen Saunders reviewed the book for this blog, and wrote: ‘The London Train is really two associated novellas connected by the themes of love, infidelity, and Bristol Parkway…Hadley’s loosely connected stories attempt a low-key exploration of how even people who have shared a home for years can be very much alone. No myths, just microwave dinners.’    Hadley’s previous book, The Master Bedroom, sailed in much rougher waters –

Wednesday

Austen Saunders

Journey of a lifetime

Tessa Hadley’s The London Train will feel very much at home in the Paddington branch of W.H. Smith. For like almost all of Dickens’ novels, The London Train involves a series of journeys to and from London. Unlike Dickens, however, Tessa Hadley chooses to subject her characters to repeated trips to South Wales – a part of the world that mostly escaped Dickens’ attention (a paucity of urchins, perhaps?). The London Train differs also from Dickens in that all these journeys add up to less than the sum of their parts. If Dickens’ novels weave new mythologies about how people live together in the modern world, Hadley’s loosely connected stories

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Poetry ‘dealt with in fell swoop’ by the Arts Council

The Arts Council (ACE) has not one ounce of sentiment. Faced with a tight spending settlement, ACE has withdrawn £111,000 funding from the Poetry Book Society (PBS), founded by T.S. Eliot to promote poetry. In consequence, the PBS is threatened with closure, along with the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize. This has inspired a furious reaction in the mainstream media and the blogosphere. A petition has been established and PBS board have written to the Times today threatening to challenge ACE’s decision. This follows separate interventions from 9 poets and Carol Ann Duffy, each expressing their concern and, in Duffy’s case, disgust that so much funding is to be withdrawn from

Peter Robins

Around the world’s book blogs

Philip Larkin is not the best poet in HMP Norwich, but could console himself by licking a colouring book. The effects of high-speed rail would be familiar to Dickens. Martin Amis’s complaints would be familiar to Proust. John Fowles’s desk is emigrating to Texas. Ebooks are indeed the wild frontier; and Google might not be the bloke in the white hat. Shouting at critics remains unwise.

Monday

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 4 April 2011

Though not strictly a weekend literary supplement, the Flavorwire has 19 pictures of achingly sharp authors working at their typewriters. They include Tennessee Williams, John Cheevor, Slyvia Plath, Francoise Sagan and William Faulkner.   A.C. Grayling was on the Today programme this morning, debating his secular Bible, The Good Book, with the Canon Chancellor of St. Pauls. Grayling has also given an interview to Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian, where, among other things, he expands on secular morality, spiritual understanding and the importance of language.    ‘He insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

Saturday

Edward King

Bookends: Murder in the dark

When the Observer critic Philip French started writing on the cinema in the early 1960s, he once explained in an interview, books about film were a rarity. ‘Now I have three book-lined rooms dedicated just to the cinema, including 50 books on Hitchcock and 30 on film noir.’ I Found it at the Movies (Carcanet, £19.95), a collection of essays and occasional writings about film first published from 1964 up to the present, is intended to ‘throw light’ on the times in which they were written and chart the shifting attitudes to film as entertainment and art. But it is surprising how little has changed. The 1964 essay ‘Violence in

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The passionate friend

Sam Leith explores H. G. Wells’s addiction to free love, as revealed in David Lodge’s latest biographical novel In the history of seduction, there can have been few scenes quite like this one: ‘Am I dreaming?’, she said when she opened her eyes. ‘No,’ he said, and kissed her again. ‘But what about Jane?’ she said. ‘You love Jane.’ ‘Yes, I love Jane, and Jane loves me, but there are many kinds of love, Amber. You’ve read A Modern Utopia, you’ve read In the Days of the Comet, you know my views on free, healthy, life-enhancing sexual relationships. Jane shares them.’ They embraced and lay in eachother’s arms, exploring and

Peter Parker

In the pink

In 1988 Katherine Swift took a lease on the Dower House at Morville Hall, a National Trust property in Shropshire, and created a one-and-a-half acre garden in what had been a field. In The Morville Hours (2008), she placed that garden in its landscape and wrote one of the finest books about the history, philosophy and the practice of gardening you are likely to read. She is currently working on a sequel, and The Morville Year is a very welcome interim volume, gathering the columns she wrote for The Times between 2001 and 2005. The book is arranged by month, starting not in January but in March: as Swift characteristically