Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

Stirred rather than shaken

James Bond is the great chameleon. From the velvety burr of Connery through to the tango tan of Moore and the aluminium pecs of Craig. And then, of course, there is the Bond of the books. Between covers (of the literary sort, at least), Bond transforms again: refrigerated in the black-and-white of print, he becomes clinical and orderly, disdaining the stagey theatrics of modern day spycraft. It is to this Bond that Jeffery Deaver returns in the latest addition to the 007 canon, Carte Blanche. Indeed, Deaver himself is given carte blanche. Rather than merely update Bond, as did Sebastian Faulks in his 2008 effort Devil May Care, Deaver recasts

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 31 May 2011

The Telegraph is live at the Telegraph Hay Festival. The Salon reports on ‘Stephen from Baltimore’s’ attempt to re-write James Joyce’s Ulysees on Twitter: ‘All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, “then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to represent that section.”‘ The Guardian’s Digested Read, by John Crace, turns its cutting eye on Jeffery Deaver’s new Bond book, Carte Blanche. ‘On his way out of M’s office, Bond noticed an attractive young agent chatting to Moneypenny. Ding-dong! Stockings or tights? “The name is Bond, James Bond,” he said. “Ophelia Maidenstone,” she replied. “I’ve

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 May 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2697 you were invited to take as your first line ‘How do I hate you? Let me count the ways’ and continue in verse for up to a further 15. Readers are no doubt familiar with the  given first line, which comes, with an impertinent tweak, from the penultimate sonnet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sequence of 44, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. And, on the subject of tweaks, Gerard Benson tells me that if you look at EBB’s manuscript in the British Museum Reading Room you will see that line 12 of the poem originally read not, ‘I love thee with the

Interconnect

Bookends | 28 May 2011

In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper napkin and a pen. ‘It’s been my childhood dream,’ said the man, ‘to have George Best ask me for my autograph.’ Best obliged. As so often, his fame was so great that it turned normality upside down. The star’s own phrase was that fame ‘turns the dial up’. He may have been associated more with another f-word, but what comes across most strongly in Celia Walden’s excellent account of her time as Best’s journalistic minder (Babysitting George, Bloomsbury, £16.99) is the role in his story of public recognition. Even when

Peter Parker

Goodbye to Berlin

Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who

Charlotte Moore

All shook up

Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off to Jordan for an indulgent weekend. Their car skids off a mountain road leaving Alice trapped inside. Kit behaves like an unheroic imperialist. ‘You bloody little man, Karim!’, he yells at the driver, but it is Karim who reminds him that they ought to be aiding Alice. They are rescued, but not all the artifice of a luxury hotel can prevent Alice’s miscarriage. Blood pours out of her ‘as if she were a vase, carelessly knocked over on a table.’

Anthony Daniels

The mind’s I

The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the world. They also seem to imply that we now understand almost everything about ourselves, apart from a few odd details to be filled in by ever-more-sophisticated scanners. In other words, man has finally come to understand himself. Here is an addition to the fast-growing genre of books that claim scientific authority for the idea that

Anne Chisholm

What did you do in the war, Mummy?

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the stage as she chronicles, largely in their own words, the lives of British women during the second world war. It is dedicated to one of them, her own mother, Anne Popham, later Anne Olivier Bell, who as a young woman suffered agonising wartime loss but went on to marry and become one of the great

Richard Davenporthines

Victorian rough and tumble

Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for him. The couple sedate the old man, reduce him to his dotage and raid his savings. Happerton also masterminds a raid on the strong-room of a City jewellers — echoes here of the jewellery raid in Taylor’s previous novel, At the Chime of a City Clock. All the while, with smug, relentless guile, he also

Anthony Sattin

Sixties mystic

The misery memoir is the fad of the moment. We seem to have a limitless desire to delve into other people’s hardships. Robert Irwin has gladly shown the way to a more enlightening type of memoir, that of the spiritual quest. But surely, I hear you say, the spiritual quest is nothing new? Think of Dante, half way along life’s path, looking for the right turning. For Dante, read the young Irwin, still a teenager, up at Merton College to read History and very much in need of direction. The year was 1965. But while others were tuning in and turning on, Irwin, as he confides in his first sentence,

Douglas Hurd

Backs to the wall

Susan Gibbs begins her book by describing the death from cancer of her first husband after 13 years of happy marriage. She ends with her farewell to Africa and her journey to Britain in 1983 with her second husband, Tim, and four children. Between these events she led a tense life farming in Zimbabwe, watching her children grow up, relishing the beauty of her surroundings and the company of friends, but always conscious that time was closing in and that one day they would be forced to leave the country they loved. They grew tired of the tension under which they lived, tired of the uncertainty, of wearing side arms,

Molly Guinness

Very drôle

It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege. It’s nice to know that the trees lining the roads in Paris have microchips embedded in their trunks, that the city council is controlling the pigeon population by shaking the eggs to make them infertile and that the Café Voisin served elephant consommé during the 1870 siege. But the pleasure of this learning comes at great personal cost. Where an innuendo can be

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Vastly entertaining

It may not be quite true that the next best thing to eating good food is reading about it, but undeniably food writing has its considerable pleasures. You’ve got it all there: sex and sensuality (the link between the appetites hardly needs spelling out), social history, the loving acquaintance with ingredients . . . and recipes. The Penguin Great Food series — a selection of 20 delightful, lightweight (we’re talking wrist-strain, not subject), prettily jacketed works by the finest food writers — is a feat. Just selecting 20 authors from the 17th century to now is difficult in itself. Do you go for good prose (Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s

Friday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Double trouble

Mark Mason has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper napkin and a pen. ‘It’s been my childhood dream,’ said the man, ‘to have George Best ask me for my autograph.’ Best obliged. As so often, his fame was so great that it turned normality upside down. The star’s own phrase was that fame ‘turns the dial up’. He may have been associated more with another f-word, but what comes across most strongly in Celia Walden’s excellent account

Matthew Richardson

The name’s Deaver, Jeffery Deaver

Now Bond is really back. Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver’s addition to the Bond series, is on the shelves. Publishing might be enduring hard times, but no expense was spared for 007. The official website had a clock ticking 24-style down to the novel’s midnight release. And the launch event was, as Katie Allen of the Bookseller reports, full of gizmos and blokeish chutzpah: abseiling Royal Marines, a BSA Spitfire and an authorial Bentley Continental GT – the full Bond shebang. For those yet to nab a copy, a taster excerpt can be found here. As I wrote when the project was announced, the Fleming novels currently occupy a curious space

Thursday

David Blackburn

Not dark yet, but it’s getting there

It was a strange scene. An audience of whiskery Classics enthusiasts listening to a lecture about the influence of Homer and Virgil on Bob Dylan, which is considerable – Sir Christopher Ricks has written a 500 page book on the subject. At the end of the lecture, this delightful and odd society moved to invite Dylan to its ranks, so impressed was it by his learning and art. A procession of old boys then shuffled out of Guildhall humming the tune to ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ (Dylan’s most Virgilian song), realising that they could have misspent their youth after all. It was a colourfully comic sight, dimmed by pathos. That was

Wednesday

Nik Darlington

Don’t blame Brando, blame the historians

Turning it over with my bare toes, it had the look and feel of finely ground coffee, typical of the island’s volcanic black beaches. I could not help but smile to myself: even the white coral sand was a myth. As a youngster, I fell in love with a 1930s book series called The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.  They introduced me to the greatest true story ever told.  The narrative is swift and vibrant, the characterisation sublime.  The book inspired the 1935 Oscar-winning film starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and the 1962 remake, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. But Nordhoff & Hall, by

Tuesday

Clarissa Tan

“Travel isn’t necessary” – an interview with Paul Theroux

American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux’s latest book, The Tao of Travel, is a compilation of excerpts from his own travel writings as well as those of authors such as Nabokov, Greene, Hemingway, Samuel Johnson, Chatwin and Waugh. Currently in London on a promotional tour, we chat to him during a gap in his busy schedule. What brought about The Tao of Travel, which is a bit like a logbook with entries by many different travellers? All my life, people ask me what’s my favourite book, what’s my favourite work of journalism, my favourite movies, my favourites songs. It’s very difficult to narrow things down to a Top Ten,

Monday

Anna Baddeley

A daunting future for Waterstone’s

The only time in the last decade I’ve bought something other than wrapping paper from Waterstone’s was when last winter’s snow prevented my Amazon order showing up in time for Christmas. Two hardbacks cost me a whopping £22 more than I had paid online. Short of forking out £50,000 for a super-injunction I can’t imagine a less satisfying transaction. Last Friday’s news that the chain has been bought by one of Russia’s poorer oligarchs was greeted rapturously by the book industry; its new managing director James Daunt (founder of the upmarket book chain) hailed as a messiah with excellent taste in bookshelves. But the notion that this takeover is going

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 23 May 2011

Fresh from winning the International Booker, Philip Roth gives a rare interview to Benjamin Taylor and the Telegraph. ‘There are some writers who have made an indelible impression. I don’t know if they shaped me as a writer, but they shaped me as a thinker and a reader and as a literary person. When I first started out, at school, I had been steeped in Henry James and there was an “influence”, not all for the good, and there was a tone I picked up from James, that didn’t suit me at all. But it’s there in Letting Go (1962). Kafka made a strong impression on me. His serious comedies