Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Mark Mason

Two legs good

In September 1954, Albert Speer decided to walk from Berlin to Heidelberg, a distance of 620 kilometres. As Hitler’s architect still had more than a decade of a prison sentence in Spandau to serve, this might have been seen as problematic. But not so. Speer mapped out a circular course of 270 metres in the prison’s garden, and proceeded to walk it over and over again. He completed the journey in a few months, having done 2,296 laps of the course. Seeking a new destination, he rejected the suggestion of fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess — Asia — on the grounds that it would mean passing through communist countries. This tale

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Under the skin

Why do so many aspiring writers think it best to begin with the short story and graduate to the novel? It’s madness. The short story is infinitely harder to write well. Some novelists succeed at both — William Trevor and John McGahern are the names that spring to mind — but Chekhov never wrote a novel and, coming up to date, our leading woman short-story writer, Helen Simpson, has not been tempted to do so either. I can count on a hand the names of contemporary writers whose collections of short stories are worth reading, but Polly Samson has belonged on one of its fingers since her fine first volume,

Daniel Swift

Dazzling puzzles

Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’ Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’ Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are dazzling puzzles,

Marcus Berkmann

Dying of laughter

Marcus Berkmann on the few genuinely funny books aimed at this year’s Christmas market It’s a worrying sign, but I suspect that Christmas may not be as amusing as it used to be. For most of my life, vast numbers of so-called ‘funny’ books have been published at around this time of year, aimed squarely at desperate shoppers lurching drunkenly into bookshops on 24 December, still looking for the perfect present for someone they don’t much like. But this year there aren’t anywhere near as many. Perhaps they stopped selling. Maybe the QI Annual and Schott’s Almanac saw them off. Or maybe it just dawned on everyone at the same

David Blackburn

The sound of broken glass

What do Evelyn Waugh, Peter Cook and Chris Morris have in common? I would have said ‘irreverence’ and left it at that; but the social scientist Peter Wilkin has written a book on the subject, The Strange Case of Tory Anarchism. What do Evelyn Waugh, Peter Cook and Chris Morris have in common? I would have said ‘irreverence’ and left it at that; but the social scientist Peter Wilkin has written a book on the subject, The Strange Case of Tory Anarchism. It’s an arresting title, not least because it appears to be an oxymoron. But this is not so, according to Wilkin. Tory anarchism is not a political ideology;

Edward Harrison

Brave on occasion

Hitler’s experiences in the Great War have long been shrouded in mystery and controversy, not least because there is relatively little material from that time written by himself. Hitler’s experiences in the Great War have long been shrouded in mystery and controversy, not least because there is relatively little material from that time written by himself. Although Austrian by nationality, he volunteered for the German army in 1914 and served throughout the war in its List Regiment, mostly as a dispatch runner based at regimental headquarters. After he became a celebrity, quite a few former comrades wrote about his war service. Some were enthusiastically positive about Hitler’s military record, others

Friday

Andrew Taylor

Bookends: The King of Horror

Here is the latest Book End column from this week’s issue of the Spectator: Much of Stephen King’s recent work has been relatively lighthearted, but in Full Dark, No Stars he returns with gusto to his dark side and explores the perils of getting what you ask for. The first and longest of these four novellas, ‘1922’, is a murderer’s confession: a farmer describes murdering his wife in Nebraska just after the first world war and the unexpected consequences that gradually destroy his life. It’s stark and compelling, and should be avoided at all costs by readers with a phobia of rats. In ‘Big Driver’, an author of cosy crime

Thursday

David Blackburn

Next year’s Booker judges

The panel of judges for next year’s Booker Prize has been announced. It will be chaired by former chief-Spook Dame Stella Rimington. Rimington’s largely candid biography Open Secret gives a very privileged insight into the momentous events of the later 20th Century; and, apparently, her thrillers are a superior treat for a beach holiday too. Joining her are ex-MP Chris Mullin (of whose diaries more than enough has been said), the Telegraph’s literary editor Gaby Wood, and former Spectator Editor, writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona. And, of course, Susan Hill, who needs no introduction to readers of the Spectator. That panel will, I think, produce a diverse longlist. Congratulations to

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Wednesday’s newly discovered poetry

I never find the time to read poetry these days; and to enjoy and remember it, you have to read a lot. One of the many pleasures of sitting opposite the Spectator’s literary editors is being given recommended reading, built on more than 50 years of professional experience between them. Yesterday, Clare Asquith recommended I read Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, of which I’d heard but never read. Written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, it has been described by political thinkers such as Paul Foot and Richard Holmes as the greatest political poem ever written in English. Having now read it, they’re not far wrong. It

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The passing of a quiet great

Hunter S Thompson’s dispatches from Vietnam have entered legend. Murray Sayle is less well known, but he too was in Vietnam as the war degenerated into bloody catastrophe, and he described it with award-winning panache for Harold Evans’ Sunday Times. Sayle, who died recently aged 84, was an inveterate adventurer and mild Quixotic. Born in Australia, he sailed to Britain in 1952 to save a doomed romance. Having failed to keep his woman, he found work as a leg-runner for the crime correspondent at The People. He published a cult autobiographical novel, A Crooked Sixpence, based on the experience in 1960. This was Fleet Street’s happy hour – that brief

Monday

Natalie Fast

My child, such trouble I have

Emma Donoghue’s excellent novel Room was rightly shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the first four (three really) inept words that came to mind after reading it were: ‘really good, really creepy’. It makes me cringe now to think that I didn’t have anything more intelligent to say; but I was emotionally exhausted and, really, no words can quite describe the world Donoghue has created in an eleven square foot shed. Room is 5-year-old Jack’s world, solely inhabited by him, Ma, Plant and the nightly visits from Old Nick. He hasn’t been lied to about his surroundings, just not told the whole truth. It is from this state of

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

BOOKENDS: Xmas with the exes

‘I only see radiators these days’, announces one of the characters in this novel — ‘You know, people who give out heat and warmth.’ A radiator is a pretty good description of India Knight’s Comfort and Joy (Fig Tree/ Penguin, £14.99), too: a book so kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. ‘I only see radiators these days’, announces one of the characters in this novel — ‘You know, people who give out heat and warmth.’ A radiator is a pretty good description of India Knight’s Comfort and Joy (Fig Tree/ Penguin, £14.99), too: a book so kindly and funny and affectionate that

Christopher Meyer

Taking the long view

While Tony Blair emerged from his memoirs as a chameleon of many colours, there is only one George W. Bush in Decision Points. The book reads like the man speaks. If it has been ghosted — and Bush gives thanks to a multitude of helpers — it has been done with consummate skill to preserve the authentic Bush voice. The result will be unexpected, even unwelcome, to many. This is an interesting and readable book, which clips along in short, spare sentences, with frequent flashes of humour. Don’t take my word for it. It has been praised by none other than Bill Clinton. Bush, of course, sets out to put

Jonathan Keates

Follow your star

In these straitened times it looks as if a great many more hours of most people’s days will have to be spent waiting in queues. In these straitened times it looks as if a great many more hours of most people’s days will have to be spent waiting in queues. The perfect companion for such a penitential exercise is the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Should you be able to read Italian, get hold of the pocket version known as the Dante Minuscolo Hoepliano, originally issued in 1904 by the enterprising Milanese publisher Ulrico Hoepli, with excellent notes by Professor Raffaello Fornaciari of Florence University and now in its umpteenth

Christopher Howse

The spur of the moment

A memorable image by André Kertész shows a steam train passing over a high viaduct behind a row of peeling French houses next to a demolition site while a man in a suit and hat with his back to the train walks across the foreground, a mysterious painting-shaped item wrapped in newspaper under one arm. It is a moment caught. The viewer, naturally, tries to connect the disparate elements. And to us it is not merely a moment but a moment in a place, from the past — when steam trains chuffed and men wore hats with suits — in this case 1928 at Meudon, a Parisian suburb. In this

Jonathan Mirsky

Charmed out of their minds

David Cameron probably didn’t need reminding while he was in China what fools intelligent people can be when they visit authoritarian regimes. David Cameron probably didn’t need reminding while he was in China what fools intelligent people can be when they visit authoritarian regimes. ‘Useful idiots’, as Lenin didn’t say, they make allowances for dishonesty, even horrors, which they never would at home, express guilt for the past of their own countries, use words like ‘progress’ for the place they are briefly visiting, and accept at face-value hospitality and words which normal consideration would tell them were well-rehearsed and manipulative. Patrick Wright, a journalist and historian, describes the three ‘missions’

John Preston

Unpredictable pleasures

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’ The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this. As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’ The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again

Ian Thomson

So far from God . . .

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics. Mexican drug cartels are now so deeply ingrained in the city’s political and social fabric that not a single bar or shop remains ‘un-narcotised’. Mexico in the 21st century, according to Ed Vulliamy, is a nation shadowed by gangland enterprise and the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs. To live on the US-Mexican border, how ever, calls for special qualities of endurance. The four US states bordering Mexico — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona

Philip Ziegler

How we roared!

To most people Christopher Plummer means Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Plummer would not be in the least ashamed by this. A year or so ago he found himself forced to watch the film at a children’s Easter party: The more I watched, the more I realised what a terrific movie it is. The very best of its genre — warm, touching, joyous and absolutely timeless. Here was I, cynical old sod that I am, being totally seduced by the damn thing — and, what’s more, I felt a sudden surge of pride that I’d been a part of it. It is an odd book, though. The

David Sexton

Change, decay and success

After having for so long been treated with such disdain by the French literary establishment, Michel Houellebecq has at last been embraced by it. Last week La carte et le territoire, his fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a distinction any of his previous novels might just as well have merited. Perhaps it has been possible to do him this belated justice because La carte et le territoire is less explicitly scandalous than its predecessors, more conventionally substantial even. If his previous novels have insolently portrayed life in our faithless, free-market world as a race between sex and death, here that race is over. There is almost no sex