Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Desk-bound, needing to get out more

Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing, loss, and of how Jews attempt to cope with the destruction that characterises their history. The title refers to the Book of Kings: ‘All the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, he burned with fire’. If, as one of Krauss’ spokesmen puts it, ‘every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one’, would the Great House be built again? The book divides into two sets of linked sections, the halves mirroring each other

Charles Sprawson

Visions of boyhood

Among the many photographs in this comprehensive history is one of a master in a clerical collar. He stares at the camera with a startled expression and looks out of place, devoid of the self-assurance of others alongside him. His name is J. W. Coke Norris, and it dawned on me slowly that this was the man on whom Rattigan had based the character of Crocker Harris, the dessicated classics master in The Browning Version, played in the film by Michael Redgrave, a play so close to Rattigan’s heart that he never had to make an alteration or change a line. Like Crocker Harris, Coke Norris taught only the lower

Justin Marozzi

Hand over fist

When King Abdullah first started work on this political memoir two years ago, he can hardly have imagined how different the Middle East would look by the time of its publication. Change in this region, which prizes stability above all else, mostly occurs at a glacial pace, if it happens at all. Yet the region has been turned upside down so quickly, with the popular revolutions that began in Tunisia and Egypt, that one can reasonably wonder what other surprises may lie in store before this review is published. Change is no longer a political slogan voiced by a distant American president. It’s real. It’s happening now. Tunis and Cairo

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The messiah is betrayed

A monsoon of literature will eventually be written about the WikiLeaks story. Here are two of the first droplets. David Leigh and Luke Harding have delivered an enjoyable account of the Guardian’s fraught dealings with Julian Assange and the publication of the secret US cables. The WikiLeaks founder comes across as a shadowy, manipulative character with the habits of a tramp and the brain of a chess grandmaster. When it suited him he displayed an absurdly possessive attitude towards documents he couldn’t possibly claim legal title to. The story is blown dramatically off course by the assault charges filed against Assange by two Swedish women last year. In Leigh and

Friday

Mark Mason

Bookends: Life underground | 25 February 2011

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. For the first 17 days of their ordeal, the Chilean miners trapped underground last year were forced to ration themselves to one sliver of tuna every 36 hours. Less than a month later, while still down the mine but after rescuers had secured them regular food supplies, they threatened to go on hunger strike. Such surprises are vital in a book like Jonathan Franklin’s The 33. When you already know the story’s conclusion, details are everything. The most gripping period is that between contact being made with the miners

Thursday

David Blackburn

Le Carre’s genius for hard work

‘The more identities a man has, the more they express the man they conceal.’ For me, that sentence indicates why John Le Carré is one of Britain’s greatest living writers. It’s elegant, profound and accessible. It comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and that story of betrayals is contained in that one sentence. In fact, it expresses concisely the broad theme of the Smiley books. I wonder how long it took Le Carré to sculpt that sentence. How many emendations? How many different combinations and sequences? How much effort is needed to fashion something so precise? By his own admission, Le Carré is an exhaustive self-editor. Writing is the labour

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A negative outlook | 24 February 2011

Here, as promised, is Sam Leith’s magazine review of Niall Ferguson’s new book Civilisation: the West and the Rest. Why, the energetic historian Niall Ferguson asks in his new book, did a minority of people stuck out on the extreme western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the world in cultural, political and economic terms for more than half a millennium? This, he says, ‘seems to me the most interesting question a historian of the modern era can ask’. Its supplementary — to which he only tentatively suggests answers — is ‘is it all over?’ ‘Make no mistake [he writes], this is not another self-satisfied version of ‘the

Wednesday

Matthew Richardson

Catering for all tastes

The BBC’s Books season started in earnest this week. And, so far at least, my earlier optimism has not been shaken. My Life in Books, the new daily literary chat show with Anne Robinson at the helm, launched on Monday at 6:30 on BBC2. P.D. James and Richard Bacon, an unlikely pairing if ever there was, kicked off proceedings. Bacon provided some blokeish bonhomie, but Baroness James carried the show. Narrating through her list (Pride and Prejudice and A Handful of Dust being the most noticeable choices), the 90-year-old twinkled with grandmotherly charm, a welcome contrast to Robinson’s shrill and starchy turn in the anchor’s chair.   The show is

Isabel Sutton

A simple reading exercise

For a long time, one of my favourite radio programmes has been Something Understood, presented by Mark Tully on BBC Radio 4.  For those who have never tuned in for its Sunday evening slot, the format is as follows: each week Tully presents a selection of literary and musical extracts all connected by a one-word linking theme. Tully’s choices are invariably lively and unpredictable and the listener is left with a richer sense of what the theme word might mean.   Reading a new book of essays, entitled Thinking on Thresholds, I had a similar experience.  The book is orientated around the central theme of liminality but it stretches its

Tuesday

Matthew Richardson

And there’s still more

The books have ended, the final film instalment is in the can and the recent valedictory Bafta was collected en masse by cast and crew. But still more, apparently, can be squeezed from the Harry Potter franchise. A Guardian article last week reported that J.K. Rowling is to be the subject of a straight-to-TV biopic called Strange Magic. The magic in question will be purely financial, detailing Rowling’s rise to fame and fortune all thanks to her wordy wizardry. Rowling is the latest author, and the youngest by a century or two, to get the silver-screen treatment. Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Love), Jane Austen (Becoming Jane), Beatrix Potter (Miss Potter) and

David Blackburn

A bridge too far for Niall Ferguson?

Niall Ferguson is among Britain’s most valuable exports – a feted international academic with seats at Harvard, Stanford, the Harvard Business School and the LSE; he has also had spells at Oxford and Cambridge. His tomes sell in their millions; his TV shows are an engaging mix of self-confidence and charm. He is a credible talking head and he is consistently placed on lists of ‘influential people’. Across the globe then, Ferguson ‘matters’. Everywhere save British academic circles, where he’s seen as a neo-conservative oddity. It’s sometimes said that the British, unlike the French and the Americans, mistrust public intellectuals. But the careers of Richard Dawkins, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry – Thomas Traherne, a real discovery

Until the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Traherne was completely unknown. Very little of his writing had ever been published, and even less had been widely read. Over the last one hundred years, however, several manuscripts of his works have been discovered, often in dramatic circumstances (one was pulled from off a fire and still bears scorch marks). These have transformed our understanding of him. As soon as his first poems were discovered Traherne was grouped with the set of 17th century poets known as the metaphysicals. It’s easy to see why. These lines from ‘The Person’ include paradoxes and strikingly unexpected image very much like the poems of

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 21 February 2011

Ian McEwan accepted the Jerusalem Prize from Israeli President Shimon Peres and the Guardian reports that he used the ceremony to launch an incisive critique of Israel’s domestic policy, branding it a ‘great injustice’. In fact that’s barely half the story. McEwan was balanced: he unequivocally denigrated the ‘nihilism of the suicide bomber and the nihilism of the extinctionist policies of Israel’. He acknowledged and praised the ‘precious tradition of the democracy of ideas in Israel’ and attacked the captive minds on both sides that are perpetuating ‘a great and self-evident injustice’. McEwan devoted the rest of his speech to the novel, which he argued: ‘Has become our best and

Saturday

The Spectator

Australian Books: Mushy methods

What Makes Us Tick? The Ten Desires That Drive Us By Hugh Mackay Hachette, $35, pp 319 ISBN 9780733625077 Hugh Mackay has been studying Australian society for more than three decades, and has a number of interesting books and reports under his belt. What Makes Us Tick? is presented as a distillation of what he has learned from his research and observations, but anyone expecting insights about shifting political allegiances, the generational confusion of ideologies and the broader social landscape of the country will not find it here. Mackay’s focus, instead, is on the internal drivers of personality, not in Australians in particular, but in Westerners in general. The result

Mark Mason

Bookends: Wit and wisdom

Nora Ephron has a clever solution to a particular social quandary. Whenever she pinches her husband’s arm at a party, it’s their agreed signal for ‘I’ve forgotten the name of this person I have to introduce you to, so give them your name directly and they’ll respond in kind’. Only one problem — his memory is now as bad as hers, so he keeps forgetting what the signal means. Nora Ephron has a clever solution to a particular social quandary. Whenever she pinches her husband’s arm at a party, it’s their agreed signal for ‘I’ve forgotten the name of this person I have to introduce you to, so give them

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: If you can’t make a table…

Why do you write? The question is sometimes posed by interviewers or by members of the audience at book festivals. My answer is usually rather feeble. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t sing or play a musical instrument or dance, and I can’t draw. So what else is left to me but writing?’ This is true enough. Why do you write? The question is sometimes posed by interviewers or by members of the audience at book festivals. My answer is usually rather feeble. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t sing or play a musical instrument or dance, and I can’t draw. So what else is left to me but writing?’ This is

John Preston

The empire strikes back

Something strange happened in New York on a cold November afternoon in 1783: the city effectively turned itself inside out. Mounted on a grey horse, George Washington marched down Manhattan at the head of the victorious US army. At the same time, British troops headed frantically in the opposite direction. When they reached the southernmost tip of the island, they clambered into longboats and rowed out to the Royal Navy ships waiting in the harbour. All this, of course, left the thousands of loyalists who had supported the British during the War of Independence in a very tricky position. It’s tempting to characterise them as a lot of 18th-century Bufton

Lewis Jones

The call of the wild

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. (Her father’s ancestors, who left Anjou for Canada in the 17th century, were called Prou or Preault; her mother’s arrived in New England soon after the Mayflower.) Her fiction tends to be

Cressida Connolly

A world of talking trees

Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger? The sad answer is Henry. The trees and the wind tell him to remove his clothes and swim in freezing water: fished out of the sea at Newhaven in February, he is taken to hospital and subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. This book is an account of the next seven years of Henry’s life, both from his father’s perspective and his

Jonathan Mirsky

Hothouse hell

Amy Chua, Tiger Mother and John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale, was born in the Chinese year of the tiger, and a tiger, she says, ‘the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect’. She describes her own personality: ‘Hot- tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving’. Amy Chua, Tiger Mother and John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale, was born in the Chinese year of the tiger, and a tiger, she says, ‘the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect’. She describes her own personality: ‘Hot- tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving’. I missed the last quality in this disturbing book; she should have written ‘monomaniacal’.