Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Correction of the Day | 22 February 2010

From a New York Times post on David Remnick’s forthcoming Obama biography An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article. Actually, like many such books this, while likely to be rather good, will still be both a pumped and pimped out version of the original 12,000 word article.

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Not ‘a boy-crazed trollop’

For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. Lives Like Loaded Guns — which combines biographical material, critical readings, and an assessment of the history of her reputation — tells a completely hair-raising story. The Dickinsons were one of the first families of respectable Amherst. Emily and her sister Lavinia — ‘Vinnie’ — lived in one house, Homestead, right next door to her brother Austin, the head of the family, and his wife Sue. Susan Dickinson was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, bosom friend to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

On our shoulders

Our politics is such a shallow game that any senior British politician who has read a book is apt to be considered cerebral, and if he has read two, feted as an original thinker. So I had never quite dispelled the suspicion that the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ might have been awarded to David Willetts for no better reason than that he knew his stuff, could talk like an academic, had a lively sense of the complexities of things, and sounded a little vague. I had wondered whether he might be one of those men to whom the learned footnote meant more than the useful conclusion. This book goes a long way

Judith Flanders

Riding for a fall

Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. The 1920s had seen a sharp recovery from

David Davis

The great bailout

Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. Hank Paulson’s new book is called On the Brink, but it could well have been entitled Over the Edge. The story of his role as US Treasury Secretary throughout the great banking crash of 2008–9 gives an impression of people being swept along by a swirling chaos of unexpected events, often completely out of control. ‘This is the economic equivalent of war,’ Paulson said in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008, scrambling to find a resolution for AIG before the insurance behemoth brought down the entire economy. Warfare is

Malcolm Deas

The ghost of an egoist

Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history

Andrew Taylor

From gloom to dispair

In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted into the bestseller lists almost before we have had time to become aware of their existence. Others, like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason and Norway’s Karin Fossum, advance steadily but less dramatically in terms of sales and critical plaudits. And then there’s Henning Mankell, the Swedish commander-in-chief of the invading forces, who deserves a category to himself. He is a distinguished playwright, publisher and children’s author, who has a long and honourable record of supporting charitable causes, especially in Africa. But he

Andrew Taylor

I smell a rat

The Diary of Miss Idilia presents the reader with an unusual problem. The writing is entirely comprehensible, the tale it tells couldn’t be easier to follow. The tricky bit, though, comes with trying to work out what on earth the book is. In 1851, 17-year-old Idilia Dubb was on holiday in the Rhineland with her middle-class Edinburgh family when one morning she disappeared. A lengthy search found nothing, and her parents returned home. Then, in 1860, workmen restoring Lahneck castle outside Coblenz discovered her remains at the top of a seemingly inaccessible tower. Near the body was Idilia’s diary, which recorded in tones of increasing anguish how she’d climbed up

Saturday

Victoria Lane

An 80-year-old mystery

‘The older I get, the more inclined I am to say those three words: I don’t know,’ says Baroness Rendell of Babergh. She turns 80 this week, and seems milder in person than in her writing. In photographs, too, she looks a bit haughty and forbidding, with incredible Ming the Merciless eyebrows. But the door was opened by a smallish woman with a sandy helmet of hair, a quizzical expression and an illuminating smile that appears from nowhere and sends her features skywards. The mouth, the eyebrows, the hair — everything lifts, as though she has stuck her finger in a socket. She has written, she estimates, about 70 books:

Paul Johnson

A dangerous fellow

Do we need another huge life of Arthur Koestler? He wrote a great deal about himself, including three autobiographical works: Spanish Testament (1937), describing his experience as a death-row prisoner of General Franco, Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954). He also contributed to The God that Failed, the fascinating collection of testimonies by former Communists which Dick Crossman edited in 1949. He and his last wife wrote an unfinished joint memoir, published a year after their deaths as Stranger on the Square (1984). An ex-wife, Mamaine, contributed a volume, Living with Koestler (1985). Then a quarter-century after his death came a large-scale 640-page biography entitled Arthur

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Unhelpful issues

It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. It would not have been so easy to describe what Joanna Trollope’s early novels were ‘about’ in a few words, but recently she has been writing what the Americans call ‘issue books’, and they can be more readily encapsulated. The Other Family is about just that — a man who has, or had, two of them. We only meet Richie in death; at the start of the book Chrissie and their

Ian Thomson

Survivor syndrome

In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him. In fact, as he recalled in Darkness Visisble (1990), he was suicidally depressed. So when he died in 2006, at the age of 81, it was assumed he had taken his life. His father, a Virginia-born engineer, had, moreover, been a depressive himself, and maybe a suicidal tendency had transmitted down the generation, like a dangerous gene? In reality, the author of Sophie’s Choice had died of pneumonia, complicated by alcoholism and addiction to tranquilisers. A lifelong malcontent, Styron indeed had few reasons to be cheerful. In The Suicide

Christopher Woodward

A dramatic streak

Late in the 19th century, archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum discovered a lime kiln. It had been built to incinerate marble into an aggregate for the mortar for the new structures of the Middle Ages. Inside were statues of six Vestal Virgins, stashed together like firewood. Their arms had been snapped off. The image came to mind as I read this excellent new book on the artist John Armstrong (1893-1975). In the 1930s he painted a series of ruined streets, with broken statues and broken monuments. They are bare and stark, and there is nothing like them in 20th-century British art. The first Armstrong I saw stopped me short:

Jonathan Sumption

Weighed in the balance

We sanctify some expressions, and in the process empty them of meaning. ‘Democracy’, ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ are all used in ways that beg more questions than they answer. As Orwell pointed out, those who reject the concepts have a habit of appropriating the words. And so it is with the ‘rule of law’. At a time when the arbitrary power of the state has rapidly increased in most western countries, the ‘rule of law’ is invoked more than ever. Is it any more than another august slogan? Tom Bingham, one of the greatest English judges of the past century, presided over the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords for

A.N. Wilson

Before she was a novelist

‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book. ‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book. It is extraordinary to read these journals and letters written by Murdoch in her very early twenties. Her tone of voice, and the preoccupations, and the turns of phrase are exactly as they were when I, a shy teenager, first met her in her late forties. Even her handwriting — reproduced in the end papers —

Charlotte Moore

A slave to her past

It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. The Long Song is also an historical fiction, but it is as much a critique of the way history is made and distorted as it is an evocation of time and place. Miss July was born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. She experienced the Baptist war and the abolition of

Alexander Starritt

An affable tour guide

In mentioning Heinrich the Fowler, 10th-century King of the Germans and one of the many obscure figures who appears in his book, Simon Winder describes a painting in the Hall of Electors in Frankfurt. A product of the historicising 19th century, it is part of a series of German monarchs stretching from Charlemagne to 1806, the first seven centuries of which are ‘simply fantasy’. Winder writes: I just feel happy not to be a professional historian who really has to stare hard at the reign of Heinrich the Fowler, say, and must ignore his notionally flowing locks and chartreuse cloak, must banish fantasies of mead-halls, damsels and winged helmets, must

Saturday

Rian Malan

F.W. de Klerk: a hero of our time

I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and

Richard Bradford

It happened one summer

For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. The Pregnant Widow is a far more complex, troubling piece of work. Amis did indeed spend much of the summer after his second year at Oxford in a castle near the Mediterranean, though not in Tuscany; that would

Philip Hensher

No example to follow

Ahundred years ago, a character in a novel who was keen on music would, like E.M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch or Leo- nard Bast, be as apt to stumble through a piece at the piano as listen to it at a concert. Ahundred years ago, a character in a novel who was keen on music would, like E. M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch or Leo- nard Bast, be as apt to stumble through a piece at the piano as listen to it at a concert. Given the relative- ly rare opportunities to hear a Brahms or Beethoven symphony before the invention of the LP, the easiest way to enjoy one was probably