Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Michela Wrong

A sage on his laurels

Last year, at a gathering in a London bookshop, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe read poetry and mused over his long career. The evening was a sell-out, the mood adoring. At the end, a Scandinavian blonde raised a hand to ask whether, if he could do it all again, there was anything about Things Fall Apart he would change. There was patronising laughter from the audience, tinged with disapproval. Didn’t the silly girl know the novel was perfect in every way? Achebe did not engage with the question. ‘No, I wouldn’t change a word.’ I was reminded of the exchange reading this slim book, Achebe’s first for more than 20

Jonathan Mirsky

Fear hovers in China

It’s lovely to be the child of a Chinese Revolutionary Martyr. It means your parent died especially heroically for the Communist cause. I had a friend who was such a son; his father, a high-ranking Chiang Kaishek army officer, came over to the Maoist cause and died fighting for it against his former comrades. The big thing for the son was that he had access to his dang-an, the official dossier containing the personal and political details of individual Chinese, which is closely guarded by the security apparatus. Few ever see their dang-an — which can make or break your career — but my friend could add favourable facts to

Jonathan Sumption

Tensions in the European Union

Perry Anderson was an editor of the New Left Review in the days when there was a New Left, and a pro-European Marxist at a time when this seemed a contradiction in terms. Since then, the opinions of this characteristically English rebel have been softened by years passed in the sociology departments of American universities. He has learned to love the values of American liberal capitalism, albeit with large qualifications. Disappointed idealism has soured his former adulation of French intellectual elites. But some things have not changed. Anderson’s contempt for the English political and intellectual tradition is as sharp as ever, and peppers the pages of this book. The influence

William Leith

Behind the net curtains

Waking Up in Toytown, by John Burnside The Freedoms of Suburbia, by Paul Barker Finding himself in a lunatic asylum, and then at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Burnside has an idea. He wants a normal life. His idea is to move to the suburbs, because it is there, he feels, that he might become ‘a regular, everyday sort of guy. The next-door neighbour whose name you can never remember, the one who keeps himself to himself, but is basically OK.’ Does he really want a normal life? I’m not so sure. In any case, he arrives in Surrey, seeking ‘a Surbiton of the mind’, and ends up on

Ian Sansom

Another damned thick, square book

William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist, a kind of vaster, stodgier, blubberier David Foster Wallace. And Vollmann’s much discussed obsessions with prostitution, destitution, degradation — exhaustingly detailed in his many and often mega-books, from You Bright and Risen Angels (1987) right through to the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means (2003) — are

Allan Massie

A reader’s writer

Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive. When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is,

Lucinda Baring

One for the road

Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country (there are a staggering 23 on India, for example). So I asked around. Which guidebook, if any (young travellers are increasingly turning to the web and online travel forums for advice whilst others are too mean to buy a guidebook and rely on friends’ recommendations, a hotel map and a good concièrge), did they choose

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Latest Great Irish Storyteller?

Who can we add to the roster of Great Irish Writers? Why none other than our old chum Patrick Bartholomew Ahern. It seems that Bertie’s autobiography (sadly not titled Dig Outs & Other Fuck-Ups) should be found on the fiction shelves. How so? Well… The granting of tax-free status to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern for earnings from his autobiography under the artists’ exemption scheme has prompted calls for the scheme to be revised. Labour Party arts spokeswoman Mary Upton said the tax break served a worthy purpose and she would not like to see it removed, but it should be reviewed. “In the current economic climate we need to have

Saturday

Pj Kavanagh

Continuity under threat

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite. As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when he was editor of Private Eye he published a regular feature called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’, written by John Betjeman — a suitable kind of investigation for a satirical magazine. When, in 1992, he founded The Oldie, a feature called ‘Unwrecked England’ written by this author, Betjeman’s daughter, was precisely intended to

Roy Foster

Strong family feelings

Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. This reflects the secret affection of the Irish bourgeoisie for the royal soap opera, even when this addiction has to be concealed as carefully as a taste for alcohol in a fundamentalist Muslim state. Oddly, her account of secret suburban Catholic covens, communing with royal weddings and jubilees via television, rather trumps my memories of royalist interests among the Protestant (though emphatically not Anglo-Irish) circles of

Patrick Carnegy

A dream made concrete

You are celebrated as the architect of one of the most famous buildings in the world, now in your late eighties and living quietly in your home outside Copenhagen. One day a beautiful blonde German girl knocks on your door. She is clutching a folder of her photographs of the extraordinary structure on the other side of the world which, following a dispute in 1965 with a new Australian Government, you have never seen completed. For her, that architectural work was love at first sight. For you, her images are a love letter that confirms the enduring greatness of your conception. It is happiness on both sides, and its fruit

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Master of accretion

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into their construction, despite their appearance of spontaneity. Feaver has a gift for the evocative phrase: ‘Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, they are keyed to an air of resolve as unguarded as joy, as involuntary as grief.’ This is a book strong on context. Auerbach emerges

Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France | 2 January 2010

After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned. The three powerful

Wednesday

Lewis Jones

Ignoble nobles

Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh. A quotation from the latter’s Put Out More Flags, about some shady manoeuvres by Basil Seal, supplies the epigraph to a chapter of Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor: ‘From time to time he disappeared … and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence…’ The chapter in question concerns ‘Victor’ — Victor Hervey (1915-85), 6th Marquess of Bristol, whose defining traits, by Scriven’s account, were his ‘tendency to criminality’ and ‘taste for wounding the vulnerable’ — which sounds like Basil Seal, as does Selina Hastings’ recollection that he ‘was

Jonathan Sumption

Poisonous relations

‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared Marshall Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, ‘have a common interest in the defeat of England as soon as possible.’ Why this should have been so is one of the many interesting questions to which this book offers no satisfactory answer. ‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared Marshall Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, ‘have a common interest in the defeat of England as soon as possible.’ Why this should have been so is one of the many interesting questions to which this book offers no satisfactory answer. France capitulated in June 1940 on terms which assumed that Britain would

Neil Clark

The face of a muffin

What was it about post-war British cinema? Our films were lit up by a collection of wonderfully idiosyncratic performers. Think Alistair Sim, Terry-Thomas and Robert Morley. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of them all was Margaret Rutherford. The drama critic, J. C. Trewin once remarked, ‘When you have seen any performance by Margaret Rutherford you are certain to remember it.’ How right he was. She stole Blithe Spirit with her portrayal of the exuberant bicycling medium, Madame Arcati. She was wonderful as Miss Whitchurch, the domineering headmistress of a girls’ school mistakenly billeted at a boys’ school in The Happiest Days of Your Life. And she was a far more colourful

Philip Ziegler

Some sunny day!

In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than life itself?’ she wrote, pleading for forgiveness and a reconciliation. It was in vain. Patmore stabbed his wife to death. ‘I live for my children and my wife,’ he told the police. ‘I hope the children will be well looked after.’ This bleak anecdote introduces a catalogue of disasters. At the end of the war

Byron Rogers

Racists, pigs and hysterics

I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years. Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of

Judith Flanders

Not perfect freedom

‘Servants’ and ‘service’ have not always meant ‘servility’. ‘Servants’ and ‘service’ have not always meant ‘servility’. From the Middle Ages right through to the 16th century, everyone was servant to someone: a lord was servant to the king, a lesser lord to a greater. Children likewise served in the households of their parents’ equals: service was what one did before God, and before one’s superiors, in class, or age. And many servants were for display as much as utility: as the consumer durables of their time, their number gave their masters’ prosperity in physical form. Gradually, as the world of family and servants became less closely entwined (by the end

James Scudamore

Objects of obsession

The Museum of Innocence is the sixth novel by Turkey’s most garlanded novelist and his first since he became a Nobel laureate in 2006. The Museum of Innocence is the sixth novel by Turkey’s most garlanded novelist and his first since he became a Nobel laureate in 2006. Pamuk’s unflinching eye on his country’s history has brought him well-documented trouble, but it is in the subtle exploration of how west and east collude and collide there that he excels, notably in the novel My Name Is Red, a bravura extemporisation on art and representation at the Ottoman court of the 16th century, and in the more modern setting of his