Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Robert Stewart

What’s in a date?

Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a grand idea. Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a grand idea. After the formation of separate continents about 150 million years ago, the world’s ‘cultures’ became progressively more ‘sundered’ and its ecosystems more divergent. Then, ‘with extraordinary suddenness’, in 1492 this long-standing pattern ‘went into reverse’: divergence ceased and ‘a new convergent era of the history of the planet began’.  Historians in the West have found it useful to break up the past into rough-and-ready segments — pre-history, followed by ancient, medieval and modern history — without jettisoning the understanding that history is seamless, a story of change and continuity whose events have both distant and immediate causes and

Justin Cartwright

A canker on the rose

This is a very short book with large type. DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America. America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town — from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford — America was more

Sebastian Smee

Shady people in the sun

The characters in Rose Tremain’s deft new novel are almost all remarkably unpleasant. The characters in Rose Tremain’s deft new novel are almost all remarkably unpleasant. Not just wicked or selfish, but strangely pathetic, too. In fact, their nastiness is so ingrained and so unignorable that one begins to suspect a degree of authorial malice. Of course, Tremain is too good to present caricatures: her characters are all amply supplied with motives, credible back stories and the appropriate quotient of human quiddity. But from start to finish, an acrid atmosphere hovers over her every description, and it permeates not just the characters but the main actions of the plot. Let’s

Allan Massie

A race well run

More than 20 years ago I wrote an admiring article about Dick Francis. I made, if I recall, only one mild criticism: that he sometimes piled a bit too much misfortune on his damaged heroes. There was, for instance, the novel in which the narrator’s wife was in an iron lung and the villains put pressure on him to abandon his investigation by invading her bedroom and threatening to switch off the electric current that kept her alive. This was going a bit far, I suggested. A couple of weeks later I got a charming letter from Francis thanking me for all the nice things I had written, and then

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Towards the End of the Night

Isaac Chotiner has a nice piece at TNR on Michael Frayn’s classic Fleet Street novel, Towards the End of the Morning. Among his observations: The most astonishing aspect of Frayn’s novel [published in 1967] is that so many of the dilemmas and complaints of the characters are easily recognizable today. “He looked anxiously at the rack of galley proofs behind him. He had only seven ‘The Country Day by Day’ columns in print, and he had sworn never to let the Countries drop below twelve. He had a ‘Meditation’ column for each of the next three days—unless Winters had made a cock-up about immaculate conception, in which case he had

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Throw it in a stream

I know a British couple with a Chinese daughter, pretty and fluent in English. Of course the little girl was adopted. It is necessary to steel one’s self against three agonising thoughts: how did such children come to be here, why does one never meet an adopted Chinese boy, and what does one reply when the adopted Chinese child asks, ‘Why did my real mother let me go?’ There is already substantial information on this subject, including television documentaries, none of it mentioned by Xinran. No one has exposed the scandal of Chinese orphanages, the starting point for the traffic in babies to foreigners — there are now well over

Stephen Bates

A narrow escape

For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office, where I worked, we had evidence that Clinton had sought to hide his dalliance through perjury and obstruction of justice. But that didn’t matter anymore. No president could survive the public revelation of sex (however defined) with a White House intern. Clinton was about to be driven from office over fellatio rather than felonies. I started thinking about a conciliatory statement Starr might release when the President resigned. Our judgment, as Ken Gormley observes in

Simon Walters

Always a murky business

Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street. Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street. In August 1997, Price was on duty for the BBC the weekend that the story of Robin Cook’s affair broke. In Where Power Lies he describes the ‘unusually rich array’ of other stories in the papers to choose from that weekend. A juicy item in the Sunday Times stated that Chris Patten, Governor of

Claudia FitzHerbert

Spoilt for choice | 27 February 2010

It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. Then she urged the sisterhood to cast aside the puritanical fixations of yesterday and instead concentrate on politics, pay and the right to work part-time for a year or two without being left behind. At the time I was one of the several crosspatch hoodies who said ‘steady on: patchwork careers are all very well, but what about the uses

Harriet Sergeant

The lady from Shanghai

By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and its relationship with the USA. By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and its relationship with the USA. Hers is an engrossing life which spanned the 20th century and included a cast of extraordinary admirers, from Chinese warlords to Churchill. ‘I think your bark is worse than your bite,’ she cooed at him during the Cairo conference. Born in 1897, she was one of three sisters whose lives

Byron Rogers

Method in his madness

The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers). He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated

Juliet Townsend

Fleeing fog and filth

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’. Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was

Oliver Marre

Love and vulgarity

When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. I thought of the decent doctor who marries a woman so beautiful and yet so unfaithful that it ruins his life; the two good-looking children who have eyes only for one another, until they discover that he is in fact the most beautiful man in the

Judith Flanders

Life beyond the canvas

Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Now she has once again turned her attention to the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite group, with a joint portrait of the four women who influenced Ford Madox Brown: his two wives, Elisabeth and Emma, and two women for whom he had spiritual affinities, and (probably platonic) romantic yearnings. Elisabeth was,

Rowena Macdonald

Shady characters

A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A Life

Andro Linklater

The greatest rogue in Europe

On 11 November 1743, the most sensational trial of the 18th century opened in the Four Courts in Dublin. The plaintiff, James Annesley, claimed that his uncle, Richard Annesley, the sixth earl of Anglesey, had robbed him of immense estates in England and Ireland worth £10,000 a year. The scale of the theft and the rank of the alleged thief would by themselves have made the case exceptional. According to Viscount Perceval who was present, it was ‘of greater importance than any tryall ever known in this or any other kingdom.’ But what really attracted attention was James Annesley’s allegation that in 1727, the year he became heir to the

Gilbert Adair

Cast a long shadow

Many years ago I invited a young student of mine to see Psycho, a film of which she had never heard, made by a director (Hitchcock) with whose name she was unfamiliar and shot in a format (black-and-white) whose apparent old-fashionedness so mystifed her she wondered aloud why no one thought to complain to the projectionist. Yet, shrieking on cue at all the spooky moments, she ultimately admitted to having been so bowled over by the film that she asked what other Hitchcocks she ought to see. I recommended North by Northwest — only subsequently to learn, to my stupefaction, that she had found it boring. Boring? The most euphoria-inducing

Aidan Hartley

Entrance exam

Before disembarking at Bulawayo airport I stuffed the book I was reading in the front-seat pocket. It was Peter Godwin’s fine When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I did not want to be carrying anything that might identify me as a subversive — or a foreign correspondent. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF goons threatened two-year jail sentences for Western journalists entering Zimbabwe illegally. Most hacks went in pretending to be ornithologists. My best friend Jonathan Clayton had arrived in Bulawayo with a set of golf clubs. He was rumbled, blindfolded and beaten. They threw him into a succession of overcrowded cells where, despite the chill nights, starving inmates stripped down to their underwear

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Newspapers, Mrs Rochester and a Presumption of Literacy

Sometimes, you know, stuff appears in the newspapers that offers just a smidgen of hope. Consider this tidbit from the Guardian’s account of the oh-so-entertaining revelations in Andrew Rawnsley’s new book. At the time of the botched 2006 attempt to topple Tony Blair: In the middle of the coup, the former welfare minister Frank Field went to No 10 to plead with Blair not to give way to Brown. “You can’t go yet. You can’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic,” he said. Rawnsley writes: “Blair roared with laughter.” The grounds for hope, you see, lie in the fact that the Guardian doesn’t feel it necessary to explain the

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.