Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Judith Flanders

Ten minutes that shook Europe

Wrath of God: the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Edward Paice Portugal in the 18th century was at once a mystery and deeply familiar to the British. Deeply familiar, as one of Britain’s most enriching trading partners, providing Brazilian gold in exchange for British textiles and other manufactured goods. A mystery, because Portugal appeared to be hundreds of years behind the rest of Europe. The Jesuit control of the country forbade ‘any conclusion whatsoever opposing the system of Aristotle’; superstition was rampant (the Spanish derided their neighbours as pocos y locos — few and mad) as the Inquisition searched out not only heretics but bigamists, witches, Jews, sodomites and

William Feaver

A backdrop of beasts and losers

There’s this cow nuzzling a bunch of roses though floating belly up over a matchwood village where smoke springs from every blessed chimney and a po-faced couple issues forth, poised either to sink back among the onion domes or zoom to the far corner where the Eiffel Tower teeters on two legs in moonlit snow. This isn’t an actual Chagall but it could well be. A late concoction of heart-warming bits melded together and overlaid with memories of a chortling Topol, or the scene in Notting Hill when the Julia Roberts character goes and gives the Hugh Grant character a Chagall original, a love token that he all too understandably

Cressida Connolly

Tales of the unexpected | 5 November 2008

The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories, by Shena Mackay In Waterstones bookshops there are little signs dotted among the fiction shelves, to prompt readers towards new purchases. The signs suggest that if you liked, say, Evelyn Waugh you’d also enjoy Nancy Mitford; or if Ruth Rendell is a favourite you might like to try Barbara Vine. Where the books of Shena Mackay are concerned, however, there could be no such proposition, because her work is quite unlike anyone else’s. Mackay has a slavish and devoted following: Julie Burchill has called her the world’s greatest living writer. So a new book from Shena Mackay is cause for celebration. Equally at

Simon Baker

A choice of first novels | 5 November 2008

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz Pollard, by Laura Beatty Chatto & Windus Inside the Whale, by Jennie Rooney Chatto & Windus Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight Doubleday AFraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, was one of two debut novels on the Booker shortlist — and is, one could argue, a more distinguished offering than the other debutant, which won. A rambling and hilarious tale about perpetual failure, it takes the form of an immense anecdote from a father, Martin Dean, to his son, Jasper. Martin has lived his life in the shadow of his brother, Terry, Australia’s most notorious (and oddly popular) criminal. Terry began life

Ian Sansom

The divided states of America

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison You may or may not agree with the New York Times, which a couple of years ago voted Toni Morrison’s Beloved the greatest work of American fiction of the past quarter century. (What about Updike’s Rabbit novels, you might ask? Or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping? Or, or, or …). And you may or not agree with the Swedish Academy’s citation, when Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, praising her ‘visionary force’. You may have struggled with the increasingly poetic and mystic drift of her recent novels, Jazz (1992) and Love (2003). But there is no denying that

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 5 November 2008

Ken Follett is a cult in countries such as Japan, Italy and Spain — in Spain, in fact, there is a statue to him, inaugurated in January this year, in the town of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque country. In Britain he is also loved, but perhaps not with the fanatical devotion he deserves. Most people don’t even know that he wrote under the pen-name, early in his career, of Bernard L Ross. In fact, most people haven’t heard of Amok, King of Legend, a book widely known in Holland, France, Tibet, the Republic of Ireland, Ghana and Germany, where it appeared with the title Amok: Der Killer Gorilla. The plot

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Revengers’ Satisfaction

There’s something awful about a bad review. By which I mean, one can sometimes feel rather sorry for the poor writer suffering under a prolonged and vicious barrage (one thinks of some of Dale Peck’s screeds in the New Republic for instance) that leaves him – and by its end, the reader too – shell-shocked. All that time and effort spent, just so some hack bastard can tear it to pieces for the (undoubted) entertainment of bastard readers who weren’t going to buy the bastarding book anyway. On the other hand, sometimes the author is Alastair Campbell. Fair game, in other words. And, to be honest, Peter Kemp’s Sunday Times

Saturday

Allan Massie

Life & letters

Chesterton refuses to go away. You may think he should have done so. Orwell tried to show him the door: Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life … every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. Given that Orwell asserted that everything he himself wrote was intended to advance the cause of Democratic Socialism, I’m not

Peter Hoskin

The Ingmar Bergman Archives

Like the crusader knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), we all eventually lose our chess game with Death. And that includes Bergman himself, who passed away only last year, leaving an immense cinematic void as he did so. He bequeathed us 62 films, a good proportion of which are among the greatest and most enigmatic art works of the 20th century.  We will, quite simply, never see their like again. Taschen’s immense book, The Ingmar Bergman Archives, feels, then, like something of a final eulogy to the man and his art. If so, what an elegant and loving one it is. Each of Bergman’s films receives due attention,

S E-G-Hopkin

Life among the dead

‘There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.’ The Graveyard Book has one of the most arresting opening sentences one could imagine. Fortunately, Neil Gaiman then leaves melodrama for something much more interesting and thoughtful. By chance, as a toddler, Bod, the central character of the story escapes the assassin who has killed his family, and wanders into a graveyard, where he is adopted by the ghosts. Gaiman observes one of the principal rules of fantasy, which is to have rules — nothing is duller than a dream-world where anything can happen. The ghosts of his world stay as they were at the moment of their

John De-Falbe

Hope and Glory

Home, by Marilynne Robinson Marilynne Robinson’s magnificent previous novel, Gilead, was structured as a letter by the elderly, ailing Reverend John Ames to his young son. A persistent theme was the fear that Jack Boughton, the black sheep son of his dearest friend, would exercise a malign influence on his wife and boy after his death. Home is a counterpart rather than a sequel: read independently, it would still be astounding. Narrated in the third person, the novel concerns the home of the widowed Reverend John Boughton, a former Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa. Boughton is looked after by the youngest of his eight children, Glory, in a house that

Oliver Gilmour

Wit and brio

Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, by John Lucas Damn awful thing, what! [The Ring] — Barbarian load of Nazi thugs, aren’t they? ‘No one can honestly maintain that the lives of musicians make exciting reading’, claimed Beecham in his autobiography, A Mingled Chime. If you were to have a wager, you would put it on Tommy Beecham to defy the odds. He was kaleidoscopic. He described his own book as ‘demi-semi-autobiographical’, and said that ‘it’s mingled because it concerns everything under the sun’. He might have added that it is also mangled. Beecham was an embroiderer, ‘a natural dissembler’ in John Lucas’s phrase, and many familiar stories do not

Michael Carlson

This is America

Homicide, by David Simon; Death Dyed Blonde, by Stanley Reynolds David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter who, having spent a Christmas Eve observing the city’s homicide squad, somehow got the department’s permission to spend an entire year with them as a ‘police intern’. The result, in 1991, was this stunning book, now published for the first time in this country, following the massive critical success of the television show Simon created, The Wire. The Wire may be the first programme praised in the media by more people, at least in this country, than have seen it on screen, which may define a cult classic. When critics rhapsodise over its

Edward Norman

A dark and desolate world

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, by Rowan Williams While the Anglican communion has been disintegrating, its symbolical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been writing an analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. This in itself presents a need for explanation: Dostoevsky has generally been assessed as an habitué of the territory between agnosticism and atheism, but Rowan Williams sees him as the author of ‘a Christocentric apologetic’. Yet the characters in Dostoevsky are miserable and dysfunctional obsessives in the main; neurotic and repulsive creations of a mind that many have judged intellectually and morally opaque. In the 19th century and throughout the Soviet era Dostoevsky’s critics considered his books unhealthy. This does

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A world too wide

Every new biographer of Shakespeare walks splat into the same old problem. What to say? Since he can’t tell us anything we don’t know, he must either tell us things we do know or things we don’t need to know. Jonathan Bate’s ingot-heavy volume announces, in its lackadaisical title, an intention to take all possible routes and to examine not just Shakespeare’s ‘life’ but his ‘world’ and ‘mind’ too. Where Bate offers facts he is sound, but he tends to theorise excessively and he devotes whole chapters to stimulating irrelevances like Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech of 1588 and the Earl of Essex’s botched coup of 1601. Like any sane earthling, Bate

Philip Ziegler

The quarrels of brothers

Masters and Commanders, by Andrew Roberts; Behind Closed Doors, by Laurence Rees Andrew Roberts is one of the liveliest as well as the most considerable of contemporary historians. He is hard-working and exceptionally well-informed, lucid, highly intelligent, pugnacious, occasionally perverse (though much less often than he used to be), combining an impressive grasp of the overall picture with a fine eye for the illuminating detail. He also writes uncommonly well. The Masters are Churchill and Roosevelt: the first considering himself a master of high strategy and certainly with much experience in that field; the second without any pretensions to such expertise but still vested with enormous powers — far more

Justin Cartwright

The coven reconvenes

The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike The Witches of Eastwick was published in 1984; it was a retrospective cele- bration of the new sexual liberties and powers available to women in the 1960s. The book aroused interest both by its unexpected boldness of design and by its frankness and it became a successful movie. Three young women, all living in Eastwick, Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart and Sukie Rougemont, abandoned their husbands and neglected their children in favour of a more louche life with a charming scoundrel called Darryl Van Horne. In his house, the Lennox Mansion, Van Horne dabbled in magic and involved the women in his pot-smoking, hot-tub

D J-Taylor

A master of drab grotesques

Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far into itself, and a writer feeding entirely off his own imagination rather than the world beyond it. Hamilton revivals, which come round every five years or so, usually concentrate on his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (1929-34), or Hangover Square (1941), but it is nearly two decades since anyone has taken a

Patrick Marnham

They do things differently there

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Richard Dowden Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So, leave the place alone and its bonjour Mugabe, or worse. For well-wishers from the north it has been a slow learning-curve. Colonialism was designed by Whitehall mandarins and old Wykhamists who knew what was best for the natives. Settlers were sent in to grow food and extract minerals and generally bring the place forward. The settlers managed to grow a vast amount of food, although they needed rather a lot of land to do

Alan Judd

A question of judgment

A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice. Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an 11th-12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, was a renowned scholastic who defended the faith by intellectual argument rather than by reference to scripture and other authorities. Broderick’s Anselm does much the same in his contemporary investigations, guided by moral reasoning and intuition rather than dogma. He is helped by the fact that, before becoming a monk,