Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

William Brett

Loved and lost

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years. This book is

Linda Kelly

From palace to cowshed

Madame de la Tour du Pin’s Journal d’une Femme de Cinquante Ans, with its vivid descriptions of her experiences during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, is one of the most enthralling memoirs of the age: a hard act, one would think, for a biographer to follow. Caroline Moorehead succeeds in doing so triumphantly in a rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of her story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life. Born in 1770 into the highest reaches of the French nobility, Lucie-Henriette Dillon spent a lonely and unhappy childhood, brought up by a tyrannical grandmother after her mother’s

Rupert Christiansen

A monumental achievement

Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book. Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated,

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

James Wood’s Post-War Library

Via Terry Teachout, the Elegant Variation republishes a list of books written between 1945 and 1985 that James Wood recommends you read. What’s notable is not so much the list itself as the extent to which it contradicts the view that Wood takes a particularly docrtinaire view of fiction. True, he may be most famous for his critique of “hysterical-realism” but there’s more to him than that and, as the list makes clear, there are some novelists after Flaubert and James that he likes. Wood’s detractors  – of whom there are many – might be surprised to find Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie et al on the list. For that matter, I’m

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 21 February 2009

During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the time Wordsworth first moved to Rydal Mount. He uses the situation to bring back to life the faces and characters of all his family and friends, now dead, who once sat around the blazing log fire in the snowbound wooden house. It is a powerful work, by no means short — around 770 lines —

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

How different from us?

The Ends of Life: Roads to Human Fulfilment in Early Modern England, by Keith Thomas The English past is not what it was, for professional historians anyway. The rest of us still talk about the Tudors and the Stuarts, about Renaissance and Reformation and the Augustan Age. But within the academy all these dynasties and eras are now bundled up into what is called the Early Modern period. The inhabitants of this huge stretch of time can only be made sense of, it seems, if we think of them as a rough, awkward prelude to Us. It is startling how rapidly Early Mod has flattened the competition, and flattened our

Simon Baker

Dark fantasies

Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his surroundings to pass the time. The Author is a famous middle-aged novelist, who happens also to be an accountant — a contrast suggesting that his artistic life is an intensely private matter which he deliberately keeps hidden beyond a functional day-to-day persona. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, he is not looking forward to the evening ahead, since he is to deliver a talk at a nearby community centre, and expects to be assailed with

Elisa Segrave

No pains spared

Matthew, the author’s son, and the subject of this memoir, had Downs Syndrome, but I should state at once that the book is much more than a guide for parents, or carers, of such children. It stands on its own as a work of literature and should win the PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography. The author, in her poised, sometimes old-fashioned prose, beguiles the reader. As a little girl, she befriended a neighbour’s child whom she first saw through the hedge: Large and silent … she wore a bow in her hair and usually carried a doll in her arms. Her smile melted my heart, and though I could

Jonathan Mirsky

Heartbreak hotel

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better. In his informative afterword, William Deresiewicz

Ian Thomson

Surviving the Middle Passage

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white,

Tuesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Mainly monk

The main thing that struck me, as I read Rupert Shortt’s biography of Rowan Williams, was how amazingly sheltered the Archbishop of Canterbury’s life has been. I don’t mean economically privileged (most of us are pretty much on a level in this respect), or emotionally easy (whose is?) – I mean ideologically and institutionally fixed. He decided as a boy that he would be a priest and theologian, and never had any trouble getting there. (His career plan met as many obstacles as that of Martin Amis, who is one year older, which feels a bit wrong.) He never had a period of adulthood, or even adolescence, in which he

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 14 February 2009

Being a professional writer is a hard life. Producing a book, especially a long one, is a severe test of courage and endurance. For even after a successful day of writing, one must begin again the next morning, the blank sheet of paper in front of you: a daunting image to start the day, the mind empty, the brain groaning. I know. I have been at it for the best part of six long decades, and the number of books I have written is creeping up to 50. Several are over 1,000 printed pages. Think of the agony! I have no complaints, really. I have made a good living, and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

For better, for worse

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in

Craig Brown

Back to basics | 11 February 2009

Wetlands, by Charlotte Roche What an odd mix of distinguished residents High Wycombe has had! Fern Britton, Benjamin Disraeli, Dusty Springfield, Karl Popper, Jimmy Carr: it’s a list that reads like a game of Celebrity Consequences in freefall. There is not much in common between those listed above. Yet a subsection of the list displays an almost obsessive interest in sexual and gastronomic experimentation. The goggle-eyed chef Heston Blumenthal, brought up in High Wycombe, has become famous for off-beat dishes such as Snail Porridge and Egg-and-Bacon Ice Cream. Ian Dury, who went to school there, is best-known for the song ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, a jaunty, multi-lingual (‘je

Rowland Manthorpe

Keeping to the straight and narrow

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman Sway is a slim, stylish book that is self-consciously part of a trend. Like Blink and Freakonomics, it looks at the science of decision-making, taking obscure academic studies and applying them to everyday life. It shares with those books the breezy, anecdotal style that should probably be called Gladwell-esque. But the one-word title that Sway bears most similarity to is Nudge, the latest publication from University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler. Along with the economist Daniel Kahneman, whose Nobel-prizewinning prospect theory is predictably referenced here, Thaler is the godfather of behavioural economics. This is hot stuff right

Michela Wrong

Killing with kindness

When I wrote a regular column on Africa for this magazine’s left-wing rival, I was always intrigued by the contrast in responses to any sceptical article on aid. ‘This reactionary bigot is clearly happy for millions of Africans to starve,’ pretty much summed up the fury of white readers at having their Oxfam direct debits questioned. ‘No, she’s right!’ replied my defenders. ‘These corrupt, thieving governments should be cut off without a penny.’ Those ones always came from Africans. The assumption that foreign aid is an unalloyed good runs so deep in the guilt- ridden, post-colonial West, people are often shocked to discover that many Africans, far from showing appropriate

Jonathan Sumption

A slow decline

The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, by Chris Wickham This outstanding book covers what used to be called the ‘dark ages’. Publishers rarely speak of the dark ages now. It does not sell copies. But the title still encapsulates the conventional view of the period: a civilised empire destroyed by barbarians and replaced by a world of anarchy and superstition, a universal monarchy superseded by a mosaic of statelets ruled by men with unpronounceable names, long hair and uncouth habits, an age of grim ignorance with few literary or administrative sources and those reflecting the enclosed prejudices of monks and priests. Geoffrey of Monmouth

Christian House

Bombs and bombshells

The Rescue Man, by Anthony Quinn The Other Side of the Stars, by Clemency Burton-Hill When journalists venture into no man’s land and begin writing fiction, they do so in the knowledge that it could all get a bit messy. It’s not long before the sound of grinding axes start up. So it’s a pleasant surprise to find two hacks emerging from the fray relatively unscathed. With The Rescue Man, Anthony Quinn, the Independent’s film critic, has taken Liverpool’s blitz during the second world war as the backdrop to a unusual tale of betrayal and obsession. In a city where faith and alcohol ferment on the waterfront, historian Tom Baines

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An important voice on African development

Ever noticed how the debate on African development is colonised by white men? I’ve just finished a book on the subject by Dambisa Moyo, an African woman, and it’s a brilliant indictment of the aid industry which, she agues, does more harm than good in her native continent. Moyo is Zambian born, bred and educated and has worked for the World Bank and then as an economist for Goldman Sachs. Her book, Dead Aid, argues that the $billions the West has ploughed into Africa have simply led to a new sort of corruption; have served in a disincentive to economic development; and are more geared to make politicians and pop

Saturday

Allan Massie

Isherwood’s fine memorial

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing. There were two good novellas, Prater Violet (1945) and A Single Man (1964), and a book of linked stories, Down There on a Visit