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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Sara Wheeler

The iceman cometh

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth and reality intertwined’. Beginning at Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, Francis sets out to ‘follow a route that Europeans had taken towards what they once saw as the very limits of the world’. Heading by ferry to the Faroes, he continues to Iceland, Greenland, the snowy hinterland of Scandinavian Finnmark, and finally Svalbard, the

Caroline Moore

Rekindling life in a dead frame

Why re-write Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein? The rewriting of well-known novels generally depends upon two techniques. The first involves recasting the narrator: telling the tale from a different point of view, usually that of the historical underdog (women, servants, woodworm, etc). The second is to update the novel, reinventing it in modern dress. Peter Ackroyd’s narrator, however, is exactly the same as Mary Shelley’s (give or take the now forgot framing device): Victor Frankenstein’s narration is interspersed, just as in the original, with long interludes from a monster endowed with preternatural Romantic magniloquence, though Ackroyd’s monster learned his English from Robinson Crusoe rather

Anne Chisholm

The châtelaine and the wanderer

Towards the end of this hugely enjoyable volume of letters, selected and edited by the skilful Charlotte Mosley from half a century of correspondence (1954-2007), Deborah Devonshire, by now in her mid-eighties, writes a postcard from Chatsworth to her friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 90, who lives in Greece. ‘Did you know’, she asks ‘That the Vikings called Constantinople Micklegarth? Well, they did. Much love, Debo.’ To which he replies: ‘I did know, and have written fruity paragraphs about it in that book called Mani. It’s really Micklegard’, going on to explain that grath, gard and grad all denote towns and that Harold Hardraada, the Viking hero, had visited the

Richard Bradford

Brave new writing

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how. Alan Sillitoe is 80 this year and his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in October 1958, almost exactly half a century ago. The novel evolved from a set of stories written between 1952 and 1958 when he lived in France, Majorca and mainland Spain, but it draws its energy and raw material from his previous experiences in Nottingham: a childhood that would have appalled Orwell and been improved upon by Dickens, followed by semi-skilled work in local factories. It was like nothing written before

Saturday

Philip Hensher

The peculiarities of a realist

Fine just the way it is: Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx The realism of Annie Proulx’s fiction is an extraordinary phenomenon. Realism in a novel has never been the same thing as plausibility, and her novels and short stories are full of bizarre and unforeseen events. The violent extremity of a great deal of her narratives sometimes verges on the territory of urban myth rather than anything recognizable as everyday life, and she enjoys characters considerably beyond the ordinary territory of the grotesque. A roll-call of her characters’ names suggests some of the fantastic strangeness of her fictional world: Freda Beautyrooms, LaVon Fronk, Rope Butt, Ruby Loving (a man), Hefran

Alexander Waugh

Will he, won’t He?

Ararat by Frank Westerman, translated by Sam Garrett Who was Noah? The Bible tells us little. He was the flood hero of course, but what else? A drunken viniculturist who lived to the age of 950; who was 600 at the time of the flood and 500 when he fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth. His wrinkled bottom was ogled by his 100-year-old sons when he passed out from drunkeness in his tent one night. But was he not also an ‘upright man’ and a man who ‘walked with God’? Each year hundreds of pilgrims, known as ‘Arkeologists’ make their way to Mount Ararat (where the Turkish, Armenian and Iranian borders

James Buchan

Worldly and otherworldly

In ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, John Betjeman has Wilde whimper to Robert Ross: ‘So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:/ And Buchan has got in it now:/ Approval of what is approved of/ Is as false as a well-kept vow.’ It is a marvellous scene, but not quite accurate. As a thousand Buchanites will clamour, Wilde was arrested in April 1895 and Buchan’s first story appeared in Aubrey Beardsley’s gorgeous fin-de-siècle magazine only the following January. Meanwhile, just a glance at this illustrated new selection of stories shows that John Buchan was the opposite of conventional. The story in question, ‘A Captain of Salvation’,

Justin Cartwright

Who is selling what to whom?

Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising by Winston Fletcher The impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant, but ultimately shallow business. It is full of accounts of crassness, of overstated promise, of meaningless awards, fly-by-night companies, promotion of the semi-talented and clashing egos. It’s quite comprehensive and at times entertaining, as we hear of the hubris of the ridiculous Saatchis, the naivete of politicians and the endless attempts by ad agencies to carve out a little philosophical niche for themselves, be it the derided USP or the idea of account management. Fletcher also includes

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sweden’s magic, its women – and its fish

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared by Andrew Brown Sweden holds a powerful allure for British men, which I used to see for myself every Friday in a departure lounge of Heathrow airport. I was part of a group of weekend commuters who met for a beer, en route to see our girlfriends in Stockholm, in Terminal 3. Every so often one of our number would disappear, being swallowed up by this beautiful country for good. There would be no goodbye or explanations. It was taken for granted each one of us, sooner or later, would succumb. But not Andrew Brown. After eight years as a Swede,

John De-Falbe

Night thoughts in an unhappy home

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster August Brill is a widower whose leg has been smashed by a car. He lies awake at night in the house he shares with his daughter, Miriam, and his granddaughter, Katya, in Vermont. Katya’s boyfriend, Titus, has been murdered, and Miriam ‘has slept alone for the past five years’. It is an unhappy, sleepless household, and Brill tells himself a story to manage the darkness until morning, when he will resume watching old movies with Katya. The story is about a man called Brick, who goes to bed with his wife in New York ‘and when I wake up I’m lying in a

Neil Clark

On home ground

Neil Clark on Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, first published in 1942. ‘The best detective story that has appeared for some time and at the end of the year will tundoubtedly stand as one of the class leaders in the English school’ was how The Spectator described Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, when it first appeared in 1942. ‘A detective masterpiece’ was the New Statesman’s verdict. Others were even more generous in their praise: the crime writer and critic, Julian Symons, included the book in his survey of ‘best, anywhere, ever’. Tragedy at Law is a detective story like no other. There can’t be any other murder mystery in which

Wednesday

Byron Rogers

On a wing and a prayer | 27 August 2008

The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of the dawn of powered flight in Britain as young men, and some not so young, fall out of the skies; the second is tea time, as Alexander Frater completes a stately trundle, interrupted by his own flying lessons, around the locations, and nearby hotels, where these events took place, but so few remember that they did. The effect is remarkable, for it puts into historical context the story of flight, seven-eighths of the entry about

Charlotte Moore

A new angle on autism

When Roy Richard Grinker’s daughter Isabel was diagnosed with autism in 1994, the condition was considered rare. It was thought to affect three in every 10,000 children. Now, the rate is closer to one in 100. Many see this rise as evidence of a catastrophic epidemic. Grinker, controversially, sees it as a cause for optimism. Grinker is an American anthropologist. Unstrange Minds is both a memoir of life with Isabel and a survey of the way autism is interpreted worldwide. His view is that autism has always existed in every society and that the numbers have probably been fairly constant. We in the West perceive an epidemic because knowledge and

Tom Holland

Like father like son

Phillip II of Macedonia by Ian Worthington Alexander the Great, it goes without saying, was a man not much given to modesty. In 334 BC, as he was preparing to embark on his invasion of Asia, his mother, the sinister witch-queen Olympias, whispered in his ear ‘the secret of his birth’, revealing that he was in fact the son of a god, of Zeus himself — and Alexander believed her. Three years later, in Egypt, he travelled hundreds of miles out of his way to consult the desert oracle of Siwah and the priest, it is said, ‘left him in no doubt that he was indeed the son of Zeus’.

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 23 August 2008

In their now famous book Nudge, self-described ‘paternalistic libertarians’ Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cite this new paint as an example of ‘feedback’ — the notion that people will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results. If you’ve tried typing on an outdated PC, where characters take seconds to appear on screen, you know how disconcerting slow feedback can be. But it can be a matter of life or death: Vehicle Activated Signs (the ones which flash up your speed) have been shown to prevent more accidents than speed cameras — at 5 per cent of the cost. Instant feedback may improve behaviour more than delayed punishment.

Interconnect

The Circus

The Circus by Noel Daniel You’d have to be a strong man yourself just to lift this amazing collection of photographs and circus posters. It covers the years 1870 to 1950 and is quite eye-watering. Buy this book and you’ll never have to watch television ever again. You sir, the man at the back in the pink suit, are you strong enough to lift this tome? Roll up! Roll up! See the dog-faced woman!

Michael Howard

His finest hour

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs Nine years ago the American historian, John Lukacs, published an excellent little book, Five Days in London: May 1940. In this he analysed in detail that critical moment in the history of the Second World War — perhaps indeed in the history of Western civilization — when the British people, under the leadership of Winston Churchill, decided to reject Hitler’s peace offers and, against all the odds, to fight on until ultimate victory. Now Lukacs has given us an even smaller book, less than 150 pages, that covers exactly the same ground and says little that he did not

Sebastian Smee

Muddying the waters

This fitfully involving, but for the most part irritating, melodrama is Tim Parks’s 14th novel, and not one of his best. Set almost entirely in India, it begins with the funeral of one Albert James, a trailblazing anthropologist whose elliptical, wide-ranging theories never really took root, and it ends with the death of his widow, Helen, an aid worker, some months later. Parks concerns himself with the interior lives of his characters as they negotiate grief and curiosity about the dead man’s unfinished research (Parks admits in a note that James was loosely inspired by the social scientist Gregory Bateson). But none of them ever quite comes into focus —

Marcus Berkmann

Really not happy at all

Bits of Me are Falling Apart by William Leith Some years ago, a young scribbler named William Leith began a column for the Independent on Sunday that divided opinion among readers and, indeed, other young scribblers like me. Instead of writing about the world outside, as columnists had previously felt obliged to, he wrote about himself and his collapsing life in simple, unadorned prose. I remember reading it every week to the sound of my own grinding teeth, partly because I couldn’t see the point of it, but mainly because at the time I was consumed by professional jealousy of any contemporary who was clearly doing better than I was.

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 23 August 2008

Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’ A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die