Book Reviews

The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is disconcerting. To begin with, it is completely Americanised, not only in its setting but in its locution, so that the reader must constantly adjust to different idioms, different references. This too is no mean feat, but somewhat alienating, as are the characters, who are universally charmless. The title is only one indication of their unreliability:

It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous philosopher, was merely the craziest. Three of his brothers killed themselves, and he often considered suicide — insofar as anything he said can be taken seriously. Almost everything he wrote, about which there have been countless decryptions, defies normal understanding. Take the epigraph of Alexander Waugh’s family biography, drawn from Ludwig’s On Certainty: ‘There are

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner. It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life as a writer, since for him, the two are neatly intertwined. So much so that he claims to have come to regard  running as ‘both exercise and metaphor’. Cheesy metaphors are the stock-in-trade of the self-improvement industry, and so it is perhaps inevitable that Murakami takes the opportunity to dish out more than a few

Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an Englishwoman, Gale Benson, daughter of Captain Leonard Plugge, an eccentric Tory MP. This book tells the whole story of Michael’s life and career, concentrating on the late 1960s in London, when he was at the peak of his notoriety. It is fluently written and totally gripping throughout. On one level it is a social comedy,

Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person with whom she was concerned. The roll-call of her conquests — Balfour and Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener, Kipling and Siegfried Sassoon — attests to her potent and widespread appeal. Beatrice Webb, a woman who might have been expected to deplore everything that Ettie Desborough stood for, paid tribute to her ‘great organising capacity … iron

Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city in flight, all normal occupations hastily abandoned. The majority, especially the rich, escaped to the countryside. Those who left it too late were incinerated, unable to make their way through streets filled with pumice. The city in flight became a city of the dead buried under thick layers of volcanic dust. It was not rediscovered