Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Allan Massie

The desperate fate of Malcolm Lowry

Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t pastiche Lowry?’ Crushing criticism; also just. At that time in my writing and drinking life I was in thrall to Malcolm Lowry. So indeed was Anthony and much of our late night/early morning conversation in bars drew heavily on Under the Volcano, often indeed consisted of quotations from the novel. ‘And often the poor guy,

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The Spectator summer reading list

You may have seen the summer reading list that Tory MPs have been issued with. But here’s an alternative set of book recommendations for you, this time from Spectator staff. Not all the books will be newly-published. But they’re generally books that we’ve read – and enjoyed – recently. Hopefully, we’ll unearth a few gems for you. If so, please do return the favour by making your own recommendations in the comments section. Right, I’ll get the ball rolling with my suggestions… Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone is up there with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as the best piece of reportage to come out of the Vietnam War. O’Brien – who took part

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A master at work

It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment of drag. In the opening chapter we are introduced to the ‘Quality of Life Task Force’ — a team of four undercover cops ‘in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run’. As the figure of speech suggests, they’re fishing —

Pj Kavanagh

Nooks for rooks

Was it Wordsworth who discovered the ‘real’ rural? Later, the Georgian poets celebrated its passing, giving rise to what Edward Thomas called ‘the Norfolk Jacket school of writing’. The poets of the 1930s took up politics instead, and nowadays poets are mostly urban. These scatter-shot generalisations, riddled with exceptions, are only meant as an introduction to the astonishing welter of prose books, not poetry, since the beginning of this new century, which contain the word ‘wild’ in their titles: How To Be Wild, The Wild Places, Wildwood, The Wild Trees. All these lament, either explicitly or by implication, the way we seem to have lost touch with the non-human world.

Simon Baker

Deceit and dilemma

Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff  This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move around the same central themes, exploring them in different ways so as to extract every possible nuance from them. Wolff’s interest throughout is morality, in particular the way we handle difficult moral choices (difficult because the evidently ‘wrong’ choice usually promises a better immediate return); the results of that interest are 31 tales, all set

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Not tired of this life

Philip Hensher on Peter Martin’s biography of Samuel Johnson Thanks to Boswell’s inexhaustibly interesting biography, Samuel Johnson is deeply familiar to us, even in his most extreme eccentricities. It’s easy to forget how bizarre and alarming he must have seemed to most of his contemporaries. His involuntary movements were such that modern scholars have often wondered whether he might not have had Tourette’s syndrome. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ sister Frances records a distressing afternoon in Twickenham when he broke into ‘antics both with his feet and hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed’. In that more robust age, ‘men,

Christian House

The world at bay

In Wild Mary, his biography of the irrepressible Mary Wesley, Patrick Marnham describes Cornwall in the 1930s as ‘a lost world, a world that had its own rules and customs and mysteries’. While Wesley was bed-hopping on the Lizard peninsula, around the Atlantic-battered rocks at Newquay, Emma Smith was enjoying a most peculiar childhood in this odd, seductive realm. It is this batty pre-adolescence that Smith captures with beguiling warmth in her wonderful memoir, The Great Western Beach. Emma Smith was born Elspeth Hallsmith in 1923 into a tense family environment. Her father, Captain G. Hallsmith, DSO, was a hero of the Great War reduced, thanks to his father’s financial

Jonathan Mirsky

Glimpses of past happiness

Jonathan Mirsky on Nancy Kohner’s new book What could be more poignant than this? ‘You know nothing of what is happening here, and I can’t explain it to you. Just be glad that you’re as far away as you are. What is happiness? Happiness is what once was, once upon a time when we lived such a beautiful, peaceful time. It’s a good thing that no one can take away our memories.’ In August 1940, Valerie Kohner wrote those words to her family, Jewish Czechs, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia to Britain. Alone in Nazi-occupied Prague, she knew what was coming. Two years later, shaven-headed and naked, the 68-year-old woman was murdered

Blair Worden

Where statesmen and authors met

Blair Worden reviews Ophelia Field’s latest book What a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found, and how adroitly she has handled it. In the Kit-Cat Club, the coterie of Whig writers and politicians that began in the last years of the 17th century and lasted into George I’s reign, she finds both a mirror and a source of great movements of taste and power. The club’s founder was the cultivated publisher Jacob Tonson, who gathered and fed his authors at the Cat and Fiddle in Gray’s Inn Lane (‘kat’ being slang for a small fiddle). Swelling numbers impelled a move to more spacious quarters, and eventually to a property in Barnes which

Philippa Stockley

The invisible muses

Philippa Stockley on the new book by Ruth Butler  Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, Rose Beuret. Who are they? The wives of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.The third is the best known; the others have largely been omitted from history. Demonstrably, in Fiquet’s case. Cézanne’s first biographer, Georges Rivière, was Fiquet’s daughter-in-law’s father. Rivière wrote the biography while she was alive, yet did not mention her once. Without the women that these three artists, born mid-19th century, took up with when young, whom they later married (Rodin in old age), many of the paintings or sculptures that made them famous could not have been created. Rose Beuret acted as

Robert Stewart

A country of ruins

Contributers to multi-volume national histories are usually straitjacketed, expected to keep to well-trodden paths. But Robert Gildea’s subtitle is ‘the French’, not France, and in the third volume of the New Penguin History of France to be published he wanders freely. Foreign policy, for example, gets short shrift. Instead, a chapter is devoted to the French view of foreigners. Mathematics, science and medicine are sidelined, but the treatment of women is spacious. The political chapters are there and so are the socio-economic ones. The political narrative down to 1870, awash with names, is a bit helter-skelter. Of little interest to the initiated, it may have green undergraduates reeling. The handling

Wednesday

Sarah Burton

The net result

Vermeer’s Hat turns on its head the conventional relationship between a history book and its illustrations. The seven paintings and one plate reproduced here are not intended to give us clues as to what the period and people in the narrative looked like, but are themselves the starting points for the web of narratives that Timothy Brook has woven on the subject of early global trade and the international exchange of ideas and practices. The eight works (five of which are paintings by Johannes Vermeer) were all made in Delft between 1630 and the end of the century and all depict objects which Brook recruits as portals not just to

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Hope born of fantasy

Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a self-obsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman’s arms. In ‘Germans’, there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a German. When she gets to Patricia’s house, it is full of

Pj Kavanagh

The pity of it

This book opens with a bang; things are suggested rather than described, in short paragraphs, mostly dialogue; the impression is of a (very English) Hemingway. A party of six inmates, two orderlies and a newly arrived doctor, Irvine, are being taken on a bus from Dartford Asylum to view a whale beached on the Thames estuary. Dartford Asylum is a real place, containing for the most part men mentally damaged by the war, and the event is carefully dated, Spring 1923. The other passengers shy away from the silent inmates, sometimes even crossing themselves as though from fear of contagion; the bus driver is deliberately unhelpful and the orderlies are

Allan Massie

The death of the novel

Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this mean that in continuing to try to write novels one is either a decadent, or engaged in energetically flogging a dead horse? Should the novelist apply to himself these lines from one of Pound’s ‘Cantos’: ‘Yuan Yin sat by the roadside pretending to receive wisdom/ And Kung said/ “You old fool, come out of it,/

Wednesday

Anne Applebaum

Deluded and abandoned

Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small piece of the gulag where the prisoners had been British. Or so the story went. Allegedly, a railwayman had once found the remnants of a British uniform on the site of the former barracks there, but no one was quite sure what had happened to it. Supposedly, some of the locals had once heard the

Michael Beloff

They are made a spectacle unto the world

In four years London will host its third Olympic Games. It is the first time it will have done so as the winner of a competition between bidding cities as fierce – and some say as suspect – as any that take place in the stadium. Before that London was volunteered as a stage only by default. In 1908 Italian civic rivalry and the eruption of Vesuvius subverted the chance of Rome. In 1948 the ravages of war postponed the choice of Helsinki. 2012 is the natural date for comparative studies of past London Games; but four writers have chosen to jump the literary gun. Three concentrate on the Games

Saturday

Andrew Roberts

Short and sweet | 19 July 2008

What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a new universal shorthand which would simplify and accelerate communication. Not that I wanted conventional spellings eradicated. A word’s spelling is an encryption of its history. But I was tempted by the prospect of an alternative orthography so we cd typ thgs lke ths 2 ch othr. It’s doubtful this will ever happen as David Crystal’s