Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

William Boyd

All at sea

On 2 July 1816 the French frigate Medusa, en route for Senegal, ran aground on the dreaded Arguin sandbank off the west coast of Africa. Incompetent seamanship had landed the vessel there and attempts to refloat the Medusa over the next couple of days proved to be in vain. The decision was therefore taken to press on for St Louis in Senegal, a couple of hundred miles to the south, in various of the ship’s boats and barges but, as they couldn’t carry all the passengers and crew, a large raft was constructed, from spars and timber lashed together, which would be towed behind four of the larger boats. The

Eric Christiansen

One of the last Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life

This book is about the Cowley Road, which runs for about a mile and a half south east out of Oxford towards a place where they assemble motor cars. Most of it was built up between 1830 and 1940, in many varieties of cheap and sometimes cheerful brickwork for the housing and lodging of ungenteel and downright working-class newcomers needed by but not welcome inside the well-fenced seat of learning across the river Cherwell. The far end crossed a marsh and was colonised and re-routed by Morris car workers between the wars; the dividing line was marked by the grandiose Regal cinema, which dwindled into a bingo hall in the

Tom Holland

Business as usual | 21 April 2007

Protests against international business are nothing new. Probably the wittiest, and certainly the most brutal, took place long before the first trashing of a Starbucks, way back in the early 1st century BC. This was a period when the Roman Republic, lacking a bureaucracy of its own, had opted to privatise the provincial tax-system — and huge conglomerates, complete with share options, board directors and AGMs, duly reaped spectacular profits. A spectacular whirlwind too, for in 89 BC, the entire province of Asia rose in revolt, and a year later, when the Roman commissioner was taken prisoner, he suffered a memorably hideous fate. ‘The Romans,’ pronounced his judge, ‘have only

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Too much information

In managing too carefully the revelation of truth, parents often betray it. Graham Swift’s new novel is narrated by a mother and addressed to ‘you’, her teenage twins, boy and girl. It involves us, as voyeurs, in the revelation of a truth that will come as a bolt from the blue to the children. But it tries to manage this revelation so carefully, with so many detours, so much cushioning and qualification, that we may easily wonder whether the truth has been served or betrayed. The novel takes the form of a letter written by Paula, the mother, late one night while her children and her husband, Mike, sleep. The

Justin Cartwright

Historical- thrillery-factual fiction

Recently, Adam Mars Jones accused me in the Observer of being in some ways worse than Hitler, because at least Hitler had an excuse for idolising the German upper classes, namely race science, which I didn’t. I was outraged, and seriously considered suing him. I have since calmed down a little and see now that novels set in the recent past are particularly prone to judgments which are more about the history than the fiction, and sometimes even confuse the author with the fictional voice.  This was the point Allan Massie made so eloquently in these pages a few weeks ago.       Dancing with Eva raises some of these questions. It is

Ben Wilson

Making a virtue out of necessity

John Evelyn would find our agonies about food all too familiar. He was impressed with the modern ‘miracles of art’ whereby plants were forced in hot beds and meats and fish were preserved for months or years; but nothing tasted better or was more wholesome than fresh ingredients. He was preoccupied by healthy diets, noting that ‘husbandmen and laborious people [were] more robust and longer lived than others of an uncertain, extravagant diet’. Others, from the 16th century through to the 18th, who were lucky or rich enough to be able to eat wild produce, rated their taste far above cultivated or reared foods. They hated that the seasons were

Simon Baker

Voodoo, rape and an apple tree

A summary of the events that take place in this novel might run as follows: a lost boy (who may be the soul of a comatose adult) walks around a hospital with an apple tree growing inconveniently in his stomach. He explores most of the floors, some of which are in a different dimension, and meets, among others, the kinky ‘Rubber Nurse’. Elsewhere, Nurse Swallow loves Mr Steele, a handsome surgeon. Nikki Froth, a prostitute, is hiding from her drug-addled pimps, Spanner and Case. PC Dixon loves Nikki. Sir Reginald Saint-Hellier, the head surgeon, leads a Satanist cult which murders babies and rapes virgins on the building’s 13th floor. Haitian

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Our women at the front

In the horror that is the Iraq war reporters usually broadcast from the safety of the vast Green Zone where Coalition civilians eat, sleep, make policy and issue statements. What we see on television are pictures taken by non-white photographers; the face-to-camera commentary usually comes from within the Zone. We can only surmise what life is like for Iraqis and along with the guessing there creeps in an I-don’t-want-to see-anymore fatigue. Now comes Lynne O’Donnell who, as Joseph Conrad insisted about good writing, above all makes us see. A foreign correspondent with considerable experience in China, she now works for Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong. In 2003 O’Donnell found herself

Montagu Curzon

From hero to villain

Patrick Bishop’s much praised Fighter Boys brought new life to the story of the Battle of Britain; by analysing the backgrounds of the pilots he added a dimension of who-they-were to the well-known what-they-did. Rescued from the status of national myth, they became people again. Trying the same with Bomber Boys is harder. Flying bombers had not the same dash: Guy Gibson likened it to driving a bus. And they were many, not a Few: 125,000 passed through Bomber Command. Hardest is the highly contested reputation of the bombing offensive. Once the scale of its devastation and carnage passed the point of comparability with that suffered in England, and then

Juliet Townsend

Starting out on the wrong foot

E. Nesbit once pointed out that, in order to write good books for the young, it is not necessary to enjoy a close relationship with children in adult life. The essential thing is to retain a true and vivid memory of one’s own childhood; not only of events and people, but of feelings and emotions, sounds and smells and all the minutiae of day-to-day life. Jacqueline Wilson, the enormously popular writer and most borrowed author from British libraries, is certainly a case in point. Her childhood covered much the same period as mine, and this account, written for her younger readers, brings back a host of memories. Many of the

Olivia Glazebrook

Wonders never cease

Janet seems to have her life neatly organised. She’s hardworking, she has a nice boyfriend, she lives in a comfortable house and she drives a dark-green Golf. Recently, however, she has been receiving messages from her mind. Seizures (which also occurred in her childhood) will strike without warning and leave her humming with nervous tension — a struck tuning fork. Janet disregards this important signal of an imminent decline; in any case, her attention is diverted by a call from a solicitor. She is told that she has inherited, from her mother, a house beside the sea. Janet is puzzled by this news. She had always believed — had been

Raymond Carr

A nation transformed in two generations

When in November 1975 Franco died, he still possessed the powers granted him by his fellow generals after the outbreak of the Civil War. Such powers, a French general observed, had been enjoyed by no leader since Napoleon. For 36 years, ‘all important decisions’, in John Hooper’s words, ‘were taken by one man’. In the last instance he decided who should govern Spain under his guidance. With the constitution of 1978 Spain became a democratic constitutional monarchy. Governments are the creation of free elctions based on universal suffrage. Elections are a contest betweeen two modern mass parties: the progressive centre left Socialists and the conservative right-of-centre Partido Popular. Hooper describes

Philippa Stockley

The squalor of the past

The ability to manufacture discontent from whatever materials are to hand is one of the most consistent characteristics of human nature. In Hubbub, pithy historian Emily Cockayne roams the seamy, stinky and squelchy side of English life: ‘The experiences presented here are unashamedly skewed towards the negative . . . . I am deliberately not presenting a rounded view of life — I am simply presenting the worst parts of it.’ For those with a cheerful predilection towards grime, gunge and disease, the torrent that follows is riveting. Within chapters headed Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty and Gloomy, Cockayne rolls like a pig in a delicious vat of

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Trick or treat

Why do the French call an April Fool a poisson d’avril and a 1 April dupe a victime d’un poisson d’avril? I have always assumed it is because the victimes take the bait and swallow the hook; but Martin Wainwright tells us that the April Fish derives its name from ‘the dim-witted, bulging look of carp’ — ‘the notion suits the bewildered look of a baffled hoax victim’. This side of the Channel we do refer to a ‘cod letter’, a genre in which I can claim a modest track record. Apparently on 1 April Frogs go round sticking paper fish on each others’ backs. How droll: if they had

David Caute

The day of the leopard

One point in Robert Mugabe’s favour, despite the Zimbabwean patriarch’s brutally protracted autumn, is that he was never planted in power by a CIA-supported coup d’état. As Larry Devlin’s self-congratulatory yet revealing memoir makes clear, the same cannot be said of Zaire’s esteemed dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, otherwise known as Mobutu Sese Seko. Army chief of staff in the newly independent Congo in 1960, when Mobutu decided to ‘neutralise’ both the elected President and the elected Prime Minister (the ill-fated Patrice Lumumba), he turned to the CIA’s new Chief of Station in Leopoldville, none other than Larry Devlin, who duly handed over the required $5,000, a modest sum given that

Jean Hayes

Playtime | 31 March 2007

Old men with dogs roam the neglected parkWhere they once played as boys. Now take a peepInto the lounge of Number Twenty  ThreeThe Meads. Four sturdy youngsters sitBefore a slick computer, playing  games.A milky, midget, artifical skyHolds them enraptured. Sterile  bullets flashAnd flicker, stuttering across the  screen,While Mother whisks around her  microwavePreparing instant meals from plastic  packs.Better to stay indoors. It’s clean and  nice.That dog-polluted field is a disgrace.Besides it makes less work for  Mummy. SoThe piper bleeps, luring his victims onThrough the dark doorway. Deep  inside that hillAll children are forever quiet and still.

Eric Weinberger

We also do some work

The narrative trademark — or gimmick — of Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, is contained in the title: the book is told in the first person plural, which gives this story of Chicago office workers its initial powerful, even oracular, thrust. ‘We were fractious and overpaid,’ the book begins. ‘Our mornings lacked promise.’ Soon comes a key sentence: ‘Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything.’ While the book’s ambition is to capture something of the American turn-of-the-century frenzy, in society and in commerce, essentially it’s about those dozen people and how

Digby Durrant

Past and future imperfect

This is a book about the failure of two marriages. One is destroyed by a past that refuses to slacken its grip, though the marriage itself has to limp on; the other is wrecked by a future impossible to avoid. They are seen through the eyes of four different people, two from one family, two from the other. Ruth, a precocious 15-year-old, has by far the most entries, hence the book’s title. The result of all this is a very crowded and colourful canvas, a patchwork quilt of a book. The two families live within walking distance of each other in a sparsely populated part of Northumberland and they are in

Ian Thomson

Meandering through the boondocks

South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first it appears to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. A theme soon emerges, however, as the disparate stories converge. Touted by the publishers (or by the author) as ‘the big British novel of our times’, South of the River opens with Labour’s election victory in 1997 and chronicles the misfortunes of a south London family over a period of five years up to 2002. London south of the river

Lee Langley

A marvel in marble

The Moghul monarchs’ way of life was an extravaganza of such breathtaking splendour that in comparison the Sun King’s Versailles seems understated. Both Shah Jahan and Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 and their courts had much in common: architectural grandeur, luxury, a love of jewels and a flair for excess. What was unique to the Muslim emperor was his devotion to a consort throughout their long marriage. Her death in childbirth and his desire to create a worthy mausoleum resulted in what many consider the most beautiful building in the world — the Taj Mahal. A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time (a syrupy phrase from Rabindranath