Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Anthony Thwaite

The space between

Tonight I heard again the rat in the roof, Fidgeting stuff about with a dry scuff, Pausing in silence, then scratching away Above my head, above the ceiling’s thin Skin that separates his life from mine. So shall I let him be, roaming so narrowly In a few finger-widths of carpentry? The evening passes by. I sit and write And hear him skittering here and there in flight From nothing. Maybe he hears My scratching pen, my intermittent cough, Below the frail thin lath that keeps me off From harming him, as it too keeps him there, Heard but unseen in narrow strips of air.

Stuart Wheeler

Roll over, Mozart

The author is nothing if not versatile. Apart from being the Observer’s music critic he has written books on a very wide variety of subjects. This book is about his experiences in the world of poker, specifically the form of poker that has taken the world by storm, No Limit Texas Hold’em. There is much good stuff. Poker players can be single-track-minded. ‘Who in the hell is this guy Saddam Hussein?’ asks one of the top poker pros. It reminded me of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer many years ago asking me where I came from. ‘England’, I told her. ‘Oh, that’s in Paris, isn’t it?’ she replied. The author

William Brett

Children of the night

‘Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,’ a bartender says in Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel. And it’s not just time that can seem out of joint during the witching hours, Murakami suggests. After Dark explores the ways in which the night can heighten our sense of isolation, and threaten our conception of reality. It’s also an engrossing story and an easy read, yet another example of the much-admired Japanese author’s skill in couching challenging, intricate themes within beguilingly simple narratives. The story centres on the lives of two young sisters over the course of one night in Tokyo, between midnight and daybreak. One,

Edward Norman

The way, the truth and the life

It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography. Those who have assembled lives of Christ in the past have come to recognise that

Friday

The Spectator

How will Harry Potter end?

Slate has a fun, little piece up on a possible ending to the final Harry Potter story. I expect we’ll see a lot more of these before the book comes out on the 21st of July. Indeed, William Hill are even running a book on who might kill Harry Potter with Voldemort the favourite at 2/1. Personally, I have a suspicion that Harry might just make it through.      

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

A cut and dried case?

The modern crime novel tends to be a serious matter involving body parts and serial killers, sometimes with a spot of social analysis thrown in for good measure. It was not always like this, and Simon Brett is among the handful of distinguished contemporary crime writers who remind us of those far-off days of innocence when detective stories were meant to be fun. Death Under the Dryer is the latest title in Brett’s ‘Fethering mysteries’. Fethering, a fortunately fictional seaside town in West Sussex, has the sort of murder rate that used to distinguish Miss Marple’s village of St Mary’s Mead. It has two resident sleuths, ladies of a certain

Hugh Massingberd

Better than chocolate

Surely the most sought after among what Lord David Cecil described as ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (a lecture title that lured John Betjeman in the expectation of a paean to the architectural delights of Berkshire’s county town) is the moment when an author articulates a feeling that you imagined was peculiar to yourself, expresses an emotion that you have carefully suppressed. In Michael Simkins’s extremely enjoyable memoir of his lifelong obsession with the ‘summer game’, this moment occurred on the very first page where he confesses to constantly making the evocative sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat. Having practised the same strange habit (‘like some sporting Tourette’s sufferer’)

James Buchan

The great negotiator

Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Talleyrand of our age, was for over 20 years the dominant personality in Arab relations with the English-speaking countries. Born into the obscurest royal poverty, Bandar turned himself into a fighter pilot of dash and elan (if not of the very first proficiency), before serving as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington from 1983 until 2005. He is now secretary-general of something called the Saudi National Security Council, but it is hard to descry through the desert sand and wind his latter-day power and influence. This biography, written by a British classmate from the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, is the usual

Andrew Lambirth

Simplicity and strength

Some of the best and most effective of 20th-century English posters were designed by the American, Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954). Born in Montana, he was the only child of German and Swedish immigrants. His parents divorced, and young Ted Kauffer was put in an orphanage, where drawing became a release from what he described as a ‘lonely, nostalgic and uninspiring’ childhood. When his mother re-married, his stepfather encouraged the boy’s artistic inclinations, including his passionate transcriptions of Frederic Remington’s cowboys and Indians paintings. He became an itinerant stage scenery painter before knuckling down to some serious study at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, and meeting the man whose

Caroline Moorehead

Lost and found

When Starbucks in the United States decided to promote Ishmael Beah’s memoir of life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone it seemed to many a surprising choice. A Long Way Gone, with its descriptions of atrocities and terror, is a far cry from the daily travails of footballers’ wives and celebratory chefs. But stories of boy soldiers, casualties of the civil wars endemic across parts of Africa and Asia, have, in recent years, become a growing branch of disaster literature, alongside memoirs of the Holocaust in occupied Europe, the great famine in China, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the contemporary tales of loss and abuse in Western life.

Jonathan Sumption

Coping with a continent

Has there ever been a better time to be alive than the 18th century, provided that one were rich, healthy, literate and European? One would not necessarily have to be a Duke of Newcastle or a Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, although either would be nice. Many of the things which make life agreeable for humbler mortals originate in their modern form in this fascinating period: passable roads, fire insurance, tea, novels, newspapers, street lighting and innoculation to suggest only some random examples. At a more elevated level, an age which began with Bach, Newton and Racine and ended with Mozart, Hume and Beaumarchais plainly has much to be said for it.

Bevis Hillier

A big talent spotted

In the late 1960s I was reviewing books in the Sunday Times alongside the great Cyril Connolly, and got to know him a bit. He said that the moment which compensated for the acres of tripe he had had to plough through in his career as a critic was when one of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels landed on his desk. He recognised genius. In over 40 years of reviewing I have been waiting for that ‘A star is born’ moment, and I think it has now come. I could be making as big a howler as Gertrude Stein when she claimed that Sir Francis Rose was an artist in the

Peter Jm-Wayne

The charnel house of liberty

Ever since I began to serve sentences of imprisonment three decades ago I have preferred not to know too much about what I’m missing outside. Whenever I do find myself receiving a social visit, crammed in amongst squabbling (or more often dysfunctionally silent) families enjoying their monthly 40 minutes together, I tend to steer the conversation deliberately away from the natural subjects of free men — which was how I came to learn about a somewhat unlikely ‘imam’ ministering to the needs of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo, one Colonel Steve Feehan, ‘born again’ Southern Baptist, who had had this greatness thrust upon him after the previous incumbent, official Muslim chaplain

Allan Massie

Paradise before the guns opened fire

Reviewing recently a new English version of Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, I was happy and relieved to find that it retains its magic. It has entranced generations of adolescents, not all of them French, but I had wondered if it would still appeal after so many years. It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed, reminding one that Alain-Fournier,

Thursday

The Spectator

Throw a hoodie

My book of the moment is Mark Law’s brilliant exploration of judo, The Pyjama Game (Aurum). A specialist book on a marginal sport? Not at all. There is something about the “gentle art” (in which I used to dabble a little) – throws, hold-downs, strangles, and arm-locks – which absorbs and changes people. Vladimir Putin, William Hague, Guy Ritchie: they all do it. And, as my former sensei, Simon Hicks (now sadly departed) explains in the book, it is a sport that teaches hopeless young people self-respect and respect for others. I can vouch for this having been amazed as a private school boy competing around the country never once

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The madness of the two Georges

I saw Jeremy Paxman lose his languid scepticism a few weeks ago on Newsnight and exhibit what looked like amazement. Michael Rose had just said that if he were an Iraqi he would fight the Americans, or at least he could see why Iraqis did it. Is that, Paxman asked, what you want the families of our servicemen fighting in Iraq to know? Rose said yes. Now the reason, I suppose, Paxman abandoned his customary eyebrow-lifting was that Michael Rose is retired General Sir Michael Rose KCB, DSO etc, the ex-Commander of the 22nd SAS Regiment that fought in the Falklands, and commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia.

Allan Mallinson

Drang nach Osten

Another book on Napoleon, or General Bonaparte as the author properly notes, though only because the man had not crowned himself emperor when he invaded Egypt. Insisting on calling him General Bonaparte, as an Englishman should, is now, alas, regarded as mere pedantry. If you type ‘Napoleon’ into the British Library catalogue, the result (13 May) is 10,861. So Paul Strathern, philosopher, mathematician, novelist and historian of the Medicis, is certainly labouring against the odds in offering us more. Except that his eclectic qualifications are probably as good as any historian’s when it comes to making sense, and making interesting, the extraordinarily muddled, vainglorious adventure that was this half-military, half-philosophical

Peter Oborne

The leading edge

Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his ‘cricket machine’ to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores. Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC. Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

It will never be buried

Why a book at all? This guide to email etiquette, written by a pair of New York Times hacks, ought to exist as a viral attachment bouncing around the world from computer to computer. It kicks off with Jo Moore’s notorious and oft-misquoted email. Here’s the exact wording: ‘It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ It’s the details that make this sorry little haiku so grisly. The verb ‘bury’ is spectacularly tasteless and the macabre contrast between the epoch-shifting events unfolding in New York and the parochial timbre of councillors’ expenses gives it a final gruesome seal of insensitivity. The

Victoria Glendinning

Tasty Woolf rissoles

When I was a child, an aunt gave my mother a cookery book called 100 Ways with Mince. This made a huge impression on me, because of my mother’s irritation — it was not her idea of a present — but even more so because of the enormity of the title. It sprang into my mind for the first time for ages as I embarked upon Virginia Woolf: The Platform of Time. In the larders of literature, as well as the left-overs of major works, there are generally minor meaty morsels lurking in saucers at the back of the shelf. Ever since Virginia Woolf died in 1941 her literary remains,