Book Reviews

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity. At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple,

On 30 August 2004 a woman wrote a letter to Le Figaro registering her dismay at the number of novels scheduled for publication in the three months that constitute the rentrée littéraire in France each autumn. She confessed that, although an assiduous reader, she rarely found anything of distinction in what was on offer and deplored the lack of true literary worth, let alone devotion to the task in hand. She perceived that this volume of production is little more than sheer economic activity. This was a worthy and pertinent comment, an alternative reading to the literary pages, in which reviewers are often more complimentary than is entirely justified. It

Opening Sentences (name the books) 1) Aaron, Richard Ithamar (1901-1987), philo- sopher, was born on 6 November 1901 at Upper Dulais, Blaendulais, Glamorgan, the son of William Aaron (1864–1937), a draper, and his wife, Margaret Griffith (d. 1940). 2) When the woman found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable’s man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley. 3) So just how mega is this then? A book on English. 4) Although 1979 may not have the same histor- ical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too

Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the citizens of Bolton as they went about their daily business. Charles Madge, a radical poet, and Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker, at about the same time and unknown to Harrisson were planning a scientific survey of ordinary people’s lives. This was to be conducted by means of sending out detailed questionnaires to a host of volunteers

One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an earl’s grandson whose father was a Harley Street physician in the inter-war era, spends a large part of this highly entertaining memoir explaining that he is actually deeply middle-class. The general effect is rather like an Edwardian stage play in which the dinner-jacketed exquisite turns out to be a cockney burglar in disguise. However outrageous

In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection. For the purposes of this quintessentially Great American Dream Fable, the reader finds himself transplanted straight back into the centre of that extensive splodge of gun-toting Republican red which dominated the TV pundits’ psephological maps, a remarkably beautiful backdrop for a novel centred around Yellowstone National Park, crowned by the ‘black and jagged’ Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, where, we are reliably