Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

How Britain prepared for Armageddon from the 1950s onwards

Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the nuclear heat, blackened fingers claw out from the rubble’ and was convinced this was really happening. ‘The experience scarred me for life,’ she declares, ‘and it is the reason you are reading this book.’ In her twenties, she suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia, so she decided to confront her fears by becoming a journalist specialising

Victor Sebestyen

The GDR was not the Stasiland of grey monotony we imagine

One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989.  There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of escape By 10.30 p.m., 20,000 people had massed in a narrow street, demanding to be allowed into the West, on the other side of the Wall – though at that crossing point the border was just a pair of gates. The mood was extraordinarily tense as the crowd became angrier.  Whenever Jäger asked for instructions

Jude Cook

The lady vanishes: Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, reviewed

‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone. Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the historian and translator Cecilia Berg, disappears without trace, leaving her publisher father Martin to bring up her and her brother Elis in a Gothenberg suburb. Fast-forward 15 years, and Martin is still living alone, visited by his children and haunted by Cecilia’s ghost. Despite the success of the publishing company begun with his teenage buddy

Horatio Clare

The life of an Exmoor stockman reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir

British nature is having a moment, thanks to David Attenborough’s Wild Isles (BBC One). As ever, spring brings a crop of new nature writing, but you are unlikely to come across anything like Once Upon a Raven’s Nest. This is the story of the life of an Exmoor man – Hedley Ralph Collard, known as Tommy – and it reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir. Fans of Niall Griffiths and Kevin Barry will bolt it down. But although the tale is told by Tommy, and rampages along like fiction, the book is actually a blend of reportage and imaginative truth constructed by Catrina Davies, who writes: ‘Where necessary I have put

Scott Bradfield

The tragically short life of Bruno Schulz – and his complicated legacy

This is the second excellent book by Benjamin Balint to consider the cross-cultural perils of being a great writer after you’re dead. His first, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, described legal battles over the residence of Kafka’s literary estate. This new one shifts the focus to a very different (and equally unusual) writer, Bruno Schulz, whose work has long been caught up in posthumous conflicts about who it most belongs to – that motley assembly of us selfish readers who actually read him, or those various governments competing to claim him as part of their national heritage. Schulz’s brief success preceded one of the most tragic

Kate Chisholm

The savage power of 18th-century caricature

Thanks to the work of the caricaturists of the late 18th century, the mistresses of the future George IV – Mrs Fitzherbert, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Lady Jersey among them – are better known to us than his eventual wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Prince of Wales’s decadent, spendthrift lifestyle (we see him emerging in 1788 from a lavish four-poster from which Mrs Fitzherbert arises en déshabillé), combined with his florid face and corpulent physique, were perfect fodder for this new genre of artistry, which used caricature (or visual exaggeration) to make political points. James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank were its chief proponents. Their high point was the

Jenny Colgan

A modern Cinderella story: Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Romance, and romantic comedy, make up a third of all novels sold – by far the highest-earning genre of fiction. They outdo crime novels 2:1. They are very rarely reviewed, and are generally excluded from year-end round ups, awards, gongs and TV book shows. They do not have their own festivals or celebrations; romance writers are extremely thin on the ground at Hay. They suffer from a triple bigotry (in an industry that likes to think itself terribly progressive): they are read by women; they are read by older women and they are read by working-class women. So it’s a landmark that the critically garlanded Curtis Sittenfeld is having a

Philip Hensher

The attraction of freethinking humanism

One rather surprising fact emerges from a history of humanism: most humanists were nice people. This might, on the surface, appear a totally fatuous observation. There is not much value in debating whether, say, architects, chancellors of the exchequer, engineers, surgeons or gardeners have been obviously nice people, and we would roll our eyes if a reviewer started speculating whether Wagner or Dickens were personally agreeable. But perhaps humanists are in a different category. The hostile divide between religion and free-thinking rose to a height in the mid-19th century There is little doubt that those writers and thinkers of the past who placed humanity rather than divinity at the centre

Monday

Suzi Feay

Magic and espionage: The Warlock Effect, by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, reviewed

When a shocking, plot-terminating event occurs almost halfway through The Warlock Effect, it’s not just the prospect of another 200 pages to go that alerts the reader to narrative trickery. The central character, Louis Warlock, is after all a stage illusionist who has already pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of mind-reading in front of a crowd of sceptics. Though Warlock likes to come across as a lone genius, behind his stunts lurks an invisible team of problem-crackers he dubs the Brains Trust. They include fellow magic- obsessive Dinah, a girlfriend he seems puzzlingly ambivalent about. The West End stages and cabaret clubs of 1950s Soho are swiftly swapped for

Paul Baker

Dazzling wordplay: Man-Eating Typewriter, by Richard Milward, reviewed

Imagine you work for a grubby Soho publishing company (the fictional Glass Eye Press) in the late 1960s and an unhinged anarchist gets in touch, offering to send you his memoirs which will detail how and why he will commit the crime of the century. Such is the premise of Richard Milward’s clever dark comedy, Man-Eating Typewriter. Coded messages are sprinkled throughout the book, with a faulty typewriter playing a key role The novel’s severely unreliable narrator is Raymond Marianne Novak, the son of a French surrealist (semi-affectionately called Madam Ovary), who is brought up in a war-damaged London squat. Novak is breathtakingly ugly, pansexual, a dab hand at the

Kate Womersley

Great men don’t shape history – but tiny microbes do

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself. Pathogenesis – the cause of disease, its development and the impact it has on cells and organisms – is thankfully not what Pathogenesis is about. Jonathan Kennedy

Anna Aslanyan

Michael Frayn remembers old friends – and the spy who duped him

Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on the arbitrary nature of both memory and creativity – and yet the way he treats them is anything but fickle. He remembers every one of them with fondness, never slipping into sentimentality or idealisation. These sober recollections are interlaced with the irony familiar from Frayn’s novels, while his playwright’s genius occasionally flashes in such lines

Rupert Shortt

David Baddiel rejects religion – but describes himself as a ‘reluctant unbeliever’

The cover design of this tract-length book associates it with David Baddiel’s excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021), which exposed a prejudice infecting both ends of the political spectrum. The God Desire resembles its precursor in other ways. Wit and dry humour abound. But as a verdict on the human appetite for the divine, it is disappointing. The question of whether life has ultimate meaning and purpose can plainly claim to trump all others. Atheism may be a viable world view, but it is hardly unproblematic. The same goes for theism. Yet rather than building up a case to support his conclusions (work undertaken with forensic rigour on separate terrain in

Simon Heffer

The Edwardian era was not such a golden summer

This is a rather odd book and, I regret to say (given the reading that seems to have gone into it), not a very good one. If one had little knowledge of the reign of King Edward VII, or of the jokes, anecdotes and scandals of that period, then it might serve as a useful introduction to it. To anyone familiar with the history of the opening years of the past century, however, there is little to learn from a book dependent entirely on secondary sources, old newspapers and copies of Tatler. Martin Williams is clearly fascinated by the Belle Époque and has read much about it; but in avoiding

William Dalrymple

How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate… dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated will ring few bells, even among historians. But it is the only memorial erected to one of the most important men in English history. Sir Thomas Smythe was perhaps the greatest businessman in Elizabethan England. He not only founded the East India Company; he also played a leading role in several other significant commercial and

Claire Lowdon

Woman of mystery: Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist ‘United Colonies’. Up north are several political unions, such as the ‘Free States’ (including New York), where gay marriage is not just legal but widespread by the end of the 19th century. Lacey plants her sensational plot-twist a little later on the timeline. In Biography of X, ‘the Great Disunion’ occurs at the end of the second world war, when a wall goes up around the ‘Southern Territory’, a

Sarah Watling

The Spanish Civil War still dominates our perception of modern Spain

Nigel Townson’s history of modern Spain begins with disaster – or, more specifically, with the Disaster. When an ignominious defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American war lost the country its last major colonies, a crisis of confidence followed, and the ‘Generation of 1898’ set about trying to diagnose Spain’s problem. Since the scope of Townson’s book runs from that year to ‘the present’ (roughly the spring of 2022), there are plenty of crises to cover. Spain has been unfortunate in its governments. The Penguin History of Modern Spain is a chronicle of ineffectiveness and corruption at the highest levels, and of failures to implement reform. As such, it sometimes reads like

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

Painful memories: Deep Down, by Imogen West-Knights, reviewed

‘What are you like with enclosed spaces?’ Tom asks his sister Billie before they head into the maze of tunnels under Paris. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city. As the setting for the climax of Imogen West-Knights’s subtle and compelling debut Deep Down, it is certainly fitting: in the wake of their father William’s death, the siblings begin to explore hidden and submerged memories from their childhood. The two are not close. Billie, who has a ‘plain, mashed potato sort of

Boyd Tonkin

Find the lady: Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías, reviewed

The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from the IRA to the Basque separatists of ETA, but now either retired from the armed struggle or quietly brewing fresh mayhem. A mothballed secret agent, one of those ‘nasty angels’ who ‘never forget what everyone else forgets’, arrives in ‘Ruán’ in 1997 on an off-the-books mission hatched in London and Madrid. Our narrator, Tomás Nevinson

Richard Briand

The fall of the Berlin Wall promised Europe a bright future – so what went wrong?

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir.  On several occasions, Russia accepted Nato membership for the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman. A jailed Erich Honecker reaches