Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

How to be top: two new books promise the self-improvement Holy Grail

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then,

David Wootton

The age-old debate continues: are science and religion compatible?

According to the census, there are more Christians in the UK than there are atheists and agnostics – yet the churches are empty. These Christians, it seems, don’t take their faith too seriously. Nor, I fear, does Nicholas Spencer, who has written a big book arguing that science and religion are fundamentally compatible. He’s wrong; but, surprisingly, he is more wrong about religion than he is about science. The great assault on Christian faith came not from science, not from a denial of creation, but from history Let me start by laying my cards on the table. I’m the son of a missionary. My father’s parents were atheists and scientists.

Philip Hensher

The biography Noël Coward deserves

‘In the prison of his days,’ W.H. Auden wrote, ‘teach the free man how to praise.’ Noël Coward’s last performance, possessing, like so much of his work, a scene-stealing quality, was in the 1969 film The Italian Job. He plays the gangster Mr Bridger, masterminding a gold robbery in Turin from his prison cell. In his final appearance he walks like a Ziegfeld heroine down the central stairs of the jail to the fervent acclamation of the other inmates, acknowledging the ovation to left and right. Coward had abundant worldly acclaim; and he knew very well where the walls lay, and the doors that would not be breached. That knowledge

Thursday

Viv Groskop

Is this the end of travel writing?

Thirty years ago, in the days when friendships were sustained not by email but by air mail, a friend of mine was spending time in some exotic faraway place. He would send me beautiful, florid accounts of his travels and I would read out the most hilarious passages to the flatmates I was living with at the time. When I next replied to him, I sent him their regards and let him know how much they had enjoyed hearing about his adventures. The next letter was angry. Although part of me understood why (I suppose I had rather naively and stupidly shared something that was supposed to be private), another

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

Living with the Xingu in deepest Amazonia

The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities. The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself. When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and

Michael Arditti

A father’s nightmare: What You Need From the Night, by Laurent Petitmangin, reviewed

The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group. The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in eastern France, near the Luxembourg border. It’s an insular part of the country, suspicious of the capital and devoid of employment prospects or cultural resources. The sole diversions appear to be football and alcohol. Petitmangin depicts a predominantly male world, accentuated in the narrator’s case by the death of his wife after her three-year battle

Sam Dalrymple

The trials of England’s first ambassador to India

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organised and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the Earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England. So began Alex von Tunzelmann’s 2007 end-of-empire classic, Indian Summer. Now Courting India by Nandini Das traces the first encounter between these vastly different worlds, offering a fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire. The world into which we are dropped is in many ways eerily familiar. Jacobean England

Tessa Dunlop

What possessed the Duke of Windsor to visit Nazi Germany in 1937?

Bombs start exploding at the beginning of this book. Buckingham Palace was targeted by the Nazis early on in the war in an act of extraordinary audacity – and one that backfired. George VI noted in his diary: ‘We all wondered why we weren’t dead.’ Little did he realise that Hitler had gifted him his first wartime ace. But while George grew into the role of stoic monarch, his older brother never worked out how shake off the trammels of his birth. Edward was hurt, angry and rudderless – which resulted, if not in treason, certainly in disloyalty The Windsors at War is a follow-up to Alexander Larman’s The Crown

Katrina Gulliver

Mass poisonings in a small town in Hungary

There is a small town in Hungary called Nagyrév. With a population of 800, it seems unlikely to make the news. But a century ago it turned out to be the centre of a murder ring, and suddenly it became the focus of news-paper reports across the world. The unlikely setting made the story. It was a backwater, literally: the redirecting of the Tiszaltiver river decades earlier had cut Nagyrév off. Forget cars: this was a town where it was notable in the 1920s if someone owned a bicycle. Yet the place had the murder rate of a violent city. By the time the authorities woke up to what was

Andrew Lambirth

The European influence on modern American art

Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York is somewhat misleadingly titled, though its true content and focus are revealed in the subtitle: ‘Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism.’ Perhaps that sounds obscure and even academic. If so, it gives the wrong idea, for this is a very readable and accessible account of a hitherto unexplored area of mainstream art history. Many of us suspected the importance of European influence on what is always claimed as the thoroughly American art movement of Abstract Expressionism. This book sets out the situation in detail, and makes a convincing argument for giving credit not only to a bunch of European émigrés but to

Jamie Collinson

A deep mystery: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes, reviewed

Martin MacInnes’s third novel, In Ascension, is a literary sci-fi epic set in the 2030s. It centres on a Dutch marine microbiologist called Leigh Hasenboch. As a child she suffers from a violent, frustrated father and a distant, unavailable mother, and tries to protect her younger sister from the worst of it. One day, swimming in the Nieuwe Maas, she experiences a revelation: ‘Absolutely everything around me was alive.’ Her fascination with the marine world eventually takes her on a voyage to explore a newly discovered mid-Atlantic trench. Strange, harmful things happen to divers who approach it. It seems to repel the ship she is on, and its oval shape

Mia Levitin

Femicide in Mexico reaches staggering proportions

In July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old architecture student, was strangled to death at her home in a borough of Mexico City. Her suspected killer, Ángel González Ramos, an ex-boyfriend, fled and remained at large. Three decades later, buttressed by a movement protesting against violence towards women, her sister returned to Mexico in the hopes of finding justice. An acclaimed author and essayist, Cristina Rivera Garza is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Liliana’s Invincible Summer begins with her quest to track down the case files. When the paper trail hits a dead end, she turns her detective work to her sister’s personal archive, motivated

Tuesday

Duncan Fallowell

Karl Lagerfeld – from fashion icon to invisible man

Karl Lagerfeld was an icon when he died in 2019, but for most of his career he was unknown outside the fashion business. He was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, a distasteful coincidence, so Lagerfeld altered his birth to 1938. He was an only child, whose father did well by introducing condensed milk into Germany. His parents had been Nazi members, and Karl saw his future elsewhere. At 18 he left Hamburg for Paris. Short and chunky, he had simian good looks, with beetling brow and a smile that was wider than his eyes; and he didn’t want for admirers. In 1954 he won the young

Elizabeth Goldring

A passion for painting at the early Stuart courts

Four years ago Roy Strong – one-time director of both the National Portrait Gallery (1967-73) and the V&A (1973-87) – published The Elizabethan Image: An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558-1603, in which he returned, after more than a 30-year hiatus, to the subject with which he first made his name: the imagery of Queen Elizabeth I and her court. Now 88, the indefatigable Strong has produced a follow-up volume charting the fate of portraiture (and painting and the visual image more generally) at the courts of Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and Charles I. Charles I would travel by barge to Van Dyck’s studio to pass the time with him

Lee Langley

Inside Warhol’s Factory: Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, reviewed

In 1965 Andy Warhol set out to record 24 one-hour audio cassettes focused on one of his ‘superstars’, the actor known as Ondine. The recordings later became a, A Novel, a Joycean distillation of a day in the life. Four typists, two of them teenagers, transcribed the cassettes verbatim – everything they heard on their headphones, every word, cough, gurgle, screech of chair or clink of glass. In his memoir POPism, Warhol mentions ‘two little high school girls’ who typed up his recordings. ‘The typists’ mistakes are all part of the process… that’s what makes it real.’ This is the inspiration for Nicole Flattery’s blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel, Nothing Special.

Steven Poole

Why Anaximander deserves to be called ‘the first scientist’

It’s a daring thing to write a whole book about a man while confessing early on that ‘we know almost nothing of his readings, life, character, appearance or voyages’, and of whose writings only a three-line fragment survives. Luckily, as with many ancient authors, the works of the 6th-century BC philosopher Anaximander are described in subsequent treatises, and a resourceful writer can infer much from this evidence about what might have been ‘the first great scientific revolution in human history’. Anaximander was the first human to say that Earth was an object floating in space with no means of support Anaximander, a Greek citizen of the cosmopolitan port Miletus, on

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Ghosts of the past: Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed

Nothing is quite what it seems in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, and that isn’t meant entirely as a compliment. While Old God’s Time is a powerful story, I will surely not be the only reader who’s occasionally baffled by its cast of ghosts presented initially as living people. After 200 pages, I lost count of the number of times one character explains to another that the person they think they have just seen is actually dead. The protagonist is the recently retired and somewhat haunted policeman Tom Kettle, who feels ‘his pension was his gun, his weapon against work’. He now lives in a lean-to annex of a Victorian castle

Christopher Bray

There’s nothing ‘magical’ about a great theatrical performance

‘Make him read the lines the way they’re written!’ Raymond Massey snarled at Elia Kazan during the East of Eden shoot. Classically trained, Massey was infuriated at the way the movie’s star, the Method instinctive James Dean, never played a scene the same way twice. Kazan, who had refereed similar rows between Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando on the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, did what good directors do with warring actors: play them off against each other the better to boost both performances. Nobody who has watched the picture, especially those scenes in which Massey flinches at Dean’s latest flight of fancy, could doubt the artfulness of

Anthony Sattin

A source of bitter rivalry: Burton and Speke fall out over the Nile

For the 19th-century English adventurer, author, ethnographer, pornographer and all-round maverick Richard Burton, one of life’s happiest moments was ‘the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands’. There would of course be difficulties; but happiness derives from the prospect of overcoming great challenges and in the process achieving fame and perhaps even fortune. By contrast, what delights the reader most is when a traveller, somewhere deep in those unknown lands, faces overwhelming obstacles. What possible interest is there in hearing that they went, they saw and they returned? Few journeys involved more hardship than the one Burton contemplated in the spring of 1855. Aged 34, he had already travelled

Rose George

Women beware women: young feminists are betraying their older sisters

Where are all the father-in-law jokes? You won’t find them, because fathers-in-law are not fair game in the way middle-aged women are. There is no male ‘Karen’. Men are not mocked as wizards, but we are witches. Victoria Smith has subtitled her timely book ‘The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women’, and if you are one of them you will know that is no exaggeration. Witches, crones, hags, scolds, evil mothers-in-law – up here in middle age, we are used to male scorn. But Smith has a different target: ‘I do not wish merely to present the myriad ways in which older women are belittled, undermined or misrepresented.’ We know all that,