Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Monday

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

Zareer Masani

There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India

It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has successfully explained the consequences of that transition. This latest attempt, though often original and incisive, fails to bridge that gap, partly because it ends in 1977, thereby largely ignoring the major turning point that brought to power India’s current Hindu-chauvinist rulers. The underlying premise of the book is a rather arbitrary division of Indian Muslims

Michael Ledger-Lomas

Our struggle to concentrate is nothing new

Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications. Even Thoreau got bored with practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle to concentrate is not. Caleb Smith’s elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention begins with the perplexities of Henry David Thoreau in early19th-century England. Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on

Alys Key

The agony of grief: Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book. Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters who have appeared previously in her work as stand-ins for herself and her partner: Nell and Tig. The collection’s first third contains stories of the two together, while the end is about Nell on her own after Tig’s death. Between these is an interlude of unrelated tales, which makes Old Babes something of a patchy

Simon Ings

The eeriness of lockdown: To Battersea Park, by Philip Hensher, reviewed

We never quite make it to Battersea Park. By the time the narrator and his husband reach its gates, it’s time for them, and us, to return home. The narrator is a writer, living just that little bit too far away from the park, inspired by eeriness of the Covid lockdown regime but also horribly blocked. All kinds of approaches to fiction beckon to him in his plight, and we are treated to not a few of them here.  Each section of this novel embodies a literary device. We begin, maddeningly, in ‘The Iterative Mood’ (‘I would have’, ‘She would normally have’ ,‘They used to’) and we end in ‘Entrelacement’,

Alexandra Coghlan

The relationship between self and singer

The professional performer is the tree in the philosopher’s human forest. If there’s no opportunity to sing or act or dance in front of an audience, are they still a performer at all? In the spring of 2020, when most of his colleagues shrugged and started making banana bread, the tenor Ian Bostridge took an altogether more existential approach to isolation, writing a series of lectures for the University of Chicago exploring the relationship between self and singer, silence and song. Now they form the basis of his latest book. Song & Self is a slim volume. Early on, Bostridge invokes the essay’s origins in Montaigne – the idea of

Alexander Larman

The chaos of coronations over the centuries

In January 1559 an Italian envoy wrote of Elizabeth I’s coronation that ‘they are preparing for [the ceremony] and work both day and night’. More than four and a half centuries later much the same could be said of the imminent investiture of Charles III – an event overshadowed, at the time of writing, by the uncertainty as to whether his publicity-shy younger son and wilting violet of a wife will be attending. But, as Ian Lloyd describes in The Throne, there have been many more dramatic build-ups to coronations, some culminating in injury or even death. James I hired 500 soldiers as a personal bodyguard to shield him against

Philip Womack

No happy ever afters: White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link, reviewed

Kelly Link’s latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to a same-sex version of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and narratological) powers of her raw material, and makes thrilling shapes while also dissecting modern society, our fears and our fantasies. Each of these scintillating stories (not a dud among them) concerns lost characters in search of truth about themselves or the world. Sometimes they find it; more often they don’t. Link’s lucid prose moves the

Kwasi Kwarteng MP

As special enclaves proliferate, what are the consequences for democracy?

When the British announced the withdrawal of their navy from Singapore in 1967, a Dutch adviser from the United Nations, Albert Winsemius, offered the Singapore government two pieces of advice. The first was to crush the communists: I am not interested in what you do with them. You can throw them in jail, throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist, it does not interest me; but I have to tell you, if you don’t eliminate them in government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development. The second piece of advice was to let the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder

Tuesday

Claudia FitzHerbert

What can we learn of George Eliot through her heroines?

‘I have… found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account. A reply from the family solicitor forced her to acknowledge that ‘our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond’. The funds were paid accordingly, but all contact was severed. Very soon, money from Evans’s novels – written under the pseudonym of