Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

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,

Alexander Masters

A radical new theory about the origin of the universe may help explain our existence

The deeper you get into physics, the simpler it becomes. The starting point of this wonderful book about Stephen Hawking’s ‘biggest legacy’ (which no one outside of physics has heard of) is the problem of our insignificance. Make a change in almost any of the slippery, basic physical properties of the universe and we’re toast – life would not be possible. If, for example, the universe had expanded even slightly more slowly than it did after the Big Bang it would have collapsed in on itself. Result? No us. A fraction faster and no galaxies would form, let alone habitable planets. In the incandescent beginning of the universe, each of

Tuesday

Richard Baxell

The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’ Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around

Andrew Lycett

Poetry anthologies to treasure

Francis Palgrave, the founder of the Public Record Office, didn’t like having his version of the past parcelled in neat gobbets. In his History of Normandy and England, he described anthologies as ‘sickly things’, adding that ‘cut flowers have no vitality’. His son, Francis Turner Palgrave, differed fundamentally, and, with Alfred Tennyson’s help, gathered what is still the greatest collection of English lyric poetry, The Golden Treasury, which sold 10,000 copies in six months after its publication by Macmillan in 1861 and, according to Clare Bucknell in this delightfully engaging survey of verse anthologies, had shifted 650,000 copies by 1939 and must surely now be hitting the million mark. Having

Victor Sebestyen

Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

The historian Bernard Wasserstein is admired as a rigorous academic. In his monumental work on the Holocaust and his perceptive study of barbarism vs civilisation in the West, he strove for objectivity and maintained a professorial tone, as if writing of the past from an Olympian height. Wasserstein’s grandparents and aunt were forced to dig their own graves, and were then shot Not so in this extraordinarily moving book about Krakowiec, the shtetl 40 miles from Lviv where his forebears lived for generations, and the role his family played there. At various times part of Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Soviet Russia, it was, he says, ‘a small place you’ve

Mark Cocker

Living trees that predate the dinosaurs

It is perhaps easy to understand why some of the Earth’s largest trees, with roots spreading deep into the underworld as their upper limbs ascend to heaven, are charged with symbolic importance. Yet the origins of our fixation are perhaps surprising. To give one example, the Buddha was said to have attained enlightenment beneath the spreading limbs of a bodi, or pipal tree. That same specimen still reputedly flourishes at Bodh Gaya in Nepal. Even earlier, the first temple of Jerusalem was constructed from timbers King Solomon obtained specifically from the cedars of Lebanon, whose own sacred status recedes into the mists of prehistory. Elderflora – a name coined by

Helen Carr

Snapshots of the Middle Ages in the Canterbury pilgrims

What does the term ‘medieval’ mean to you? Most of us have some idea of the Dark Ages, the centuries roughly spanning the departure of the Romans and the early, or indeed late, Middle Ages (which Ian Mortimer extends to the Renaissance). For those brought up on school history, or who revere the nous of the Romans, it was a time when civilisation declined. But the ‘Dark Age’ moniker is increasingly accepted as unfair, with historians arguing hotly and convincingly that the period was anything but dark. Seb Falk’s recent The Light Ages showed that major scientific exploration was under way in the late Middle Ages. Following on from this,

Christopher Shrimpton

Shared secrets: The New Life, by Tom Crewe, reviewed

‘It is shocking to read about. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.’ This is the accepting, if unfeeling, response of John Addington’s undergraduate daughter after reading his recently completed book on homosexuality. ‘It is a very rational argument, Papa.’ The New Life, Tom Crewe’s superb debut novel, is set in fin-de-siècle London and follows Addington and his co-author Henry Ellis (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) as they try to make a rational argument for ‘the impossible subject’. They are respected writers and family men, but each is burdened by an unacceptable private life: Addington has brought

Stuart Kelly

The idealist vs the entrepreneur: Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, reviewed

I always feel an element of trepidation when approaching a new book by an author whose previous work I have admired. When the novelist in question won the Booker prize in 2013, and I was on the judging panel, the static crackle of anxiety is even more intense. And so the fearful question: is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood a stinker? No, it isn’t. But will it ‘pull a Mantel’ and win the Booker again? I doubt it, though I would not rule out its appearance on other prize shortlists. It is a subtle, sometimes acerbically comic and ultimately tragic novel of great sensitivity. It is also engaged, taking in topics