Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

The stone boats of Celtic saints inspire a bizarre pilgrimage

‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were Orcadians sleeping in stone box beds. For Beatrice Searle, one Orkney stone proved life-changing. While still a teenager, she felt the stirrings of a vocation to work with stone. It spoke to her, almost literally: ‘There is information to be found in the sound of the stone, just-audible messages from the deep past to be

Laurel Berger

The lost world of Jewish Rhodes

Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new friend, Stella Levi, on a journey back to her native Rhodes. Readers feel protective of old women, and all the more so if, like Levi, they are Holocaust survivors. As if to allay readers’ apprehensions, Frank writes: ‘Later she will tell me this was one of the reasons why she decided to trust me with

Mark Bostridge

Nursing grievances in the Crimean War

Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds. However, as Terry Tastard points out, one aspect of Nightingale’s Crimean nursing that is often overlooked is its reliance on the nuns who responded to the national outcry at the negligent care of the sick and dying. They were a familiar sight in the wards in their black hoods and habits, or ghostly white garments, sharing the hardships of

Mia Levitin

How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy

In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam in 1993. ‘No one can say no to Elmo,’ a Sesame/Children’s Television Workshop executive insisted. Launched in 1969 to bridge the socio-economic gap in education among American pre-schoolers, by the early 1990s Sesame Street had created nearly two dozen foreign co-productions, with programming adapted for cultural differences. In the wake

Andrew Taylor

The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican: My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed

One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews after the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943. It is by any standards an extraordinary tale. O Flaherty’s organisation called itself the Choir; the prisoners it sheltered were known as Books, and their hiding places, scattered across Rome, as Shelves. The priest was constantly at risk from the Gestapo, as were his helpers, who included

Daisy Dunn

Butchered to make a Roman holiday: cruelty to animals in and out of the Colosseum

Did you know that the elephant was the most written about animal in the Roman world? Pyrrhus of Epirus, of victory fame, was the first to introduce it to Italy as an engine of war when he invaded in 280 BC. Roman soldiers could not decide whether it was an animal or a machine. Eventually they plumped for luca bos (‘Lucanian cow’), though the creatures came from India rather than Italian Lucania and were more inclined to trumpet than moo. And did you know that the people of Roman Cyrene in Libya were legally obliged to declare war on locusts three times a year? The swarms were so deadly that

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Thomas Halliday: Otherlands

54 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn’t eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be a good time to do it, and gives a jaw-dropping sense of what the night sky looked like when the earth was young.

Tuesday

Alexandra Coghlan

From precocious child to polymath – Stephen Hough’s life is full of singularity

At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’. There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps just a little indecency) here. Hough, one senses, is more likely to be the man at the table looking on wryly, silent until, pressed,  he’ll mention the time he just happened to end up playing the vibraphone ‘with Oscar Peterson’s trio on the telly’ or the two occasions he ‘seriously considered leaving the piano behind

Alex Preston

A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it: a book with little plot but with so much life. The Shards can be usefully thought of as both a prequel to Less Than Zero and a presentation of the atmosphere and circumstances that brought that novel into being. Ellis has spent much of his career exploring the territory between fiction and autobiography. Lunar Park

Nicholas Lezard

If Lady Mendl didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent her

It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the stool. ‘My God, he’s dead,’ says Lady Mendl. He isn’t, of course. He’s the classic English booby beloved by Hollywood, so is immortal. Death hangs over this book in a way I’ll return to later, but at this point it’s mainly because Lady Mendl is old, old. 80? 90? No one knows for certain. But

Gillian Kenny

What the Wife of Bath teaches us about misogyny

Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives.   The book is divided into two main sections. In the first, Turner examines four different aspects of Alison – the worker, married woman, storyteller and traveller – and expertly conceptualises the late medieval English world and its attitudes to, and treatment of,

George Cochrane

Vanity Fair updated: Becky, by Sarah May, reviewed

Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to Thackeray’s original. That shadow is particularly occluding in Becky’s early chapters, when the reader’s instinct is to look for what they know, not what is new. To speak only of the unmissable differences, then, May’s Becky is a Gen Xer, not a Georgian, an aspiring journalist, not a socialite, and her story is told in

Daniel Rey

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Damascene conversion to liberalism

Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Vargas Llosa’s world view changed radically in the late 1960s, as he watched the Cuban revolution silence local writers and put homosexuals in forced labour camps. During a visit to the USSR in 1968, he realised that had he been a Soviet citizen his disregard for authority would have

Ian Thomson

Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, was not such a ridiculous figure

In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was solemnly removed from the French tricolore. Haiti’s is the only successful slave revolt in recorded human history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave himself and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas. Thousands of French settler colonists were massacred during the Louverturian struggle. The

Lee Langley

A gripping psychological thriller: The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier, reviewed

Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification. What Javier Marías did for the spy story, Laurent Mauvignier does for terror. It begins quietly, with an ominous sense of something waiting to happen. An isolated hamlet in deep rural France; just three houses, one empty, one occupied by a family – Patrice, a farmer, his wife Marion and ten-year-old daughter Ida. In the third, Christine, an elderly bohemian artist, enjoys the seclusion with her dog for company. Each of these characters in turn will take up the narrative in a tortuous relay race.

R. W. Johnson

How Hitler benefited from the Allies’ mutual distrust

In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’ R.T. Howard’s

Justin Marozzi

Here be dragons, dog-headed men and women growing on trees

I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of the general reader – that would be most of us. Given how short life is, there is no good reason why reading should be more of a pain than a pleasure. Thankfully, the spell finally wore off, which was fortunate, because this book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and

Thursday

Annie Gray

English food has always been a moveable feast

There is a lot to like about Diane Purkiss’s English Food. It’s a hefty thing, packed full of titbits to trot out down the pub, but also a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time, and of the perils of assuming there has ever been a golden age, or even a very stable one. The layout is good, organised thematically rather than a chronologically, which saves the book from getting bogged down in repetition, and avoids the common trap of listing endless menus and foodstuffs. The best chapters are often the shortest. The one on apples includes a fascinating collection of facts, folklore and recipes, as well

Wednesday

David Kynaston

Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy?

In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into a flood’, adding that ‘both in intelligence and ambition they compete strongly with the public school boys’. In short, a new, largely state-funded elite was now emerging to rival the familiar products of Eton, Winchester et al. ‘Egalitarians didn’t want ordinary people to go to conservative, hierarchical and Christian schools’ Yet at this very point,

Tuesday

Christopher Priest

Victorian science fiction soon ceased to be fanciful

One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from the steam turbines, windows replaced by watch dials, and hundreds of rivets holding the whole thing together. Inside would be a palm court saloon hosting a tea dance. Many of the gentlemen are garbed in comic-book versions of the army officer and entrepreneur style of British imperialism, the ladies in dark velvet, veils and stays,