Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

John Gimlette

It’s time to stop sneering at metal detectorists

As a teenager growing up in Cheshire I had a metal detector. Although I was slightly ashamed of it, I found all sorts of intriguing things: shrapnel, a French coin, a Khartoum Racing Club key ring, an adze and a silver brooch in the shape of a lobster. All went well until I found a second world war bomb in Tatton Park. They had to call out the army, and I got a Grade A bollocking. People hated metal detectors. Since then I haven’t given them much thought; but Nigel Richardson has. An acclaimed travel writer, he was grounded by the Covid pandemic and, like many of us, began to

Philip Hensher

A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger reviewed

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow. There are conversations about what I think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

The Queen Mother’s tipsy bons mots and other stocking fillers

The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I myself may have moaned to this effect in the past. But either they are getting better or my critical faculties are beginning to fail. I think it’s the former, but if I’m wrong don’t be surprised if I’m sucking on milky rusks by this time next year. My daft picture book of the season – a vital category – is Ryan Herman’s Remarkable Football Grounds (Pavilion, £25), which is exactly what it seems to be: a collection of colour photographs of some of the most spectacular football grounds in the

Ursula Buchan

A choice of gardening books for Christmas

Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books on this most precious of natural resources, I am now obsessed. So much has recently been discovered about the invaluable symbiotic relationships that form between microbes, fungi and plant roots in the soil that it feels perverse to turn one’s head away. Lately, the book that has most influenced my thinking (perhaps because it is a rattling read) is Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy by Matthew Evans (Murdoch Books, £14.99). It’s the work of a no-nonsense Australian farmer and former restaurant critic who

Wednesday

The Spectator

Books of the year II – chosen by our regular reviewers

Andrew Lycett Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination. Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about her mixed reactions to her beloved dad’s dive into a religious cult and subsequent alcoholism, is notable for its emotional truthfulness, sure sense of time and place and appealing tone of delivery. The novel which gave me most pleasure was Winchelsea by Alex Preston (Canongate, £14.99), a rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and

Stephen Bayley

Why are heritage enthusiasts so stubbornly hidebound?

Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on. A la recherche of what precisely? Our troubled world accommodates, even embraces, heritage tomatoes and heritage paint. The former reaches back into agricultural history to find an uncontaminated source of perfect taste; the latter, chalk-dense, impure colours popularised by Farrow & Ball, elevates ordinary cottage woodwork to gentility. And these two poles of misplaced desire

John McEwen

In defence of John James Audubon 

The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in four volumes, The Birds of America. Part III is devoted to his 1833 seabird searching expedition to Labrador. The well chosen excerpts are introduced and meticulously annotated.  Audubon’s innate love of birds grew into a grand ambition to observe, record and publish life-size images – never previously attempted anywhere – of all the birds of

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Imprisoned on the whim of Enver Hoxha

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps.  It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the

Allan Mallinson

A young soldier’s noble vision: creating the Western Front Way 

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was ‘dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing’, and when they married, his father, whose own people had been refugees from the pogroms in Ukraine, was delighted that he’d found a Jewish girl. After her death, which ‘ripped me in two’, writes Seldon, he threw himself into his work – his prodigious writing and the vice-chancellorship

Peter Parker

The frustrated life of John Singer Sargent

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation. Some queried his generous gift on the frankly snobbish and anti-Semitic grounds that it was not for upstart Jewish businessmen to force their likenesses into a national collection. The Conservative MP Sir Charles Oman went so far as to say in the Commons that ‘these clever but extremely repulsive pictures should be placed in a

Alexander Larman

The afterlife of a painting: Molly & the Captain, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed

Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a strained exercise in trying to yoke together two irreconcilable mediums. It is to Anthony Quinn’s credit that his ninth novel, Molly & the Captain, not only succeeds admirably as a centuries-spanning account of the influence and afterlife of the eponymous painting, but manages to say illuminating things about creativity, love and family dynamics in the process. The book is divided into three sections. The first, ‘Merrymounts’, is the shortest, and is written in an 18th-century literary pastiche style that initially jars but soon enthrals. Exploring the relationship between the Gainsboroughesque

Stuart Evers

An Argentinian allegory: Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez, reviewed

‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling image; one that Gaspar, the central character, experiences both literally and figuratively. Bodies are everywhere in this novel – whether dead, undead, dying or decomposing, at swim or making love – and what they feel and what they can know is the intellectual dynamic that underpins plotlines familiar from the work of Stephen King, the films of Guillermo del Toro and the horror drama Stranger Things. The Order grew out of British occultism of the late 19th century and, by the 1980s, when the book opens, is a powerful, shadowy

David Crane

The history of the world in bloodshed and megalomania

It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history of the whole world then Simon Sebag-Montefiore must be as good a candidate to write it as anyone. He would seem to have read pretty well everything that has ever been written, visited everywhere of historical interest on the planet and enjoyed – thanks to Covid and lockdown – the time to write the one book that he has always had in his sights. The only history we ‘adore’, Chairman Mao reckoned (and he ought to know), is the history of wars, and in The World: A Family History Sebag-Montefiore

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Christopher de Hamel: The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case – forged them.

Wednesday

Claudia Gold

The cruel legacy of the She-Wolf of France

The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labour for the fields… and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God. It was a century when the four horsemen of St John’s apocalyptic vision

Mia Levitin

Displacement and disturbance: Seven Empty Houses, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving from Buenos Aires to Berlin, the seven stories depict displacement (there are a lot of boxes) and disturbance. A woman sneaks around mansions to rearrange them; a man worries about his children staying with his nudist parents; a woman is unmoored after moving back from Spain. One of the most unsettling stories, ‘An Unlucky Man’,

James Walton

Strange bedfellows: Charles Dickens and the popstar Prince

One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and Prince is as strange as it sounds: an extended essay yoking together a 19th-century British novelist and a recently deceased African-American popstar. At the start, Hornby says he won’t be looking for ‘uncanny similarities’ between the two – which might make you wonder why they’re in the same book. Or at least it would if

Lynn Barber

The troubled life of Paul Newman

Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the book is only being published now, when Newman died in 2008? The answer seems to be that the material was lost for many years. In 1986, Newman asked his closest friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, to collect accounts of his life from his family and friends. He said he might use them one day to

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Vatican II has always been seriously misunderstood

People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk at bus stops ridiculing the ‘new pence’ of decimal currency. Students no longer care about Vietnam. Retired wing commanders have finally stopped writing to the newspapers about the misuse of that fine old English word ‘gay’. But there is one topic that still attracts world-class windbags. It’s worthy of inclusion in the fictional world boring championships described by the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, right up there with ‘A history of plywood’ and ‘Parking problems in Wolverhampton’. We’re talking about the Second Vatican Council, whose first session was held 60

Maggie Fergusson

All the art you’d pay not to own

‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of an art book wondering which painting you most covet, but with this one it’s more a question of which you’d pay not to own: the 13th-century ‘Penis tree’ maybe? The 90 cans of excrement sealed up by Piero Manzoni in 1961 and now selling for up to €275,000 apiece? Or, most repellent, the ‘Portrait of