Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Scott Bradfield

Harpo Marx – genius, idiot savant or lovable overgrown child?

It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally impossible to imagine the Marx Brothers without their forever silent, animal-loving, hilariously unpredictable Harpo, he of the moppet wig, trampish overcoat packed with stolen silverware and blow torches, and recurringly grotesque facial expressions. For while the greatest comic performers of the silent film era (such as Chaplin and Keaton) couldn’t speak to the camera, Harpo was the only comic of the talkie era who simply wouldn’t, as if human conversation were somehow beneath him. There was always something about Harpo that seemed a little better than the ridiculous world he

Mika Ross-Southall

Adrift in Berlin: Sojourn, by Amit Chaudhuri, reviewed

Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s unsettling trip back to his childhood home in Bombay. Before that, Odysseus Abroad (2014) charted the day of a lonely English literature student from India as he meandered around London. Now, in Sojourn – Chaudhuri’s eighth novel – we meet a nameless first-person narrator adrift in Berlin. It is the early 2000s, and the 43-year-old, Indian protagonist has just arrived as a visiting professor at a university for four months. He doesn’t know anyone, and navigating the streets is confusing. After giving his inaugural talk, he is accosted by Faqrul,

Elisa Segrave

An angry poltergeist: Long Shadows, by Abigail Cutter, reviewed

Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The narrator, Tom Smiley, is now an unhappy ghost trapped in his old home, which, apart from snakes, mice and silverfish, has been uninhabited since his widowed daughter Clara died. A young couple arrive: Harry, who has inherited the property, and Phoebe, a psychic. To Tom’s indignation, they start renovating, getting rid of loved objects such as his family’s kitchen table and piano. Letters, medals and his sisters’ clothes are unearthed, prompting painful memories for him. This is the story of a man from a modest Virginia farming family who were

Susie Mesure

Seize the moment: Undercurrent, by Barney Norris, reviewed

Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion that does, paving the way for a story about love, family and stories themselves, which is apt from a writer who is known for his dramas on the stage as much as on the page. Ed, who narrates half the novel, is there with his girlfriend Juliet, wondering why they’re yet to get married. It’s the expense, he supposes, and the not knowing what sort of ring to buy. And so he allows time to drift by, ‘just letting it happen to me, rather than me doing very much with

Nicholas Lezard

Aleister Crowley was even more beastly than we’d imagined

I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts for him to take as many drugs and have as much sex as he could. And he was a second-rate writer at best. When the novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall said he had gone ‘from Great Beast to Great Bore’, I thought it a fair summing-up. Crowley initiates were some of the dodgiest people in the western world – either frauds or hucksters themselves or the most gullible of fools. There was always the matter of his self-reinvention. Aleister Crowley was not christened thus: he changed his first name because he thought

Wednesday

Mette Leonard

Should a character in a novel review the book in which they appear?

It is generally thought to be wrong, reprehensible even, for a literary critic to review a book by a friend, professional contact, former lover or other personal relation. In such cases the critic is likely to be biased, and moved, consciously or unconsciously, by ulterior motives of revenge or social or professional advancement and in clear breach of the highly held principles of objectivity and impartiality. Though writers have been given licence to freely use whatever private material they like as long as it serves their higher artistic purpose, the critic is expected to refrain from referencing personal experiences or using autobiographical material in order to be considered professional and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones: A Question of Standing

46 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones – whose new book A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA looks at the real-life story behind one of the most mythologised agencies of American power. How does the world’s first democratically answerable spy agency actually work? Were all those dirty tricks, extra-legal shenanigans and attempted assassinations – sorry: ‘health adjustments’ in the lingo of Langley – really the work of an agency gone rogue? Did the CIA fail to foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iranian Revolution, the Arab Spring and the Twin Towers – or has it been made to take the fall for political

Owen Matthews

The Russian enigma

Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian

Thursday

Michael Arditti

Propaganda from the Russian Front: The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman, reviewed

On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all the novel’s many virtues, the comparison was hyperbolic. In one respect, how-ever, Grossman’s was the more remarkable achievement. Whereas Tolstoy wrote about historical events with the benefit of hindsight, Grossman wrote about ones that he had recently endured. Life and Fate was the third of Grossman’s novels set during the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. The first was The People Immortal, which, like the second, Stalingrad, is now available in an unexpurgated edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. It covers a few days in July 1941

Tim Newark

The bizarre history of London’s private members’ clubs

At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the front window of the In & Out – the Naval and Military Club, then in Piccadilly. Exploding, it knocked everyone off their feet, including the barman Robbins, and trashed the Long Bar. But in the silence that followed came the unwavering request of senior member Commander Vaughan Williams: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.’ A subsequent cartoon in the London Evening Standard depicted the scene of devastation (no one was injured or killed) with a mess-jacket-wearing member calmly wondering what the barman had put in his pink gin: ‘But I’ll have

Guy Stagg

How the travel industry convinced us we needed holidays

In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to a company that had lasted 178 years and survived both world wars. Founded by a Baptist preacher who began organising railway trips to Midland cities for local temperance societies, the company grew into one of the largest travel agencies in the world, thanks to the transformation of tourism from an activity for the idle rich to an experience open to all. This opening up of travel is the story Lucy Lethbridge tells in Tourists, taking the reader from the last years of the Grand Tour to the first years of

Ian Thomson

The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed

Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart of Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 novel The Glass Pearls, was devoted to the furtherance of so-called ‘science’ under the Führer. In the interests of research he cut up the brains of a number of concentration camp inmates. His chosen victims – Jews and other ‘useless mouths’ – were crematorium fodder. Yet Braun sees himself as a decent, God-fearing family man. Undoubtedly he had to carry out unpleasant work, but does that mean he has no conscience? Pressburger, a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré, had reason to dislike the Germans: his mother and other

Wynn Wheldon

More stirring stories of little ships

‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that she discovered in a far corner of her attic. True, but also false. This is not one story: it is a tsunami of stories. Sometimes it’s hard going, as you try to shelve the curiosity aroused by each tale. But the author writes with vim and vigour and with her own curiosity to the fore. It is all, appropriately, as far from dry as one could wish. The imagination finds it difficult to yoke yachting with war – the one solitary and pacific, the other dense with people and mayhem

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed

Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about the Dark Ages that deliberately parodied a sub-Tolkien mysticism of tone. ‘Little is known,’ his opening sentence ran, ‘about those shadowy twilit years twixt 400 and 600 AD.’ Our teacher was particularly enraged by the word ‘twixt’. In Dom’s defence, he was just reacting to a challenge that still confronts medievalists today. When there’s barely any evidence, what is there to say? The response of this intriguing book by Thomas Williams is to lean into the problem. In Lost Realms, he makes a beeline for the very darkest part of

Andrew Watts

We do love to be beside the seaside

In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of a goodly pumpkin. In the middle, where the stalk would be, there is a hole filled with rusting iron. The day I moved in, a neighbour told me that the hole was drilled and filled with molten iron to attach a hook, long since rusted away, to make a ‘sinking stone’. Smuggled cargo could be submerged just off shore if there were any danger of meeting King George’s men, to be harvested when the coast was clear. About a year later, another Cornish neighbour saw it and told me that,

Jon Day

Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed

Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful. Craceland is a compelling place to visit, full of hazy yet broadly recognisable locations (Tudoresque England in the IMPAC award winning Harvest; a vaguely Mediterranean town in Melody) and spanning indeterminate times (the post-apocalyptic future in The Pesthouse; the end of the Stone Age in The Gift of Stones). The specific non-specificity of his fiction reflects Crace’s view of himself as more of a storyteller than a novelist, and his sense of history as a largely unwritten – and therefore often forgotten – phenomenon. In this, eden

Artemis Cooper

How Alice Prin conquered bohemian Paris

This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and Man Ray, the decade of their creative collaboration and the cafés and nightclubs of Montparnasse, immersing the reader in a world where everyone was pushing their creativity in unimaginable directions. Emmanuel Radnitzky, the Jewish tailor’s son from Brooklyn who turned himself into Man Ray, the painter and photographer, saw himself as the equal of Picasso, Duchamp, Picabia, Léger and the other artists who were being talked and written about with such excitement. Yet people found him more interesting as an innovative photographer than a painter, and while photography was definitely

Diana Hendry

Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed

I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of view, namely eternity. The Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue doesn’t entirely qualify as a Catholic writer, even though she’s on record as saying she’s currently obsessed with Catholic theology, specifically Purgatory, but there’s a thread of Catholicism (particularly the Irish variety) in many of her books. Also, it has to be said that she’s frightfully good at suffering and endurance. I thought this when reading her 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars, set in the 1918 flu epidemic, and Haven is no exception. This must surely be her most Catholic

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Our long, vulnerable childhoods may be the key to our success

The central question in Brenna Hassett’s book, put simply, is: why are our children so very useless for so very long? Or: ‘What is the possible adaptive value of teenagers?’ If we consider maturity, or adulthood, to be the point at which an animal can play its own role in the evolutionary process – i.e. have its own babies – why is it that we have evolved to mature so slowly; and, even when mature, to delay having children until many years after we’re first physically capable of doing so? The framework in which Hassett sets out to answer this is one to do with investment and return on investment.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels

48 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Andrea Wulf to talk about the birth of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century. Her new book Magnificent Rebels tells the story of the “Jena set” – a staggering assemblage of the superstars of German literature and philosophy who gathered in a small town and collectively came up with a whole new way of looking at the world. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, the von Humboldt brothers – and their brilliant and daring wives and lovers… their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here’s a piece of the