Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Ian Sansom

Plain tales of crookedness and corruption: Rogues reviewed

Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a ‘best of’ articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and Malcolm Gladwell. Let’s be honest, Patrick Radden Keefe is not one of them – or wasn’t, until the publication last year of Empire of Pain, his book about the Sackler family and America’s opioid epidemic, based on an old New Yorker article. An overnight sensation, it was years in the making. In fact if you’ve

Hugh Thomson

Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po

It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length – but the Po has always exerted a fertile grip on the Italian imagination. Virgil called it ‘the king of rivers’; Dante died in its marsh estuary, having earlier described in Purgatorio how Jacopo del Cassero was chased there and fell fatally, ‘entangled in the mud and reeds of the Paduan swamp’, leaving a pool of blood on its waters. Yet the rest of the world has been less interested. Perhaps it has something to do with the modern name’s slightly comical sound: shortened from the original, more euphonic Padus

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spikes and stagnant growth: why we are where we are

We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and an almost certain recession. But we don’t know quite how painful it’s going to be and we don’t know how to apportion blame between bad decisions and ‘black swans’. Clearly the coming train crash has something to do with the Covid pandemic and quite a lot to do with the madness of Vladimir Putin. But what if economic prospects had been fundamentally damaged, especially for the most vulnerable, by policy responses to the previous crisis, namely the ultra-low interest rates and money printing deployed after the near collapse of the

Madeleine Feeny

An authentic portrait of gay love in small-town Britain: The Whale Tattoo reviewed

In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set in the liminal landscape of Norfolk’s tidal wetlands, it’s an urgent, roiling tale of gay love, suppressed traumas and lives cut short. A working-class writer with no formal education, Norfolk-raised Ransom wrote the first draft on his phone on a bus. Muswell Press has launched it to considerable acclaim, including an appearance at Damian Barr’s Literary Salon. After a whale washed up on a beach tells Joe Gunner that death will stalk him wherever he goes, he leaves home. But two years later he returns, to a town haunted by

Eleanor Myerson

The forgotten heroines of the Middle Ages

Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives. Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical

Juliet Nicolson

A call to farms: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots

Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood. But her grandfather, ‘an oak of a man’ with his high-waisted trousers and ‘smelling of butter, honey and dust’, occupies no romantic sepia image in her memory. A tenant farmer, proud to have provided for the local Hampshire population during the second world war, he remains in the author’s mind a figure unfaded in achievement and identity. Having spent her early adult years as a successful London-based barrister, Langford and her husband were bringing up their two young sons with hard pavement beneath their feet until a sudden job loss

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Kavita Puri: Partition Voices

39 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Kavita Puri, whose book Partition Voices excavates the often traumatic memories of the last generation to remember first-hand the mass migration and bloody violence of the partition of India. She tells me why the story has been so shrouded in silence – there isn’t a memorial to Partition, she says, anywhere on earth – and yet how it has shaped the UK’s population and politics ever since, and she says why she believes it’s vital that empire and the end of empire be taught in every British school.

James Ball

What is the metaverse, actually?

There is a concept in tech and innovation – branded by an expensive consultancy company, naturally – known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any innovation, be it NFTs (a means of owning ‘unique’ digital art), blockchains (the technology powering crypto-currencies like bitcoin), self-driving cars or wearable tech, will go through distinct (buzzword-heavy) stages before it is adopted by the mainstream. First, it will head to a ‘peak of inflated expectations’, before entering the ‘trough of disillusionment’. As people then work out what the tech might actually deliver it climbs the ‘slope of enlightenment’ to the ‘plateau of productivity’. It’s an idea that definitely fits lots of the technologies that we

Thursday

Houman Barekat

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village in rural Normandy and moved to Paris, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. By his mid-twenties he had published three well-received autobiographical novels: about working-class machismo (The End of Eddy), his experience of sexual assault (A History of Violence) and the condition of the French welfare state (Who Killed My Father). In his latest book he turns the spotlight on his mother, revisiting ‘the succession of accidents that made up her life’. Monique Bellegueule had ambitions to train as a chef, but was derailed by teenage pregnancies

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Putin’s mistake was to discard the velvet glove

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature of autocracy – and the West’s relationship to it. We kicked things off by trying to realise the Trotskyite dream of ushering in global democracy through the barrel of a gun. We wanted to bring an end to the world’s tyrants – or the ones of relevance to us at any rate. We got Iraq. But if we failed to end tyrants, we played our part in helping to mould them. As Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman observe in their intelligent, important book Spin Dictators, throughout this time something far

Hugh Thomson

The wonder of the wandering life

Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about nomads but never quite succeeded (the nearest he got was Songlines). Hoping to persuade Tom Maschler at Cape of the virtues of the project, Chatwin described nomads as ‘a subject that appeals to irrational instincts’ – perhaps not the best way to sell something to publishers, who tend to pride themselves on their rational ones. But Chatwin’s thesis – that we were all originally nomads and need to recover some of that instinct – is now triumphantly brought to its conclusion in Sattin’s fascinating journey through 12,000 years, from the

Susanna Rustin

Why should advocating sexual restraint be ridiculed?

Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’ she declares at the start of her punchy first book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. So she offers advice as well to the young women she believes have been ‘utterly failed by liberal feminism’. That’s because contemporary sexual mores have exposed them to risks, the most serious of which are linked to some men’s propensity for violence. Women, Perry argues, have in recent decades been conditioned to repress their desire for attachment. They have learned instead to behave in ways more typical of men, with their greater (on average)

Ian Thomson

Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius

Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its outskirts masquerade as ‘legitimate’ couture operations that transform bolts of Chinese silk into contraband Dolce & Gabbana or Versace. The textile sweatshops are controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, or Camorra. All this was exposed by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his scorching reportage, Gomorrah. Published in Italy in 2006, Saviano’s was nevertheless a partial account, in which the carnival city of mandolins and ‘O Sole Mio’ was overrun by Armani-coutured killer-capitalists. Marius Kociejowski, poet, essayist and travel writer, is alert to the city’s reputation for Camorra and pickpocketing crime.

Suzi Feay

Hysterical outbursts: Bewitched, by Jill Dawson, reviewed

‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go up in flames rather than bodies. The mob mentality behind the phenomenon may not have changed as much as the medium or the mindset. In retelling a celebrated case from Elizabethan England, Jill Dawson enters thoroughly into her characters’ religious world view, while giving a meaningful glance at the issues of today. The fate of the Warboys witches – three members of one family – was recounted in prurient pamphlets of the time, but Dawson colours in the crude woodcut of history with passionate emotions and plausible motivations. As she

Henry Jeffreys

The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?

A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon crispiness, egg doneness and whether baked beans are a vital component or just spoil the whole thing. Felicity Cloake is a writer after my own heart: she is not a fan of beans with her full English. ‘I object to the way they encroach on everything,’ she writes in Red Sauce Brown Sauce, and then quotes Alan Partridge on the importance of ‘distance between the eggs and the beans. I may want to mix them, but I want that to be my decision. Use a sausage as a breakwater.’ Or,

Philip Hensher

‘Jerusalem’ is a rousing anthem – but who knows what the words mean?

The spontaneous mass adoption of deep feeling is always interesting. Jason Whittaker has a very good subject, in the journey of the cryptic lyric section of the preface to William Blake’s incomprehensible epic Milton, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810, to its becoming the de facto national anthem of England. ‘And did those feet…’ only took on its familiar title ‘Jerusalem’ (which has nothing to do with Blake’s poem entitled ‘Jerusalem’) after it was set to music by Hubert Parry on 10 March 1916. The following day, Parry handed over his composition to his colleague Walford Davies, saying insouciantly: ‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

How inoculation against smallpox became all the rage in Russia

The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book focuses on two individuals: the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale, who, from his small Hertfordshire surgery, pioneered a simple smallpox immunisation; and Catherine the Great, who summoned him all the way to St Petersburg to inoculate her and the teenage Grand Duke Paul. Despite success all round, though, it turns out that anti-vaxxers are nothing new. After revealing the destructive force of smallpox – in one period of the 18th century, 400,000 perished annually in Europe – Lucy Ward, a journalist and former lobby correspondent, recapitulates the history of inoculation against

Ian Sansom

Where is Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen, hiding?

This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human condition. It’s also a book based on a podcast, which brings difficulties of its own. To cut a very long story short, The Missing Cryptoqueen tells the true story of a Bulgarian crook named Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen of the book’s title. In 2014, she set up a pyramid scheme-cum-multi-level-marketing scam based on a fake cryptocurrency called OneCoin. In 2017, having swindled people out of billions of pounds, dollars, euros and just about every other currency on the planet, and with the authorities closing in, Ignatova suddenly went missing.

Peter Parker

We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb

‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’ wrote Ronald Blythe in 2008, ‘though none better than to walk knowledgeably among our native plants.’ To many today, when the age-old connection between people and their indigenous flora is in danger of being extinguished altogether, this pronouncement may seem eccentric; but is rightly endorsed by Leif Bersweden in Where the Wildflowers Grow, which vividly describes the botanical journey through Britain and Ireland he undertook last year. He was born in 1994 and, unusually for his generation, has been a keen amateur botanist since childhood. There was a time, not

Lee Langley

Dangerous liaisons: Bad Eminence, by James Greer, reviewed

Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’ – she can indulge herself professionally with obscure, neglected books. About to embark on a forgotten nouveau roman by Alain Robbe-Grillet, she’s offered an irresistible assignment. A bestselling French novelist who is definitely not Michel Houellebecq wants to pay her an extravagant fee to translate his next book – before he’s written it. Vanessa accepts, and her life free-falls into a nightmare of dangerous, sadistic games, involving two possible Not-Houellebecqs, but which is the imposter? She herself is a very unreliable narrator. Bad Eminence is the American writer and musician