Book review

Thursday

Nicholas Lezard

Stories about stories

I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and an impermeable membrane between invention and reality — the novel, that is, being a box from which nothing can leap out, and into which nothing, except what the author has chosen to put there, can leap in? And does it conform to the conventions laid down by the great writers of the 19th century? That’s what I assumed, during my schooldays; and the little that had filtered down to me of Don Quixote, which is claimed by many to be the ‘first’ novel, did not alert me to the fact

Henry Jeffreys

How to infuriate the French

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by Steven Spurrier, the man behind that notorious tasting, have been keenly anticipated. It was a glass of 1908 Cockburns port that Spurrier tried at the age of 13 that sparked a lifelong interest in wine. Rather than go to university, as expected, he worked in the cellars of a wine merchant, Christopher’s, in Soho. In

Philip Hensher

Manners maketh the Englishman

In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become, lies civility. Keith Thomas’s marvellous new book addresses the subject of ideal behaviour. It shows the way that early modern England formed notions of civilisation and proper conduct, in contrast to what was termed ‘the Other’. These alternative people were labelled ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’ when found abroad or on the Celtic fringe. If the unacceptable was found within England, rural or impoverished, they would be called ‘clowns’ or ‘clodhoppers’. The fact that these barbarians or clodhoppers might have their own notions of proper behaviour, according to which the English ruling

Thursday

Hamish Robinson

A cat, a dog and a ghost

Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well understood — a child is lost — and the viewer, with certain advantages, rides through the unfolding events saddled up on the back of a questing protagonist, in Alison Moore’s Missing, as in her Booker-shortlisted first novel The Lighthouse, the reader is placed in a very different position. Jesse Noon, a divorced mother approaching 50, is followed round her house in Hawick in the Scottish Borders by a cat and a dog, and the reader follows too. Something is wrong — several things. One morning less than a year earlier,

Rebecca Watson

The weight of womanhood

‘I don’t think this was something I ever felt’, Sheila Heti writes in Motherhood — ‘that my body, my life, belonged to me.’ Heti’s narrator is childless, nearing her forties and living with her boyfriend. In semi-diaristic vignettes, she navigates the space of childlessness; the ‘sensation of life tapping its foot’. She reckons with the feeling that her body is not fully her own, that it exists to make space for another. The narrator encounters friends and strangers, speaks to psychics and, in regular passages, uses a method of flipping three coins (two or three tails — no; two or three heads —yes) to find answers. ‘I’m projecting onto you,

Max Décharné

Getting their kicks on Route 66

In 1973, four years before he disappeared down the Star Wars rabbit hole, George Lucas directed the film American Graffiti, eulogising his days as a teenage car fanatic in Modesto, California; parking at drive-ins, hot-rodding and cruising for dates. This vanished world was only a decade away —‘Where were you in 62?’ said thepublicity — the equivalent of someone today getting dewy-eyed about 2007. Yet the clashes and strife of the late 1960s in mainland America and the deepening quagmire of the Vietnam War had already made those days look like an age of lost innocence. The film was an international hit, but in October that year Opec’s oil embargo

Dominic Dromgoole

As full of grief as age

Why are rehearsal diaries so compelling? One approaches them with cynicism and then ends up reading with racing heart through to the early hours, hurtling with a shared terror towards the described first night. First and foremost, there is the gossip, the sense of being behind closed doors, and gaining off-guard glimpses into the nature of those who are frequently well-fortressed. The character of this gossip changes markedly as the actor-diarist grows older. In youth it is all about which tearaway deals the best cocaine to enable company shagging: in age it morphs into which besuited figure makes the most ruefully telling remark at the latest in a series of

Mark Cocker

Wading to extinction

Mary Colwell, a producer at the BBC natural history unit, is on a mission: to save the British curlew from extinction. Yet there is a key moment in this readable, highly informed and heartfelt book, when its author shows you the scale of her challenge. It is at the beginning of her 500-mile trek across Ireland, Wales and England to raise the flag for the totem bird. She goes to a school in Ballinamore in the heart of rural Ireland — where curlews would once have been abundant — and is asked to address a classroom of 17- to 18-year-olds. The pupils are taking their final exams in agriculture and

Duncan Fallowell

Free-wheeling flakiness

Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite terrifying — xenophobic, paranoid, enclosed, pitifully nostalgic, cruel. But in much of the country that landscape never went away.’ One’s heart sinks. This isn’t even polemical; it’s just silly. The introduction, subtitled ‘What is a European city?’, continues to push the line until something like a position is reached: Britain is awful, Europe is wonderful. I was reminded of certain of my French, Italian and German friends who are excited by the new horizons of living anywhere but in their own homelands, which they find every bit as stultifying as

Peter Mckay

Breaking bad news

The humble title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is somewhat at odds with the tone of the book. He says the celebrated New York Times Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam once wrote to him saying: ‘You are, my friend, a national treasure. Bless you.’ Another New York Times star, Harrison Salisbury, is quoted in reference to the Watergate scandal: It was as though Sy Hersh had been born for this moment. At long last the great investigative story and the great investigative reporter had been linked. To be fair, Hersh has much to be immodest about. He is best known for exposing what happened in the village of My Lai, Vietnam,

Elisa Segrave

Fish in troubled waters

‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise. His subject is the return of the ‘king’ salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake in Canada. These fish are many pounds of muscle, toned from years of swimming headlong into Pacific storms, and their flesh is as red as blood. They force against the Yukon’s current, shouldering their way upriver, setting their fins like sails. Eventually they will push thousands of miles into North America’s interior. They will reach

Patrick Skene-Catling

From New York to the New Hebrides

Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally a longer process, and delivery of a book is more deeply fraught. Here is some evidence that the labour can be worthwhile. Asymmetry (Granta, £14.99) by Lisa Halliday, a young American now living in Milan, is a lopsided triptych of admirable erudition and stylishness — in effect, two novellas and a short story: a Manhattan romance, an Iraqi reminiscence of the devastation of Baghdad, and a BBC interview on Desert Island Discs. In the initial, most enjoyable episode, Alice, an assistant editor of a New York publishing house, would like

Ferdinand Mount

Keeping Faith

It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me the most beguiling novels that have zipped across the Atlantic in the past half-century or so are mostly about groups, specifically groups on campus, usually a rather classy campus at that. Mary McCarthy’s Group were at Vassar; Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is set in an elite liberal arts college in Vermont. Even The Catcher in the Rye, though legendary as a portrait of moody adolescence, is also a brilliant picture of life at the sort of college Salinger himself went to. But no novelist I can think of has

James Walton

Women on the warpath | 31 May 2018

In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he mused, ‘for every time I’d heard someone say, “Why aren’t you more well known?…”’ Looking back on his reviews, you can certainly see what he means. For more than 30 years, virtually all his novels have been not only warmly acclaimed; they’ve also been greeted with the sadly inaccurate declaration that now, at last, he’s bound to achieve the wider fame he deserves. But, as Thomson also acknowledges, in the past decade those missing dollars have taken on a less metaphorical significance. After starting

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Suits you, sir

The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well, so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress,’ Carlyle wrote of the dandy in Sartor Resartus. Tommy Nutter was one of Tommy Carlyle’s dandies, a ‘clothes-wearing man’ and a ‘poet of the cloth’. From 1969 to 1976, Nutter bestrode the world

Sam Byers

Rough justice

Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler of the American underbelly, tends to cite Damon Runyon’s biographer Jimmy Breslin, who said that Runyon ‘did what all good journalists do — he hung out’. Set in the brutal confines of the Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, and, through flashback, in the equally unforgiving milieu of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with the kind of authentic hyper-detail only a good deal of hanging out can capture. Whether she’s describing the ‘clammy fingers of fog… and big bluffs of wet mist working their

Christopher Bray

Been there, done that

Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London (including reviewing films for The Spectator), Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume (perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), ‘Been there,

Justin Marozzi

Lone and level sands

Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the dank, wind-lashed chill of Britain’s moorland for eight of the world’s fieriest deserts, from the Empty Quarter of Oman and Egypt’s Eastern Desert to the Taklamakan in China and an unlikely stint at Burning Man in America’s Black Rock Desert. It’s not entirely clear what prompted these particular journeys or this specific quest. We learn in the second sentence that a long-standing girlfriend has gone to live and work abroad and Atkins is not going with her; so perhaps a retreat into the desert is the wholly appropriate response in

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Romancing the stone wall

We all tell stories about ourselves, every one of us. ‘I’m a useless cook.’ ‘Spiders don’t scare me.’ Not all these stories are true, but then self-perception has never held much truck with truth. Our stories are our own,to hold, repeat and believe in. But what if your story isn’t your own? What if you start out on life’s journey and discover that your story is, in fact, someone else’s? This deeply unsettling scenario provides the driving narrative to this confessional, heartfelt, if somewhat scatty memoir. Whitney Brown was, as we’re frequently reminded, an A-star student, a valedictorian. Growing up in small-town South Carolina, she was the kid deemed ‘most

Julie Mcdowall

Fingers on the nuclear button

In 1983, Soviet spies skulked in our midnight streets to check the lights were out. The Kremlin, convinced the West was planning nuclear war, launched Project RYAN, whereby agents watched for signs of impending attack. One was that lights would burn all night in government buildings, as fiendish mandarins drew up the war plans. It didn’t occur to them that lights might indicate nothing more than cleaners on a late shift. Soviet paranoia was such that they saw menace everywhere, and agents, eager to please Moscow, reinforced this fear. ‘The more alarming the reports, the more the agents were congratulated for their diligence.’ RYAN became self-fulfilling. In an easy, accessible