Book review

Thursday

Henry Keswick

By Patten or design?

My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to the TV set. I’m more assiduous: I have actually read this book under review. And Chris Patten’s latest memoir is a very enjoyable read — the account of a life of considerable privilege. Born into a middle-class family in suburban London, Patten won an exhibition to Balliol before — after a brief dalliance with US politics — he became a Conservative apparatchik and, in due course, an MP. Once he’d reached the cabinet, he was a made man — and from his middle years onward garnered a succession of agreeable

Alan Judd

The infamous four

Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy to forget that we also spawned a few who worked for the Germans in the second world war. This book concerns four of them: John Amery, wastrel son of a Conservative cabinet minister; William Joyce, the Irish-American Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Haw-Haw; Harold Cole, soldier and petty criminal who sent 150 or more Resistance members to their deaths; and Eric Pleasants, a circus strong-man who disavowed national loyalties while donning German uniform. Their motives were mixed but, treachery apart, they had one thing in common: an insistence on

James Walton

Playing Stalin for laughs

Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read. The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953 — and that a road accident when he was six damaged his brain, leaving him with a curious set of symptoms that couldn’t be worse suited to life under Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask awkward questions and a face so angelically trustworthy that everybody tells him their deepest secrets. Given

Graham Robb

Something in the water

‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’ From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the

Ian Thomson

The new age of the refugee

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic

Mick Brown

A strange vibration

Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of the so called ‘summer of love’ in 1967 the British historian Arnold Toynbee, on a visit to San Francisco, made his way to the Haight-Ashbury district — hippy central — to catch a concert by one of the Bay Area’s most popular bands, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Just what Toynbee, who was 78 at the time, made of the group’s epic exercise in free form, psychedelic improvisation, ‘The Fool’, Goldberg does not mention. But he does tell us that elsewhere in the Haight, at around the same time, Dame Margot Fonteyn

Thursday

Frank Brinkley

A choice of first novels | 29 June 2017

Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen Moran learning that her brother —adopted, as she was — has committed suicide. Helen lives in New York, working with troubled teenagers who have dubbed her ‘Sister Reliability’. Against familial expectations she returns to Milwaukee to her adoptive parents’ home for the funeral. But Helen has not arrived simply to grieve: Perhaps to investigate his death would revitalise my own life, and if I could communicate my eventual findings to them, it would strengthen and support the lives of my adoptive parents as well. Despite her nickname and these somewhat

Keith Lowe

High flyers

It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their covers. So, it seems, do passengers on the No. 29 bus. For a middle-aged man reading Clare Mulley’s The Women Who Flew for Hitler, some of the looks I got made me so uncomfortable that I took to hiding the cover behind a newspaper. So let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: this is not a niche book for Third Reich enthusiasts, nor a seedy excuse to fantasise about women in Nazi uniforms. Do not be put off by the awful title: it is in fact a serious double

Jonathan Mcaloon

Life classes

It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of her wonderful 2010 book The Possessed —a chimera of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism — she declares: I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life… and that, as an aspiring novelist, I should therefore try not to read too many novels. Selin, the Turkish-American protagonist of her first novel, is engaged in gathering writerly experience at Harvard, reading novels and falling for Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student with a girlfriend. The pair begin an online relationship at the dawn of email. But

Houman Barekat

Whimsical digressions

The practical difficulties of extracting keys from the pockets of tight-fitting trousers while ascending stairs; the logistical hazards of seducing pub landladies; the absurdity of certain idiomatic expressions if interpreted too literally; the qualitative difference between homemade and shop-bought pizza. Such are the disparate matters occupying the mind of Simon Okotie’s unnamed detective protagonist as he goes about investigating the disappearance of a colleague. In the Absence of Absalon holds a plethora of whimsical digressions in a wafer-thin plot, as Okotie’s story-telling is repeatedly driven off-piste. These, along with the geometric minutiae of his surroundings, are dissected with the kind of exhaustive, hyper-officious attention to contingency we might expect to

William Leith

Two dark tales

Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed kissing’. She says: ‘I love kissing her.’ And: ‘We kissed and kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off.’ And: ‘I kissed her again.’ And: ‘I reached down between her legs.’ And: ‘She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.’ Then she says: ‘And then it didn’t.’ The sex feels good. Then it doesn’t. Something has happened to the author, deep in her past, and it comes

Steven Poole

Size matters | 29 June 2017

Trust scientists to ruin all our fun. The spectacularly beautiful 2014 film reboot of Godzilla, it turns out, is anatomically misleading. At 350ft tall, such a beast would simply collapse under its own weight, because an animal’s mass cubes with a doubling of its size, while the strength of its supporting limbs only squares. The basic principle was known to Galileo, and it turns out that the simple observation that things do not scale linearly can tell us much else besides, as this quite dazzling book amply demonstrates. Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who became interested in biology and then in cities, and (with colleagues at the Santa Fe

Jonathan Steinberg

The appeal of mysticism

This extraordinary book has two main characters: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), an early Zionist and the founder of the modern study of traditional Jewish mysticism, and the author George Prochnik, who was 28 when he first moved with his then wife to make a new life in Israel. Stranger in a Strange Land has as subtitle ‘Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem’; but it also tells the story of Prochnik’s search for his own identity. If this sounds complicated, it is. The reader needs to pay attention to the shifts from one period and place to another. Scholem went to Palestine in 1923 when hardly anybody from the German bourgeoisie made

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Fad fury

Anthony Warner is angry. He’s angry about diets. He’s angry about detoxes. He’s angry about pseudoscience — and he has good reason. Fad diets are nothing new: for centuries, there have been charlatans whose dubious diets will help you lose weight, love life and beat cancer. But the rise of social media over the past 15 years has given such charlatans unprecedented reach. Their regimes and recipes, their coffee table books and Instagram posts suck in the young, the gullible and the vulnerable. Anthony Warner’s mission is to set the record straight. Warner has been writing as ‘The Angry Chef’ on his blog and elsewhere for several years. As he

Craig Raine

Worthy, but wordy

Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit and arranging for Johann Eckermann to record his conversation. He is, says Kundera, designing a handsome smoking jacket, posing for posterity. He wants to look his best. Then along comes the young Bettina von Arnim, a platonic flirtation from his past, with an alternative, memorably ridiculous version, ostensibly admiring, in which Goethe’s wife Christiane is portrayed as ‘the crazy, fat sausage’. There is immortal egg on the facings of that smoking jacket. In the case of Czesław Miłosz, we have a variant on this paradigm. He wanted, as it were,

Thursday

P. F. King

A policeman’s lot

Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’, John Sutherland’s memoir is most to be admired for its frank depiction of mental breakdown. Sutherland has spent more than 20 years in the Met and this memoir, presented in a sequence of short, staccato episodes told in the present tense (which feel like expanded blog entries), covers his entire career to date, including a number of high-profile cases that readers will be familiar with. Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue

Anne Margaret Daniel

Borne back ceaselessly into the past

‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936. Fitzgerald may not have liked it, but he certainly let himself in for it. As he wrote, with a grin, in 1937: ‘Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short stories, that is, all the parts that could go into print.’ Of all the male American modernist writers with tragic lives, including Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane and Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald still serves to many people as the defining figure. A glittering success as a writer when he was just 23, Fitzgerald died 20

Stuart Kelly

A barren prospect

In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife, Sylvie, 35, is a former topless dancer and aspiring film-maker. Sylvie has a dog but wants a baby. Together they will cross the former Soviet bloc looking for a child of their own, despite Sylvie having already had three abortions: Romania is their chosen finale, where, of course, orphans are two-a-penny. There is much to admire in it; but the clever bits aren’t funny and the funny bits aren’t clever. The novel is littered with references to continental theorists. Blanchot, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan all show up — poor

James Bartholomew

The disgrace of the British left

Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years ago and happened to hear about Norilsk, a remote, frozen part of Siberia where the Soviet Union had established forced labour camps. Udy managed to get permission to visit the place. The temperature there could fall to as low as 50C and many thousands died due to this, low rations and barbaric treatment. The inmates were too weak to dig deep graves in the ice-hardened ground for the ones who died, so sometimes the slow movement of the Earth still brings bones to the surface. Udy’s original idea was to

Sara Wheeler

The greatest survival story

This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic for 26 years. The island was St Helena, and Fernão Lopes is the ‘other exile’ of the book’s title, in contrast to Napoleon, who pitched up 300 years later. But Lopes’s lonely sojourn was self-imposed. He was born in Lisbon in Portugal’s Golden Age, when Manuel I embarked on an ambitious period of expansion and ushered his nation into the ranks of the great European powers. Lopes was not of noble line, but had a good education and rigorous military training and rose to become a