Book review

Thursday

Sofka Zinovieff

When Rachel Cusk went to Greece: would she be nice or nasty?

Last year in Athens, rumours raced about Rachel Cusk’s creative writing classes at the British Council. Some of the (mostly Athenian) pupils revered her for her intelligence and pitiless honesty, while others reviled her for her ‘colonial attitude’ and an apparent antipathy towards Greeks. One might suspect Greeks of tending towards intense emotional reactions, but the phlegmatic British have had no less divided opinions about Cusk’s books. The author of seven novels, she was amongst Granta’s best young writers in 2003, yet her memoirs about the horrors of having babies (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother) and about the break-up of her ten-year marriage (Aftermath) provoked outrage as well

Christopher Howse

Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking photographs’. One of the most successful of these is a black and white image of male and female figures: ‘Gruesome and gaunt, they look like extras from an early piece of zombie cinema.’ They are, it soon becomes clear, oddments saved by firemen from a blaze at Madame Tussauds in 1925. Madame Tussaud, the author reminds us, ‘would ‘tiptoe through the piles of corpses behind the guillotine to discover the most illustrious of the heads, and would promptly make casts of them, her hands bathed in their blood’. Each little

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How dare this author trash one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century?

Should one say ‘vicious circle’ or ‘vicious cycle’? That’s a question that just goes round and round inside my head. In the case of the American novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, he has always abhorred reviewers (‘whores and failures’, in his eyes), and the reviewers have returned the compliment. When he was paid $400,000 for the script of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, it was the highest price ever for a screenplay, and the pundits were quick to pan it. The public differed, and the film was a smash hit (the script, of course, is a masterpiece). But it’s interesting to consider why Goldman has always been

Alexander Starritt

Margaret Atwood settles her accounts with this new short story collection

Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has never fully shaken off the suspicion that her politics have spoiled her writing. Despite the practised prose, delicate observation and steady-handed drip-feed of plot, there sometimes rises off the page a teacherly spirit that grabs you by the lapels and says, ‘Now listen here’. Gender relations, climate change; Atwood would probably say these subjects are more important than whether the direction of a book isn’t just a bit too obvious. And maybe she’s right. But it bodes well for the reader that in Stone Mattress, her new collection of ‘tales’,

James Walton

Howard Jacobson’s J convinced me that I’d just read a masterpiece

At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard Jacobson. It’s set in a future Britain where some sort of apocalypse — known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’ — has taken place several decades ago. It also contains virtually no jokes. Yet, from within this unfamiliar framework, some familiar concerns soon emerge. In 2010, The Finkler Question was hailed as the first comic novel to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. But the book darkened considerably towards the end, with Jacobson unsmilingly warning his readers — and especially any fellow Jews who regard such

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914

Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992). What made that book so captivating was the young narrator’s sweet, naïve total acceptance of the chaotically nomadic existence her hippy mother brought her to in Morocco. The first-person voice was enchantingly concise, always noticing colours, as little girls do (‘the red and green town’), and unquestioningly stating the facts: ‘Bea and I waited at the Polio school while Mum looked for somewhere else to live.’ Freud’s latest novel, Mr Mac and Me, is also written in the first person through the eyes of a child: a 12-year-old

Sean Mcglynn

Britain’s own game of thrones

Thank goodness for Game of Thrones. I think. Apparently it is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, drawing inspiration from the bloody, ruthless machinations of England’s power-brokers at the waning of the Middle Ages. Anyway, plenty of readers and watchers of George R.R. Martin’s work think that it is; what with that and BBC television’s recent The White Queen and She-Wolves series and (spot the marketing opportunity) the Shakespearean trilogy of, ahem, The Hollow Crown, undergraduates are queuing up for courses on this period of history. As I teach one, that has to be a good thing. Chuck ‘the Tudors’ into the title of your book and you’re on

Michael Bywater

A flashlight into the cellar of the lawless ‘dark net’

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the world wide web, and I wonder whether its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, would still have given it away had he known where it would be now. Had he foreseen Google and Facebook and Twitter, the conquest of web porn and the normalisation among teen-agers of misogyny and sodomy, the endless harvesting and mining of data, the surveillance, the cruelty and vulgarity and invasive crassness, the commercialisation of everything — would he still have said, ‘Have it for free, in the common good’? That’s a question that only he can answer. But the great fascination of the web lies in the near-asymptotic rate at

John Akeroyd

Bees make magic: an inspirational case for biodiversity

The importance of biodiversity, a handy concept that embraces diversity of eco-systems, species, genes and molecules, has been promoted for over three decades. Yet much life on Earth still faces unsustainable loss or extinction, perhaps because, as an otherwise upbeat Dave Goulson notes in A Buzz in the Meadow, ‘at a global level, conservation efforts so far have been a dismal failure’. A bumblebee specialist with an extensive interest in the natural world, Goulson presents an inspirational case for awareness and appreciation of the teeming diversity of living things that exists even in our gardens or the local park. In this discursive account of the insects in a French meadow,

Patrick Skene-Catling

A Troubles novel with plenty of violence and, thank heaven, some sex too

‘The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying. . . . They will go without a struggle, unlamented,’ Christopher Bland, 76, declares at the outset of his exciting, poignant and ultimately consoling debut novel. He refers particularly to the Protestant landed gentry, who achieved political and economic ascendancy in Ireland even before the Penal Laws disenfranchised and dispossessed the Catholic majority, until, in the 20th century, rebellion and civil war brought about independence, with incomplete national unity. Everyone in Ireland of mixed English and Irish parentage, on every social level, is Anglo-Irish; however, Bland is most concerned with the history of the declining power and eventual more or less harmonious assimilation of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began

In Burberry’s on Regent Street on a dank December day in 1959, David Kynaston records, ‘a young Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen […] bought a not-yet-famous blue raincoat’. For those joining Kynaston’s groaning historical wagon train for the first time, this is a sample of the sort of thing with which it abounds. Here is a fun little fact — gathered in from a distinctly marginal source — dropped in a wry half-sentence where it belongs chronologically, but looking forward to the future: a stitch in time. A Shake of the Dice is the sixth book in Tales of a New Jerusalem, the great historian’s ‘projected sequence of books about Britain

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

Improbable, unconvincing and lazy – Ian McEwan’s latest is unforgivable

The Children Act could hardly be more attuned to the temper of the times, appearing just as our newspapers are full of a story about parents absconding to Spain with their critically ill child. The incident makes us wonder who should have ultimate responsibility for a sick minor: his parents, his doctors, the law? Ian McEwan’s short novel examines these very questions and, like the family currently in the headlines, his patient is a Jehovah’s Witness. Here the boy is suffering from leukemia and requires immediate treatment, but his religion forbids the transfusion of blood. The book’s heroine, Fiona Maye, is a judge whose task it is to determine what

Paul Staines

Owen Jones’s new book should be called The Consensus: And How I Want to Change it

Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the other end of society, the ruling class. On the cover of The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It the cod-philosopher and comedian Russell Brand endorses the author as ‘this generation’s Orwell’. Jones’s concept of the Establishment is more than Henry Fairlie’s matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised through social networks; it is a state of mind, ‘the ideas and mentalities’ that govern the way certain people behave. The Establishment is made up of ‘powerful groups that need to protect their position in a

William Leith

A book about human nature that makes your head spin – in a good way

Vincent Deary is a therapist, and this book is the first part of a trilogy. How We Are is about human nature. Books two and three will be called How We Break and How We Mend. Three serious tomes, backed by a serious publisher. You open it thinking: this is not going to be an easy self-help book where everything is mapped out for you. It won’t be a walk in the park. In fact, pretty much the first thing Deary does is to examine the concept of walking in a park. ‘“A walk in the park” is a synonym for ease,’ he tells us, ‘because the park knows how

Lewis Jones

Enjoy gin but don’t read books? Or read them only while drinking gin? This is the book for you

Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful drink that embodies the best of London’, which is a judgment that would raise eyebrows even at closing time in Soho. It is not a remotely scholarly book. There are no notes or index, and on the second page Olivia Williams informs us that the first citation for gin in the OED is from 1714, as ‘an infamous liquor’. It’s actually from 1723, as ‘the infamous liquor’ — mere details, but still. I stopped checking things after that. It’s essentially a book for people who enjoy gin but don’t necessarily

Robert Collins

How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), featured a disembodied spirit that wandered around making itself at home in other people’s souls. Transmigration spread throughout that book — the lives of its characters intertwined in brilliantly intricate ways — and has continued to throughout Mitchell’s fiction. When his characters aren’t being reborn as new people in one book, they’re turning up alive and well for a second outing in another. His latest, The Bone Clocks, continues the cycle of endless rebirth. Like four out of five of his earlier works, this supernatural, intertwining epic has made it

Aidan Hartley

The forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army

The British who fought in Burma became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’ because this was a neglected theatre of the second world war. Barnaby Phillips’s tale is about the African forces fighting across this green hell — ‘the forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the Forgotten Army’. At the age of 16 Isaac Fadoyebo left his village in colonial Nigeria and joined Britain’s call for recruits in the war. Hitler did regard black people as ‘semi-apes’, but Britain enrolled 500,000 Africans to fight for a cause they barely understood against enemies on the other side of the world. Isaac was sent not to battle the Nazis in Europe, as

Jane Ridley

Is there anything left to say about Queen Victoria? A.N. Wilson has found plenty

Do we really need a thumping new life of Queen Victoria? She seems to be one of our most familiar figures, the subject of countless books; but the surprising fact is that there hasn’t been a full, authoritative study since Elizabeth Longford’s life of 1974. A.N. Wilson has spent many years thinking and reading about Queen Victoria, and this superb revisionist biography is the book that he was born to write. In Wilson’s view there are two Victorias. The young Victoria was always someone’s pawn, trying to be a person that she wasn’t. She was in thrall first to Lord Melbourne and then to Baron Stockmar and Prince Albert. Only

Thursday

Tobias Grey

In defence of the Jacobins

The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a new political instrument,’ writes Eric Hazan. ‘The King of France never gave speeches and neither did his ministers.’ Indeed Louis XVI’s lack of eloquence, or more specifically his egregious line of sentimental claptrap, had fatal repercussions for him in the court of public opinion. He was certainly no Mirabeau, whose speeches, printed in their thousands, were heard right across the country. Travelling in France at the time of the Revolution, the English writer Arthur Young noted how the Parisian coffee houses were alive with speech-making: ‘Expectant crowds are at the

Wynn Wheldon

Kafka goes to Dubai

‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his new novel is a riff on Kafka’s The Castle. Kafka’s ‘K’ has become X, struggling for recognition by his lover, by his employer, by the world. The Situation is a residential block in Dubai (desert sand for Kafka’s snow). X is a corporate lawyer who has been invited there by an old college friend, a dodgy Lebanese billionaire, to handle the family’s personal financial affairs. The burdens of this job constitute the first of the three threads that bind the novel together. The second is the story of X’s relationship