Books

A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession: she imagines them as painted saintly icons, golden against a dark wall, ‘flies crawling across their faces… the first threads of a spider’s web spun from their eyes’. People in the Room is set in the early 20th century in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano, where the author lived as a child.

The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts, after all, to spin a yarn out of a rich Upper East Side orphan who decides to put herself to sleep for a year in an attempt at rebirth. Beyond the evident — the death of her parents, an obnoxious man in her life — precisely why our narrator wishes to shed her skin remains unclear to us; but her tenacity in pursuing oblivion is unshakeable.

Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member, conducts its business and that of the country. Those who control the destinies of that government would do well to read his book on Adam Smith, and indeed Adam Smith himself.

The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar naivety was shown by his would-be rescuers. Helen Rappaport’s frank and brilliant study of the various efforts to save the Romanovs begins, intelligently, with the race to save them from themselves. Their downfall began in 1916 as the course of the first world war began to run against Russia.

Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track and outmanoeuvre their foreign and domestic enemies. So they place spies, suborn traitors, eavesdrop, decipher other people’s messages, subvert their governments, assassinate their servants and sabotage their property. The technology has changed massively over the centuries; the aims and the basic methods have not.

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and envies her. Her pain is temporary; his is permanent.