Books

“Very fine people on both sides” was one of the first Trumpisms to enter our national lexicon. In the heady days of 2017, when Donald Trump’s presence in the White House was still a novelty and liberal resistance at its peak, the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia precipitated a full-blown political crisis. Trump, in his inimitable fashion, clumsily suggested that those protesting the statue’s removal had a point, an argument that was widely interpreted as proof of his secret affinity for Confederate sympathizers, white supremacists and other far-right fanatics. In truth, Trump was awkwardly defending a version of the Civil War that has lately been eclipsed in our national consciousness. Is Trump a history buff?

Film The Substance Seeing Dune: Part Two in IMAX, with the floor shaking as Paul Atreides’s forces charged the palace was my second-best cinema-going experience of the year. Trumping it was watching a DC audience recoil every other minute at Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror The Substance, a film that nods to Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg while declaring itself the most original of 2024. Two-thirds of the way through, I stopped wincing and started laughing, probably because my body didn’t know how to react. The film is a brutal parable of female self-loathing and insecurity — exacerbated, of course, by a venal male-led system, which Dennis Quaid’s producer Harvey personifies in a manner as grotesque as any of the movie’s gross-out special effects.

I wouldn’t have thought a book about America’s decline would cause me to laugh out loud, but having enjoyed its author Matt Purple’s work for years now (full disclosure: he’s a personal friend and former Spectator colleague), I should not have been the least bit surprised that his debut book is as funny as it is insightful. Decline from the Top: Snapshots from America’s Crisis and Glimmers of Hope is a veritable joy to read. Though he declares himself to be a “cranky conservative,” Purple’s humor and wit offer a diagnostic examination of the American condition that exudes warmth and obvious heartfelt concern for our nation’s wellbeing.

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate “catch-fart.” (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim.

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a seventeenth-century craftsman and a twentieth-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to lgo on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes?

During his lifetime, author Cormac McCarthy was renowned for being one of literature’s most retiring, even reclusive figures. Although his books and original screenplays were adapted into high-profile films by the likes of the Coen brothers and Ridley Scott, he barely gave interviews and preferred to lead a quiet and low-key existence in his own home own Santa Fe. Most believed that his solitude simply came about because of his desire to be left alone, but now an explosive new Vanity Fair feature has put a metaphorical rocket under McCarthy’s posthumous reputation. The article, written by Vincenzo Barney, reveals that, when McCarthy was forty-two years old, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Augusta Britt, who he met by a motel pool.

“I have been instructed to tell you that what you are proposing is entirely impossible. Nevertheless, in Iran, even the totally impossible becomes possible at times.” Such was the mysterious riddle that confronted the English art dealer Oliver Hoare as he sat across from an Iranian contact in Paris in 1992. He had just presented a madcap plan: to reunite the state of Iran with one of its most prized but long-lost manuscripts.   The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is an illustrated epic poem comprising 50,000 rhyming couplets. Completed in the mid-sixteenth century, this “book of Kings” is one of the most exquisite examples of Islamic art and poetry ever to have been produced.

"Woke” is a term much overused by those on both sides of the culture war but — a little like pornography — while it may be difficult to define, you absolutely know it when you see it. The capture of the entertainment industry by an ideology — perhaps more accurately described as a group of roughly consanguineous ideas that seem, superficially, to be the Right, Kind and Thoughtful beliefs to hold — seems now to be absolute. Fiction of all kinds has been affected, but heroic narratives have proved especially vulnerable, perhaps because of the size and dedication of their audiences. You will doubtless know the kind of thing I mean.