More from Books

Tuesday

Sara Wheeler

The clear and present danger of exploring the Gulag

On 21 February 2022, 35-year-old Charlie Walker flew into Yakutsk in the Russian Far East, ready to ski hundreds of miles up the frozen River Lena, pulling his gear on a sledge. He was heading to the Laptev Sea, a large peripheral bay of the Arctic Ocean. A neighbour at home in London had wished him luck. ‘Frostbite I can handle,’ Walker replied. ‘Let’s just hope Russia doesn’t start a war while I’m there.’ But it did. Walker writes: ‘That Special Military Operation changed everything: for me, for Ukraine and for the world.’ Obliged to change plans, he flew north-east to Batagay over the Verkhoyansk Mountains, and from there set out over the Yana and Omoloy rivers.

Horatio Clare

A trove of avian lore and history

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: ‘Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not “What is that bird?” but “Who is that bird?”. The aim is to help readers identify with them.

Jianan Qian

A grandmother’s twisted mind: The Passage of Roses, by Tie Ning, reviewed

At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural Revolution in which bourgeois families and pre-1949 intellectuals are purged and banished. But the unnerving characters of Si Yiwen and her granddaughter Mei, whom Si cares for, influences and later harms, soon promise something different. Born into wealth in Old China, Si survives under the new regime as a marginal housewife, insignificant enough to avoid persecution. Yet it is precisely this insignificance that piques her desire for recognition. From an early age, she was denied love with a young revolutionary and was then ignored by her husband and in-laws. Now she finds herself drawn to the political fervour like a moth to a flame.

Anne Sebba

There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units

Most conventional second world war military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory over Hitler and the Axis powers. Little has been written about blood as a strategic resource. However, a pioneering service of specially trained medics who worked dangerously close to the front lines, pumping blood into the veins of battle casualties, saved not only lives but contributed significantly to winning the war. They did this by returning men to the front line and boosting morale by persuading them that, if wounded, they had the maximum chance of life.

Piers Torday

No fairytale: The Children, by Melissa Albert, reviewed

Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland. This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children.

Bryan Appleyard

Alien fever shows no signs of abating

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; Danny Lavelle is a journalist and sceptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US army initially claimed were parts of a ‘flying disc’.

Boyd Tonkin

Vigilante justice: Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, reviewed

Like the Booker, the Prix Goncourt’s laureates now tend to veer between diamonds and duds. One of the strongest recent novels to take France’s premier book award was, in 2021, The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, from Senegal. Almost a West African Possession, it sent its narrator on a quest for a cult writer named T.C. Elimane – inspired by the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem – who had vanished after claims of plagiarism shredded his reputation. A combination of mystery, satire and cultural inquiry, it spotlit the fate of African authors who are lionised and then forsaken by the Parisian literary elite. The Goncourt coup has prompted English-language publishers to revisit Sarr’s backlist.

Tuesday

Henry Hitchings

Nothing works: The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, reviewed

For more than half a century, M. John Harrison has been writing about decay and dispossession in a style that is at once restless and exacting. Often an audacious weaver of science fictions, he has also operated in a ruggedly realistic vein – though the distinction would probably strike him as bogus, a marketing position rather than useful framing. The End of Everything occupies typical Harrison terrain, with notes of J.G. Ballard and David Lynch as well as more than a hint of Stanley Spencer’s paintings (think compost heaps and clutter).

Clemmie Read

Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed

The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead. He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food... pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.

Mark Cocker

Symbol of wisdom or harbinger of death – the owl preserves its mystery

As the author of this engaging book makes plain, it is with good reason that owls are such cherished birds. They possess the most acute sense of hearing not just of any avian group but possibly of any creature. In experimental conditions of total darkness, barn owls were able to catch mice merely by hearing their rustling as they moved. The owls’ own flight is soundless because of special comb-like structures on the leading edges of their wings. Almost all owl species are adapted to see acutely at night and the largest are able to catch deer or pluck young eagles from the nest. But it is not merely these definable physical attributes that set owls apart. They also have a psychological aura. Their forward-facing eyes in a rather flat-faced configuration mimic our own arrangement.

Charlotte Stroud

The agonies of an abandoned wife: Mrs Dickens, by Emily Howes, reviewed

For every smog-spitting chimney in Victorian London there was a woman tasked with keeping the hearth clean, both physically and morally. This ‘angel in the house’, as Coventry Patmore dubbed her, lived entirely for her family, but above all for her husband. With her organs tightly compressed beneath a whalebone corset, she ministered to his every need and forgave him all his worldly sins. She was, in short, not a real woman but an ideal. In Mrs Dickens, Emily Howes exercises the novelist’s prerogative to flesh out an ideal, to show how the real woman beneath her halo of thorns suffered.

Philip Hensher

The banality of Hélène von Bismarck’s view of Britain is astounding

Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.

Jim Lawley

The disgrace of Juan Carlos of Spain, a modern-day Don Juan

The life of Juan Carlos I, Spain’s 88-year-old former king, who reigned from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, falls into two parts: richly deserved triumph followed by richly deserved disgrace. Building on his 2004 biography, Juan Carlos: A People’s King, Paul Preston’s account of this extraordinary life is magisterial. The son of Don Juan de Borbon, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938. With a view to the eventual restoration of an authoritarian monarchy, he was sent to Spain, aged ten, to be indoctrinated in General Franco’s political tenets. He also had to endure the dictator’s long lectures on the mistakes made by previous Spanish monarchs.

Victor Sebestyen

The botched coup that presaged the end of the Soviet Union

The best thing about the Soviet Union – arguably the only good thing – was the manner of its going. Though it lost its European empire when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, almost nobody predicted that the USSR itself would fall apart so quickly. Most historians, Moscow-based journalists and the world’s espionage agencies thought it would limp on for decades, like the Ottoman empire. Yet the world’s second most powerful state withered away, and not in the classical Marxist sense: it just ceased to exist. As Robert Service shows, the Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union, not outsiders, and without any significant violence.

Kate Chisholm

In the dazzling company of Alexander Pope and friends

In the summer of 1726, the writers Jonathan Swift and John Gay spent several weeks at the home of their friend Alexander Pope on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham (then known as ‘Twitnam’), not resting but toiling away at their various literary activities and mutually inspiring each other. On the surface they were an unlikely trio: Swift was almost 20 years older than either Pope or Gay; Pope was Catholic (at a time when Catholicism was still treated with suspicion) and financially independent, while Swift was an Anglican cleric, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Gay, in contrast, was a jobbing writer, dependent for financial security on his amiable sociability and maintenance of good relations with a long list of wealthy patrons.

Tuesday

Alys Key

Jaded and adrift: I Want You to Be Happy, by Jem Calder, reviewed

Two people make an awkward stab at a relationship, even as both flounder under the realities of modern life. Yes, we’ve seen elements of I Want You to Be Happy before – and it even comes with an endorsement from Sally Rooney. But Jem Calder still succeeds in offering something fresh, and the novel stands on its own two feet as an intricate analysis of love in the 2020s. Chuck and Joey meet at a nightclub. He is in his thirties, recently single, with a steady job as a senior copywriter. She is in her early twenties and works as a barista. The chapters alternate between their perspectives as their relationship develops. It’s a very east London book. The couple’s dates include a trip to ‘an independent bookshop, whose branded tote bag they both owned’.

Jonathan Meades

The world’s most beautiful man in a den of iniquity

A photograph from the late 1960s shows a lavishly underdressed Marianne Faithfull sandwiched between Alain Delon, the most beautiful man in the world, and Mick Jagger, the second most beautiful man in the Rolling Stones. The gulf between these two indefatigable tombeurs is not merely sartorial. Delon wears a sharp suit, gun-metal grey, and a black tie. There are the makings of a master/servant dialogue here, for Jagger, far from mondaine, is gauche and scruffy with mismatched socks, no doubt counter-cultural. His picayune mis-demeanour, and his fitting up by bad apples in blue such as Pilcher of the Met, might have been a glitch, but it all turned out cosily parish-pump and, further, a great career move, assisted by William Rees-Mogg’s indignation. No one died in that Sussex cottage.

Genevieve Gaunt

Mapping the Emerald Isle: Land, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed

Maggie O’Farrell’s two previous historical novels, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, made her a household name. Land marks a return to her Irish roots: ‘Every family has its myths and ours was that my great-great-grandfather had worked on the early maps of Ireland.’ The year is 1865 and 31-year-old Tomás, a mapmaker, accompanied by his ten-year-old son Liam, is in the employ of the English redcoats and tasked with surveying and mapping Ireland from top to bottom, rocky outcrop to drumlin.

Suzi Feay

Signs of impending doom: The Given World, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed

Melissa Harrison’s bestselling 2018 novel All Among the Barley, set in the early 1930s, was much concerned with the pace of change in the countryside. The interfering outsider Constance FitzAllen passionately advocated for tradition, while worn-down farmers welcomed any innovation that would ease their punishing workload. Almost a century later, in another fictional English village, change can be neither debated nor resisted. While Barley was narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her rural childhood, The Given World portrays a whole community, granting a chapter each to significant characters over six months, with birds, blossom and crops forming a restless backdrop.

Elizabeth Garner

The importance of fairy tales in testing times

In the realm of magic and imagination, human nature can be better understood than in the world of our everyday lives: ‘The best of our tales do not lie or die.’ It is a bold claim, which the folklorist Jack Zipes explores across continents and class in a series of essays. He guides the reader from the origin of oral storytelling, through medieval writings, to 17th-century literary salons and finally to today’s cinema screens. In the course of this journey, he focuses on the specific genre of the ‘wonder tale’, in which ‘those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognise the wondrous signs... They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism.