More from Books

Thursday

Daniel Hahn

Experiences of Eton — and the success it rewards

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was racially abused by another passenger. Besides using several words too offensive to quote, the man spat that Sethi should go back to where she came from. And so she did. Sethi comes from Manchester. Her first reaction to the experience was to speak out, to alert a member of staff and to ensure her abuser faced justice; her second was to start planning a trek across northern England, the landscape that was hers and where she belonged.

Susie Mesure

Studies in vulnerability: A Shock, by Keith Ridgway, reviewed

Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the critical success of Hawthorn & Child, he retired from writing, telling his publishers he was done with making up stories. He also stopped reading — although only for a year, lured back by the likes of Muriel Spark and Georges Simenon’s Maigret series. Reading made him want to write again. The result is A Shock, a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths. The composite form, popular with the likes of Polly Samson, Jennifer Egan and David Szalay, creates something stronger than its parts.

Stuart Jeffries

Liberate yourself from sexual repression the Wilhelm Reich way

When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour by the sign outside claiming that headaches, anger, depression and colds — in fact any symptoms at all — were caused by stuck energy from past traumas that body psychotherapy could release. ‘The idea of the body as a storage unit for emotional distress excited me,’ she writes. Just as well she didn’t present with cancer or the symptoms of Covid. At the time, Laing’s body was, she thought, a cataclysm of inaccessible traumas: ‘I was so rigid and stiff I flinched when anyone touched me, like a mousetrap going off. The massages of Anna, a herbalist, helped.

William Skidelsky

Is Serena Williams’s fame as a cultural icon eclipsing her tennis?

Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but one of her shots is an exception. Her serve is not only one of the most destructive strokes in tennis, it’s also one of the most beguilingly beautiful. Her action begins slowly, even ponderously — as if her limbs are reluctant to emerge from stillness. But from this heaviness comes a sudden gathering, an explosive acceleration, as racket, arm, trunk and legs are flung up in unison towards the ball. Gerald Marzorati devotes a couple of pages to Williams’s serve in Seeing Serena, and he points out something I’d never noticed, which is how ‘effortlessly smooth’ her ball toss is.

Fleur Macdonald

Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed

Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the sexual hang-ups of three ordinary women. It took eight years to research and write. It didn’t seem worth it. Luckily, she was also gathering material for a novel, Animal, a book teeming with the rage, frustration and drama so lacking in the debut. The same motifs and ideas —mothers, desire, shame — appear, but with a story that twists and turns. Animal is the first-person account of Joan, a slightly unhinged 37-year-old woman: ‘I am depraved. I hope you like me.’ She leaves New York after her former lover shoots himself in the face in a restaurant while she’s on a date with another man.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Journey to the end of the world: the full horror of the Belgica’s Antarctic expedition

The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure: an aristocratic expedition commander who carries the pride of a small nation on his shoulders; an eccentric American surgeon who was to become known as one of the greatest frauds in the history of polar exploration; a cantankerous crew, racked by madness, scurvy and mutiny; a desperate sunless polar winter stuck in shifting sea ice that threatens to crush the ship; and finally an escape plan that involves half a ton of explosives and hand-sawing through a mile and a half of sea ice.

James Walton

Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed

Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet life. Freddy Otash breaks legs for Frank Sinatra. He gets Dean Martin’s pregnant Latina maid deported. He sticks the hand of someone blackmailing Liberace into a deep-fat fryer. He sleeps with the 21-year-old Elizabeth Taylor while she’s only on her second marriage. And all that’s in the first 20 pages, while Otash is still an LA cop. Once he goes freelance as a private eye, things turn rather more lurid. Widespread Panic is a rare stand-alone novel among Ellroy’s assorted trilogies and quartets. But, as you can maybe tell already, that doesn’t necessarily make it a radical departure.

Olivia Potts

A lesson in understanding serial killers and child molesters

True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the grisliest, most depraved actions imaginable. Once only the domain of fanatics, true crime is now mainstream. At its best, it’s fascinating, shining a light on human behaviour, but at its worst, it can be voyeuristic and dehumanising. So I approached The Devil You Know, Dr Gwen Adshead’s memoir of forensic psychotherapy charting her encounters with serial killers, murderers and paedophiles with a little trepidation. The book is divided into 11 chapters, each telling the story of an (anonymised) patient of Adshead. They come from her time spent working in prisons, secure hospitals such as Broadmoor and private practice.

Marcus Berkmann

A load of oddballs: the eccentricities of past cricketing heroes

For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a distance, was Sir John Major’s plodding effort, a labour of love to write, I’m sure, but a real labour to read. One of the most astute was Sir Derek Birley’s magisterial A Social History of English Cricket. It apparently helps to be a knight of the realm if you wish to get your cricketing history into hard covers. Richard H. Thomas isn’t there yet — he’s an associate professor of journalism at Swansea university — but his book is so absorbing and entertaining I would be surprised if the offer of at least a CBE wasn’t already in the post. For Thomas has done something unusual but actually very simple and effective.

Frances Wilson

We’ve embraced William Blake without having any idea of what he was on about

Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were on his same wavelength is one of the things, according to John Higgs, ‘that makes his writing a glorious puzzle’. Equally puzzling, argues Higgs, is that the cockney visionary, unsung in his lifetime and buried in a pauper’s grave, has now been absorbed thoroughly into mainstream culture without our having the faintest idea of what he was on about.

Andrew Lycett

Not so dryasdust: how 18th-century antiquarians proved the first ‘modern’ historians

Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over details of manuscripts and shards with little relevance to the wider world. As recently as 1990, the respected ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano skewered their pretensions when he described them as ‘interested in historical facts without being interested in history’. Rosemary Hill, the biographer of Augustus Pugin, the architect of Gothic revivalism, which owed much to antiquarianism, has other ideas.

A. N. Wilson

Leni Riefenstahl is missing: The Dictator’s Muse, by Nigel Farndale, reviewed

Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph of the Will, which won the gold medal at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. It is an unforgettable piece of cinema, with the lonely hero descending, like one of the immortals, from the clouds. As he enters the podium at Nuremberg, we only see the back of his head as he wows the tens of thousands. In Nigel Farndale’s riveting novel, Riefenstahl remarks to one of the athletes at the 1936 Olympics that the only thing which she really cares about is film. This seems indeed to have been the case. Farndale’s story does not concern Triumph of the Will.

Sara Wheeler

The strangest landscapes are close to home

This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so much as a book of fantasy: four small pilgrimages into imagination’. In its pages Nick Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on a raw white onion and meditates both on what remains and on what we have lost. Outlandish is divided into four parts, each covering a short walk through a uniquely unusual landscape: Arctic tundra in the Cairngorms; a remnant of primeval forest straddling Poland and Belarus (‘the closest thing that Europe has to a true jungle’); the continent’s ‘only true desert’, in Spain’s south-eastern Andalucía; and the grassland steppes of Hungary. What unites the four?

Chloë Ashby

Sweet and sour: Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed

I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’. Cafés con leche and jugs of caipirinha with wedges of lime and crushed ice. The clutter of pink-and-white buildings and the port, ‘the masts of boats swaying and clicking in the offshore breeze, the sunlight glassy, dazzling’. In places, those buildings give way to dusty wastelands — ‘areas like this were common in Barcelona’.

Thursday

Clinton Heylin

A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there

Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with her creativity undimmed — like that other postwar English exile P.G. Wodehouse — her afterlife has reaffirmed the old maxim ‘Now that I’m dead I’m finally making a living’. Her collected short stories (as grotesquely funny and sharp as her paintings and their titles) were published on her centenary in 2017. So, too, was a biography by Joanna Moorhead which to most editors would barely have qualified as a proposal. It ran to just over 200 pages, written by a journalist who is ‘especially interested in relationships and family life’ — but didn’t discover until middle age that her second cousin was a world-famous painter.

A. E. Stallings

Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed

We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook, to name a few. Admittedly, Greek mythology has it all: love, sex, murder, incest, cannibalism, magical transformations, pirates, monsters, miracles. Surely some readers, though, will want to go even deeper, to tap into the ancient sources, incorrigibly plural and various. These sources include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s genesis and who-begat-whom of the gods, the Theogony. (Plus a chunk of ‘Greek’ mythology which we actually get via the Roman poet Ovid.

Lynn Barber

The sexploits of Mariella Novotny

Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any credible way. Searching for facts in the foetid gloop of Pizzichini’s prose feels like bog-snorkelling. The subject, Mariella Novotny, was a ‘party girl’, or prostitute, who turns up like Zelig in many 1960s scandals. She claimed to have had sex with John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby when she was only 20, and she was on the scene when Christine Keeler was having her affairs with Profumo and the Russian spy Ivanov. She featured in several News of the World exposés, and later contributed an autobiographical serial to the porn magazine Club International. She was born Stella Marie Capes in 1942 in Sheffield.

Brian Martin

In search of Great-Aunt Pearl’s will: a black comedy of familial strife

Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology of character. This debut novel is narrated by a precocious 14-year-old, Benjamin Carter, whose family on his father’s side is having a collective nervous breakdown. Great-Aunt Pearl has died; her derelict house, ‘a riot of mould and malfunction’, must be sold for the benefit of family members, but first, within the chaotic mess, they must find her will. Cook is master of the judicious turn of phrase.

Hermione Eyre

Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?

I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I put my head in my hands when I realised there were photographs), it was also dispiriting, because it showed up my hypocrisy. Like so many, I would gratefully accept perfusion brain-cooling techniques if they helped me survive surgery, yet I do not wish to read about how these techniques were developed on primates. It would be enough for me just to know that their suffering was minimised. This book asks even more of its reader, by focusing on gruelling experiments that lead nowhere.

John Burnside

Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief

‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and without getting into the detail of his argument, we can say that the impact of having read and admired others is always an issue for all but the most naive writers. And while Bloom’s attempts to ‘de-idealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’ may seem a far cry from the workings of the current literary thriller, even a passing consideration of the influence of James Ellroy, master of LA noir, on his admirer David Peace quickly raises some interesting questions on how we perceive authorship, and authority, in contemporary fiction.