More from Books

Tuesday

Anthony Sattin

The citizens of nowhere adrift in the West

We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy to see how the castle walls were breached – first by mobile phones and wifi, then by the smart speakers and other gadgets that help and also harvest us. The idea that our homes are inviolate seems quaint nowadays. We know there are many other ways in which we are being uncastled, not least by government agents acting with impunity. And if you think that’s a problem, wait till you read the other home truths delivered by Ece Temelkuran in a book you’ll ignore at your peril. Temelkuran is a writer of rare gifts with an urgent message. Her first books, including the award-winning Women who Blow on Knots, appeared in her native Turkish.

Brian Martin

No good deed goes unpunished: A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone is talking about. Shriver’s problem is that her plot and her characters can seem like ciphers for her polemical views; they dominate the novel’s form. Gloria Bonaventura, a 62-year-old divorcée, lives with Nico, her 26-year-old, Fordham educated, unemployed layabout son, in a Queen Anne mansion in a fashionable part of New York.

Christopher Harding

The two faces of modern Japan

Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of those problems. You’ll enjoy hyper-modern Tokyo with its fabulous restaurants, flawless transport and non-stop shopping and entertainment. You’ll jostle tourists and schoolchildren for the perfect view of the Golden Temple in Kyoto without losing your enthusiasm for Japan’s ‘eternal city’. Then you’ll fly home with pretty much only good things to say about Japan and the Japanese.

Rowan Williams

Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions

If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists to’ is hardly fair, the whole persona, the register of his writing and performing, resists any mood of simple celebration.

Jim Lawley

Growing up with thieves, murderers and heroin addicts

‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of this extraordinary coming-of-age story. And: ‘If your parents are missionaries, it changes everything... They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.’ In the 1980s and 1990s Jonathan’s parents, Elliott and Mary, were American missionaries in San Blas, then the poorest part of Madrid: ‘Our neighbourhood was the biggest drug supermarket not only in Spain but in all of Europe.’ At a time when Spain hadn’t started spending on prevention or rehabilitation, Jonathan, aged seven, along with his two older brothers – all of them blond and blue-eyed – saw junkies lying dead in ditches.

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

Goddesses and courtesans: six centuries of the female body in art

This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the present but also to explain how this body has been used to express both emotion and the attitudes of the day. Take Hiran Powers’s 1845 marble sculpture of a naked woman in chains, entitled ‘The Greek Slave’. This appeared after Britain had abolished slavery but before the American Civil War had put an end to it in the US. Thanks in part to the statue’s symbolism, beauty and perhaps also to its slight but titillating hint of bondage and thus of female subjection, it touched many nerves.

Gareth Rees

Lust for gold: White River Crossing, by Ian McGuire, reviewed

Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts, embodied the Schopenhauerian creed that to be human is to suffer. His latest, White River Crossing, is no different. Canada, 1766. A pedlar appears at Prince of Wales Fort, a Hudson Bay Company trading post on the Churchill River, bearing a fistful of gold ore. The chief factor, Magnus Norton, dispatches his deputy, John Shaw, his nephew, Abel Walker, and Tom Hearn, first mate of the fort’s whaling sloop, on a 500-mile expedition to the Barren Grounds, deep in the subarctic tundra, to locate the source of the treasure. They’re guided by a native Indian chieftain, Datsanthi, and his family.

Michael Arditti

Musical bumps: Discord, by Jeremy Cooper, reviewed

From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. In Discord, Jeremy Cooper’s eighth novel, Rebekah Rosen goes a step further, seeking inspiration not in nature itself but in a wartime diary chronicling the annual crops on a Peckham allotment. She intends to use this natural code as the basis of a piece for saxophone and orchestra commissioned for the 2022 BBC Proms.  Her chosen soloist is Evie Bennett, a rising star on the international stage. Cooper’s narrative traces their complex – indeed, discordant – collaboration, through alternating points of view. Though both trained at the Royal College of Music, in other respects they are polar opposites.

Rupert Shortt

What hope is there for the Church of England today?

A familiar defence of Anglicanism holds that flowers of principle bloomed in the mucky soil of compromise. Yes, this idea runs, the Church of England that evolved from Henry VIII’s marital strife was indeed a theological hotchpotch; but there is nevertheless much to be said for a tolerant strand of Christianity forming a middle way between Roman Catholic and hardline Protestant alternatives.   The perceived breadth of Anglicanism has long remained its selling point. Like the proverbial Australian farm, it is (or was) a Church with few fences but many wells. Elasticity over matters of secondary importance used to apply at a structural level.

Ian Birrell

Are western governments actively facilitating money laundering?

On the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, there is a two-storey factory churning out a vast number of dollar bills every day for the United States Federal Reserve. When Oliver Bullough visited, he counted 129 pallets in one room, collectively containing more than $4 billion. He also watched a woman use a jack to casually shift another $64 million across the concrete floor. Yet he barely used cash on his visit to the Lone Star state, relying on credit cards and smartphone apps, apart from when tipping waiters. As he points out, this is increasingly typical: many fewer Americans or Brits are bothering with cash, and when they do it is for small transactions. So why is more and more money being printed in such places, and in the biggest denominations?

David Horspool

The tale of John Tom, the Cornish rebel with the Messiah complex

When was the last battle fought on English soil? The traditional answer, still sanctioned by Wikipedia, is Sedgemoor, in 1685, when the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion was defeated and more than 1,000 combatants were killed. But there are other candidates, such as the Jacobite encounters at Preston and Clifton Moor in 1715 and 1745, reminders that English history didn’t end in everlasting peaceful compromise with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The subject of Ian Breckon’s book was killed at yet another last battle, at Bossenden Wood in Kent, in 1838. It wasn’t a pitched battle like Sedgemoor, and only 11 people died, nine on the day and two later of their wounds.

Tuesday

Laurel Berger

Dark days in Kolkata: A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar, reviewed

In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. Others in the pestilent, depleted city do what they must to feed their loved ones – storming ration shops, looting the pantries of the well-to-do, even battering old women for a fistful of green beans. A Guardian and a Thief follows Majumdar’s virtuosic debut, the political fiction A Burning. It opens a week before the flight that is meant to take a woman, known only as Ma (Bengali for ‘Mother’), along with her young daughter and widower father, from Kolkata to Michigan, where Ma’s husband, a research scientist, awaits them. In the meantime, the child needs to eat.

Amanda Craig

Horror in Victorian Hampstead: Mrs Pearcey, by Lottie Moggach, reviewed

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid, immersive imagination. Part of the novel’s attraction lies in its setting in and around Camden Town.

Simon Ings

The turbulent life of the Marquis de Morès – the 19th-century aristocrat turned populist thug

The Marquis de Morès (1858-96) was a man of many abilities, but balancing a chequebook was not one of them. Bested (savaged, frankly) by the Chicago meat-packing lobby and frustrated in his attempt to build a railroad across Indochina, the soldier, duelist and self-styled ‘economist’ returned to his native France in 1886, caused havoc and invented fascism (if we allow the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto to have his way) – only to meet his nemesis much closer to home.

Leyla Sanai

Sabotage in occupied France: The Shock of the Light, by Lori Inglis Hall, reviewed

The courage of women dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe in order to work for Special Operations Executive (SOE), was immense. Trained as spies in Britain, they were tasked with sabotage and subversion of Nazi military rule and operated covertly with Resistance fighters and other British agents. It was a hugely risky job. Thirty-nine entered occupied France in this way, mostly by parachute. Imagining their experiences seems to be a rite of passage for many esteemed novelists – off the top of my head I can think of William Boyd, Sebastian Faulks, Simon Mawer and Kate Quinn. I have read and enjoyed their books, but there is often a sense of the protagonists being superhumanly lucky: beautiful, outspoken, brave, and able to glide through the espionage.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mark Haddon attempts to exorcise the memory of a loveless childhood

Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house, trying to figure out the universe. In this dark, sui-generis memoir he writes: Even now, insoluble conundrums such as ‘Why was I born as me and not someone else?’ and ‘If the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into?’ come packaged with images of a shampoo bottle in the shape of a fat sailor with a twist-off head. The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has a scientifically inclined mind in which small physical details, such as that sailor’s twist-off head, get permanently lodged.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

A poignant study of female attachment: Chosen Family, by Madeleine Gray, reviewed

Madeleine Gray’s first novel, Green Dot (2023), was a witty account of a messy office affair, whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow-up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has described it as the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why is it that every queer person I know (including me) has a story about having an intense friendship breakup in high school that years later they realise was probably their queer root? […] Two, why do more people not choose to have children with their platonic best friends? Surely raising a child with someone you trust implicitly and don’t have sex with makes more sense than the other way round?

Stuart Jeffries

Where will the extremes of OOO philosophy lead?

The world divides between creeps and jerks. History can be seen as a long, unedifying creep, or what one of Alan Bennett’s characters called ‘one fucking thing after another’. Alternatively, it might be seen as consisting of jerks – that’s to say, big events that revolutionise the world (the invention of the printing press, the advent of steam, the French Revolution, Hiroshima, Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web). The latter position is essentially that of the philosopher Alain Badiou. The French Maoist maintains that the significance of events that stand out from the usual blah of history can only be grasped retroactively – vindicating Zhou Enlai’s reply when asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution: ‘Too early to say.

Francesca Peacock

A commentary on the grim present: Glyph, by Ali Smith, reviewed

Glyph (whose sibling, Gliff, was published last year) is Ali Smith’s 14th novel and her fifth since 2016, when her ‘Seasonal Quartet’ saw the beginning of her project to use fiction to comment on contemporary events. It takes as its subject two sisters. Petra and Patricia (‘Patch’) negotiate their difficult childhood by retreating into a story world. Not that their escape is all unicorns and rainbows. The two stories they most often return to involve a horse blinded in the Great War and a man’s corpse flattened towards the end of the second world war. They call this flattened man ‘Glyph’: it’s ‘the sound he makes when he breathes out’. We soon skate from this grim past to the grim present.

Dylan Neri

How mastering friction transformed humanity

The fundamental purpose of science is to view the world from a different perspective. In the age of modern science, however, in which each academic discipline represents a world in itself, this is hard to remember. The field of ‘tribology’ would appear to be a perfect example. But such opacity is merely a front for the study of friction. And, according to Jennifer R. Vail, friction is ‘the unsung hero of the material world’. Why? Because ‘the way we experience the world, whether through greater efficiency, flight or space exploration, has been shaped by our understanding of friction’. Indeed, ‘our relationship with friction dates back to one of humanity’s greatest discoveries: fire’. How’s that?