More from Books

Thursday

Jay Elwes

The great betrayer

When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby and the Cambridge Five, that preening group of loudmouths that still dominate our national history of Soviet treachery. In his own quiet, devastating way, Fuchs proved more significant than all of them put together. A brilliant but unassuming German refugee who found sanctuary in Britain, Fuchs rose to become one of the leading theoretical physicists of the Allied nuclear bomb project. As Frank Close, himself an Oxford nuclear physicist, writes: ‘By 1946, Fuchs knew more about the construction of the atomic bomb and the conception of the hydrogen bomb than anyone in the UK and all but a handful in the world.

Peter Carty

Guns and poppies

My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked him what fighting in the jungle was like, his response was brief. ‘Grown men were crying for their mothers,’ he said, and would say no more: the worst combat theatre of that war was not a subject for children. Meanwhile, in India, my grandparents were taking in British refugees from Burma who had little to say either, being sick and traumatised after fleeing the Japanese over high mountain passes during the monsoon. Before 1939, Burma was one of Asia’s most prosperous countries. Yangon was the second busiest port in the world (after London) and the country the largest rice exporter. But after the war, its cities were mostly destroyed and its economy ruined.

Max Décharné

They just keep rolling along

At the end of 1969, teenage Rolling Stones fans reading the new Fab 208 annual could be forgiven for thinking that time wasn’t on their side: After five years as Britain’s most controversial group, how much more moss can they gather before they call it a day? Will we ever see the world’s most exciting group ‘live’ again, and where do wicked Mick and Co. go from here on? Mick Jagger himself spoke of the dietary measures he had adopted to fortify his supposedly ancient 26-year-old body: ‘If you eat any old rubbish like lots of potatoes and take no exercise, then you end up looking like a potato — all knobbly knees and bloated.

Brian Martin

Cuckoo in the nest?

You might think The Carer rather an unpromising title, but Deborah Moggach’s book delivers a wickedly witty entertainment. Towards the end, she describes the setting where a crucial event takes place — ‘somewhere as humdrum as a caravan park, toilet block, clock golf, Tupperware’. So very good at describing the ordinary, she transforms it into the unusual, shocking and fascinating. Behind the normality of people’s lives there often lies an extraordinary story. It’s this that Moggach tells with insight, acute observation of character and mordant humour. The carer is Mandy, ‘doughy-faced’, fat-legged, stout of person and of purpose: ‘I speak as I find.

Jeff Noon

Secrets and suspense

Andrew Martin continues his quest to create uniquely interesting crime novels in The Winker (Corsair, £16.99). Lee Jones is a rock musician facing cultural extinction as the punks take over. It’s 1976. He wanders around London dressed to the nines, living his fantasies. His trademark move on stage was to wink at a member of the audience. He’s still doing that to people on the street, but what follows these days is anything but mutual admiration. And so begins the career of the winking killer. (The author has fun with vowels.) Charles Underhill, a wealthy Englishman living in Paris, has his own reasons for being obsessed with the Winker’s killing spree. He sets out to uncover the identity of the murderer.

Rupert Christiansen

Master of the grand spectacle

Should the man on the Clapham omnibus ever turn his mind to ballet, he is bound to envisage the work of Marius Petipa. The  ballerina holding an arabesque on pointe shoes was his creation, as were The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, Don Quixote, most of Swan Lake, the concept of The Nutcracker and aspects of La Sylphide, Giselle and Coppélia — this being merely the cream of a vast oeuvre dreamed up over the half century he spent based in St Petersburg. When he died in 1910, one obituary claimed (in reference to Louis XIV’s view of l’état) that ‘with just reason, he could have said —“Russian ballet is me”’.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Bold venture

In 2017’s Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker strewed pages with multicoloured text. The Cauliflower, her joyful previous offering, employed winky-face emoticons while telling the story of a 19th-century Hindu mystic. In her 13th novel I Am Sovereign, huge fonts careen, in the space of an exclamation, into tiny fonts. Bold and underlined text prickles on the page. Barker has many ways of presenting what one of her characters, an estate agent from Llandudno called Avigail, describes as ‘BASTARD WORDS’. And these bastard words are all that the novel’s three protagonists have when trying to distract themselves from their doubts, or break free from what is holding them back.

Caspar Henderson

The wilder shores of Britain

After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, and camping overnight on top of its cliffs, David Gange awoke to revelation. To the west he could see almost the entire length of the Outer Hebrides. To the north-east the mainland, with its distinctive peaks, stretched towards Cape Wrath. The British Isles may be diminutive on a global scale but, Gange realised, ‘just how small they really are depends on how you measure them’. Merely the first hundred miles of longitude on the mainland’s north-west coast hold thousands of miles of coastline, with mountains, bays, estuaries, cliffs and islets — ‘enough to repay a lifetime’s exploration’.

Thursday

Suzi Feay

Beetle invasion

Silicon Valley moguls might not find Zed a particularly amusing read. Joanna Kavenna’s latest mindbender features the CEO of a multinational tech company whose sway has long outstripped that of mere governments. Guy Matthias’s creation, Beetle, has invaded western lives to an unprecedented degree. BeetleBands on wrists advise users when they need to eat, hydrate or calm down. Very Intelligent Personal Assistants or Veeps perform tasks and offer factual information. Monetary systems have long since switched to the cryptocurrency Beetlebits, leaving late adopters penniless. Beetle runs the premier mode of transport, all telecommunications and the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The information is fed back to individual, constantly adjusted Lifestreams.

Nina Lyon

An uncertain world

The venerable Oxford philologist Max Müller held that ‘mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language’. Gods filled a void, reanimating meaning as words became more fixed and less metaphorical. A more fundamental disease of language — the words themselves — is the subject of Paul Kingsnorth’s memoir. It takes the form of a series of meditations that weave to and fro around the question that forms its narrative thread: should he give up writing in favour of a more innocent life of working his land and raising his family? The old trope of the writer as wordsmith, forger of truth and meaning, no longer applies: instead, the words, and their compulsion to exist, own him.

Ian Garrick-Mason

Everyday wonders

Walking home from work one day during the half-year I lived in London’s Maida Vale (almost three decades ago now), I was just about to turn into an archway leading to the mews house in which I rented a room when into my path a steady stream of grey feathers suddenly began falling. From directly below I couldn’t make out the cause of this, so I ascended to the top-floor patio and climbed the metal stairs to the roof. From this better vantage point I immediately saw that I was being watched in return: looking coolly back at me from the top of the keystone, only ten yards away, were the steady yellow eyes of the falcon I had interrupted in the midst of plucking its prey. Such moments of encounter with the natural world stick with us.

Claire Kohda

Brother sun and sister moon

At the very back of the eye is a cluster of cells called ipRGCs. They are cells that don’t depend on vision to sense light, and that keep the circadian rhythms of both sighted and non-sighted people in sync with the sun. Without them, we would not feel the pull of sleep at night; we might fall asleep in the middle of the day and we would feel perpetually jet-lagged. It is the continuous effect of the strong, high-lux light of the sun and dim, low-lux light of the moon on these cells that keeps us, essentially, in sync with time and with society. This is too true for Linda Geddes’s interviewees in Chasing the Sun: The New Science of Sunlight and How it Shapes our Bodies and Minds (Wellcome, £14.99).

Mary Killen

The husband trap

Around 25 years ago it became clear that there existed only two groups that could still be bullied by journalists without fear of public backlash. These were the upper classes and husbands. Female ramblings about how annoying men are began, and continue, to go down well and strike a chord of recognition among wearied women. (Men, by the way, have never been allowed to write columns about how annoying women are.) From my perspective, it can be both helpful and unhelpful to have a regular ‘gig’ attacking my own husband. I wrote a weekly ‘Family Life’ column in the Sunday Telegraph (from 1994 to 2000).

James Mcnamara

Manhunt in the taiga

The Siberian-born novelist Andreï Makine has, as we say in the book world, a shedload of French literary bling. He’s the only writer to win the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis for a single novel (Le Testament Français) which is, in pop cultural terms, like winning The Great British Bake Off and Strictly on the same day. So one imagines that when old Andreï sat down to write this one, he enjoined himself not to cock it up. Reader, he hasn’t. One hesitates to use the word ‘masterful’, but for The Archipelago of Another Life it feels warranted. Set largely in 1950s USSR, Makine’s novel tells the story of Pavel Gartsev, a reluctant Red Army reservist tasked with hunting down an escaped convict in the Siberian forests.

Thursday

Elizabeth Goldring

Sables, ruffs and doublets

Roy Strong first encountered the portraiture of Elizabeth I and her court while a schoolboy in post-war Edmonton. In the early 1950s, as a second Elizabethan age beckoned, the teenaged Strong unexpectedly found himself face to face with the ‘Ermine’ and ‘Rainbow’ portraits of the Virgin Queen on a day trip to nearby Hatfield House. It was, as he later recalled in his Self-Portrait as a Young Man, ‘the birth of a love affair’. Shortly after, he began compiling a card index of Elizabeth I’s portraits and trying his hand at painting miniatures in the style of Nicholas Hilliard, the most celebrated portraitist of her reign.

Zoë Apostolides

Farewell, Tequila Leila

Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much of her previous work, that city plays a significant and shape-shifting role in this her 11th novel, where the Bosphorus, ‘waking from its turquoise sleep, yawned with force’ one November morning in 1990. It is ‘life at full blast’ — and yet the story’s beginning also marks an ending. A woman named Leila has just died, inside a wheelie bin on the outskirts of town. ‘Can’t you see, you moron?’ says the ringleader of the adolescent boys who discover her body. ‘She’s a whore.

Frank Lawton

Seek, and ye shall find

The bearded figure clad in white robes and wandering barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem is not, in fact, the messiah. But neither is he a very naughty boy.  Rather, he is a middle-aged man from Texas in need of a shower who, like the German across the street claiming to be Saint Paul, is caught in the grip of Jerusalem Syndrome — first clinically described in 1937. The afflicted are visitors so struck by their encounter with the city they become convinced they are ‘prophets, messiahs or redeemers. They can no longer distinguish between reality and fevered imagination.

Nicholas Lezard

… to nonagenarian love

Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting for something to go wrong. It already has.’ And we know what has, because some 200 pages earlier we have seen the man as a young boy, just before the second world war, pulling his mother’s underwear out of the laundry basket. Here is how the moment, and its repercussions, are described: ‘He climbed into his mother’s bloomers and tumbled into hell.’ Let’s pause to consider the comic elegance and precision of that sentence.

Sofka Zinovieff

From teenage passion…

The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary Merton Grange and, having flunked his exams, Charlie Lewis attends the leaving disco — all dry ice, vomit and snogging, laced with Cointreau and disinfectant. An infinity looms of bloated summer days, with only a part-time, underpaid garage job as distraction. Home is a small southern English Everytown, neither city, suburb nor rural village, with Dog Shit Park and Murder Wood ‘where porn yellowed beneath the brambles’. Worse, Charlie’s parents have separated, and he is stranded with his depressed, boozy, bankrupt father, eating cold curry from takeaway foil containers.

Chris Mullin

The great ministerial merry-go-round

‘Annual reshuffles are crazy,’ remarked one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers in July 1999 as I hovered outside the cabinet room, waiting to be anointed as the lowest form of ministerial life in John Prescott’s vast department — environment, transport and the regions. He went on: There is massive in-built insecurity. Ministers, who may not be there in a year, are on top of a civil service which is permanent and who have nothing more to worry about than who gets what gong. The chances of moving anything more than 0.1 per cent are slim. Crazy as reshuffles may be, most prime ministers are addicted to them. On New Labour’s watch, John Reid held nine different ministerial posts in ten years.