More from Books

Thursday

Colin Greenwood

First-class air mail

Growing up as a rootless army brat in bases home and abroad, I would listen in appalled delight to my parents’ record of Tom Lehrer singing ‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’: ‘When they see us coming the birdies all try and hide/ but they still go for peanuts, when coated in cyanide.’ Now, I have lived in the same house for 20 years, determined to stay put, and every year a brace of feral pigeons join me by nesting under the eaves of my porch. In Homing, Jon Day takes on the humble racing pigeon to ask just what home is, how we establish it, miss it and depart and return to it. He elevates this heroic bird to its rightful place in natural history and our history too, and celebrates its shared instinct with us for home.

Fiona Sampson

Back from the brink

Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless, they also frequently bring the styles and music of the 1950s and 1960s back to elegant life. These pleasures can be found once again in Williams’s new book, Lines Off; but this time they’re not unmixed. For, in the five years since his last collection, the poet’s worsening health has led him to undergo a kidney transplant. Now the ultimate subject has presented itself, and has resulted in some piercing testimony. Of course, it’s much more than testimony: Williams, who characterises writing a poem as being like sealing a roll-up with ‘that final twiddle and lick’, would never produce anything so po-faced.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

An asymmetrical friendship

If you know your Peter Conradi from your Peter J. Conradi, you’ll also know that the former is foreign editor at the Sunday Times, while the latter is a professor emeritus at the University of Kingston and the authorised biographer of the late Iris Murdoch, of whom he was a devoted friend and disciple. It’s Peter J. who has written this crisp memoir, and he gets the doppelgänger confusion over with early on: ‘We two Peter Conradis have never met,’ he writes, ‘but we share an optician, who once offered me his new spectacles instead of my own, so the world was out of focus.

Ian Thomson

Native wood-notes wild | 20 June 2019

With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear cleaning’ exercises that might attune us beatifically to a hushed environment. Silence itself can be quite noisy, of course. Even in the countryside the thoughts in one’s head and the sound of one’s breathing can disturb the peace. Music, at least, may help to restore a sense of quietude. Vaughan Williams’s 15-minute meditation ‘The Lark Ascending’ conjures a pastoral idyll untouched by the clamour and carnage attendant on the Great War. In 1921, when the music was premiered, the green fields of Europe had been psychologically altered by the bloodiest battles in recorded history.

Leyla Sanai

Illusions about delusions

Schizophrenia is the psychiatric illness about which the most misconceptions abound. It’s not so much the ‘negative’ symptoms that cause misunderstanding, devastating as they are — social withdrawal, self-neglect, flattening of mood — but the auditory hallucinations and delusions, often of a paranoid nature, that can accompany it. Nathan Filer, a psychiatric nurse, wrote the best novel I’ve read about schizophrenia, the Costa-winning The Shock of the Fall. The Heartland, his non-fiction book on the subject, is easily as good. Perhaps it’s the foreign nature of their experiences that gives rise to the myth that schizophrenics are dangerous.

Rowan Pelling

A shaggy showgirl story

One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is that no one writes novels like Love in a Cold Climate and The Dud Avocado any more. I’m talking about the brand of romantic misadventure written with such wit, verve and emotional honesty that you feel you’ve washed down 100 life lessons within a vodka martini. Miraculously, Elizabeth Gilbert has managed to pull off exactly this feat with her high-kicking new novel City of Girls. It helps that she’s set the story in a shabby New York vaudeville theatre in the 1940s, thronging with bohemians, and everyone spouts one-liners straight out of Romcom Central.

Thursday

Alex Colville

The third oldest profession?

Western attitudes to piracy have dripped with hubris. In his classic history of 1932, Philip Gosse confidently argued that European empires and technological superiority had ‘done away’ with pirates entirely. He and others regretted the sacrifice of these noble savages to the march of progress. Nostalgia imbued pirates with a romantic aura as happy-go-lucky rebels, rough in appearance but pure of heart. Long John Silver aspired to be an MP; the Pirates of Penzance swilled sherry, with ‘dash it all’ their adorable attempt at foul language. Dr Peter Lehr puts the brakes on: 174 incidents of piracy were reported to the International Maritime Bureau last year, with Somali pirates responsible for only three.

Taylor C. Sherman

Villains, one and all

K.S. Komireddi sets out to establish his secular credentials before he sets up his primary argument: which is that India’s secularism is in danger. In the prologue, we are introduced to the author as a young man who briefly attended a madrassah, where he made a Muslim friend, and the two celebrated the Hindu festival of Diwali together. In the coda, we peek at his bookshelf, where we find the well-thumbed works of a Muslim poet. These bookends establish Komireddi’s secular bona fides, for his name marks him as a Hindu. And yet at first Malevolent Republic seems to be an assault on everything we associate with secularism in India, including the Indian National Congress Party and India’s secular historians. It is a puzzle.

Mark Mason

Blessed Brian

Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round to claim that the animal has spontaneously combusted. Brian has his doubts, not least because Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog. But he nevertheless uses the incident as inspiration for a poem, ‘The Day My Dog Spontaneously Combusted’: there he was, chasing sticks, doing tricks, and all that stuff next minute, woof Brian tweets the poem to his 23 followers. This is part of his ‘renewed commitment to social media’, but serves only to reduce his follower count to 17. What’s worse, ‘to add insult to invisibility’ he also gets angry messages from the RSPCA. Bilston is the greatest English anti-hero of our time.

James Walton

One female sleuth after another

Susannah Stapleton’s erudite but hugely entertaining debut is a true-life detective story about the quest for a true-life detective. A longstanding fan of Golden Age crime fiction, Stapleton is reading a 1930s Gladys Mitchell novel featuring the sleuth Mrs Bradley when she has a sudden thought: were there any non-fictional female sleuths around at the time? Reaching for her laptop, she soon finds a reference to Maud West, who billed herself as ‘London’s only lady detective’. And with that, writes Stapleton, in by no means the book’s only use of classic detective-story phrases, ‘The game was afoot’. Her first stop is the Times archive, where she discovers an advert for Maud’s services from 1909 (‘Are you worried? If so, consult me!

Dorian Lynskey

The last days of Sodom

In 2002 I flew to New York to interview the dance music producer whose 1999 release Play remains the bestselling electronica album of all time. A few years earlier, Moby had been known as a teetotal Christian vegan, an ascetic anomaly in a scene built on hedonism, so there was something comic about his new-found reputation as a promiscuous party monster. The photo-shoot paid homage to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, with Moby posing in a cardigan, reading a magazine, oblivious to the 18 naked women surrounding him. (No, this concept wouldn’t fly in 2019.) The headline was ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’.

David Crane

The Elder, the better

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about the poet and verse dramatist Gordon Bottomley. I can’t remember now which of his plays it concerns, but it must have been just after the notorious MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley had been imprisoned for fraud in 1922, because as the curtain fell on the final excruciating scene there was a shout from the audience: ‘My God, they’ve gaoled the wrong Bottomley!’ A reader is not going to get very far with Daisy Dunn’s new biography — the opening four lines, in fact — without a sinking sensation that the author has landed herself with the wrong Pliny.

Justin Marozzi

A legend under siege

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them: We have it in our power to die nobly and in freedom. Our fate at the break of day is certain capture; but there is still the free choice of a noble death with those we hold most dear. That way their wives would not be dishonoured by Roman soldiers, nor their children enslaved: Let us spare nothing but our provisions; for they will testify, when we are dead, that it was not want which subdued us, but that… we preferred death to slavery.

Duncan Fallowell

Where’s Coco?

Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th century. Her book The Viceroy’s Daughters, an account of the three daughters of Lord Curzon, marked her transition from debutante-itis to something grittier. It was followed by a biography of Diana Mosley, published a few months after Mosley’s death. When I questioned Diana about it she told me that her previous biographer, Jan Dalley, had been frightened to ask anything too personal, but that De Courcy had been robust and unafraid to probe.

Lynn Barber

A fatal misunderstanding

What is it about Naomi Wolf that inspires such venom? Perhaps that she’s American, brash, media-savvy and not averse to showing off her impressive embonpoint, which might go down badly in academe. But also — she makes mistakes. She made a pretty bad mistake in her very first book, The Beauty Myth, published in l990, by saying that 150,000 women died of anorexia in the US every year — whereas in fact she should have said 150,000 women suffered from anorexia. In this book, she seems to have dropped an even bigger clanger. Matthew Sweet started the ball rolling on his Radio 3 Free Thinking programme, when he told her that she was quite wrong to say that the number of executions for sodomy increased in the latter half of the l9th century.

Matthew Adams

Anything but a quiet life

Meet Deen Datta, a nervous, practical and cautious man, born and brought up in Calcutta, who now lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a dealer in rare books. Recently and unceremoniously ditched by a woman with whom he had been in a once promising relationship, and with his sixties ‘looming in the not-too-distant-future’, he spends his days in a state of relentless desolation: humiliated, lovelorn and ‘more alone than ever’. Emotional turbulence must be dispensed with. What’s called for, Deen resolves, is ‘a quiet, understated, uneventful life’. His resolve is not signally robust. When we encounter him in the early pages of Gun Island (Amitav Ghosh’s tenth novel), he is already casting about for another romantic entanglement.

Thursday

Tom Lathan

Poisoned paradise

For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be… we begin to realise that we have more past than future’. With the approach of her 50th birthday and the onset of the menopause, she is struck powerfully by this notion. Her response is to leave London and to relocate, with her husband and their six-year-old daughter, to the American West, a place where she hopes ‘the fabric of our lives and rhythm of our days would be different’. It is an idyllic, optimistic premise that ties into the mythos of the American West as being a place where people can reinvent themselves.

Carolyne Larrington

Myths ancient and modern

Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo Cycle of heroic poems, the French Chanson de Roland, the German Nibelunglied and our own home-grown epic Beowulf, Nicholas Jubber’s new work is at once a travel journal, a meditation on the idea — and ideal — of Europe, and an exploration of a pivotal moment in the author’s own past. Following the 2016 referendum, Jubber sets off to the Greek island of Chios, perhaps Homer’s birthplace, and now at the front line of the Mediterranean migrant crisis. After a month volunteering in a refugee camp he works his way west and northwards until he comes to rest on the turf roof of a farmhouse in southern Iceland.

John Burnside

Evil under the sun

When James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential appeared in 1990, it introduced us to a world of blatant corruption, casual racism and routine police brutality that, a year before anybody ever heard of Rodney King, might have seemed fanciful to some. Set in the early 1950s, the novel was a landmark in neo-noir writing, in which historical detail mingled with pacy fiction to conjure up a city that was both highly glamorous and rotten to the core. At the same time, Ellroy’s staccato, near-telegraphic prose drove the action relentlessly onwards, with an urgency that seemed designed to swamp not just the reader but also the protagonists themselves with noise, movement and a lowering, inescapable sense of doom.

Diana Hendry

The lust of kings

The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or shrink to accommodate almost anything, from Ali Smith’s Spring (part story, part polemic) to Max Porter’s prose-poem/fable, Lanny. Then there’s the current vogue for re-tellings: Margaret Atwood’s version of The Tempest and Pat Barker’s feminist look at the Iliad. Penguin even has a ‘Modern Retellings Book List’, which includes Alexander McCall Smith’s reworking of Emma. (Why would you?) Elizabeth Cook was ahead of the game with her Achilles in 2001.