More from Books

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.

Thursday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Staring into the abyss

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has achieved that rare feat, in her second novel Starling Days, of writing a convincing novel about depression which manages, miraculously, not to be in itself depressing. Her success is partly due to the fact that her protagonist, Mina, is not flattened by her despair and remains alive enough to become fascinated by another woman, Phoebe, her husband’s best friend’s sister. When Phoebe asks her to say something about herself, Mina considers what she might voice: I want to run my tongue along the dent in your collarbone that your top has made visible. Nope. Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a box of tomatoes and stand by the fridge eating them out of a paper carton and I don’t understand how I can hold both desires. Nope.

André Van Loon

Love at first sight | 4 July 2019

France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home. So thinks an English boy, Cromwell, as he lies on a beach at Biarritz, contrasting the green fields of Scotland and Eton with the state he is now in, perpetually waiting and haunted by the ‘constant premonition of love’. Looking out over the rose-tinged waves of the rushing ocean, he thinks of Tristan and Isolde, and then sees the piercingly beautiful Isolde herself walking towards him. The fact that she’s a teenage Russian girl, Liza, staying with her mother and brother Nikolai near by, doesn’t bother Cromwell a bit. He is immediately infatuated.

Sam Mills

Women on the edge

In Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her female protagonists grapple with abusive relationships, degree courses, difficult bosses, unemployment programmes and a lascivious professor. The stories are tragicomic and deliciously odd. The author writes sentences that make you laugh, and then immediately want to reread to savour a striking image: a woman’s boss ‘had a way of looking me up and down like I was a CV full of errors and misspellings’. They somersault from the everyday to the absurd, in a way that reflects the disorientation of the characters, leaving one feeling both sympathetic and alienated.

Margie Orford

King of a wild frontier

Red Dog is an ambitious hybrid of a book. It was published in South Africa to wide acclaim in 2014 and has been expertly translated by Michiel Heyns, who has retained the cadence and some of the vocabulary of the original Afrikaans — the mongrel tongue that evolved in the Dutch East India Company’s Cape colony. Willem Anker brings South Africa’s bloody birth to life through the story of Coenraad de Buys. The priapic founding father of a nation of bastards, he is a pillager and survivor, a rapist and husband, a colonist and outlaw, a rebel and hero. With his numerous wives and children, he is the gargantuan progenitor at the centre of this sprawling tale, pushing those with whom his life intersects — his intimates and his enemies — to the periphery.

Sarah Churchwell

Murder at the funeral

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most beloved American novels of all time. Famously, Lee never completed another book, once declaring she’d ‘said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again’. But a journalist who went to Lee’s home in Monroeville, Alabama in 2015 learned of another book that Lee had worked on, perhaps for decades — again the story of an Alabama courtroom trial with a black defendant and white lawyer, but this one was true. Lee does not appear to have finished that book, but the journalist who discovered the story, Casey Cep, has: the result is Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

Katrina Gulliver

Harlequin ladybird, fly away home

I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They first arrived in the 1820s, in barrels of water from a visiting ship. Of course, the climate was perfect for them, and they settled in very happily. But we could have had tropical islands free of them  — and the risk of diseases they can carry. The story of invasive species is often one of accidental introduction. Or of misguided humans who think they are somehow setting a creature ‘free’ — like the group of Buddhists who released hundreds of foreign lobsters from a boat off the English coast in 2015 as part of a religious ceremony.

Steven Poole

Distress signals

It’s an increasingly common lament that computers have ruined everything, and a longing for the days before Google and Twitter, when everything was somehow more organic and authentic, is on the rise. As someone who can remember writing early reviews on an electric typewriter and then going to the library to fax them to a literary journal, I’m partial to this kind of unplugged nostalgia myself. But it can get out of hand. So it does in this book — ambitiously titled to evoke John Berger’s classic of art criticism, Ways of Seeing — which explains that computers have wrecked music along with everything else.

Peter Parker

Feasts and flowers

Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises, he has always been highly regarded in horticultural circles, his reputation as a painter has been subject to regular fluctuations. Last year, two excellent and complementary London exhibitions — Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden  Wall at Philip Mould & Company — did a great deal to revive interest in his paintings; and so a joint biography of Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines is welcome. They met in 1918 at an Armistice party hosted by Lett (as he was always known) and his wife.