More from Books

Thursday

Lee Langley

Mystery in the Mojave desert

Late one night, on a dimly lit stretch of highway in a small town in the Californian Mojave desert, an elderly Moroccan has just locked up his restaurant when he’s struck by a speeding car and left for dead. A hit and run. An accident? Or something more sinister? The only witness, a Mexican worker with dubious papers, knows better than to talk to the police. And in any case, he didn’t actually see what happened: fixing his bicycle chain, he had looked up just as the man bounced off the windscreen. As he repeatedly tells himself: ‘All I saw was a man falling to the ground.’ The violent death is a catalyst, gradually revealing evasions and lies; unexpected links between people in the fag-end town where The Other Americans is set.

Anna Aslanyan

Writing as exorcism

Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as an agent of the present and the future. Siri Hustvedt’s novel, masked as a memoir, suggests you should rely not so much on your recollection of particular events as on your ability to interpret them, which can produce something truer than bare facts. ‘Yes, it is a memoir,’ the narrator says, ‘but memory is not fixed… memory and imagination are a single faculty.’  The outcome of Hustvedt’s attempts to commit the past to the page depends on memory acting as her editor. The book is centred on one year in the heroine’s life, beginning in 1978, when the 23-year-old S.H.

Thursday

Alex Preston

Finding his voice

The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down author. Like his friend and sometime collaborator Jonathan Safran Foer, there’s the sense with Eggers that, after launching himself so spectacularly onto the literary scene with his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this is an author who hasn’t quite worked out what sort of grown-up writer he wants to be.

John Sutherland

The sage of age

Ashton Applewhite is a leading American ‘inspirer’ on how to make the most of being over the hill. She has followers to whom she dispatches her inspiration by blog, YouTube, TED, magazine column and talk-show interview. This Chair Rocks first came into the world, three years ago, as a ‘networked book’. It now presents itself in a form more congenial to ‘olders’ as Applewhite likes to call them. Whether to go large print must have been an option considered by its current publishers. Applewhite’s previous book-qua-book was Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well. ‘Upbeat’ is her middle name. There is one passing reference to her ex in This Chair Rocks and we gather she now has a partner, Bob.

Alan Johnson

Teebee or not Teebee

On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by the leader of the opposition) I was moved from Education to Health and, a few days later, was to accompany the new prime minister on his first official engagement — to a hospital in Kingston-upon-Thames. I wandered into the PM’s office next to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street early on that Saturday morning and noticed that something was missing. The sofa had gone. Gordon Brown had wasted no time in differentiating himself from a predecessor to whom the words ‘sofa government’ along with ‘spin’, ‘spads’ and ‘Iraq’ had attached themselves pejoratively like barnacles to a ship’s hull.

Caroline Moore

Time is the essence

Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’. Hadley labours under perceived limitations: she is distinctively British, writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the puff on the back rightly says, ‘the quintessential domestic novel’. Those who are put off by this description — probably mostly men — miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler.

Mary Kenny

The cult of Patrick

St Patrick’s Day, on 17 March, is now regarded as a prime opportunity for Irish politicians to travel abroad on a mission for ‘brand Ireland’. They fly off overseas, armed with the symbol of the shamrock, alerting their hosts to the shiny new liberal Ireland which is such a fabulous investment opportunity — and don’t forget the low corporation tax! Few national saints have the global reach of Patrick: it has been calculated that church bells ring out in 800 worldwide locations to celebrate the feast day of this Roman Briton who brought Christianity to Ireland in the early 5th century. Jewish bakeries in New York sell green bagels and horses run at Cheltenham in his honour.

Thursday

Stuart Evers

Unexpectedly delicious

‘Food experiences,’ writes Michael Flanagan in his paper ‘Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: Food in Popular Children’s Literature’, ‘form part of the daily texture of every child’s life… thus it is hardly surprising that food is a constantly recurring motif in literature written for children.’ Though Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread, is far from a novel for children, it is steeped in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum, even Lemony Snicket. But this being the work of Oyeyemi, these initial influences are soon turned inside out, reimagined and repurposed by one of our most singular and inventive contemporary voices.

Stephen Phillips

Don’t call them colonies

Where other nations disbanded their empires following the second world war, America’s underwent transubstantiation, from something solid to something more ethereal. It became a shorthand, connoting an amorphous global entity and its quasi-imperial depredations: commercial infiltration, cultural indoctrination, fomenting coups, waging war. Suitably, this construct (Coca-Cola and cruise missiles) acquired a ‘logo’, writes Daniel Immerwahr — the silhouette of the continental United States sitting athwart the northern half of the Western hemisphere, as iconic as Nike’s swoosh; on the map at least, minding its own business.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 7 March 2019

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Last time in this space we were talking about Harry Hotspur’s role as a shadow-self for Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One. But nor, of course, can we ignore the other pole around which the play swings: the sack-swilling anti-Santa Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations — some, among them Orson Welles, who played the fat knight in The Chimes at Midnight, have said the greatest — and, perhaps even more than Romeo, Prospero and Hamlet, has escaped the play to take on the quality of a mythological figure. Henry IV, Part One — on from April 23 at the Globe — sees Sir John in his pomp. He is not (yet) pitiable.

James Walton

Take drugs, write songs

If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then you’re not alone. So, it seems, is Shaun Ryder. ‘I… wouldn’t call myself a poet,’ he writes in the preface, adding characteristically that ‘I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith… like fucking Morrissey.’ It’s also unlikely that his work would have appealed much to Faber’s original poetry editor T.S. Eliot — not when the very first lyric contains the phrase, ‘Jesus is a c***’.

David Crane

Europe’s front line

In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways, and yet what is perhaps most moving is not the scenes of devastation, but the sight of the people below, picking up again the threads of their old lives among the shattered ruins of what had once been homes, with the resilience of a people whom history had long accustomed to the miseries of war.

Mark Cocker

Mission improbable

Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him in postwar Baghdad, he had spent the early part of the century searching for Iraqi scientists who had previously worked on weapons’ manufacture for Saddam Hussein. Presumably the life-threatening risks entailed in that role were insufficient, because he then allowed himself to be headhunted for fresh challenges in Afghanistan. Not only was the new post more dangerous, even on paper its goals looked to border on madness.

Andrew Taylor

The root of all evil

The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point. The novel is Sadie Jones’s fourth, and the first to be set in the present. It’s the story of Bea and Dan, a nice young couple who are struggling to make the repayments on their mortgage. She’s a psychotherapist with an outsize social conscience; he’s a trainee estate agent who yearns to be an artist. Desperate for a break, they decide to spend their meagre savings on a three month unpaid holiday in Europe. The first stop is in Burgundy, at the rundown hotel run by Bea’s brother, Alex, who has recently returned from three months drying out in the Priory.

Daniel Hahn

The gift of tongues

English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s in it for us? And what, more seriously, are the implications if we decide not to bother? Digging deeply into these questions, Marek Kohn’s book asks what it actually means to have some mastery of another language (is that the same as being ‘fluent’, or being able to ‘speak’ another language?), and looks at language acquisition, at how the language we happen to speak can alter perception, whether there are cognitive benefits to multiple language use, and what roles the state can play in determining how languages are valued or stigmatised.

Brian Martin

Eros and Agape

‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about Peter Abelard. In Melvyn Bragg’s narrative, Arthur is finishing his novel about Abelard and Heloise, living in Paris, separated from his wife, and visited by Julia. She gives a modern woman’s view of the behaviour of Abelard towards his beloved Heloise. ‘She didn’t ask to be a Bride of Christ,’ Julia protests; and Arthur’s telling of the great love story makes that clear. Heloise’s taking of the veil is forced upon her by her lover’s seemingly selfish logic. Arthur’s answer, and undoubtedly Bragg’s too, is that the infatuated pair must be judged in the context of the medieval church.

Thursday

D.D. Guttenplan

Antisemitism for dummies

Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record in responding to the problem — 673 complaints, 96 members suspended, 12 expelled. Labour’s failure to act decisively against anti-Semitism was also cited by most of the nine MPs who left the party.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Physician, heal thyself

The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’ In the case of the clinical neuropsychologist Dr A.K. Benjamin, both of these seem to apply. He is impelled by the desire for revenge, mainly on his own self-important profession, but also on women for being nuts. Or perhaps, because he’s scrupulously fair about this, that should be ‘nuts in a different way from the way men are’. As for Benjamin’s self-exposure, it’s a striptease.

Sam Leith

Getting off on Scott Free

Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the fictional ‘Escapist’ created by Michael Chabon in his Kirby-drenched Kavalier and Clay, Scott Free is part superhero and part vaudeville act — forever wriggling free from mountainous shackles or making nick-of-time exits from water-filled coffins or tea-crates in the paths of runaway trains. But when we first meet him in this 12-issue trade paperback he’s slumped on the floor of a bathroom with a razor blade in the foreground, bleeding out from his slashed wrists.

John Self

Stone walls do not a prison make

There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the bookshelf. I will never see the world again. It’s there, at the top of every page. I Will Never See the World Again. It’s a killer opening, before the book has even begun, and it’s all true. Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s leading writers, in 2016 was arrested on charges of providing subliminal messages to coup supporters, and has since been sentenced to life imprisonment: Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets. I would not have my room to write in, my machine to write with, my library to reach for. I would not be able to open a door by myself.