More from Books

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Back to the fabulous Fifties

Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant hit in 1963. She then wrote another 33 bestselling novels and co-wrote, with her husband Terence Brady, various TV series, including Upstairs Downstairs. But when he was dying of cancer two years ago, she suddenly skipped back to the 1950s and picked up the story of Coronet Among the Weeds where it left off. The result was a very surprising memoir called MI5 and Me, published last year, to which Spies and Stars is the follow-up.

Andrew Motion

Village voices

Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his wife, and whose efforts to look after their two children, are shaped by the appearance in his life of Hughes’s celebrated figure of the Crow, a real/metaphorical creature who is on the one hand disgusting, violent, abusive, anarchic and gloating, and on the other bracingly vigorous, unkillable and transformative. The bird’s dynamism blows apart familiar structures of narrative and prevents any one point of view from achieving a steady control.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

God’s messengers

A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at a vicarage supper party after finishing Peter Stanford’s highly informative book about angels, which had left me angel-obsessed and an angel bore. No one came up with the answer. ‘Of all things visible and invisible, of course!’, I declared triumphantly. Once you see it, it’s obvious that the ‘invisible’ are the angels, but it had never occurred to me before.

Thursday

John Burnside

An epic quest

Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit, never mind The Lord of the Rings), anyone who falls asleep while watching a tedious Joseph Campbell-formula flick such as Star Wars, anyone saddened by the 2014 BBC poll of adult readers that included six fantasy books among its top ten British novels of all time may well approach Marlon James’s latest offering warily. With a cover puff from Neil Gaiman that invokes Tolkien (as well as Angela Carter) and comparisons elsewhere to George R.R. Martin and Charles R.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 21 February 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the centrepiece of the theatre’s summer season this year. The second half of April will see openings for Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V; and on ‘Trilogy Days’, theatregoers with especially resilient bottoms will have the chance to see all three in a single day.

Anne Sebba

A life in pieces

When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried on walking through the wall until she emerged as a plaster statue: At that moment I realise… that Budapest is absolutely crammed with statues that were once people, people who had simply walked through the walls and become stylised allegorical figures, that this was their fate, hers, and mine too, come to that. This exquisitely told memoir is crammed with similarly evocative and occasionally deeply unsettling images.

Damian Thompson

Cardinal sins

The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as a ‘bombshell’ that will ‘blow apart’ the summit. We shall see. Certainly many Catholic priests are more interested in Martel’s exposé than in Francis’s initiative. The author spent four years researching the subject of high-ranking gays in the Catholic church. Forty-one cardinals spoke to him.

Ian Sansom

Big, bold, beautiful ideas

I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall: He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!

Thursday

Nick Spencer

The strange birth of liberal England

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones. We like to imagine otherwise. We are rational, sensible, moral creatures. If we only think scientifically and apply ourselves, we can achieve anything. Hence the recent secular historiography of the Enlightenment and modern world, which, at least according to Steven Pinker’s latest offering, can be explained straightforwardly by the emergence of science, reason and humanism. Alas, history is not so neat, as real historians know. Good things often come from bad intentions.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Running on empty, and on and on

Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February 2005 Thompson, 67, killed himself with a .45 at home in Woody Creek, Colorado, freethinkers and lovers of his savage, beautiful words grieved the world over — and we still do. Thompson was a Southern boy from Louisville, Kentucky, whence comes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Fay, later Buchanan. After a sally into higher education and military service, both marked by varying degrees of brilliance and insubordination, Thompson moved to New York City and worked as a reporter. His specialty was, initially, sport, and his forte was observation.

Boyd Tonkin

Mocking the mandarins

Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of machinations within the European Commission in Brussels, readers may fear that the writer who pulls the trigger wields no more than a pop-gun. Yet the Austrian author Robert Menasse has scoured these corridors of power — and powerlessness — to furnish a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas. For sure, Menasse has an agenda. His nicest characters tend to believe in the ‘post-national democracy’ of EU integration. Still, their efforts to sell the Brussels system as ‘the moral of history’ pass through enough comically convoluted byways to give succour to sceptics too.

Claire Kohda

Dialogue with the dead

When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never write or be published in it again. She has described this decision as being like a suicide. In languages, she suggests, we form our identities. Leaving one behind is a death of a version of our self; and starting afresh in a new language is a kind of rebirth. In Where Reasons End, the English language, in which Li has made her name as a Chinese-American author, has transformed into something the narrator can no longer depend upon.

Stuart Kelly

Spot on target

This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt and Elmer Gantry) and John Kennedy Toole. Sam Lipsyte certainly hits his prime target — the cultish behaviour around mindfulness, motivational speakers and pallid spiritual beliefs — but one of the joys of the novel is that over and above that there is a scatter-gun sniping at various fads. Although it is laugh-out-loud funny, it swerves towards the end (the reasons would be too much of a spoiler) into slightly more melancholy and mystical modes. At the novel’s centre is the eponymous Hark, a strange, naive man who has developed a sort of lifestyle therapy he calls ‘mental archery’.

Simon Ings

A man of great magnetism

Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it, and in the middle of the wall, insert a tiny shutter. Conjure up a tiny critter who can open and shut this little door at will. When a hotter-than-average air molecule careers towards it, the creature opens the shutter and lets the molecule pass to the other side of the room. Colder-than-average molecules are allowed to pass in the other direction. Soon enough, one half of the room is sweltering, while the other half is distinctly nippy. Magic? Not yet. A fridge performs exactly this trick, pumping heat out of its interior through that dinky radiator at the back. The refrigerator only becomes magical if it carries on running after you unplug it. Fighting entropy is expensive.

Leyla Sanai

Tormented by guilt and desire

James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling. His eye-boggling psychological thrillers are understated, yet perspicacious and hilarious. By ‘psychological thriller’ I don’t mean they contain newsworthy physical violence. Lasdun is too English for that (although he now lives in New York). I mean the kind of dilemmas that would have your average, settled individual writhing in empathetic angst: secrets and lies in a kaleidoscope; knuckles-in-mouth mortification. Unwittingly (because he started them before the furore), Lasdun has written two superb novellas for the #MeToo age, published together in Victory. Both explore themes of lust, transgression, self-delusion and male friendships.

Sara Wheeler

Ninety degrees north

Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast. Michael Bravo promises to reveal something of that enigma, claiming at the outset of his book: ‘I will treat the mysterious power and allure of the North Pole in a way you will not have seen before.’ The volume is one of an interesting series on the cultural history of natural phenomena, that includes a title on Fire, and another on Swamp. Bravo structures his book around the struggle of navigators and philosophers to make sense of the strange powers of the North Pole, beginning with the ancients of Greece, Egypt, India and Persia.

Ian Thomson

Moving images of Christianity

The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of his life in around 1990 he determined to film Dante’s Inferno for national television. The brimstone poem appealed to Fellini for its comico-grotesque scenes of mass writhing human nudity amid firecracker detonations. He was not the first filmmaker to take on the work of the medieval Florentine poet. In the early 1970s, Fellini’s compatriot Franco Zeffirelli persuaded Dustin Hoffman to star as Dante Alighieri in his own version of the Inferno. Hoffman, dressed in a medieval coif hat and Tootsie-red robe, was supposed to wander through a sulphurous underworld accompanied by the Latin poet Virgil. Nothing came of either Zeffirelli’s or Fellini’s Inferno.

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Reading the reeds

In 2016, after some unseemly back-and-forth between the Commons and Lords, it was decided that Acts of Parliament should no longer be printed on calfskin. Instead, new acts are now recorded on paper, though, in a classic parliamentary compromise, they will still be bound between vellum covers. Since the first paper mills appeared in Britain at the end of the 15th century —and paper almost immediately became the dominant medium for print — this means that parliament has managed valiantly to hold back the paper tide for over half a millennium. (To be fair, they only stopped writing acts out by hand in 1849, four centuries after Gutenberg.) Meanwhile, over the past 15 years, I have come to conduct most of my daily correspondence by email rather than troubling the postal service.

Alex Preston

Echoes of The Tempest…

‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg’s brief, dark and wonderfully atmospheric 12th novel, The Tempest. Islands play a special role in our literary imagination. They are crucibles, havens, prisons and escapes, places of magic and mysterious transformation, worlds that can be shaped and owned. There is a rich history of island-writing, from D.H. Lawrence to J.M. Barrie, Compton Mackenzie to Aldous Huxley, William Golding to John Fowles. Behind them all sits Shakespeare’s late, troublesome, self-reflexive play of creativity and destruction, forgiveness and retribution. Sem-Sandberg’s island is one of a small archipelago sitting in a fjord on the Norwegian coast.

Michael Tanner

A true labour of love

This is a fascinating example of a small genre, in which the author decides at an early stage in his adult life that he would like to devote himself to a great figure whom he idolises, but who needs help of one kind or another to continue with his work, or at least for what he has done to be more widely appreciated.  The classic case in the recent past is that of Robert Craft, who in his early twenties offered his unlimited services to Igor Stravinsky, and can plausibly be claimed to have enabled the Master to create the works of his last decade, but who also fought against being seen as no more than a vassal, and whose copious writings, in all their brilliance, both celebrate Stravinsky and reduce him, at least as a person, to size.