More from Books

Thursday

Derek Turner

Living with Leviathan

Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of the Book of Revelation’s ‘beast out of the sea’, and the frescoed dolphin-riders of Pompeii. Rare, huge, and unknowable, whales have traditionally been omens, or metaphors for improbability — ‘very like a whale’, Hamlet chaffs the cloud-watching Polonius. They were long chased by daring Basques, Icelanders and Inuit, and prized whenever they washed up — they were declared ‘Fishes Royal’ by Edward II — but then they met 18th-century modernity.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

An outsider inside

It’s not immediately obvious who the survivors in Tash Aw’s formidable new novel are, or who the narrator even is, or who has been killed. We know there has been a murder, however, or a culpable homicide not amounting to murder, as the narrator quotes the person being addressed as describing it. Details reveal themselves gradually: the narrator is a Chinese Malaysian man called Lee Hock Lye — known to his friends as Ah Hock — who is recounting the story to a local journalist of how he ended up in prison (for what part, in what crime exactly, we don’t know yet). His descriptions of the night of the killing are vivid: ‘I walked through the long grass — it was stringy and sharp and slashed my legs right up to my knees.

Alex Colville

Genius and geniality

I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of my Disciples, who require Speculations of Wit and Humour; the others are those of a more solemn and sober Turn, who find no Pleasure but in Papers of Morality and sound Sense…Were I always Grave, one half of my Readers would fall off from me: Were I always Merry, I should lose the other. I make it therefore my endeavour to find out Entertainments of both kinds. Thus spake Joseph Addison in 1711, frustrated at the difficulty of keeping readers of The Spectator happy. Leo Damrosch, emeritus professor of literature at Harvard, appears to have taken heed when writing this detailed, gripping study of genius and geniality in 18th-century London.

Dennis Duncan

Method in the madness

Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have heard of some of its members: Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp. The group’s stock-in-trade (so-called ‘constrained writing’) is best illustrated by their most notorious production: Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition which manages to avoid using the letter ‘e’ (and which was miraculously translated into English as A Void). Founded in 1960, the Oulipo spent its first decade in self-imposed semi-secrecy. While its academic sibling, Structuralism, came to dominate literature departments both at home and abroad, the Oulipo watched discreetly in disdain: why are the structuralists so dry, so up themselves?

Ian Sansom

The bad cat of journalism

God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Review of Books, the occasional incendiary non-fiction bestseller (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), even the famous lawsuit. (She was sued for libel by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.) If Janet Malcolm is the thinking woman’s Joan Didion, then Nobody’s Looking at You is her Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a lot less slouching. Nobody’s Looking at You collects just over a dozen of Malcolm’s articles from the past decade or so, ranging from some pretty stringent profile pieces to a few rambling book reviews and feature articles.

Michael Tanner

A moral hypochondriac

Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians, reaching their climax perhaps in the 19th century, when they involved Him with German idealism, and then the descent from that to the present day, when the sheer naivete of anyone who thinks that God is ‘out there’ or actually exists, in some sense we can understand, provokes genial and condescending ridicule from the professionals. Central to the development of thought about Christianity is the work of the melancholy Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who in the course of his short life — he died, aged 42, in 1855 — wrote more books and notebooks than many of us succeed in reading in a longer lifetime.

Mark Mason

The ultimate comfort food

‘You are what you eat.’ The old phrase always reminds me of Denzil, John Sparkes’s character in the comedy sketch show Absolutely, who quotes it to his girlfriend and then adds: ‘And you have obviously eaten something very stupid.’ Pete Brown, on the other hand, has taken it as the theme of his book about British food. By examining nine classic ‘dishes’ — fish and chips, the full English, cream tea, crumble and custard, pie and peas, a cheese sandwich, spag bol, curry and the Sunday roast — he builds a picture not just of the grub itself but of the people who put themselves outside it. It says something about the British, for instance, that cheddar sells more by volume in this country than all other cheeses put together.

D.J. Taylor

The House of Eliot

Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The inaugurating Faber — Geoffrey — was an All Souls don in search of a livelihood, who began his career in the post-Great War book trade by investing in the Scientific Press, publishers of the Nursing Mirror. There was trouble with the Gwyer family, owners of the original concern, who resisted the move into general books and disliked the poems of Faber’s brisk young protégé Mr Eliot, but by 1929 the sale of the Mirror for an eye-watering £190,000 (about £5 million at current values), allowed Geoffrey to buy them out and set up on his own.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 25 April 2019

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON As I noted last week, the dramatic climax of Henry IV, Part Two — that stew of rot and renewal — is reached when Prince Hal casts off the roguish companion of his younger years, ‘the tutor and the feeder of my riots’, Sir John Falstaff, on the way to his coronation in the final act. Falstaff is a parodic king, an anti-king. That is what gives much of the dramatic electricity to the clowning scenes in Part One where Falstaff play-acts King Henry. The King embodies the rule of law; and Falstaff holds it in contempt. The King embodies honour; and Falstaff delivers a celebrated soliloquy in which he mocks it as ‘a mere scutcheon’.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The ugly truth

Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s not even about what ugliness is, or why our understanding of what it is see-saws so violently. We don’t learn why people once loathed John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, one MP calling it ‘a horrible object’, or what insanity led Edwin Lutyens to condemn — as ‘an ugly angle’ — roofs slanted at 45 degrees. The mud-slinging doesn’t interest Hyde. How the slung mud shapes us excites him much more. Arguments over ugliness, he contends, are never just about aesthetics. They’re a proxy for social, political, even theological, concerns.

Wednesday

Allan Massie

Was there no end to his talents?

John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher; one of Lord Milner’s ‘young men’, charged with the reconstruction of South Africa after the second Boer war; director of propaganda 1917–18, a Member of Parliament; lord high commissioner (i.e. the king’s representative) to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland; governor-general of Canada. Yet the title of this excellent biography by his granddaughter is to the point. He is best known today as the author of a thriller he wrote in a few weeks in 1914 which, more than 20 years later, was made into a film by Hitchcock. The book is still read; the film, which Buchan thought better than the book, still watched.

Sue Prideaux

A struggle not to scream

Norway doesn’t have a world-class philosopher (Kierkegaard was Danish). Karl Ove Knausgaard declared at the end of his previous book that he is no longer a writer, and it looks as though he’s moving in to fill that space. A very modern space: a selfie space. Nietzsche observed that all philosophy is autobiography, and Knausgaard certainly qualifies, having written 4,000 pages of a multi-volume autobiography called My Struggle. Now he has given us a book on Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist best known for painting ‘The Scream’. Munch wrote an almost Knausgaardian number of autobiographical pages in his private journals while recording the outer reality of his life in hundreds of self-portraits.

Andrew Taylor

The nanny’s tale

Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the 1922 Bywaters and Thompson murder case. More recently, The Crime Writer cunningly blended an English episode from the life of Patricia Highsmith with elements of one of Highsmith’s own crime novels. Now Dawson has turned to the Lucan case, which has rarely been far from the tabloid headlines since 1974. One November evening, an intruder bludgeoned to death the Lucan children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in the basement kitchen of their Belgravia home and viciously attacked Lady Lucan herself. Lord Lucan disappeared in murky circumstances and has never been found. At the inquest, he was named as Sandra Rivett’s murderer.

Christopher Bray

Hollywood’s invisible man

What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Josef von Sternberg, George Stevens, Charles Vidor, King Vidor, Orson Welles and William Wyler? I know, it’s a toughie — and it isn’t much less tough if you consult IMDb. But the answer is that all of them made pictures from scripts that had been worked on by the same man. His name was Ben Hecht and, even today, 125 years after his birth, he’s regarded as the greatest screenwriter the movies ever had.

Steven Poole

Muzak, not Mozart

What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert definition in his introduction: ‘Creativity is the drive to come up with something that is new and surprising and that has value.’ This, he argues, is possible in mathematics (he himself invented a new kind of symmetrical object) as well as the arts in general, or what he describes as ‘the outpourings of what I call the human code’. The question he sets himself in this book is: can Artificial Intelligence do as well, or even better?

Robert Chandler

Witness for the prosecution | 17 April 2019

Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has been translated into most European languages and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Vietnamese. There have been stage productions, TV series and an eight-hour BBC radio dramatisation. And Grossman himself — like Leo Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and several other Russian poets and novelists — is now venerated not only as a writer but also as a moral exemplar. His life story is indeed remarkable.

Hugh Thomson

Stormy sees

There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had been previously unaware of the Belarus Autocephalous Orthodox Church). But, wisely, Christopher Somerville focuses on those great galleons with which we are most familiar: the cathedrals that first rose up above the plains of England after 1066. The metaphor which Somerville uses, of these cathedrals as ‘ships of heaven’, runs before the wind throughout this book. If the early cathedrals were blunt old battleships, built as foursquare as castles to show that the conquering Normans were here to stay, later Gothic ones were as elegant as grand and beautiful yachts.

Sam Leith

Life at the Globe | 17 April 2019

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON And so, as we continue through the Summer Season of history plays at Shakespeare’s Globe — supported by principal partner Merian Global Investors — to Henry IV: Part Two, which opens this week. This is, for my money, the most complex and moving of this sequence of plays – where the just-about-comic and just-about-heroic elements of Part One show their seamy side. It’s a play full of melancholy, sickness and regret: the death of the old king looming in the background. It’s where, to cite Morrissey, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’.

Thursday

Simon Garfield

Pirates of the printing presses

Say what you like about the efficiency of the Kindle, one day we’re going to wake up and miss the lizards. Among the many lost methods of making an illuminated book in the pioneering days of Renaissance printing, the way we once obtained powdered gold may be the most lamented: ‘In a pot place nine lizards in the milk, put on the cover, and bury it in damp earth. Make sure the lizards have air so they do not die.’ By the seventh day, ‘the lizards will have eaten the brass... and their strong poison will have compelled the brass to turn to gold.

Colin Greenwood

‘God has abandoned us’

At a dinner recently I was told the story of a Canadian billionaire (now defined in banking circles as someone withmore than $500 million in liquid assets) who is building an escape destination from the oncoming climate apocalypse: an ersatz Versailles, with two runways, deep in the thawing Canadian tundra. Four hundred years earlier, the world faced a different meteorological crisis. Temperatures plummeted by around 2° C, and summers zig-zagged between floods and droughts, possibly due to variations in solar and geothermal activity. Harvests were cut short, rivers and seas froze over as the climate changed with a biblical ferocity. Birds, frozen on the wing, were said to have plummeted from the sky.