More from Books

Thursday

Alex Clark

Courage and humour in the face of unimaginable grief

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for a fortnight. ‘Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?’ he asked as he left his ham sandwich uneaten at a family lunch. Afterwards, he made his way to the railway tracks. A dozen years later, Miriam’s older sister Marjorie died by suicide in the same manner the day before her 52nd birthday. Toews wrote about her father’s life in the non-fictional Swing Low, and about her sister in the astounding novel All My Puny Sorrows.

David Wootton

Alchemy – the ultimate fool’s errand

Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond. Alchemy turned into chemistry; astrology was divorced by astronomy; and medicine (which might have become Pasteurism or Listerism) somehow kept its old name while abandoning all its old therapies. There have always been people with the good sense to say that alchemists and astrologers were charlatans, and doctors were more likely to kill you than cure you, but few listened. After all, all three could claim to be ancient, respectable forms of learning. And all three were too good to be true. Who does not want wealth, foresight and good health?

Jamie Collinson

The joyless rants of Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu is the poster girl critic of the American progressive left. Writing primarily for New York magazine, she made her name with takedowns of celebrated novelists such as Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reviews that ‘scrutinise authors as well as their works’. Refusing to separate art from artist is, of course, central to both critical theory and wider progressive politics. ‘If that makes me an ideologue, so be it,’ Chu writes. Authority is a compilation of these pieces, two new essays, and others that Chu published between 2018 and last year. ‘Why shouldn’t a book review be personal?’ she asks. ‘It’s my understanding that persons are where books come from.’ Fair enough.

Thursday

Rachel Clarke

Will we resist the bacteria of the future?

Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from the graze into the deepest tissues, where it dissolved flesh with the ease of battery acid.

Michael Gove

What this new history of Brexit gets right

Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches a debate which has polarised politics and shattered friendships with disciplined, but never anaemic, detachment. It is hard to think of many books which leave one admiring both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell more. McTague has set himself a formidable task in seeking to explain the two most consequential decisions of British postwar politics. That he does so not just with fair-mindedness but mastery of narrative sweep and fresh perspective makes this a significant achievement.

Sarah Ditum

Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?

At some point in the past ten years, trauma became a joke in my household. Should any Ditum suffer a minor mishap, the correct reaction is to adopt a wounded expression, bob your head to the side and whimper: ‘My trauma!’ Not because trauma is funny, but because what Darren McGarvey refers to as the ‘trauma industrial complex’ has become so consuming, the only option is to laugh about it. By ‘trauma industrial complex’, McGarvey means the culture that treats trauma, and those who have been traumatised, as commodities. He’s a good person to write this book because he personally has been commodified in this way. His first book, 2017’s Poverty Safari, detailed his working-class background in Glasgow – a story of alcoholism, addiction, abuse and homelessness.

Genevieve Gaunt

Hell is other academics: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang, reviewed

‘Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.’ R.F. Kuang’s latest novel is a promising adventure story full of magic and maths but let down by florid prose. When Alice Law, an American postgraduate student of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, learns of the death of her chauvinist thesis supervisor Professor Grimes, she and her peer, Peter Murdoch, must rescue his soul from the eight courts of hell. Their journey comes with the debt of half a lifetime. But without Grimes, Alice is stuck in academic limbo on Earth, so she must pay this penalty and ‘beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful, Ruler of the Underworld’. The hellscape they encounter differs from Dante’s vision.

Bryan Appleyard

The word ‘artisanal’ has lost its meaning and dignity

‘Artisan’ is now a word attached to coffee, candles, paper, clothes, rugs etc. It is used to raise prices by giving consumers a warm feeling of being pampered with the solid, ancient virtues of the handmade. It is, of course, a lie. If you want to know about Britain and yourself, read this book. James Fox is an academic and broadcaster. His book is a history of the true artisans that made Britain – the carpet-weavers of Kidderminster, the hatters of Luton, the Chilterns bodgers with their Windsor chairs, the potters of Stoke and the brewers of Burton. The strong, proud feeling of craft locality meant that every town was different, as opposed to now when, as Fox says, ‘every high street looks alike’.

Adam Begley

The ‘idiot Disneyland’ of Sin City

In italics at the very end of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion spills the beans: ‘Writers are always selling somebody out.’ It’s hard to improve on that, but we can at least specify that she had journalists in mind, not poets or novelists, though probably she looked on all scribblers with a cold eye. Six years later, Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne published Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which isn’t really a memoir, more a queasily auto-biographical novel. Or, as he puts it, ‘a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined’. A time and also a place – Las Vegas, Nevada, in the early 1970s.

Andrew Taylor

Whitehall farce: Clown Town, by Mick Herron, reviewed

It’s good to be back in the unspeakable awfulness of Slough House, the decaying London office block in which the security service’s rejects do battle not only with the nation’s enemies but also with each other. Clown Town is Mick Herron’s ninth novel in the series, though he has explored different aspects of Slough House’s skewed universe in seven other books. It follows on from its series predecessor, Bad Actors. The office is looking underpopulated these days. River Cartwright, the nearest thing the series has to a juvenile lead, is recovering from life-threatening injuries sustained in the line of duty and hoping against hope that they will not mean the end of his career as a spook.

Thursday

Sam Mills

Dirty work: The Expansion Project, by Ben Pester, reviewed

The Expansion Project, Ben Pester’s debut novel, builds on the satire of corporate culture that he previously explored in his short stories. It centres on Capmeadow, a business park that proliferates with offices, wellness gardens, chalets, convenience stores and even a temple carved with reliefs of ‘collaborative working practices’. Shrouded in creepy mists, it seems to ‘reproduce itself’ with a will of its own, like ‘a -living community fabric’. Tom Crowley, who writes briefs for fire safety protocol, endures a stressful journey taking his eight-year-old daughter, Hen, to his office, mistakenly believing that it is ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work’ day. She seemingly goes missing. But then Tom is shown CCTV footage which suggests she was never there at all.

Anne de Courcy

The grand life writ small: a history of modern British aristocracy

One of the facts that emerges from this detailed study of ‘modern British aristocracy’ is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us, although the old unwritten adage that it didn’t much matter how you behaved provided discretion prevailed has long held good among many. Witness the 10th Duke of Beaufort, one of whose many mistresses, Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, would even boss the servants and change the menus when she stayed at Badminton. Most of these lady loves attended his funeral – but then, as Eleanor Doughty points out, the Duke’s relationship with the cuckolded husbands suggests ‘that embarrassment was not a word that figured in his dictionary’, since they were frequently invited to shoot at Badminton.

Clinton Heylin

Music to some ears: how 20th-century classical music led to pop

It was Sir Hubert Parry who in 1899 complained about ‘an enemy at the doors of [real] music… namely the common popular songs of the day’, ten years before he put a William Blake poem to music and came up with the most famous classical/pop fusion of all time, ‘Jerusalem’, which even featured on a mid-1970s number-one album by ELP. I did assume that a book subtitled How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop would reference such synergies. It does not. Elizabeth Alker’s is instead a competently written, entertaining if scattershot history of avant-garde electronic music, but presented as if some musical chasm separates John Cage from Sonic Youth. In fact one can easily draw a line between the two.

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

No stone unturned: the art of communing with rocks

At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet was ‘an animate entity… alive with stories that needed to be heard’. From then on, rocks have been, well, her rock. More than a geologist, Khatwa calls herself an ‘earth scientist’. So, while there is plenty of geology in this book, some of it mildly challenging (‘Along with other silica-rich microcrystalline rocks such as obsidian and agate, flint breaks with a conchoidal fracture’), there is also mythology, folklore, ecology and spirituality.

Sarah Ditum

The enduring miracle of human birth – a history

One of the most compelling artefacts described in this history of human birth is a stone carving discovered at an ancient temple site in what is now Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe totem pole, 11,500 years old, 6ft 3in tall and weighing 1,100lb, shows successive generations giving birth: a faceless figure at the top delivers a woman, who delivers another woman, who delivers a man, who is ‘proffering his phallus’. The exact meaning and function of this object is long lost, but it is clear that it has something to do with fertility. For as long as humans have had a culture, that culture has been – understandably – concerned with the mystery of reproduction and birth. The totem pole is a reminder of a very basic truth: everyone who has ever lived came out of a woman’s body.

Christian Wolmar

Starry starry night: the return of the sleeper train

The railways have survived into the 21st century by constantly reinventing themselves. Written off all too frequently by parsimonious politicians as a 19th-century invention made redundant by the car and the aeroplane, trains have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Most happily, the sleeper has made a comeback, despite the fact that towards the end of the past century the mostly state-owned rail companies decided it was too much hassle to provide couchettes and compartments on trains running through the night. These trains got in the way of essential track maintenance; their use tended to be seasonal, and much of the rolling stock was well past its sell-by date. Budget airlines and high-speed rail further contributed to their demise.

Jonathan Boff

Clerical skulduggery on the far borders of 1830s Germany

Königsberg is no more. Now known as Kaliningrad, it forms part of a small Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. It is probably here that the third world war will start. Before it was bombed flat and ethnically cleansed, the historic Baltic city formed one of the main centres of the German province of Prussia. Old Königsberg was a port and a -meatballs-and-potatoes kind of place, but also one of the battlefields of the Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died there. One of the questions he struggled with was how to reconcile the claims of human reason with the need for faith in the divine.

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

Lives upended: TonyInterruptor, by Nicola Barker, reviewed

‘Is it any good?’ a friend asked when he saw I was reading this book. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s full of wankers.’ By that stage I was only up to page 24, but the remaining 184 pages did nothing to fundamentally alter my view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The works of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen, not to mention thousands of others, would be considerably poorer if all the tiresome people were filtered out. But it does make it hard to read TonyInterruptor for more than 30 pages at a stretch. One has to pinch the bridge of the nose and go for a little walk.

Peter Parker

The enigma of C.P. Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy, who had a very high opinion of his own work, would no doubt be gratified to learn that he is now one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. This is all the more remarkable because during his lifetime (1863-1933) he did not allow a single volume of his poetry to be published, preferring to circulate privately printed sheets and pamphlets among his admirers. He was also disinclined to co-operate with those who wanted to translate the poems from their original Greek into other languages; but in English alone there have now been more than 30 different volumes of his complete or selected poems.

Susie Mesure

An ill wind: Helm, by Sarah Hall, reviewed

To read something by the Cumbria-born Sarah Hall is to enter a dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red. Her nine previous short story collections and novels straddle life’s peripheries, often scratching at the limits of what it means to be human. ‘Mrs Fox’, one of her best known stories – and one of two for which she has won the BBC Short Story Prize – is a visceral tale about a woman who turns into a fox. In her 2021 novel Burntcoat, a virulent virus made Covid-19 look almost benign. Helm is a different beast again, one she has been working on for almost 20 years. Its title and main character is Britain’s only named wind, which hits the southwest slopes of Cross Fell, in Cumbria’s Eden Valley where Hall grew up.