More from Books

Thursday

Caroline Moore

Distant neighbours

Readers should skim past the blurb of The Friendly Ones. The novel is about prejudice, of many different kinds; but this description might prejudice one’s reading: The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together, and redeem each other… by the decision to know something about people who are not like us. That might suggest a saccharine narrative arc. A Bangladeshi academic and his family move in next door to a retired doctor in Sheffield, and prejudices are overcome, with various members of both families ‘making their different ways towards lives that make sense’ — a trite, Hollywood-style epiphany. There is certainly something of this movement in the novel.

Zenga Longmore

Ghosts of No. 10

If you associate Lord Salisbury more with a pub than with politics, here is Andrew Gimson to the rescue, with succinct portraits of every prime minister to have graced — or disgraced — No. 10 to date. You will find no trace of waspish mockery in his book. In a time when heroes are constantly being debunked, its kindly, intelligent tone appears refreshingly old-fashioned. The flamboyant Robert Walpole makes for an ideal scene-setter. In 1721 he invented the office of prime minister and held it for longer than any of his successors — a full 21 years. Plump, affable and crude, with an astute business sense, he managed to amass a fortune by ingratiating himself with the first two Hanoverians and getting out of the South Sea Bubble in the nick of time.

Andrew Lycett

Vive la libération!

We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s (the cool French version, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Françoise Hardy). Agnès Poirier, the author of this kaleidoscopic cultural history, certainly has hers: the turbulent 1940s, which saw the French capital endure the hardships of Nazi occupation before throwing off this yoke and embracing freedom in every aspect — sexual, political and intellectual. Leading the way was that maligned couple, Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, political activist and father of existentialism, and Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant pioneer feminist, who was his life partner, if often errant lover.

James Bradley

A host of feuding poets

The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One part de Quincey, one part Burroughs, it was distinguished not just by the sustained beauty and brilliance of its prose but by what must surely rank as a strong contender for the funniest scene in a Theosophy Hall ever written. It was also highly autobiographical and, perhaps just as importantly, deliberately subversive, rejecting the questions of national identity and family that preoccupy most Indian novels that find favour in the West. Something similar might be said about Thayil’s new novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints.

Thursday

Andrew Crumey

The cosmic made comic

We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers to prime-counting insects. Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird argues that we’ve got quantum mechanics all wrong: it’s not so weird actually, but quite sensible. All three books do a fine job for their respective audiences. Just make sure you know which target group you’re in.

James Ball

Pandora’s Box

On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos every day, with creators uploading 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute. Given this almost incomprehensible scale, it’s fitting that the word Videocracy — the title of YouTube Head of Trends Kevin Allocca’s history of the site — evokes the idea of an authoritarian dystopia. Like any approved account from such a regime, its analysis never strays far from the realms of the vapid or tepid.

Mark Bostridge

Princesses of Parallelograms

It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and self-proclaimed ‘bride of science’. Not the least of Lovelace’s fascination is the way in which her reputation and the claims for her significance have fluctuated so wildly during that time. She’s been hailed for her understanding of the potential of Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine and for her far-reaching vision of the role of the technology of the future. This has unfortunately led to her being credited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley.

Jeff Noon

Unusual motives for murder

Donald E. Westlake wrote crime books that were funny, light and intricate. Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (Hard Case Crime, £7.99) was first published in 1974. The protagonist is Harold Künt. (That umlaut, as you can imagine, is very, very important.) In reaction against his name, he’s become a serial prankster. After one of his jokes goes badly wrong, he ends up in prison. Here he falls in with the Tunnel Gang, a group of inmates who use a secret tunnel to escape into the nearby town. But they only go there for a few hours at a time before returning to prison to serve out their sentences. Künt strolls around town, chats to locals, even falls in love, and then heads back to his cell. It’s a perfect life.

Lisa Hilton

On a wing and a prayer | 15 March 2018

Operation Columba was one of the most secretive arms of British Intelligence during the second world war. Between April 1941 and September 1944, its agents made 16,554 drops over an area stretching from Copenhagen to Bordeaux. Amongst Columba’s successes was the mapping of Belgium’s entire coastal defence system, 67 kilometres worth of priceless, minutely detailed information. Columba was the province of a specially created Secret Service division, M114 (d), which received its first message from occupied Europe on 10 April 1941. The correspondent ended his message stoutly: ‘I am, and will always remain, a Frenchman.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Yet more ponies for Jean

After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting.

Henry Jeffreys

In vino veritas

Taste has a well-noted ability to evoke memory, so it is curious how infrequently most wine writers mine their pasts for inspiration. You wouldn’t think that some had ever fallen in love, read a novel or even got drunk. Instead they obsess over scores, sulphur and diurnal temperature variation. Thank heavens for Nina Caplan, who brings a bit of hinterland to this often dry subject in her weekly New Statesman column. Characteristically, The Wandering Vine, her first book, is about much more than wine. It’s a heady blend of travel, literature, memoir, history and what I can only describe as psychogeography, though don’t let that put you off. The publishers have given the book a whimsical cover, which is misleading, because this is not a lightweight read.

Boyd Tonkin

A thing of shreds and patches

On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon of St George with his lance raised. She chats with the saint like an old friend, but wonders why, in the picture, he stays frozen mid-thrust and why ‘he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago’. As her ravaged city suffers an interminable ‘binge of death and devastation’, Elishva frets that ‘everything remained half-completed’, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. During the blood-soaked interregnum, which continues to this day, monsters breed.

Patrick Skene-Catling

An unprincipled Principal

‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at home in Oxford, where he spent most of his career teaching, and seems to know all about the professional and psychological complexities of the university. Holt College, his fourth novel, written with dedicated probity and Baedeker thoroughness, is a suspenseful tragedy without a hero — just a few men and women who mean well. Concerned with the administrative deliberations and manoeuvrings of the fellows of a respected, ancient college, the story serves analogically to show how an unscrupulous individual of obsessive ambition and manipulative cunning can turn even the most idealistically conceived democracy into a dictatorial hierarchy.

Dominic Green

Ankle-deep in LSD

‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van Morrison. The music business abounds with stories about Morrison being grumpy. In my experience, he’s perfectly reasonable. You’d be grumpy if your job obliged you to consort with thieves, liars and drummers who can’t keep time. You’d be especially irritated by people asking how you wrote Astral Weeks. Sensibly, Morrison explains that Astral Weeks was written by a different person living, as its title song says, ‘In another time/ In another place.

Thursday

Stuart Evers

Shadows of the past

The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section turns in on the next, binding them together with devastating effect. It is one of the oddest and most radically structured moments in pop, and one that came to mind when reading these three very different debut novels. With similar temporal concerns to the Lieber-Butler-Morton lyric, each traces the implications of past action on the present —and how these in turn could shape the coming years. The future is most notably explored in Danny Denton’s brilliantly conceived The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow, a polyphonic trawl through the murky waters of a permanently raining Irish dystopia.

Amy Sackville

A time for reflection | 8 March 2018

The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an uncomfortable one — for reflection. She sifts through her own immediate and past experience: caring for her dying mother in her early twenties; her relationship with her partner Johannes; her childhood; the birth of her first child. This fragmented narrative is intercut with the stories of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the inventor of the X-ray; Sigmund and Anna Freud; and the 18th-century anatomist, surgeon and empiricist John Hunter — along with other brief cameos from the history of science, from the Lumière brothers to the engraver Jan van Rymsdyk.

Sara Wheeler

Flitting from flower to flower

‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book with this assertion by Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and it rather sums up the whole endeavour of the volume. Feigel weaves close readings of Lessing’s prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with accounts of her own self-stretching. Feigel, an academic, had read Lessing as an undergraduate, but, returning to her in her thirties, she discovered in the books a stimulating discussion about ‘how as a woman to reconcile your need to be desired by men with your wish for sexual equality’. She is particularly interested in the way Lessing ‘placed sexual fulfilment at the centre of women’s lives’.

Tibor Fischer

They fill you with the faults they had

You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a degree of fondness for an anthology put together by a magician who has performed in North Korea. Dale Salwak also has a sideline as a professor of literature at Citrus College in Los Angeles, and Writers and their Mothers is a collection of 22 pieces he has edited, by novelists, poets and literary critics, some biographical and analytical, some autobiographical. In his introduction, Salwak makes reference to an assertion by Georges Simenon that writers are ‘united in their hatred of their mothers’, an assertion, I’d suggest, that tells you much more about the whore-mongering Simenon than about writers in general.

Juliet Nicolson

Listing or sinking?

The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century was no glamorous picnic, as she grappled with a ceremonial sword in a golf bag, three months supply of toothpaste, a crate of hot water bottles and enough safety pins for every emergency. Born in 1915, and having lived in Brussels, Paris, Latvia, Persia and China as a diplomat’s daughter, Elisabeth Knatchbull-Hugessen, aged 24, married Gerry Young, a man from her father’s profession. With marriage she continued the familiar routine of packing and unpacking, and arriving at, and departing from, different countries.

Claire Kohda

Going down in glory

In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission. The ship sailed to Okinawa, where a huge American assault was taking place. Under extensive enemy fire, it sank, as was expected, to the bottom of the Pacific. With it, it took 2,280 of its crew. Survivors’ accounts exist and continued to be taken until very recently. They describe seamen lost even on board, unable to find their living quarters because of the sheer size of the vessel; arrows painted on decks to indicate the direction of the bow or stern; and the testing days before what the crew knew would be the battleship’s last mission. Jan Morris, however, does not include the human stories of the Yamato.