More from Books

Thursday

Mick Herron

Carry on spying

That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into his study to reveal that he worked for MI5, she was terrified that he was about to explain the facts of life, many of which had already been revealed to her by a friend on Bognor beach: ‘I thought I was going to pass out with the horror of what was to come.’ But the particular facts he reveals are no less life-altering.

Leyla Sanai

Cutting up rough

Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under the Knife and Anaesthesia admit to the fallibility of medicine and the responsibilities, flaws and complex emotions of its practitioners. Arnold van de Laar does not rely on personal experience. Instead, he explores the world of surgery through 28 clinical conditions; its historical scope makes for a fascinating book.

Thursday

Oliver Balch

The Little Matchstick that ignited civil war

Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the Spanish-born waiter in Bonn’s Casa Pepe approached my table, it struck me as an opportune moment to solicit his opinion about the former dictator. ‘No sé mucho,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know a whole lot.’ Just imagine it: an unexceptional army cadet becomes a general in his mid- thirties, leads the Nationalists to victory in a bloody civil war, wields absolute power for close to three decades, and then, barely a generation later, his memory is reduced to an indifferent shrug. The contrast with Germany’s treatment of its totalitarian past could not be greater. Students are compelled to study every angle of the Third Reich.

Mike Cormack

Ray of light

Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of...’). The Adulterants, however, talks of ‘the modern everyman... stubbornly ensconced in an adolescence that has extended well beyond his biological prime’. We thus expect a man-child, resiling from responsibility and dependent on internet porn and gaming — basically the Simon Pegg character in Shaun of the Dead. But the protagonist, Ray, is really ‘mostly’ a good guy: he mostly loves his pregnant wife Garthene, and looks forward to being a father; and the youngish couple are striving to buy ‘a horrible maisonette’ in the brutal London property market.

Anna Aslanyan

Close to the bone

Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines a society better described by the formula ‘the future = technology – sex’. There is no procreation in it, and any manifestation of sexuality is a crime. Its inhabitants have left Earth for a space station, a hi-tech prison only the rich can afford, moving away from ‘a lunar landscape of jagged rocks, treeless mountains, or scorched dirt’, the scene of endless wars fought by child soldiers, where ‘technology is seized by those who kill best’.

Nick Lezard

A comedy of violence

The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely it. However, we now have a new contender: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series. It was a brief but intriguing review in the TLS that first alerted me to the books, with their sidelined spooks, contemptuously nicknamed ‘slow horses’, sent to an oubliette next to the Barbican on having screwed up, and their appalling boss, the veteran Jackson Lamb, a monster of flatulence, astonishing drinking habits and withering put-downs (on requesting ‘an educated guess’, he says, on hearing what’s offered: ‘I said educated.

William Leith

Drugs, guns and blood

The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning I counted down the days until I could leave’. So: Honduras, says Arce, is bad. How bad? He tells us that ‘Tegucigalpa is the most dangerous capital city in the world without a declared war.’ And that ‘in 2012 and 2013, more people were murdered in Honduras than in Iraq, even though the population in Honduras is three times smaller’. Also that in 2012, there were 7,100 murders.

Ruth Scurr

The only word that hurts

It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious.’ In her first book, the literary critic and art historian Laura Freeman is determined to tell the truth about her recovery from the illness that ravaged her adolescence and early adult life. The result is the reverse of a misery memoir. Freeman’s celebratory book is about getting better and learning to savour life again by doing what she most loves: reading. Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia when she was 15 and had already been ill for two years.

Thursday

Max Décharné

Angels with dirty faces

The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish the Nationwide Festival of Light, making religious inspired protests against the so-called permissive society, she also wrote an autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is?, published by New English Library. Thus her thoughts regarding the impending moral collapse of the nation were brought to the public by the same outfit responsible for a comprehensive range of sinew-stiffening pulp fiction delights such as The Degenerates by Sandra Shulman, Bikers at War by Jan Hudson and Gang Girls by Maisie Mosco.

Peter Carty

Fit for the gods

For many of us, coffee is the lift that eases the load of our working day. Yet the sharpened mental focus it offers is rarely directed towards its origins. Coffee’s birthplace is Ethiopia and its beans remain high on caffeine aficionados’ hit lists. They produce smooth brews that carry an extraordinary range of tastes — variously, chocolate, wine, floral, spice and fruit. They have an extraordinary history too. Jeff Koehler travelled extensively in Ethiopia and other coffee producing countries to research Where the Wild Coffee Grows. The arabica species of coffee tree, which yields the finest coffee, first appeared in Ethiopia’s south-western mountain rainforests.

Philip Womack

Paris mismatch

There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels that are assured of their place alongside other writers, reacting to, and taking pleasure in discussing them; that are aware of the world’s events and their impact on humanity; that have delicately drawn characters; and that range with ease from intense emotions to moments of high drama; and that use careful, subtle imagery, then C. K. Stead’s The Necessary Angel is all this and more. His previous novel, Risk, touched upon banking and Iraq, but was never overwhelmed by them.

Houman Barekat

Soft dystopias

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating the present. In a new collection of short stories by the veteran sf author M. John Harrison, lurid visions of aliens and spaceships play second fiddle to melancholic snapshots of plodding suburbia. Many of the tales in You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press, £9.99) are set in leafy south-west London, amid the banality of modest affluence: from Putney to Chiswick, Twickenham and St Margarets, and along ‘the endless heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea’. In ‘Cicisbeo’, a husband ensconces himself in his loft, and will only communicate with his wife via notes. ‘You found people like Tim all over London,’ the narrator explains.

Andrew Roberts

With Europe, but not of it

Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles. The most serious of these is that in the four years that Churchill was prime minister, between 1951 and 1955, he personally, regularly and decisively blocked all movement towards Britain joining any of the European federal institutions that existed. However engaging Klos may be, and however well written his book, he is utterly wrong in his central thesis.

Alice O’Keeffe

Accentuate the positive | 15 February 2018

A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve Fox, a long-serving journalist, whose delightful and moving first book Milkshakes and Morphine was inspired by a diagnosis of head and neck cancer. The illness, though treatable, is just as grim as it sounds: she pulls no punches in describing the horror of breaking the news to her husband and teenage sons, of losing the ability to eat, talk or swallow, and of radiotherapy, which sounds like torture. Despite all that, Fox’s writing brims with joie de vivre.

Michela Wrong

Pleading with the emperor

Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she could become a spouse, he first had to raise her. Her education involved beatings when she left the house, even if it was only to borrow shallots from a neighbour. At 14, she gave birth for the first time. Successive pregnancies came like waves. Some of the children died or succumbed to diseases for which the only known treatment was prayer; most survived. She was a grandmother by her early thirties. In Ethiopia, it’s a story that ranks as utterly banal. Millions of women have lived it and millions will continue to do so, development programmes and government policy papers notwithstanding.

Taki

Unlucky at cards, unlucky in love

A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south of France more than 50 years ago. They were very proud of their nationality, rather broke and talked down to most people. Colonel so-and-so and Lord so-and-so were distant relations or acquaintances. It also reminded me of Separate Tables, Terence Rattigan’s brilliant play about snobbish souls living out their desperate lives in a grubby seaside hotel back in the 1950s. Except that poor old Veronica Lucan, now dead by her own hand, does not in any way write like Rattigan. Instead, she details her everyday disasters methodically, listing all the bad things that have happened to her. And I must admit there have been many.

Philip Marsden

Dreams of the green room

Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and physically way too demanding for anyone over the age of 27. But those young people grew up and they’re still at it. For millennials it’s hard to maintain a sense of cool when your parents are heaving their boards into the same breaks and when, according to the marketing people, there are upwards of 35 million surfers worldwide, in a sector that’s worth at least $10 billion per year. Now comes the season of the surfing memoir. The 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography was won by the very brilliant Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan.

Allan Mallinson

Fighting other people’s battles

What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the dustjacket of From Byron to Bin Laden, one of my favourite statues in Rome — Anita Garibaldi, pistol in one hand, babe in the other, galloping side-saddle to escape an ambush — and I said ‘yes please’. This was clearly going to be an invigorating read. But the index proved to have just a single reference to Anita. And the text is not light on PhD-speak: ‘The shared characteristics and commonalities across the generations discussed here clearly illustrate that foreign war volunteering constitutes a distinct diachronic phenomenon.

Patrick Flanery

Life in reverse

The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the Argentinian writer’s massive literary output — now more than 70 books — remains inaccessible in English. In this novella, which teases readers with suggestions of the autobiographical, Aira has one eye on his country’s past and the social effects of Juan Perón’s regime, and the other on the literary legacies of Proust. For Aira’s unnamed narrator, it is not the taste of lime blossom tea that spurs his fluid reminiscences, but a particular tree itself, ‘grown to an enormous size’ and central to the small-town landscape of his childhood in Coronel Pringles, where Aira himself was born.

Helen R Brown

Stripped to the bone

Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from her arm and drops it into the soup she has made for her dying mother. She spills another bowl of soup over her young daughter, seriously scalding the child’s neck. When that scarred little girl grows up and emigrates to America, she tells herself that to find her true identity, ‘You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.’ Almost 30 years later, the author has finally found the courage to take her character’s advice.