More from Books

Wednesday

Sara Wheeler

In the land of the Thunder Dragon

This charming collection of individual photographic portraits of Bhutanese citizens intentionally highlights the two central features of the kingdom today: cultural tradition and the encroachment of modernity. The photographer A.J. Heath lived in Bhutan for a year. Over three weekends he set up an open-air studio in the main square of the capital, Thimphu, and invited people in to be snapped. The subjects, mostly young, range from teenagers to a miner and a royal bodyguard. Opposite each picture Heath reproduces the questions he asked his subjects, and how they replied. The conversations reflect the duality I mentioned earlier: Heath asks for example what makes people feel Bhutanese.

Emma Williams

The hopes and fears of Bethlehem

Before a certain baby was born there, Bethlehem was famous for its sweet water. Shepherd boys like the young David, king-to-be, herded their flocks into the town and drank from the fountain at the gates. Water, as well as Jesus Christ, helped shape Bethlehem’s story. Its aqueduct enabled nearby Jerusalem to function and expand as a city and pilgrimage site: every invader from the Seleucids to the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British and, in 1967, Israeli forces, has seized control of the water supply in order to take Jerusalem. As a result, Bethlehem was militarised from its early days. Having lived in Bethlehem for a number of years, Nicholas Blincoe knows the area intimately.

Mervyn King

Murder, fraud and bankruptcy

Hamilton, created by the remarkable Lin-Manuel Miranda, has brought the financial musical to the London stage: a serious biography of a great man translated into rap. What comes next? Now we know. It is the story not of one individual but of a national institution — the life and times of the Bank of England. I can’t wait for David Kynaston’s new history to reach the stage. We may have to call on Tim Rice, a revolutionary himself in the world of musicals, to generate a libretto from the long original text. But there is a wealth of material in this fascinating book. Often seen as a rather traditional and staid institution, the Bank of England’s more than 320-year life has been remarkably eventful.

Thursday

Anne Margaret Daniel

A complicated man

‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ Lord Henry Wotton said that. It is always better to read Bob Dylan than to read about him. I said that. Two new books by Dylan, and two about him, prove my point. Just out in a lovely slim hardback is Dylan’s Nobel lecture (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). Its 32 pages have already been well picked over and much written about, but Dylan’s own account of the way he took ‘folk lingo’ and ‘fundamental’ literary themes — by way of Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Odyssey — to write ‘songs unlike anything anybody ever heard’ should be both read and heard.

Marcus Berkmann

Fiendishly puzzling

There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on his desk exuding yuletide jollity. But this year’s aren’t bad at all. Some are serious works of quasi-academic research, others are tooth-pullingly funny and one or two are utterly bizarre. For sheer magnificent pointlessness, you should look no further than Great British Pub Dogs by Abbie Lucas and Paul Fleckney (Robinson, £12.99). Lucas (a photographer) and Fleckney (a journalist) have, for no doubt pressing reasons of their own, roamed the nation to identify the ‘wonderful variety’ of Britain’s pub- dwelling dogs. Oh, and one pig, Frances Bacon.

Valentine Cunningham

Literary mafia boss

Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer of English literature. D.H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda hailed him as ‘the midwife’ of Lawrence’s ‘genius’. And so he was; while he also nurtured Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E. Bates and Henry Green. He presided as ‘reader’ over the shoals of expectant manuscripts piling up daily at the publishers — starting out at Fisher Unwin, doing the business for Heinemann and Duckworth, putting in long stints at Dent and ending up at Cape. Jonathan Cape headhunted Garnett for his new firm in 1921 as ‘the best reader’ in the land.

Claire Kohda

Perturbed spirits

The events of this book take place where the world of the living and the world of the dead rub shoulders. Mama, 12-year-old Jojo’s grandmother, hears the voices — singing, talking, crying — of ghosts; Leoni, Jojo’s mother, sees her brother — ‘given, that he’s been dead 15 years now’ — sitting at the table, in the car, on the sofa between her and her friend, and every time she is high; and Richie, a 12-year-old boy whom Jojo’s grandfather, Pops, knew in prison, haunts Jojo, searching for a way ‘home’.

Paul Levy

Loving in triangles

Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of her life, the homosexual biographer Lytton Strachey; and this pair of Edwardian virgins actually managed to consumate their relationship in 1916. She loathed her given name, and insisted on her new friends, such as Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and the entire large clan of Stracheys using her surname alone. Whatever her merits as an artist, the dramatic story of her life with the Bloomsbury group, and death by her own hand, is so enthralling that it was made into a film, in 1995, with Emma Thompson playing the title role. Like her frustrated suitor and fellow Slade student, Mark Gertler, she painted at least one masterpiece.

Tanya Gold

What will Katie do next?

In her memoir Rude, the former Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins reveals her true self. She does this by accident, because she has no self-awareness, but it is there, on page 233: It may we’ll [sic] be that by the time you are reading this I will be going through a dominatrix phase… a fierce bedroom warrior, nipples pinched tight by clamps, an orange in my gob, more buckles than a boot store, locked into a metal girdle with only my front bottom on show. Oh Katie! Don’t you know anything? The dominatrix doesn’t wear the nipple clamps; she doesn’t suck the orange; she isn’t locked into a metal girdle. This is the costume of the masochist.

Jeff Noon

Close up and far away

It’s difficult to keep a crime series going after 11 books but Boris Akunin manages it well in All the World’s a Stage (Weidenfeld, £20). His hero, Erast Fandorin, is now in his fifties. It’s 1911 in Russia, and while the Bolsheviks gather their power, another revolution is taking place in the theatre, and the Noah’s Ark Company are at the forefront of this new expression. When their star actress Eliza Altairsky-Lointaine’s life is threatened during a performance, Fandorin is called in to investigate. He’s working undercover as, of all things, the writer of their next production. This is a traditional crime drama in which members of the company are killed off one by one in ever more mysterious circumstances.

Andy Miller

From Bradford to Belgravia

In her debut novel, Adelle Stripe recounts the brief, defiant life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar was raised on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford, one of eight siblings. Her first play, The Arbor, which premiered at the Royal Court in London when she was just 18, originated as a CSE English assignment. She was, according to one tabloid newspaper at the time, ‘a genius straight from the slums’. Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) was also a hit at the Royal Court and was subsequently filmed by the director Alan Clarke. Dunbar wrote one more play, Shirley, and died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990. She was 29.

Thursday

Louis Amis

Only connect | 30 November 2017

This newly translated novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is really two books, spliced together in alternating chapters. One is a deeply researched account of the squalid peregrinations of James Earl Ray, who spent two months on the run after murdering Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. The other is a memoir charting the gradual attainment of personal and professional happiness on the part of the author himself. The reader feels confident that both protagonists will eventually arrive at their historically appointed destinies: handcuffs at Heathrow airport for Ray; a career as a celebrated author for Muñoz Molina. But considerable suspense surrounds the question of what on earth these two stories will have to do with each other.

Wynn Wheldon

High stakes and chips

According to the subtitle, this is a collection of ‘short stories of long nights at the poker table’. Were that the case, this would be a more enjoyable book, but there are too many stories here that stray from the baize. As a game, poker is relatively simple. The deal gives you your ‘hole’ cards, the ones you and no one else can see. They determine whether you play the hand or not. The betting follows as cards are further distributed. One by one players drop out, hopes dashed. Finally someone wins, not necessarily with the best hand. Beginning, middle, end. Poker has a richer literature than any other card game. Its attraction to writers is in its inherent suspense and the tension that creates. An old poker saw maintains that you play the players, not the cards.

Andrew Lambirth

Sculpture of the imagination

At the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) was buying fast cars and flying to architects’ meetings by helicopter. Within a decade the commissions for public sculptures had dwindled, and the rest of his career was something of an anticlimax. Yet he remained largely undaunted and was exceptionally prolific, making some 900 sculptures and more than 200 etchings, as well as 3,500 monotypes. He first came to public attention in 1952, as one of the artists representing Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Richard Davenporthines

Found and lost | 30 November 2017

Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the subtitle’s threat of earnest Welsh soul-searching, Charley’s Woods is tart, arch and crisp. It recalls a strange, lonely childhood with brisk frivolity and a ruthless perception of other people’s oddities, vices and humours. Duff was born in Battersea in 1949. His mother, Irene Gray, was a Dublin social worker who pioneered role-play therapy in Ireland, and became pregnant by an Irish don of French-Jewish descent. After her son’s surreptitious birth, she hastened back to Dublin.

Owen Matthews

Turkish delights | 30 November 2017

Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the crumbling grandeur of Count Ignatiev’s Russian embassy summer villa on the upper shores of the Bosphorus to the remote and fog-bound manor houses of the Black Sea. But the Palace Lady’s Summerhouse is much more than a beautifully illustrated book: it’s about the people who lived — and live — in these buildings, and a portrait of the vanishing worlds they represent. We meet the gentlemanly descendants of a dynasty of grand viziers who quizzically watch the maritime traffic of the modern world passing by their ancestral waterside palace.

Suzi Feay

Just a few tweaks…

As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I tried to imagine what a hapless editor might have had to say about the manuscript. ‘I like the way you, I mean Jay the narrator, makes the point that your, sorry his, mother is just like a scheming medieval queen, but I think you can assume readers willing to tackle 500-page literary novels will remember, so you don’t need to keep saying it, especially since the idea’s implied in the title,’ such a person might begin. ‘Likewise, the idea that the siblings interact like members of cannibal tribes that Jay encounters on his travels. So funny and apt, but just the one mention will do.

Katrina Gulliver

On with the new

I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told about rationing and petrol coupons, as yet another chapter in the long book of ‘how good you have it now’ — along with chilblains, measles, castor oil and walking ten miles to school neck deep in snow, uphill both ways. The Swedish author Elizabeth Åsbrink presents the year as the fulcrum of modern history, when ‘everything seemed possible, as it had already happened’. Month by month, she shows us the year through the eyes of a disparate cast of characters. Some of them are well known (George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir, Chuck Yeager, Primo Levi), some are passers-by who happened to be in history’s path.

Claire Kohda

The colour of fate

Before the narrator of The White Book is born, her mother has another child; two months premature, the baby dies ‘less than two hours into life’. The narrator is born in the dead baby’s place. ‘This life,’ she writes, in a passage directly addressed to her sister, ‘needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.’ In small, breath-like fragments, The White Book, written while Han Kang was on a writers’ residency in Warsaw, feels its way through and tries to find meaning in both lives, the narrator’s and her sister’s — or, rather, the single life they have each inhabited, at and for different times.