More from Books

Thursday

Hugh Pearman

Lost in the metropolis

Richard Rogers is to architecture what Jamie Oliver is to cookery. It is not enough for either of them just to be very good at what they do and to bank the proceeds: they want so much more. They want to use their skills and money to improve society more broadly. They are old-school campaigning idealists (and Oliver trained in the kitchen at the River Café, run by Rogers’s equally committed wife, Ruthie). The downside of being a do-gooder in the UK, of course, is that people can find you irritating.

Horatio Clare

The worst things happen at sea

This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness about our mental health, I declare an interest: diagnosed as cyclothymic, and having known more than two attacks of depression and hypomania in the past 30 years, I would have been disqualified from passage as an emigrant to New York by the 1907 US Immigration Act, which prohibited ‘All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons and persons who have been insane within five years previous....

Lee Langley

Octopus beaks and snake soup

Driving across Japan’s Shikuko island, the food and travel writer Michael Booth pulls into a filling station to find, alongside the fizzy drinks and chewing gum, ‘vacuum-packed octopus beaks’. Who could resist? Not Booth. ‘Very crunchy,’ he reports. ‘And not in a good way.’ Booth is drawn to the offbeat, and The Meaning of Rice gives us a banquet of the unfamiliar: seaweed caviar, live squid sashimi, sea-urchin tongues, snake soup, bonito guts, silkworm pupae, and more, with all their smells, flavours and textures. I recall my disconcerting first meal in a traditional ryokan: pink wafers of raw horsemeat, boiled firefly squid and dark, gleaming eel. It was delicious; Booth would have approved.

Honor Clerk

August Auguste

In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The beetling brow, piercing eye and a succession of roll-ups stuck to his lower lip offer almost a caricature of the undimmed rascality of the old devil. Like all the films in that remarkable series, it offers a glimpse into a world that we thought television was invented too late to record. But how much more extraordinary it is to watch, in a three-minute film made in 1915, another elderly artist — the 74-year-old Pierre-Auguste Renoir, crippled with arthritis, working at his easel.

A.N. Wilson

That’s no lady

Did I enjoy this novel? Yes! Nevertheless, it dismayed me. How could John Banville, whom I’ve admired so much ever since he published his first short stories, whose great novel The Sea deservedly won the Booker and whose thrillers, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, so hauntingly evoke 1950s Dublin, have wasted however long it took to write it? The answer, perhaps, was given some years ago, in an interview with a journalist, when he confessed: ‘The guiding light has always been Henry James.’ Probably all serious novelists in our language revere James beyond idolatry. He calls us to raise the craft of fiction to the level of art. And the trouble is that anyone with an ear soaked in the Jamesian music falls into the danger of parody.

Thursday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Brotherly love | 28 September 2017

Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal. Emile is realistic about the scale of the challenge, but Lucien views it as a great adventure.

Victoria Schofield

Portraits of Pakistan

By his own admission, Isambard Wilkinson’s memoir of his experiences in Pakistan a decade ago as a foreign correspondent has taken ‘criminally’ long to write. A litany of thanks to assorted individuals in his acknowledgements is testimony to the book’s painful gestation. Perhaps the most surprising is to his brother, Chev, ‘who is missing a vital organ on my account’. Reading Wilkinson’s narrative, which is both humorous and poig-nant, the reason is clear. From an early age he suffered kidney failure requiring a kidney transplant; but dire predictions of the disease, which might leave him bound for life to a dialysis machine, did not prevent him from being ‘internationally curious’.

Paul Levy

Alice’s restaurant

Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known celebrity cook, the person who inspired the planting of Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden, the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Légion d’Honneur, vice-president of Slow Food International, the founding figure of California cuisine. She is the mentor of Sally Clarke and, claims Wikipedia, of René Redzepi and Yotam Ottolenghi. It all began in 1971 with a simple French restaurant in Berkeley, California, which she called Chez Panisse in homage to the films of Marcel Pagnol. It served a no-choice menu, costing $3.95, consisting of the traditional dishes she’d tasted during her year abroad in France.

Andy Miller

Having your cake

For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up there with Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson, Goffin and King, Holland, Dozier and Holland, and Bacharach and David. The hits he wrote for Glen Campbell alone earned him his place in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Galveston’ and of course ‘Wichita Lineman’, the dying fall of which — ‘And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time’ — is so perfect that I am fighting back tears even as I type it. The song was written in an afternoon at the request of Campbell who, after the success of ‘Phoenix’ was looking for ‘something about a town’.

A.N. Wilson

Trials and Trinitarians

John Calvin believed that human nature was a ‘permanent factory of idols’; the mind conceived them, and the hand gave them birth. Isaac Newton acquired a copy of Calvin’s Institutes when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661 as a teenager. By the time he was a mature man, however, Newton’s determined effort to strip the mind of superstitious superfluities had far outstripped the austere predestinarian of Geneva. As a Fellow of Trinity, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1669 onwards, Newton was obliged to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. It was noted that, most unusually for a Cambridge academic at this period, he refused to take Holy Orders.

Katrina Gulliver

Ratings war

Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years. The first and second world wars were the most anticipated conflicts in history. Military strategists and popular novelists all published the wars they envisioned in the decades before. Whether in the spycraft of Erskine Childers or the science-fiction of H.G. Wells, the reading public was warned of the carnage to come in many imaginative forms. But all that anticipation did little to avert the bloodbaths. In this book, Lawrence Freedman offers a detailed analysis of how we have planned (or failed to plan) for conflict. Into the 20th century, military planning suffered from still focusing on the model of the Napoleonic wars, with the notion of the decisive battle.

Christian Wolmar

Going places

Stations, according to Simon Jenkins, are the forgotten part of the railway experience. People love the trains, the journey, the passing countryside, the leisurely pace and the locomotives, especially steam ones. The stations, however, have been rather ignored. Sure, the ubiquity of Prêt, Upper Crust and all those coffee chains on station concourses has made the experience somewhat tawdry at times, but even the worst is better than an airport. Brief Encounter would not have worked in a departure lounge. As Jenkins discovers, there is still plenty to celebrate and enjoy, and the modern disdain of stations is partly borne of our reluctance to linger in the face of modern life’s myriad competing demands.

Andrew Taylor

Apostle of gloom

Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of the grim and darkly fascinating Wallander series of Swedish crime novels, though he also produced a formidable body of other novels, as well as plays, screenplays and children’s books, before his death in 2015. After the Fire is his last book, now published in an admirably smooth English translation. It reprises the main setting and many of the characters of an earlier book, Italian Shoes, including the narrator. Fredrik is a former surgeon whose medical career was destroyed after he botched an operation. Now nudging 70, he lives alone on a bleak island in the Stockholm archipelago. The novel opens one autumn night when he wakes to find his house on fire.

Thursday

Harry Ritchie

Learning to talk

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been blessed by such great popularisers — your Attenboroughs, your Sagans, your Dawkinses. Alas, there is one inglorious exception to this marvellous rule — linguistics. A discipline that has produced enormous and enormously important advances over the last century — but not one linguist who has managed to tell the rest of the world about them. Steven Pinker did have a bestseller with The Language Instinct, but he was moonlighting from his day job in neuropsychology.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Demonised by history

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’ In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’. Remind you of anyone?

Richard Davenporthines

Muddled in minutiae

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his quarterly review of literature, the Criterion, which had its first issue in October 1922. Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding editor of the New York Times books website, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fashions, publicity drives and the politicking of literary factions. And so he makes a painfully reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark: ‘The importance of Proust was publitical above all.’ 1922 was the publication year of P.G.

Neel Mukherjee

Deep learning

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate career in non-fiction. He trained as an academic (English literature, mathematics, linguistics and computer analysis of stylistics), taught for several years in the US and in South Africa, and continues to translate, write essays and reviews — most notably for the New York Review of Books — and introductions to books. This third volume of non-fiction pieces, Late Essays 2006-2017, gathers a selection mostly from the NYRB and from his introductions to a series of novels translated into Spanish and published by the Spanish-language press El Hilo de Ariadna.

Ian Thomson

The cult of Holy Bob

The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy Cliff as the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw amid the ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamaican capital of Kingston. The film’s director Perry Henzell, a ganja-smoking white Jamaican who had been sent to board at Sherborne school, was influenced by the gritty ‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed for a documentary immediacy off the street. The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in under a week, effectively introduced reggae to white British audiences. Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to say, reggae would not have taken hold in Britain in the way it did.

Owen Matthews

The hunger

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black Packard automobile would draw up to the door of the handsome pre-revolutionary mansion her family shared with other senior Party cadres to take her father to his job as Party boss at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. When he returned in the evening her father would be carrying bulging packets of sausages and meat from the factory canteen. Lenina did not remember wanting for anything. Yet in reality Kharkov, like all Ukraine’s cities in that terrible year, was an island of plenty in a sea of starvation. All over Ukraine millions of peasants were dying of hunger in a massive, man-made famine deliberately unleashed by the Soviet state.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Harsh, but entertaining

When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal. Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption. Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old Canadian mogul who founded and developed the world’s second-most influential media conglomerate. His older daughters, Abigail and Megan, want the wealth and power; his youngest daughter, Florence, wants only his love.