More from Books

Thursday

Simon Ings

Help over the hump

Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the special province of our elders, though for no better reason than that old people were less common than they are now. Aristotle had their measure: ‘As they have a lot of experience,’ he wrote, ‘they are sure about nothing, and under-do everything.’ Now the old are as common as grass, and we draw the truth about life experience as much as possible from the source. If you want to know how a child feels, ask a child. If you want a considered opinion about Muslim dress codes, stop opining into a bucket, drunk on your own echo, and ask a Muslim. There’s much virtue in this attitude, but some obvious drawbacks.

Mark Cocker

Animals make us human

There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen as the ultimate scientific sin and suitable only for children’s stories. Not anymore. Today the inner lives of other creatures are widely accepted as a major research frontier, and here are three books that reflect these preoccupations. One of them even defines it as an entirely new discipline: anthrozoology. Peter Wohlleben may be no scientist, but he is a professional German forester and the author of the enormously successful The Hidden Life of Trees. In this new book he sets out to overturn the stock assumption that other creatures are mere automata driven by instinct, drawing particularly on studies that use MRI digital imaging of the human brain.

Ian Sansom

The spirits of the age

Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising group turned up as Trump, Kim Jong-un, a Disney Princess, and — I’ll admit that this had to be explained to me — a zombie Taylor Swift. Truly a quartet of contemporary horrors. Halloween, it is safe to say, is not what it once was: in my day, a gentle bit of apple bobbing, turnip carving and maybe a white sheet with holes for eyes at a fancy-dress disco was about the full extent of it. Ghosts and ghouls, it seems, change their appearance depending on time and place.

David Goodhart

Racism is a grey area

This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning its core liberal values under threat from a resurgent populist right. It is a largely fact-free polemic that passes itself off as an open-minded work of interview reportage. Yet if you can ignore the author’s sly interventions on behalf of his left-liberal premises, he does introduce the reader to a fascinating cast of characters, mainly from the European populist right.

Tim Martin

A dense, angry fable

Set partly in a future surveillance society, partly in ancient Carthage and 1970s Ethiopia, partly in contemporary Greece and London and partly in the synaptic passageways of the human brain, this huge sci-fi detective novel of ideas is so eccentric, so audaciously plotted and so completely labyrinthine and bizarre that I had to put it aside more than once to emit Keanu-like ‘Whoahs’ of appreciation. Science fiction in general is having an interesting moment right now, as writers and filmmakers respond to the loopily futuristic contemporaneities of robotics and AI research, but Nick Harkaway goes further than most in this vast and baroque novel.

Claire Lowdon

How to be good

Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ emphasises the mundanity of pain (‘even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/ Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot’) and how irrelevant it is to all but the sufferer: ‘Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.’ Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, is peopled by women who refuse to turn away from the disasters of others. The ‘untidy spot’ is Brooklyn, sometime in the first half of the 20th century, and the unsung heroines with no time for leisure are the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor.

Nicola Barker

A Muslim’s insights into Christianity

I’m not a critic, I’m an enthusiast. And when you are an enthusiast you need to try your best to keep it in check when writing reviews, just in case your prodigious levels of excitement and, well, enthusiasm, threaten to overwhelm readers and only succeed in putting them off. Because people generally need a bit of room — to create some distance, establish a tiny bit of breathing space — in order to make their own considered decisions about the liable goodness or badness of a thing. But shucks to all of that.

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat

Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise.’ By that, the Tory grandee meant that in the spring of 1940 Winston Churchill managed to use Britain’s grotesque military cock-up in Norway, for which he was responsible, to supplant Neville Chamberlain. Churchill sidelined Chamberlain’s most likely successor, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax. He overcame Tory backbench distrust. He even got Labour on side, though its leaders had long considered him the class enemy incarnate.

Tim Martin

Unearthly powers

This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family saga, a bit of mobster crime thriller, a bit of Cold War goat-staring spy story and really quite a lot of psychic/psycho-kinetic fantasy. And yet Daryl Gregory, who won several impressive prizes a few years ago for his fabulous horror novella We Are All Completely Fine, pulls the whole thing off with the unflustered charm of a stage magician. The setting is Chicago in the summer of 1995, where the Telemachus family, formerly a bunch of stage psychics and entertainers (‘Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family!’) have fallen on hard times.

Melanie McDonagh

Three daemons in a boat

Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer to Harry Potter — is an intriguing work. It’s notionally set some time near our own, but the world it evokes is the 1950s and 1960s England of the author’s youth. The hero, Malcolm Polstead, is the only child of an innkeeper — that timeless calling — and the inn was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other Barry) stalked among the drinkers...

Emily Rhodes

A choice of first novels | 19 October 2017

Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The Trojan Flea’ is scrawled across X-ray screens; ‘I am so full of your death I can now only breathe your rot’ on a stairwell; and, on a dead body, ‘cut into the flesh with a scalpel, from throat to navel, is the word INSPIRATION’. A.S. Patric grabs his reader’s attention with the riddle of ‘Dr Graffito’s’ identity, while a more subtle mystery unfurls alongside. Jovan, the hospital cleaner — whose job it is to remove the offensive graffiti — has come to Melbourne from Sarajevo, where he was a teacher and ‘used to wake in the mornings with poetry emerging in rhapsodies’.

Isabel Hardman

Hunt the lady’s slipper

Who would want to read a whole book about a teenage boy’s gap year? When most 18-year-olds take time off before university, they either head for Thailand to experience middle-class Western culture in warmer climes with more drugs, or spend six months shelf-stacking and six months ‘finding themselves’ at a Ugandan orphanage. A tedious evening in the pub during freshers’ week when all the gap year students bore one another into submission about how much better Mexico made them is normally enough. Leif Bersweden thought so much of his year off, though, that he wrote 360 pages about it.

Alex Marklew

Lend me your ears

Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the Gettysburg Address ‘dull and commonplace’ and, as this joy of a book points out, even Cicero had to put up with the Neo-Attics sniggering from behind their togas at his overwrought and outdated speaking style. The poor Roman must have felt rather like Harry Kane when a bunch of pub footballers take to Twitter to bemoan his inability to find the target. In rhetorical terms, Philip Collins is a long way from a Sunday League layabout. With three years as Tony Blair’s principal speechwriter/verb-remover, followed by a successful career as a leader writer and columnist for the Times, he is certainly no stranger to the art of persuasion.

Christopher Bray

Art and aspiration

When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and his wife-to-be were reduced to sharing a 9’ x 11’ basement with a bunch of cockroaches. But everything was going to be all right because Gopnik had his guitar with him and he ‘knew someone who’d once had dinner with the sister of a close friend of Art Garfunkel’s psychotherapist’. Having sent a tape of his songs over, he settled down to ‘write jokes for comedians. It seemed like a plan for life’. In a way it was. Though Gopnik has yet to hear back from Garfunkel, his oratorio about Alan Turing played recently at the Barbican.

Suzi Feay

Something scary in the attic

How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but what appals A might bore B and merely confuse C. The mechanics of apparition, however fanciful, must be internally consistent, and explanations kept simple. M.R. James excelled at giving his spectres agency and focus, but in some hands ambiguity is more effective. Read a Robert Aickman and half the time you have no idea what happened, if indeed anything did. I was once put off by a description in a novel of a ghost drifting round a house at night and contemplating its sleeping inhabitants. While that might give you the willies, for me that violates an essential requirement for manifestation: that it involve interplay between deceased and living consciousness.

Paul Strohm

The pilgrims’ ways

Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting tapestry of life in 14th-century England. Her technique — pursued with the verve and spirit for which she is already justly admired — is to celebrate Chaucer’s pilgrim portraits by resituating them within an enlarged field of medieval practices and assumptions. Geoffrey Chaucer’s own trick, in enlivening the portraits with which he launches his Canterbury Tales, is the epitomising detail, the apparently random observation — in current poker language, the ‘tell’ — that gives the pilgrim’s game away.

Thursday

Jeff Noon

Recent crime fiction | 12 October 2017

Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (4th Estate, £12.99) has the word masterpiece emblazoned on the cover, alongside quotes from several famous authors telling us how brilliant it is. It can be difficult to see through this hype and find the true novel, but let’s try. Fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston lives with her father, Martin, a survivalist type who’s taught her how to fire a gun and use a hunting knife from an early age. He abuses his daughter, trapping her in a circle of love and pain. When Martin brings home another young girl, Turtle at last finds the courage to confront the man who has so dominated and controlled her life. This is a bloodstained book, etched with violence, with unflinching depictions of abusive sex and desperate love.

Jonathan Mirsky

His dark materials | 12 October 2017

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and  lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of the press and the east-coast elite, and feelings of having been short-changed and despised by snobs, held steady until their hero and champion unmistakably broke the law and had to resign his second-term presidency. Nixon won a smashing re-election in 1972, even as it was apparent that the White House was awash with skulduggery.

Boyd Tonkin

Navigating a new world

In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of foreigners who served in their crews; which could top 40 per cent. Their worry is not surprising, given the verdicts gathered from British consulates in port cities on the native seaman: ‘drunk, illiterate, weak, syphilitic, drunk, dishonest, drunk…’ In 1894, a parliamentary committee interrogated officers about manning and skills in the merchant marine. One informant was a British-naturalised master ‘with 16 years’ experience’. The MPs, who didn’t presume to ask this expert witness specifically about foreign crews, recorded his name as ‘Mr J. Conrad Korzeniowski’.

Tibor Fischer

The problem with Hungary

The name of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is on the lips of most left-wing, liberal politicians and intellectuals in Europe. They have adorable tantrums, denouncing him as ‘authoritarian’, ‘autocratic’ or, even uglier, ‘dictatorial’, as they congratulate themselves on their righteousness and courage in speaking out. A few months ago I visited Budapest. On the way in from the airport I saw several billboards depicting Orbán and his rich chum Lörinc Mészáros, the mayor of Felcsút, Orbán’s home town. Beneath, in large letters, were two words: ‘They Steal’. It seems to me a rather poor autocracy where that sort of thing goes on.