More from Books

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

A girl in a million

All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed me as this one, just as events alarmed and frightened its central character. She is Okatsu, a young woman from the samurai Satsuma Clan in mid-19th-century Japan. The country has been ruled by the shogunate, a military caste, since the early 17th century; the emperors were remote figures until their restoration to power in 1868. China is already under attack and exploitation by Britain and the US, and many Japanese fear they may be next. Some urge driving the foreigners off, while others — realists — insist that treaties must be signed that yield some sovereignty to the westerners even while Japan is modernising.

Simon Bradley

Little and large

Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier volumes on England’s best churches and houses, and like them includes fine photography by the late Paul Barker of Country Life. Too hefty to serve as a guide book, it can be consulted as a reference work, or read with pleasure for its vivid and well-informed descriptions. Jenkins’s parish churches book was a publishing hit in 1999 — partly, one suspects, because it stimulated parochial rivalries with its five-star rating system. The cathedrals are ranked too.

Janine di Giovanni

Arms and the woman

In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by the Daily Telegraph when she landed her first serious journalistic coup. Using feminine wiles and diplomatic skills extraordinaire, she convinced a friend in the Foreign Office to lend her his chauffeured car. Stocking up with supplies in soon to be starving Poland, and charming the border guards, she crossed into Germany with nothing but her gut instinct and her smarts — the most important of a reporter’s tools (together with ‘ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’, in the words of the late Nicholas Tomalin). She didn’t disappoint her editors.

Ian Sansom

Port in any storm

Cometh the hour, cometh the book, and so Christmas brings us once again a tidal wave of titles relating to food and drink: cookbooks of seasonal dishes from around the world, never once to be consulted, and endless tomes of wine connoisseurship for all of us dedicated cheapskate consumers of Lidl and Aldi plonk. So the question is: are Thomas Tylston Greg’s Through a Glass Darkly and Henry Jeffreys’s Empire of Booze destined to last any longer than your turkey carcass and your festive case of supermarket Prosecco? Both books are undoubtedly charming.

Paul Keegan

Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As when soft Snows, brought down by Western Gales, Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . . Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright, And mourns her lost Variety in White. Unlike themselves the Objects glare around, And with false Rays the dazzled Sight confound. Lost variety is the nub: before it is anything else, snow is Nature’s alienation-effect, making all things look the same and ‘unlike themselves’ — even while we watch, or else behind our backs, noiselessly.

Jeff Noon

Crime fiction for Christmas

Imagine receiving an anonymous suicide note addressed to you by mistake. Would you try to find that person, to help them in some way? This is the opening dilemma in Bernard Minier’s Don’t Turn Out the Lights (Mulholland Books, £14.99), and Christine Steinmeyer’s failure to locate the letter’s sender turns her life in Toulouse upside down. Her dog disappears, she’s accused of harassment at work and her fiancé walks out on her. She believes that someone — some unknown person — is to blame for her misfortunes; but are the threats real, or is Christine losing her mind? This is a super-accelerated version of a Hitchcock thriller, with thrills and shocks on nearly every page.

John Sutherland

Love at first bite

Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high years, a supreme London beauty. She preserved her Dresden perfection by denying her husband conjugal access. Bram consoled himself with warmer but more dangerous ladies of the night; such satisfactions came at greater cost than a few sovereigns. According to David J. Skal, a quarter of men of Stoker’s bohemian class (including all of those central to his book) were infected with syphilis. And Bram? Skal thinks so too. Florence Balcombe, when a young Dublin beauty, was courted by Oscar Wilde as well as Bram. Oscar she was not inclined to — because of his ‘curly teeth’ quite possibly.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Dark and graphic

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the message, ‘I was you.’ Doubting yourself. Knowing you don’t love your girlfriend. Waking beside someone beautiful and new, only to notice a filigree of knife-scars etched across her breasts. If, sensitive reader, these ingredients make you inclined to do a runner (your finger already hooked around the next, less distressing page), then go right ahead. Because Charles Burns’s Last Look (illustrated above) clearly isn’t your kind of book. But if you’re in two or three minds about this, then please hesitate, because I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I think it may be a masterpiece.

Brian Martin

Double trouble | 8 December 2016

Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after reading the first quarter. It seems to be a dreary saga about three generations of the Tye family. The background is of an intellectual, comfortably off, left-wing family from a milieu in which Polly Toynbee would be happy. Grandpa was a Cambridge-educated conscientious objector during the second world war. The characters fail to interest. It all seems to have been said before. Then suddenly the plot develops and the narrative pace accelerates. Perseverance is rewarded. Mysteries unfold, complex moral issues are explored, some left hanging for the reader to decide on later, and many aperçus about the way we live now are there for us to ponder.

Mary Wakefield

The unkindest cult of all

When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah. Yisrayl (born Bill) lived with his many disciples and several wives in a compound carved out of the red dirt scrub near Abilene, Texas. His cult was called the House of Yahweh, and as a sign of their commitment, his 400 followers had all changed their names to Hawkins. Yisrayl was a narcissist, as most cult leaders are, and this made him tremendously boring. As he droned on about being chosen, and his conviction that Satan was in fact female, I watched the ferrety little Hawkins children dart between mobile homes and Airstream caravans, and his wives, the many Mrs Hawkinses, all in headscarves. They were good-looking women, and educated too.

India Knight

We’re all snobs really

D.J. Taylor’s clever dissection of snobs is really two books in one. Scattered throughout are entertaining, delicious (initially), solemnly related nuggets of hardcore snobbery. He writes brilliantly, for example, about the diarist and National Trust employee James Lees-Milne, who liked a world that knew its place (ideally beneath him). Lees-Milne was steeped so far in snobbery that he couldn’t bear the vulgarity of calling a garage a garage and so called his the ‘motor-house’. Either the absurdity of this makes you snort with laughter or it doesn’t. It does me, though I have to say the cumulative effect of a zillion snobberies is nauseating. You find yourself thinking, ‘My God, these terrible people’ on every other page.

Thursday

Niall Griffiths

From man to beast and back again

If there’s one shared characteristic of the so-called ‘new nature writing’ it is a failure, with a few notable exceptions, even to approach what up until very recently writing about the non-human had as its core ambition; that is, to dissolve the ego, to melt the self in the recognition of the other and, through that and in a wonderful paradox, to stretch the knowledge of what it is to be human. The solipsistic trait of the age is, it seems, pandemic; try consciously and ostentatiously to be a beast and you’ll succeed only in being a beast of a human being. Emblematic of this is a kind of empathetic glee in the suffering of animals, as if the evolutionary botch of Homo sapiens could ever be as pure and as perfect in its predations as, say, an otter or a sparrowhawk.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Is this the American Houellebecq?

I Hate the Internet is not so much a novel as a wildly entertaining rant. Jarett Kobek is a self-published former software engineer who has been hailed as the Michel Houellebecq of San Francisco — a city whose tech-era hypocrisies he doesn’t so much as satirise as carpet-bomb with excrement.

Melanie McDonagh

Children’s books for Christmas | 1 December 2016

Maurice Sendak, no mean judge, observed that William Nicholson’s Clever Bill was ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’. I’d go along with that if I didn’t think Nicholson’s other picture book, The Pirate Twins, even better, with its lovely opening, ‘One evening, on the sands, Mary found the pirate twins.’ Now Clever Bill (Egmont, £9.99) is back in print, 90 years after it was first published, so you can see for yourself what a genius little book it is. Nicholson (better known as the illustrator of The Velveteen Rabbit) wrote very few words, but what a tremendous narrative it is. Mary is invited to visit her aunt, and in the rush leaves behind her friend, the toy soldier clever Bill Davis. He sets off in pursuit.

Julie Myerson

High priestess of horror

A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her immediately. That was ten years ago and she has since become one of a handful of talismanic writers I reach for when craving literary succour. An undisputed master of the gothic and the uncanny— We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman are both masterclasses in the unearthly and the opaque — she plumbs domestic and familial horror in a way which manages to be both universal and chillingly particular. She is also, in Britain anyway, still ridiculously underrated, even unknown. This new biography by the New Yorker critic Ruth Franklin, therefore, could not be more welcome or timely.

Christopher Hawtree

Ripeness is all

‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.’ In fact, cheese animates the Bible and — building on Job’s searing image of the womb — its coagulation became an emblem of the Immaculate Conception, endorsed by no less than Hildegard of Bingen. This is just one of innumerable thoughts prompted by this Oxford Companion’s elegant, double-columned, well-illustrated pages. Here is a strong, pleasingly ripe case for cheese’s global role in social, political and economic history. It all makes for many ‘cheese adventures’.

Ursula Buchan

A choice of gardening books | 1 December 2016

Garden design usually breaks out of its confines to become part of the general consciousness only in Chelsea Flower Show week, but this year there have been so many events to mark the tercentenary of the birth of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown — the most prolific and talented designer of the 18th-century landscape garden — that even the general public has noticed. Most events have occurred under the umbrella of the Capability Brown Partnership, the brainchild of a landscape historian called John Phibbs, who has spent several decades studying Brown’s 170-odd landscapes and advising some of the owners on their recovery, care and conservation.

Frances Wilson

Rifling through a writer’s desk

Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book by Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book at all. It’s a celebration of the life of the novel and a manifesto for the death of the author, told in a collection of interviews, letters from journalists requesting interviews, letters within letters, stories within letters, and letters from Ferrante’s editor in which the idea of publishing all these letters, dating from 1991 to the present day, is initially proposed. The whole caboodle is a dizzying ‘jumble of fragments’, ‘a miscellaneous crowd of things’, a mass of ‘contradictory sensations’ which ‘make a noise in your head’.

Thursday

Keiron Pim

For king and countryside

In July 1915 the poet Edward Thomas enlisted as a soldier with the Artists’ Rifles, even though, at the age of 37, he had no obligation to do so. When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked why, he scooped up a handful of earth and replied: ‘Literally, for this.’ John Lewis-Stempel’s new book is persuasive that Thomas and his contemporaries’ love of the natural world informed both their motivation to fight and their conduct during the first world war. Theirs was the prelapsarian Britain of Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’, which records a brief, unscheduled halt aboard a steam train on a hot June afternoon in 1914: peaceful, inviolate, chiming with birdsong, loved and understood by a generation of young men who knew willowherb from meadowsweet.

Ian Thomson

Blackouts and white coats

In the cult Steve Martin film The Man With Two Brains, a doctor falls in love with a surgically removed brain. The object of his desire (fizzing, if I remember rightly, in a demijohn of formaldehyde) makes for an enduring gothic comedy of the mind. On the movie’s release in the early 1980s, neuroscience was still in its infancy. Men in white coats were cutting up monkey brains and their laboratories smelled of monkey urine. In recent years, however, neuro-imaging has changed the study of the human mind completely. Rainbow-coloured images on the scanner screen reveal our most precious and mysterious organ in all its alien complexity. Computer imaging may yet fathom the mystery of epilepsy.