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Thursday

Caroline Moore

The great Dadaist novel

Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless have been delighted to learn that it is almost impossible to review. An art critic, with his ‘little gadgets… called criteria’, is satirised in these pages as a kind of ‘policeman’, whose mission is in fact to seek out artists whose theories and works might disturb the peace… At the slightest threat of disorder the critic must set things right by exposing fraud and anarchy. Here, in pre-emptive defiance, is a ‘novel’ which is nothing but ‘fraud and anarchy’: a work in which there is no coherent plot, no illusion of character, written in a style riddled with self-mockery.

Honor Clerk

Monet’s great war effort

Claude Monet wanted to be buried in a buoy. ‘This idea seemed to please him,’ his friend Gustave Geffroy wrote. ‘He laughed under his breath at the thought of being locked forever in this kind of invulnerable cork, dancing among the waves, braving storms, resting gently in the harmonious movements of calm weather, in the light of the sun.’ Tethered below the water, but bobbing on the surface like a necropolitan bud, this bizarre image would have the great Impressionist finally metamorphosing into the thing that had so dominated his later years: the water lily. For an author who has taken on those titans of the Renaissance, Leonardo and Michelangelo, an ageing Claude Monet might seem an odd choice of subject.

David Horspool

A lively, rebellious boy

It is one of the great set-pieces of high drama in English history. The king, shamed by his part in the murder of his one-time friend turned implacable enemy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, agrees to come as a penitent to the holy site of the archbishop’s death to seek forgiveness and, in a conspicuously unkingly gesture, to prostrate himself at the martyr’s tomb. By the time he does so, the innocent blood spilled in the cathedral has begun to attract pilgrims from all over Europe, drawn by the miracles performed at the place where royal anger unleashed such unprecedented violence. In the words of Matthew Strickland, the king showed himself to be ‘overcome with feelings of guilt and remorse’.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Hit and miss | 15 September 2016

A few years ago, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune stumbled upon what was widely reported as ‘the Holy Grail of chicken’: a version of Colonel Sanders’s secret recipe that his second wife had scribbled in an album. Anyone hoping that it would contain exotic ingredients such as powdered lark’s tongue or virgin snow from Kilimanjaro was in for a disappointment. Those famous 11 herbs and spices turned out to be sadly humdrum: salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, and so on. It sounded like the kind of thing someone might come up with by dropping a spice rack on the floor and then adding a bag of flour. But none of that mattered to modern fans of KFC. Now they could recreate their favourite fast food much more slowly at home.

Sinclair McKay

Ghosts of the past

You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted pipelines, the pale reeds of the marshes, the barbed wire, the peeling housing estates, the lonely river paths. You hear it in the thick silence by the water, broken only by the wide river slurping and slopping against the embankment. There is something in the landscape of the Thames estuary that is curiously and powerfully uncanny. But how can that be in the otherwise earthy county of Essex? This is one of the subterranean themes of Rachel Lichtenstein’s electrifying exploration of the estuary. What ought to be a grey stretch of post-industrial England is in fact rich in eerie poetry.

Robert Colvile

Dancing with robots

Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected images from YouTube. The computer churned through them, and announced that it kept finding these strange things with furry faces. It had, in other words, discovered cats. Artificial intelligence has, all of a sudden, become the next big thing again. It is not so much sweeping across our world as seeping into it, with a combination of enormous computing power and the latest ‘deep learning’ techniques promising to give us better medical diagnoses, better devices, better recipes and better lives. Soon, it might even be able to give us new Beatles songs.

Jonathan Sumption

Come in, but keep your voices down

The illustrated manuscripts of the European Middle Ages are among the most beautiful works to survive from a maligned and misrepresented age. The darkest of the Dark Ages produced the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Out of the most vicious period of France’s medieval history emerged the exquisite books of hours painted by the Limbourg brothers for the repellent Duke of Berry. Yet, unlike the panel paintings, the sculpture, the buildings or the jewellery of the period, illustrated manuscripts are almost entirely inaccessible to the public. Light, oxygen and humidity, the three great enemies of pictorial artefacts, are especially unkind to manuscripts. Vellum is made of animal skin, which naturally decays. Vege-table dyes fade. Mineral pigments discolour.

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Writing on the fly

Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book. Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off.

Charlotte Hobson

Exit the Tsar

Helen Rappaport’s new book makes no claim to be a complete account of the Russian revolution. Instead it presents a highly readable and fluent description of the events of 1917 in the capital, Petrograd, as experienced by the city’s many foreign residents. Russia’s booming prewar economy had attracted every sort of business person and technical expert, as well as diplomats, journalists, adventurers and fleets of governesses. Their first-hand revolutionary experiences were too extraordinary not to record, and those who did not write contemporaneous accounts often produced memoirs later. Rappaport has unearthed striking new material from archives in Russia, the US, France and at the University of Leeds.

Anna Aslanyan

Digging deep into history

The year is 1963. A girl is walking around Stepney with a pack of index cards, visiting old residents in their dilapidated houses, drinking strong tea with tinned milk, listening to their stories of happy days past and looking at cracked walls and leaking roofs. As she promises them help on behalf of her employer, the Old People’s Welfare Association, redevelopment plans for the area are being drawn up with little regard for its inhabitants, many of whom don’t want to move. ‘There may be heartbreak in store for some,’ breezily remarks a magazine article. That girl was Gillian Tindall, and her interest in ‘the landscape of people’s lives’ has never waned, recently leading her to Crossrail, a project designed to transform London on a colossal scale.

Ian Sansom

Smaller than life

For Jonathan Safran Foer fans and sceptics alike, Here I Am comes as a wonderful gift, a truly painful, honest book which purports to be about a lot of things but is mainly about one thing: the breakdown of a marriage between a whiny, self-obsessed Jewish novelist turned scriptwriter and his blameless wife. Whether or not Foer drew inspiration for the book from the much-publicised breakdown of his own marriage to fellow novelist Nicole Krauss I have absolutely no idea and care less. Like any fully functioning adult, good fiction outgrows its origins. Or at least it should. A large part of Here I Am concerns itself with the very question of what we owe to the past and to others.

Iain Martin

No regrets, really?

Never speak on the same platform as Sir Malcolm Rifkind. I tried it once, at a Spectator debate held during the Scottish independence referendum campaign in 2014, and I will not be repeating the experience. The former Foreign Secretary spoke as usual without notes, and with such ringing clarity and confidence that all the other panelists were easily eclipsed. That included Kelvin McKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, speaking in favour of Scottish independence. Sir Malcolm might just as well have recited the Edinburgh phonebook from memory, in his Jean Brodie tones, and the audience would still have cheered him to the echo. It was a magnificent performance from one of the best speakers of his generation. And yet, for all the brilliance, I can’t recall a single word he said.

Frances Wilson

Champagne all the way

A more appropriate subtitle to this homage to the queen bees of the interwar years might have been ‘How to Suck Up in Society’, for the servility of these six stately galleons simply beggars belief. Each was a mistress of her art, but the oiliest of the lot has to be Mrs Ronnie Greville, the illegitimate spawn of a Scottish distiller who was described by Harold Nicolson as ‘a great fat slug filled with venom’. By offering to bequeath her house, Polesdon Lacey, to the stammering Prince Albert, Mrs Greville kept the monarchy buzzing around her hive for years to come. Queen Bees is a sticky blend of anecdote and social history, in which Sian Evans makes exaggerated claims for the historical significance of her salonnières.

Sara Wheeler

Alone on a wide, wide sea

Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag and introduced himself as Robinson. Ten minutes later, I found a room to rent. The homeowner’s first name was Crusoe. Get the idea? Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth of the Orinoco, Juan Fernández was where the real Crusoe, the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, spent four years and four months in the company only of goats. Andrew Lambert has had the very good idea of writing a kind of historical biography of the 15x5-mile lump of volcanic rock 415 miles off the coast of Chile (he includes the other two smaller islands in the archipelago).

Dominic Green

Towards the best of all possible worlds

The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we ask what time it is, we don’t want to know how watches are constructed.’ A telling assertion, considering Lichtenberg’s place and time. For nearly two centuries, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ had ground down tradition and metaphysics into reason and material processes. Enlightenment metaphors were mechanical: God as the divine watchmaker; or, in Leibniz’s image, the Cartesian mind and body as two clocks, synchronised but separate. As an experimental physicist, Lichtenberg practised the Enlightenment method, experiment and induction. But his frustration with matter and reason was Romantic.

Mark Mason

Paths to fulfillment

You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you go for a bit of a stroll and might turn here or might turn there, but specifically trails, where you can only follow one route. He likes them because ‘they are a rigidly bounded experience. Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit.’ And yet the book itself operates by exploring tangents, lots of subjects related to trails but which aren’t themselves trails. Not that the contradiction matters; Moor goes down some pretty interesting tangents.

Andrew Taylor

Where there’s a will…

‘Clonakilty, God help us,’ my Irish mother would say automatically when we drove into the town, in pious remembrance of those who had died there during the famine. Clonakilty acquires another corpse in Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second novel to feature Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, which is set mainly in a country house nearby. The continuing success of the Christie brand is one of the marvels of the modern entertainment industry. Estimates of her global book sales start at two billion. Only last August, the BBC announced that it had commissioned seven new Christie adaptations over the next four years.

Alan Judd

Listening in to the Russians

There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Somme and Winston Churchill. Rather than rehearse the Enigma story, however, Sinclair McKay describes what happened to the organisation that became GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) during the immediate postwar years. This was the crucial period when intelligence effort was redirected from fighting a hot war against Germany and Japan to beginning a Cold War against the Soviet Union. It is a neglected period in popular history and McKay does well to bring it to life. When the second world war ended, what we now know as GCHQ was part of MI6, under whose wing it had been since the early 1920s.

Philip Hensher

A life of telling stories

Not all novelists lead a public life. Those who do, however, tend to make a bit of a performance out of it. Beryl Bainbridge’s life, even before she started publishing novels, was an act, and during her period of fame she was famous for presenting herself in a certain way. It was an effective strategy for dealing with life, and because of it Beryl was one of the most widely loved figures of London life. I didn’t know her at all well, but always found her a total delight when she surfaced at literary parties; she had a knack of making you feel that you were going to enjoy looking after her for the next ten minutes.

Lucy Moore

Why the revolution went off the rails

Assignats are the bane of every student of the French revolution without an economics background. They were the bonds issued by the National Assembly from 1789, underwritten by the sale of newly nationalised church property, and all I ever really grasped about them was that they contributed to rampant inflation. In fact, as Ian Davidson shows in his new account of the revolution, their issue and ‘reckless mismanagement’ were as essential to the revolution’s initial success as to its ultimate failure. They may even have been ‘the single most important factor that caused the revolution to go off the rails’. At last someone has not just explained assignats but made them interesting.