More from Books

Thursday

Will Cohu

The fallen Angel

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing two burly, possibly Middle-eastern figures framed in the tableau. Investigations were inconclusive. Marwan, then in his sixties, wasn’t well, but hadn’t seemed suicidal. On the other hand, he had been afraid, and with good reason, because plenty of people wanted him dead. Marwan had been a spy. That seems to be the most concrete element about his story.

Dominic Green

Knight’s tale

In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in the English-speaking world: the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. The ideological battle lines of 1641 recurred in 1776 and 1865, and not just because the Sons of Liberty and the Yankee industrialists were frequently descended from English Puritans. Broadly, all three revolts pitted Protestants against Catholics, reform against tradition, and yeomen against landowners. Civil war cuts across geography as well as families: Phillips compared pre-revolutionary America to the Balkans.

Christopher Bray

Frankly impenetrable

One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free, the sociologist-cum-philosopher told the packed hall at Frankfurt University, to ask questions as I go. Two of his charges did so immediately. When was Adorno going to apologise for having set the cops on those campus protesters three months earlier? Before Adorno could reply, another student scrawled ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease’ on the blackboard. At which point the whole class shrieked ‘Down with the informer!’ Then a group of women surrounded Adorno, bared their breasts, and showered him with rose petals. Grabbing his hat and coat, the hapless prof ran.

Jeff Noon

Recent crime fiction | 29 September 2016

There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy ring planning a terrorist act; the other is a police agent planted there to befriend the spy, and gather information on the terrorist cell. But the reader doesn’t know which is the cop, and which the criminal. This is the brilliant conundrum at the heart of Frédéric Dard’s The Wicked Go to Hell (Pushkin Vertigo, £7.99). The relationship between the two men moves from mutual loathing, suspicion and violence, to a begrudging partnership, to friendship, then to suspicion once more. Even after they escape prison together and go on the run, the fragile relationship continues: ‘Hatred like ours... is stronger than just affection, it goes much deeper!

Nigel Jones

Eden’s folly

Until it was overtaken by the still more disastrous debacle in Iraq, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was widely judged to be Britain’s worst postwar foreign blunder. Not only, to use Talleyrand’s phrase, a crime, but an error of monumental proportions. The deceitful plot by Britain and France, in secret collusion with Israel, to invade Egypt disguised as peacemakers; restore the recently nationalised Suez Canal to western control; and overthrow Egypt’s charismatic nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser into the bargain, went horribly and fatally wrong. Britain’s humiliating retreat, forced by a disapproving United States, marked the effective end of both the British and French empires, and raised the US to undisputed hegemony over the non-communist world.

Ian Sansom

All work, many plays

‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains much krapping away to both no little and little or no avail. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ remarks Krapp in the play, ‘But I wouldn’t want them back.

Anthony Cummins

Free love’s fallout

Ann Patchett’s new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and too many coincidences to count. The premise is straight out of John Updike — a writer she admires — but her eye is on free love’s fallout, not its thrills. As the title hints, she’s interested in the larger family units that itchy-footed spouse-swappers inadvertently create when they do the dirty on their kin. It opens with Bert, a father of three with another baby on the way, sneaking a kiss from Beverly, a married woman hosting a christening party for her second child, Frances.

Matthew Walther

One dead in Ohio

For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate for a major party has received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan; one prominent former member of that fraternity — a Grand Wizard, I think: or was it a Grand Dragon? — is running for the US Senate. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement did not riot in Cleveland, but that is only because they were nearly always surrounded by troops of mounted policemen. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of us are looking back with hope and trepidation at the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. One of the most remarkable books the movement produced is this 1973 family memoir, newly reissued with an afterword by the author.

Kate Webb

The art of listening

Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in a short space of time. Many, who not long ago were offended by the overflowing emotion of her memoirs of motherhood and divorce, are now full of praise for her current trilogy of novels, admiring particularly their restraint. What’s interesting about this turnaround is that while Cusk’s mode of presentation has changed, her subjects — the uncertain nature of reality, the relation of the individual to society, and the calibration of power — have not. Moreover, switching her focus from an outraged, opinionated woman to a recalcitrant, enigmatic one, has intensified her writing and clarified her project.

Jonathan Mirsky

Untold tales of Tibet

On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer residence in Lhasa, and began his flight to India, where he arrived on 31 March, after crossing some of Tibet’s most rugged terrain. He was so heavily disguised that the faithful crowds who had gathered to worship and protect him along the way mistakenly prostrated themselves before a monk in his entourage. Establishing in Dharamsala Tibet’s first democratically elected government, the Dalai Lama has ever since travelled the world making clear how the Chinese occupiers — who invaded Tibet in 1950 — eviscerated the country’s traditional culture.

Elisa Segrave

Body and soul

Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired by Josef Fritzel’s incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth, it described a mother and son held captive in one room for several years. It depicted their intense, private world and focused on maternal love. The Wonder also inhabits a small, claustrophobic space, whose inhabitants cling to idiosyncratic rules and beliefs. Set in the Irish Midlands soon after the potato famine, the story shows the reliance of the poor and often starving on a mostly joyless and self-punishing Catholicism. The Wonder, as Room did, depicts maternal love, this time distorted, but no less intense.

Adam Nicolson

Perils of the Pacific

In the great Iberian empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, a career was already avail-able in global administration not very different from the lives of the bankers or lawyers who globe-trot today. In 1509, as one example among hundreds, Duarte Coelho Pereira, a soldier for the Portuguese crown in Morocco and West Africa, went to India, where he spent the next 20 years accompanying missions to China, Vietnam and Siam. Back in Portugal, he became ambassador to the French court and then commander of a patrol on the Malaga coast before taking up the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, a plum royal job, where he made his fortune and founded a dynasty.

Claire Lowdon

The curse of Mr Kurtz

Marie Darrieussecq shot to literary fame in France when her bestselling debut, Pig Tales (1996), was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. Featuring a woman who turns into a pig, the novel earned Darrieussecq a reputation as a surrealist writer in the tradition of Kafka, and many of her subsequent works have involved fantastical elements and a dreamy, drifting prose style. Her two most recent novels, however, are rooted in the real, and narrated in a crisp, clear, present tense. Translated by Penny Hueston, both All The Way (2010) and her new book, Men, are about the same woman, Solange. All the Way was shot in close-up, focussing on the minutiae of Solange’s sexed-up adolescence in small-town France. In Men, the camera never leaves the boom.

Thursday

Eva Hoffman

Thinking of Israel

‘Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960,’ announces the opening sentence of Amos Oz’s challenging, complex and strangely compelling new novel. The story itself is easily summarised. At its centre is Shmuel Ash, a rather woebegone young man who abandons his university studies in Jerusalem when his girlfriend leaves him and his father withdraws his financial support.

Alex Clark

When less is more

It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before the crash, for the masters of the universe and social X-rays first sighted in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to launch another hostile takeover or push a lettuce leaf around a $25,000-a-table benefit dinner-plate. For Russell Calloway, encountered here for the third time, following previous outings in the novels Brightness Falls and The Good Life, such decadence is both revolting and alluring: as a struggling independent publisher, he is committed to the survival of bohemianism and the life of the mind; as a bon viveur, oenophile and gourmand, he’s made his peace with sniffing round the rich men’s tables.

Minoo Dinshaw

The Crusades live

The 12th-century crusader Reynald de Chatillon was one of the most controversial men of his time, and his new biographer Jeffrey Lee believes he has returned to disturbing relevance in ours. Over a relatively long life with a dramatically violent end, Reynald became Prince of Antioch by marriage, endured 16 years in a dungeon below Aleppo, attempted (uniquely in Islamic history) to raid Mecca and Medina, overturned the politics of the Crusader states, and became the bitterest enemy of Saladin. Reynald probably could not read or write, but had he tried his bloodstained hand at Blairesque apologetic memoir, the result might well have resembled Lee’s book. Like Reynald, Lee possesses a memorable style, flashy and crass by turns.

Daniel Hahn

Who you think you are

The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays about black and ethnic minority experience and identity in Britain today, is inconsistent, infuriating, uncomfortable and just occasionally insulting. It is also right to be every one of those things, and highly recommended. Its editor, Nikesh Shukla, was prompted to compile the book by an online comment on a Guardian article; but what really prompted it, of course, wasn’t just one commenter’s assumption but the society that the comment epitomises: a society in which immigrants are welcome, but only under certain conditions. That they are the right kind of immigrant, that minorities dutifully and above all gratefully play the role assigned to them.

Philip Collins

The quiet patriot

History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental than the Labour party. The stone monument of Labour history is Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 administration, so any biography of the great man is, inevitably, an intervention into the present state of the party, even if it comes supported with all the best scholarly apparatus. The last major biography of Attlee was Kenneth Harris’s official work, more than 30 years ago, in 1982. There is a neat symmetry to the fact that Harris was writing during the last occasion that the Labour party decided to join hands and walk off a cliff.

Elif Shafak

What makes Turkey tick

I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental things that people talked about when they gathered around dinner tables. Not quite so in Turkey. Over lengthy breakfasts and suppers, lunches and drinks, we Turks tend to talk about something else: politics. The truth is, we cannot get enough of politics. Even though politics dampens our spirits and darkens our minds, we return to the subject, like moths to their flames. Politics is a fast-running hare: we chase it as fast as our legs can possibly carry us, never quite managing to get hold of it. Everything happens too fast in Turkey. From one week to the next the mood alters. Yesterday’s heroes become tomorrow’s betrayers, and then suddenly, vice versa.

Wynn Wheldon

My mother, my self

To tell this story of his search for a mother lost to mystery in early infancy, its author uses the techniques of documentary drama. He describes past scenes and conversations in extreme, atmospheric detail: a particular dream on a particular night in the 1940s, a conversation in the 1950s. Perhaps his work as a screenwriter has helped in this, but it is the clarity of his prose and the emotional significance of his search that ensure an entirely plausible imaginative reconstruction. As one would in reviewing a novel, the characters may be described in the present tense.