More from Books

Thursday

Stuart Kelly

Rich in legend and song

There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with literary connections: as Walter Scott wrote in Marmion, ‘Nor hill, nor brook we paced along/ But had its legend or its song.’ Many years ago when the Scottish Borders was marketing itself as the ‘Land of Creativity’ I assembled a database of references which stretched to well over 1,000 entries — for example, the village of Yetholm crops up in a strange extended simile in Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous October Ferry to Gabriola. Then there is Scotland’s propensity for memorialising its own writers. The Scott Monument is only the most obvious example.

Thursday

Matt Thorne

Riding high

How’s this for a heartwarming set-up­­? Forty-something recovering alcoholic and aspiring artist Ginger copes with the disappointment of being unable to have children of her own by signing up to an organisation that sends underprivileged inner-city kids to the homes of middle-class couples in the countryside. When she is introduced to 11-year-old Dominican girl Velvet, the two bond over horses, with Ginger offering the girl a freedom denied to her by her domineering mother. It sounds perfect for book clubs, soon to be a life-affirming movie, and of little literary interest. But The Mare has much more merit than the synopsis suggests.

Boyd Tonkin

Something new out of Africa

In a Johannesburg mall, a listless and lonely IT worker chats with his dad about the bitter fruits of upward mobility in South Africa. ‘Do you remember when you scored 139 for that IQ test?’ Pa asks, in Masande Ntshanga’s story ‘Space II’. ‘I thought it meant my life would be different, I tell him, but I don’t really like computers.’ As the dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ fades, all the Ubers, espressos and craft beers in the city can’t dispel the mood of yuppie melancholia. Modern Africa, as several pieces in the latest edition of this annual anthology attest, may cast away old burdens only to take on the anxious freight of globalised life.

John Hare

In the steppes of the Golden Horde

When I first visited the complex of Buddhist cave grottoes, dating from the fifth to the 14th century, at Bezekilk in Xinjiang province, China, I was struck by the destruction wreaked on them by Muslims whose religion proscribes figurative images of human beings. Eyes had been gouged out and figures lacerated with knives. When and by whom had the vandalism of these exquisite and colourful portraits been done? I later learnt that the Buddhist Uyghurs of the Kingdom of Qocho and Turfan, in which Bezekilk was situated, were converted to Islam by conquest during a holy war at the hands of the Muslim Chagatai Khizr Khwaja. Not easy information to assimilate. The activities of Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes are widely known but not always in detail.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Death in Greenwich

With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on the bedside book over the last few weeks. When, in this true Victorian murder mystery, I came to the sentence, ‘Ebeneezer Pook, however, had no intention of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure’, all I could see in my head was Jeremy Corbyn emerging from his house, ducking under the prickly rosebush and refusing to stand down. And when I came to this complicated passage: Mrs Thomas’s story buttressed the account that William Sparshott had given and would dovetail with the account Olivia Cavell was about to give.

Kate Womersley

Stiffen the sinews

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in the course manual for directions about how to cut — through? around? underneath? But there was no mention of these pleasure-giving, milk-yielding, cancer-visited organs. One justification for the vast expense of cadaveric dissection is to develop a clinical understanding of the body in its supposed entirety.

Tom Holland

Pitch perfect | 21 July 2016

One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect sky’. Hotten’s prose, simultaneously spare and lyrical, conjures up the scene as magically as Edward Thomas’s poem evokes Adlestrop. What happened to the people who played with him on that day, Hotten wonders. ‘Have they had good lives since then? I hope so. Nothing ties us except that game, but I doubt that anyone who played has forgotten it.

Richard Ingrams

The great sulker

Ted ‘Grocer’ Heath, as he will always be for me, was chosen by his fellow MPs to be their leader in 1965 as the Tory answer to Harold Wilson. After two Old Etonian patricians, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, the Grocer was a grammar-school boy, a meritocrat who would spearhead a new-look, classless Conservative party. He was a clever, hard-working man, totally devoted to his political career. Unfortunately, with his wooden stance and curious ‘neow-neow’ voice, he lacked charisma, a failing he would never have admitted, as Michael Gove did recently. I remember Heath presenting the awards at the annual What the Papers Say lunch in 1968 and you could see journalists furtively looking at their watches after only a few minutes of his speech.

Thursday

Alex Clark

Mournful and meticulous

After a curtain-twitching cul-de-sac, a Preston shopping precinct, and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints brought to Lancashire, Jenn Ashworth ups sticks for the seaside in her fourth novel. Set in the determinedly genteel resort of Grange-over-Sands, just across the bay from Morecambe on the Cumbrian coast, Fell is a disturbing, precisely rendered tale of charisma, misplaced faith and transgenerational trauma, with a touch — not too heavy-handed, fortunately — of the supernatural.

Sam Byers

The wonder of knowledge

‘Transparency,’ remarks Eliade Jenks, narrator of Joanna Kavenna’s fourth novel, A Field Guide to Reality, ‘is an aspiration. But wouldn’t it be strange, if you could see all things clearly?’ It’s an apposite question. For a novel with illumination and the quest for knowledge at its heart, clarity is in beguilingly short supply. Set in a distorted contemporary Oxford smothered by an eldritch mist, peopled not only by modern-day academics but by the spectres of thinkers past, and illustrated in gloomy monochrome by Oly Ralfe, A Field Guide to Reality is a work of cunning misdirection and trickery — a mystery in thrall to mystery’s beauty. When the scholar Solete dies, he leaves his friend Eliade a message.

Rose George

Making waves | 14 July 2016

The tour guides of Ephesus, in Turkey, have a nice party trick to wake up their dozing coach passengers. As the coach drives along, they say, ‘This is the ancient port of Ephesus’, and the passengers look, as I did, at fields and trees and nothing else. They peer for the sea and are told it is miles away. Ephesus was a major river port in antiquity but the river has long since silted up and left its port stranded. This fact isn’t in Aldersey-Williams’s book on tides but there are plenty more to be told of the curious, attritional relationship of humans and the tidal waters of the planet.

Ian Thomson

The art of getting by

Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, is reckoned to be a hive of pickpocketing and black-market manoeuvrings. (A Neapolitan gambling manual advises: ‘Rule Number 1 — always try to see your opponent’s cards.’) Crime is not the whole picture, of course. To look out across the Bay of Naples remains a visual education in the grand style as the twin, dromedary-like mounds of Vesuvius shadow the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Erri De Luca, one of Italy’s bestselling authors, was born in Naples in 1950, and understands perfectly the city’s obscure exuberance of life. The Day Before Happiness, a novella, unfolds amid the card-sharps, prostitutes and barefoot scugnizzi (urchins) who scrimped and scuffled in the city during the postwar years.

Sarah Ditum

Daddy dearest

In 2004, after a 25-year estrangement, Susan Faludi’s father reappeared in her life via email. ‘I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man I have never been inside,’ it read, and was signed, ‘Love from your parent, Stefánie.’ The 77-year-old had embarked on a new life as a woman, both a dramatic abruption and the continuation of a biography full of reinvention. He was born as a Hungarian Jew called István Friedman, survived the Holocaust thanks to a talent for imitating Nazis, adopted the name Faludi to show he was ‘100 per cent Hungarian’, and later settled in the US, where he became Stephen Faludi, archetypal ‘American Dad’ and, as a photographer, a master manipulator of images.

Harry Mount

Worlds apart

Classics is a boastful subject. Even the name — classics — has an inner boast; as does the classics course at Oxford, Literae Humaniores (‘more humane letters’), and the course’s second half, Greats. Michael Scott, a classics professor at Warwick University and a telegenic media don, tries to put an end to the boastfulness in this book. It has always understandably annoyed him that, in the field of Greek and Roman studies, book titles often include the words ‘Ancient World’ — as if there were only one ancient world, and it only included Greece and Rome. And so he attempts an ambitious reordering of ancient worlds — thus the book’s title — and brings the study of Greece and Rome together with Central Asia, India and China.

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Good clean fun | 7 July 2016

The Detection Club is rather like the House of Lords of British crime writing, though considerably more select. (I should declare an interest: I’m a member of the club, so it’s possible I may be biased.) Founded in 1930 by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers among others, the club chooses new members by secret ballot. Candidates undergo an initiation ritual involving black candles, a billowing red robe originally designed for G.K. Chesterton, a terrifying sacred oath and a skull called Eric. (Forensic examination has demonstrated that Eric belonged to a female.) The story of the club’s early years has been well told in The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, the current president.

Andy Miller

We’re all curators now

In January 1980 Isaac Asimov, writer of ‘hard science fiction’, professor of bio-chemistry and vice-president of Mensa International, penned a column for Newsweek magazine in which he addressed a prevailing ‘cult of ignorance’ in America. ‘The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life,’ he wrote, ‘nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

Richard Francis

Back from the front

In his preface Sebastian Junger tells us that this book grew out of an earlier article. It obviously didn’t grow much, since the main text is still only 138 (small) pages long, less than half the length of its predecessors The Perfect Storm and War, though it comes armed with a list of sources amounting to another 30 pages. Junger is attempting to explore the relationship between two ‘impulses’, as he oddly terms them. The first is that certain white captives of American Indian tribes chose to stay with their new communities even after release was possible, while the second is the disappointment felt by many American soldiers when returning home from war.

James Walton

MPs and DTs

In 1964, a newly elected Labour MP was put in charge of the House of Commons kitchen committee. (An unpromising start to a review, I appreciate, but bear with me.) His idea of selling off the House’s rather splendid wine cellar duly appalled some MPs, but was accepted as a useful money-making scheme. Only later did it emerge that he’d bought/ripped off a collection of the best bottles for himself at a bargain price, and that this was not untypical behaviour — because the Labour MP was Robert Maxwell. Order, Order! is packed with memorable tales like this.

Lee Langley

Music, love and all things human

When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling it ‘crap’ and the award a disgrace. A columnist counted the number of ‘fucks’ — apparently 4,000. This was 1994 and savage Glaswegian vernacular replete with rhythmic obscenities was terra incognita to English readers. Kelman was paving the way for followers like Irvine Welsh with Trainspotting and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar. Scottish writers are part of the mainstream now, but Kelman, recognised as the godfather of modern Scottish writing, critically admired on both sides of the Atlantic, remains oddly uncelebrated south of the border. His ninth novel, Dirt Road, is a strange and beautiful thing for those prepared to follow its meandering path.

Dominic Green

Godly swingers

There were two communist manifestos of 1848. One had no influence whatsoever on the revolutions of that year, but now symbolises the struggle against bourgeois capitalism. The other secured a small readership, and is almost forgotten today, but it also laid the foundations of a business that catered to bourgeois propriety. The gestation of Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto is fascinating — notably their attempts to peel socialism away from its roots in Christianity and the ‘utopian’ theories of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The gestation of John Humphrey Noyes’s Bible Communism is astounding. And gestation is the word.