More from Books

Thursday

Mark Fisher

Finders keepers

Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that we should need any such reminder after the depredations of the Taleban in Afghanistan, or Isis’s earlier rampage through the museum in Mosul and its attacks on sites at Hatra and Nimrud. A former director at the Institute of Ideas and a visiting fellow at the LSE, Tiffany Jenkins applies her considerable experience of cultural policy to construct an excellent survey that rehearses the issues. Who is responsible for the great examples of our shared heritage? Where should they be located: where they originated; where they have ended up; or where they can best be looked after, seen and understood?

Sukhdev Sandhu

Fifty shades of blue

Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people, she soon became unjoined. She stopped eating and drifted, moved from sublet to sublet, wandered the streets in a desperate daze. She craved intimacy and shied away from it, was painfully self-conscious but also anxious that she was in danger of vanishing. What does loneliness feel like? It feels, she says, ‘like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.’ The Lonely City is memoir, art criticism and a portrait of the Big Apple seen through the eyes of an accidental flâneuse.

Craig Raine

Rich and fruity

F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert of apparatus, the trickle sometimes disappearing altogether. In this volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters, from 1932–1933, the footnotes, the infantry and the grunts, are the stars — shooting stars, flares with flair, illuminating apparently unpromising basic materials. For example, this is a letter to Auden in April 1932 in all its Spartan amplitude: Dear Auden, The modifications of the few passages which I discussed with you the other day have been agreed upon.

Andrew Taylor

A leap in the dark

The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and (which is not always the same thing) a pleasure to read. After that, it gets more complicated. The book defies tidy categorisation. Set in a nameless eastern European country, it opens in the literary territory of the crime thriller, with private investigators on the trail of a government minister on the way to visit his rubber-clad mistress. One of them, the narrator Jonathan, is English. He’s furiously jealous of his employee Frank, a hunk who has had a fling with Sarah, Jonathan’s archaeologist wife. In another case, the parents of a missing girl have retained Jonathan to search for their daughter, Petra.

Julie Myerson

The ultimate nightmare

On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounded many others, then turned their guns on themselves. Among the many questions fired at Klebold’s stunned parents in the wake of this appalling event, two were especially hard for them to hear. Did they ever hug their kids? And — this from one of the many bereaved — ‘Were you a family that ever spent much time at the dinner table together?’ When brutal and frightening things happen, people want brutal and frightening explanations: the need for causality becomes paramount. If this family bred a monster, then they must have done something monstrous.

Tim Martin

Foreign body count

China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author rarely loses sight of the delightfully mind-warping possibilities of his chosen genres. Last year’s story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, offered brief slices of imaginary futures in which icebergs floated above London streets, archaeologists hauled crystal statues from the Mediterranean earth and urban hipsters attended parties wearing the heads of butchered animals.

Ian Thomson

Wild man of the woods

The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted an ability to hear the dead — ‘clairaudience’. Her front room, hung with plastic foliate Green Man gargoyle motifs and photographs of Stonehenge, was grimly inimical to mediumship and made me want to make a joke about striking a happy medium. ‘Have you been meditating of late? No? ’Cos I’m getting a gorgeous greenish light off of you, and it’s making me feel ever so sunshiny.’ She fluttered her hands. ‘Yes, I like the psychic aura that you have, but why do I see Stonehenge?’ (The roar of an airplane coming in to land over Gatwick muted my reply.

Keith Miller

A choice of first novels | 10 March 2016

At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of every stripe. I subsisted on police procedurals and grown-up Ladybird books, and watched a lot of TV. It was tough, but you’ve got to defrag the old hard drive once in a while. And it was worth it: when this new batch of first novels was helicoptered in, I felt ready to approach the gig in a spirit of optimism and can-do. I’m not even going to rant about the tendency of publishers to overmarket new writers, to box them up, underplay their strangeness and render them safe and familiar. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (Little Brown, £14.99) and Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa (Little, Brown, £12.

Daniel Swift

Wonderful waffle

It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or rather: a lot of things almost happen. In these strange and unquantifiable books, which feel like a spiritual autobiography but read like trashy fiction, Knausgaard recounts his ambiguous relationships with his brother and parents and wives; he describes terrible-sounding meals which he cooks (he eats a lot of pasta with dubious sauces) and the rambling, incomplete conversations he has with acquaintances. He discusses books he has read and books he would like to write. He goes out, meets girls, gets drunk, feels sorry for himself, and then goes back to his desk.

Thursday

Alex Clark

A host of unquiet spirits

As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss so absolute and cataclysmic that there seems no possible way forward; when the future seems not merely unthinkably disrupted but also irrelevant. For the majority of people lucky enough to live out their days beyond war zones, barbaric regimes and disaster areas, such events usually come no closer than a news item; but even — perhaps especially — when the calamity is near at hand, we so often find ourselves at once desperate to empathise and yet incapable of imagining. Mary, whom we gradually discover has lost both her young daughters, understands that people can’t understand; often, she can barely understand herself.

Robert E.

When sharing isn’t fair

In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be far more profitable than renting out your own. Over the past few years, companies like Airbnb and Uber have made a great deal of money by pioneering a business model of connecting consumers, who want to use things — such as apartments and cars with drivers — with other people, who want to provide them. For public relations reasons they promote this model as the ‘sharing economy’. And who could be against ‘sharing’? But this isn’t the kind of sharing your mother taught you.

Paul Levy

Strangers in their native land

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly happy marriage, Their Promised Land by Ian Buruma has a deeper purpose. The cache of letters to and from Winifred (‘Win’) and Bernard (‘Bun’) Schlesinger is the pre-email, daily correspondence of two people who could not bear to be apart, yet were separated for years at a time by both world wars. Although his grandparents died in 1984 and 1986, this artful volume reveals a good deal about the world we live in today.

Bob Fischer

Mr Spock and I

For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’ is celebrating its 50th anniversary, although, as Marcus Berkmann’s entertaining and irreverent history points out, things could have been very different. Roddenberry’s initial idea was for a troupe of disparate 19th-century adventurers to explore the undiscovered corners of the New World in a grand airborne dirigible. While the prospect of Leonard Nimoy arching an eyebrow in a flimsy, flying gondola is irresistible, it’s hard to imagine such a concept proving as enduring as Roddenberry’s eventual brainchild.

Will Nicoll

Reds against Whites

On the 24–25 October 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, or 7–8 November according to the Gregorian) the political disputes which had shaken the Russian empire reached a peak. The provisional government, or All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (which had been formed in the wake of the February revolution and abdication of Tsar Nicholas II) was stormed by the Bolsheviks. These men and women — whom Churchill later described as ‘swarms of typhus-bearing vermin, vampires, troops of ferocious baboons’ — quickly consolidated power in Petrograd, now St Petersburg.

William Cook

Putting the sun in the shade

About a century ago, scientists started meddling with an unfamiliar force of nature and the rest of us were terrified. That force was called electricity and nowadays we’re all fine with it. What Timothy Jorgensen wants to know is: why don’t we feel equally relaxed about radiation? After all, electricity is just as dangerous, but only if you’re very unlucky or very stupid. As his sparky book explains, radiation is really much the same. So why are we so scared of it, even when we’ve (usually) no need to be? Cards on the table: I know nothing about science. But that’s OK, because this book is meant for Luddites like me.

Andrew Lycett

A good editor and a good man

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew. Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement. The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and became the owner and editor of the Observer during its mid-20th-century heyday.

Christopher Fildes

What went wrong

I once asked an American friend to come and talk to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. He told them that he was against it. That put him ahead of his time, but Mervyn King agrees with him. In his decade as Governor of the Bank of England, he had seen what innovation could do, in good times and bad — in crisis, and in the fitful recovery that followed. He has resisted any temptation to write a memoir with himself as hero. Instead, he has set out to explain what went wrong and what must change to stop it happening again—and since we all need to know that, he wanted to write, not in economists’ algebraic shorthand, but in English. That shorthand gave an illusion of certainty.

Toby Young

Purifying the gymnasium

When Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869 he was so happy he burst into song. He was only 24 at the time — a year younger than Enoch Powell, who became a professor of Greek at the university of Sydney aged 25 — and looked forward to a brilliant academic career. Three years later, when he delivered the six lectures contained in this book, he was already showing signs of disillusionment. His teaching duties included six hours at the local gymnasium — the German equivalent of a secondary school — and he wasn’t impressed by what he found there.

Wynn Wheldon

A disarming heroine

The name Freya is derived from the old Norse word for ‘spouse’, perhaps Odin’s. As a goddess she is variously responsible for birth, death, war and beauty, which seems to cover a fairly wide range of human endeavour. It is a name befitting the ardent heroine of this old-fashioned novel with a distinctly contemporary bearing. An initial irritation at the use of a literary pun (the first of the three parts of the book is called ‘At Swim, Two Birds’ for no very obvious reason) and a sprinkling of period props (powdered eggs always pop up in the late 1940s) soon gives way to the pleasurable anticipation of a long tale well told.

Thursday

Frances Wilson

An electrifying politician

Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of the lightning rod, the Franklin Stove, the milometer, swimming flippers and the flexible catheter, the man who engineered the America postal system, who established the first lending library, who wrote one of the finest autobiographies in the language, and who schooled us in soundbites such as ‘Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly.’ Amen to that. Despite being the subject of a steady flow of worthy biographies, of which this is the latest, Franklin remains as cunning in heaven as he was on Earth. A master manipulator, people saw in Franklin what he wanted them to see.