More from Books

Thursday

Honor Clerk

Pure and endless light

There has been extraordinarily little bright sunlight in the far northwest corner of Britain over the past year. Damp, drizzling summer, an endless sequence of howling autumnal gales and downpours, a muddy dismal winter. Then at the beginning of February, by some accounts traditionally a season for good weather in northern Scotland, a series of brilliant sparkling days arrived unannounced. While the rest of the country shivered and dripped, the sun in the north bounced off the sea, the hills were brilliant with deep snow, the night sky was clear and starry, northern lights pulsing on the horizon and the moon bright enough to read by. Enough to turn anyone’s fancy to Gerard Manley Hopkins. And this is what happens to Ann Wroe.

James Walton

When pop gave way to rock

According to David Hepworth, the year he turned 21 was also the year when ‘a huge proportion of the most memorable albums ever made were released’. Having been a rock journalist for four decades, he does of course know the theory that everybody thinks music was at its best when they were young. But, as he puts it with untypical — if presumably ironic — machismo, the ‘important difference in the case of me and 1971’ is that ‘I’m right’. The strange thing is that he might well be.

Charles Moore

Witness to the truth

George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, and passed his career in the C of E’s fast stream. Never a parish priest, he became, first, chaplain (and later, biographer) of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson; next, Dean of Canterbury; finally, Bishop of Chichester. He was not an intellectual or a contemplative. He was an effective, energetic leader, strongly interested in public affairs, a natural candidate to end up as an archbishop of the established church. This did not happen, probably because Bell opposed ‘area’ Allied bombing of Germany in the second world war. Such carpet-bombing threatened ‘the roots of civilisation’, he said.

Aidan Hartley

Lost in translation | 31 March 2016

Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but has only now found a UK publisher. Eben Venter — one of the notable voices in white South African writing post-Apartheid — has been ‘temporarily’ based in Australia for more than two decades, but returns to his home for stories. You can see why. After Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee emigrated to Australia — and hasn’t published a decent novel since. He evacuated his subject. For Africa-born whites, the one thing worse than staying is leaving. The left brain urges you to settle in a safe economy with prospects, where the right brain dies.

Lucy Ellmann

Graphic, bleak and misogynistic

If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler’s mother, seek out your old house and play ball with your former self, or locate your (eventual) wife during her unhappy adolescence and punch her violent boyfriends? These are the dilemmas facing Jack, the hero of Daniel Clowes’s latest graphic novel. The murderous attitude towards Hitler’s mother (rather than towards Hitler himself) fits right in with an underlying misogyny throughout. Indebted to Hollywood for most of its ideas and its deficiencies, Patience only squeaks by in the Bechdel test. It begins wittily enough with the tip of a penis, a semi-circle of cervix, and a big white splodge in between. Across this romantic conception scene the year 2012 is emblazoned.

Brian Martin

Hostage to misfortune

Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist who knows how the mind is tortured by deception, infidelity, obfuscation, suspicion and sex. Eitan Green is a neurosurgeon who, exhilaratedly driving his SUV at speed on the desert tracks outside Beersheba, runs down an Eritrean refugee. As he looks at the body with its cracked skull, he thinks that since ‘he can’t save this man, at least he’d try to save himself’. From that point, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s omniscient narrator involves us in a web of lies, guilt, evasion, seduction and moral equivocation. The incident is registered officially as a hit-and-run case. Eitan’s wife, Liat, happens to be a senior police officer.

Marcus Nevitt

Courting Sultana Isabel

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’. Knowing that Mehmed had a growing reputation for psychopathy rather than ornithology — he had his 19 brothers circumcised and then strangled to death — Elizabeth demurred and eventually sent him an elaborate clockwork organ instead. The organ was accompanied by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who spent his first month in Constantinople fixing the damage it had suffered in transit before eventually playing it for the Sultan and his retinue at the Topkapi palace.

Wednesday

Richard Beard

Following the followers

In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start with human remains. His frame for this uneven combination of travel and Church history is a series of trips to the alleged tombs of the apostles. To flesh out 13 ghosts (the 12 disciples and Paul) Bissell mines the gospels, the work of Church historians both early and late, and the Apocrypha. ‘Without the Apocrypha,’ he admits, ‘the 12 apostles would seem even more irrevocably distant.’ The former disciples of Jesus are an elusive bunch. Destroyed or partial texts throw up discrepancies and cases of contested identity, equivocal traditions set in unspecified places and fanciful pasts invented by unreliable chroniclers.

Caroline Moore

Sins of omission | 23 March 2016

My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts the life of an artist favoured by a brutally oppressive regime, this time written by one who was there. Ismail Kadare survived the rule of that isolationist tyrant Enver Hoxha. In some quarters, Kadare has been criticised for surviving. Like Shostokovitch, indeed, he has been accused of collaborating with the regime within which he worked, joining the party and accepting public appointments. It is not the business of a book review to enter into such arguments; but some of the criticisms, made by armchair freedom fighters insisting that others should stand up for uncompromising heroism, are obviously, cruelly and merely naive.

Elisa Segrave

Neighbours and strangers

Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated, can experience jealousy, disapproval or dislike. Here, ‘Sarah’ has changed her name to live incognito on the west coast of Cumbria, in a town chosen at random. When she gets locked out of her house, a bond is formed between her and her elderly neighbour Nancy — whose deceased friend Amy once owned Sarah’s rental and left Nancy a key. Although Sarah is ostensibly the one with ‘a past’ (prison), it was Nancy whom I found most interesting.

Pippa Goldschmidt

Worshipping the sun

The Sun is a star that many astronomers assume is only worth studying because of its averageness; it’s middle-aged and middle-sized. Its convenient proximity to us means it can act as a testbed for physics research. But we’re too well-schooled in the Copernican principle to view it as ‘special’ in any way. In contrast, Lucie Green’s huge enthusiasm for the Sun is apparent throughout her book. Her purpose is to convey the current state of knowledge about our neighbourhood star, and the story proper starts with sunspots.

Ian Thomson

Diced heart and a full-bodied red

Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term dietrologia, which translates, not very happily, as ‘behindology’, presumes that shadowy consortia are everywhere manipulating political scandals. A Woman Much Missed, the fourth of the excellent Commissario Soneri thrillers to be translated into English, unfolds in present-day Parma amid rumours of Mafioso-style machinations. As always, Varesi’s lugubrious, cigar-puffing detective Soneri retains a degree of disabused integrity and is a trencherman, moreover, as he seeks out only the best buffalo-milk mozzarella and bottles of Bonarda red. Under it all, though, lies a deepening corruption, where justice may not prevail.

Robert Service

Murder most foul

On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB officer and by then a British citizen, met two of his former colleagues, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, in Mayfair and drank a cup of tea with them. What happened next must count as the century’s most gruesome crime so far. The tea taken by Litvinenko was laced with a dose of polonium-210 and he died in agony in UCH several days later. The radioactive substance was detected on a belated hunch of a brilliant forensic scientist. The suspects, Lugovoi and Kovtun, had already left Britain, and the Metropolitan Police found polonium deposits at nearly every hotel and shop that they had visited.

Honor Clerk

Sexy self-advertising

At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is by any reckoning a tour-de-force. Painted in 1785, it shows the artist seated at her easel, palette, brushes and mahlstick in hand, as though looking up briefly before adding to the large canvas before her. Seated on a gilt and green velvet chair, she is dressed in a pale blue satin décolleté dress and a straw hat decorated with ribbons and ostrich feathers. Her two female pupils stand behind her, one gazing in admiration at the work in progress, the other looking out of the painting, level-eyed and sober.

Lewis Jones

Disgusted of X-ville

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964. Her mother, whom she loathed, has died some years ago, and at the age of 24 Eileen is living in a dreary New England town she calls ‘X-ville’ with her father. He’s a demented, gin-sodden retired cop whom she also loathes, and whom she is supposedly looking after, though her care is limited to shouting at him, maintaining his gin supply and hiding his shoes to prevent him from terrorising X-ville in his pursuit of imaginary ‘hoodlums’.

Emily Rhodes

A mix of myths

With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’, Kitty Finch swam naked into view in Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. Similarly, in Hot Milk, Sofia Papastergiadis loves to swim —as, indeed, does Levy herself. Only, whereas Kitty swims up and down the gravelike plot of a villa’s swimming pool, Sofia prefers the open expanse of the sea. She swims off the coast of Spain, in Almeria, where she is helping her mother find treatment for the periodic ‘mysterious’ paralysis of her legs. Caring for her mother means that she has given up pursuing a doctorate in anthropology, despite her first-class degree.

Dorian Lynskey

Tainted love | 23 March 2016

In 1963, when the bloom was still on the rose, Bob Dylan described Woodstock as a place where ‘we stop the clouds, turn time back and inside out, make the sun turn on and off… the greatest place’. Six years later, he wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, ‘Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos.’ Barney Hoskyns, who lived there in the 1990s, marshals plenty of evidence to support both assessments. This Catskills hamlet has been at various times a blue-collar small town, a bohemian enclave, a tourist trap, a hotbed of creativity, a cauldron of hedonism, a madhouse and ‘a counter-cultural touchstone’. In its heyday it attracted such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren, George Harrison and The Band.

Simon Heffer

Going global

We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and technological advances of the 1910s and 1940s are obvious. Ben Wilson has been more thoughtful, and has chosen the 1850s — or, more specifically, the years from 1851 to 1862. It was a time when, as he says, Britain was at the peak of her power. The empire was not at its greatest — the Scramble for Africa had yet to occur — but Germany had not unified, and America was economically overdependent on slavery and, not least because of that abomination, about to fall into civil war. Wilson describes the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a showcase of Britain’s manufacturing might, when it was truly ‘the workshop of the world’.

Helen R Brown

Sick transit

Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed her thumbs deep into her eyelids, allowed herself to visualise a chocolate brownie and started to salivate. After work she stopped at the supermarket and bought some brownies… along with a chocolate loaf cake and a large pot of cream to pour over it, a giant chocolate bar, an apple puff, two eclairs, a cream slice, a selection of reduced pastries, a loaf of bread, a packet of butter and three packets of biscuits: bourbons, custard creams and Maryland cookies. When she got home she ate it all in under four hours. In her thoughtful new memoir on her 14-year struggle with bulimia, Jones describes a moment of sharp self-awareness experienced two hours into that binge.

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Among the snobs, slobs and scolds

The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope, Plato, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and millions of others — but not, alas, my former next-door neighbour, the wonderfully controversial Brian Sewell. Crammed in alongside George Orwell’s ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy’ and H. L. Mencken’s ‘Literature always thrives best in an atmosphere of hearty strife,’ the author’s own views often hit hardest.