More from Books

Thursday

Alexander Masters

There’s nothing wrong with plugging a friend’s book

The advantage of reviewing books by a friend is that you can invite him out for a walk across the South Downs and menace him with blunt questions. Books pages editors call this sort of thing ‘backscratching’ and ‘logrolling’, as if, instead of engaging in proper criticism, you and your mate had spent the time on a sauna holiday in Sweden. But cronyism lets you discover new things about writing, literature and yourself that are inaccessible to the ordinary critic. Cornelius Medvei, whose father lives in Sussex, a few fields away from me, has published three novels. They are fables that are witty, wry and thin (in terms of pages) and nobody except Susan Hill and I reads them.

Claire Lowdon

Too much gush

The cover of Edna O’Brien’s 17th novel sports a handsome quote from Philip Roth: ‘The great Edna O’Brien has written her masterpiece.’ Late Roth and late O’Brien have something in common. In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth provided an alternative history of the 20th century: what if Roosevelt had been defeated by the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh? O’Brien, whose stellar career began 55 years ago with her wonderful debut, The Country Girls (1960), is increasingly interested in exploring real-life events. Down by the River (1997) fictionalised the true story of a 14-year-old rape victim, while In the Forest (2002) was inspired by the Cregg Wood murders of 1994.

Thursday

John Mole

The Wolves of Memory

Loping through thick snow, fur matted with ice, they have lost the trace that led them long ago from a legendary tale to this blank page of survival. Their warm breath freezes at the touch of air as they huddle here with sharp, bewildered faces grown solemnly pale and howl and howl and howl.

Richard Francis

A chronic case of mass hysteria

There have been many books devoted to the terrible events that took place in the small rural community of Salem Village and its larger sister, Salem Town, between February 1692 and May 1693. As Stacy Schiff points out, most of them are shaped by particular theses — she lists 13 in all. This approach doesn’t just offer readers the consolation of an overriding explanation, but gives authors built-in filters, enabling them to concentrate on what proves their particular case. Such a strategy is tempting because of the unruly complexity of the Salem phenomenon, with its hundreds of accusers, accused, magistrates, ministers and fearful bystanders. Schiff’s own selective cast of characters runs to six closely printed pages and lists 88 names.

William Leith

Warning: this book only contains strong language

Dan Marshall, the author of this memoir, loves to swear. ‘It’s very difficult for me to write a sentence without using a bad word,’ he tells us. ‘That last sentence, for instance, was fucking impossible for me to write.’ Dan is young, rich and American. One day, in his twenties, he and his girlfriend, Abby, were on holiday, lying poolside at the Marriott resort in Desert Springs, California. He is in a world of material and sexual abundance. ‘My siblings and I were lucky, living with the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses,’ he tells us. He has lots of sex. So does his gay brother Greg. His mother’s cancer was ‘under control’.

Jeff Noon

When escape to the sun — or even to Devon — goes horribly wrong

A character in Sophie Hannah’s A Game for All the Family (Hodder, £14.99, pp. 432) presents a theory: ‘Mysteries are the best kind of stories because you only get the truth at the very end, when you’re absolutely desperate.’ This makes us realise just how scarce truth is. In books, as in life. It’s an idea to keep in mind as we follow former television producer Justine on her quest to start a new, quieter life in Devon. This dream proves elusive, as her teenage daughter makes a new friend at school, a friend who the teachers insist doesn’t actually exist. Is the friend real, or just a product of a girl’s imagination?

Christopher Bray

Frank’s world

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.’ Who was Bob Dylan talking about earlier this year? Woody Guthrie? Elvis Presley? Or maybe, halfway through the sixth decade of his own career, himself? But no. The man in question was Frank Sinatra — the inspiration behind Dylan’s latest album, Shadows in the Night. That record is a collection of covers —from the great American songbook — ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘The Night We Called it a Day’, ‘What’ll I Do’. We call such songs standards, as if they have been set, if not in stone, then at least on the stave, forever. But that isn’t so.

Stephen Bayley

Designing the swimming car, the Doodlebug and the Panzer tank was all in a day’s work for Ferdinand Porsche

The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers. The joke goes: ‘When you get into a Porsche, you feel you want to invade Poland.’ In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, Karl Ludvigsen investigates the genetic spiral that gave Porsche cars the character of weaponry. All German manufacturers were forced to supply the Third Reich. The BMW-sponsored London Olympics 2012 were held on a site devastated by Luftwaffe planes powered by its engines.

Wynn Wheldon

To the ends of the earth

What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing novel: Naomi, a good Hebrew name; Williams, a stout Welsh name; born in Japan; lives in California. The earth is spanned. Landfalls charts the voyage of two French frigates exploring the world at the end of the 18th century, after Cook but before the Revolution. Based on true events, the story unfolds in discrete episodes, short stories indeed, told from a variety of points of view, in changing cases and in differing person. The dramatis personae remain more or less constant; they cross-inform each others’ stories. In its work as historical fiction, Williams subtly outlines the cusp between ancien regime and republic.

Anna Aslanyan

Umberto Eco really tries our patience

Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan. Domani (‘Tomorrow’) will never be published: a tycoon who finances it plans to use it as a blackmail tool in his shady dealings. The proposed title of the memoir, Domani: Yesterday, sets the tone for this pacy book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Carmen Callil

Where would America be without Gloria Steinem?, asks Carmen Callil

This is a book written by a most admirable woman, which is nevertheless — with some rare and excellent exceptions — most tiresome to read. Gloria Steinem has done heroic work as a founding force of American feminism and as an organiser, in America, for a myriad of causes. She is an icon of 1960s feminism, when persons such as she explained to women — mostly western women, but you have to start somewhere —that some sort of equality could be fought for and, if won, could change the world for all men and women. She spent some early years after university in India and a Gandhian philosophy permeates her good works.

Mark Mason

Discover your inner nerd

There’s a curious thing about the bowling green in my Suffolk village. The footpath running alongside it is on a slope, meaning that as you descend, the wall gradually rises and hides the players from view. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I find myself slowing down to see what happens to the wood that’s just been delivered. Not knowing whether it reached the jack, or managed to nudge the opponent’s wood to one side, simply isn’t an option. It would be like going to see a whodunit and not staying to the end. This book gave me the same feeling. Crown green bowls is one of those things you don’t want any personal contact with; you’re just glad it’s still there. A bit like penicillin, or Ken Dodd.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

From the Big Smoke to the Big Choke

‘A foggy day in London town,’ croons Fred Astaire in the 1937 musical comedy A Damsel in Distress, puffing nonchalantly on a cigar as he wanders through a wood that has already been half obliterated by belching Hollywood smoke machines. Today Gershwin’s lyrics conjure up a nostalgic vision of life in the city, involving pale fingers of fog wrapping themselves around lamp posts and the muffled clop of hooves on cobbles. Actually, for many years the reality of a London fog was far less appealing. It clogged your lungs and made your eyes smart; it turned the air into a murky kaleidoscope of colours (yellow, grey, blue) that appeared to be on the verge of turning into a solid.

Sinclair McKay

Through the eyes of spies

Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig’s face. Its adepts interrogate the surface of reality — people, landscapes, texts — knowing that they will discover extraordinary hermetic meanings. They study fragments of documents, whispers of messages, and from these, they summon entire worlds. Possibly one of the reasons Max Hastings cannot pretend to be hugely impressed by the boasts of wartime spies is the philosophical nebulousness of what constitutes ‘results’ in secret-agent speak. Soldiers fight, shoulder to shoulder; battles are clearly lost and won.

Alistair Elliot

Porridge Season

Tuesday morning. The Chopin of golden syrup is going to perform his Breakfast Fantaisie for teaspoon and dessertspoon. Such a treat to see those thin arthritic fingers pose a moment over the tranquil creamy surface. The oats lie quiet, possibly getting cold. But on the left a deep and mellow chord lands in the centre of the quivering target. Arpeggios, scribbles, signatures from the right cover the margins. What a score! It seems to wander clockwise now and widdershins in the same second, trailing off to silence with a few final isolated notes. All we can do now is to clap, and eat.

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

A hint of anarchy everywhere

For a genre that is frequently dismissed as dead, travel writing is proving a remarkably stubborn survivor. If anything, this year’s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, won by Horatio Clare with Down to the Sea in Ships, a very British tale of the container-shipping trade, demonstrated how the genre remains in remarkably good health, shrugging off its perennial obituaries with great élan. Bristling with literary talent, the shortlist took in Jens Mühling on Russia, Elizabeth Pisani on Indonesia, a homage to Paddy Leigh Fermor by Nick Hunt, Helena Attlee on Italy and Philip Marsden on Cornwall.

Andrew Barrow

A tale of cloaks and daggers

You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio Scarpia, portrayed on stage as a ‘sadistic agent of reaction’, a cut-throat murderer who enjoys drinking his victims’ blood from their skulls and, as one of my opera-loving Kensington pals puts it, ‘not a nice bloke at all!’ In fact you may not even recognise him in these pages. Here Scarpia appears as an all-round human being, kind-hearted, handsome, likeable, occasionally lonely, even destitute, who also just happens to be a brilliant swordsman and man of action. Brought up in Sicily, his first act of daring is to rescue a girl who has been captured by Barbary pirates, even if it means stabbing her lover in the stomach.

Richard Ingrams

Super man of legend

On 13 March 2014 a congregation of 2,000 people, including many of the great and the good, gathered in Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for David Frost, who had died suddenly six months previously while travelling on the Queen Mary to America. During the service a select band, led by the Dean of Westminster, John Hall, retired to Poets’ Corner, sacred to the memory of Keats, Shelley and others of the immortals, where the Prince of Wales laid flowers on a tablet in the floor bearing the illustrious name of Frost. Given that in only a few years’ time Frost’s name, along with many of today’s celebrities, was likely to be forgotten, it might have been better to dedicate the tablet ‘To the Unknown Television Personality’.

David Horspool

Who was then the gentleman?

Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 hasn’t proved particularly attractive to writers of historical fiction. Pierce Egan, better known for his essays on boxing, wrote an interminable novel called Wat Tyler in 1841, and Robert Southey produced a dramatic poem of the same title which he later disavowed. William Morris took another hero of the revolt, the itinerant preacher John Ball, as his inspiration for a time-travelling socialist fantasy; and that’s about it. Historians and political thinkers in the centuries after the revolt have often tried to redress the balance of the unrelentingly hostile monastic chronicles that first told the story of 1381.

A.N. Wilson

What an absolute darling you are!

Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea, the Sea, and an equally gripping rendition, on Woman’s Hour, of A Severed Head. Her books are distinguished by the rate at which her characters fall in and out of love with one another, usually leaving streams of chaos and pain behind them. Iris’s letters, especially the ones which were written before she began to write novels, were blueprints for the fiction.