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Thursday

Victor Sebestyen

The brutal mask of anarchy

In September 1939 Britain went to war against Germany, ostensibly in defence of Poland. One big secret that the British government didn’t know at the time — and not until much later — was that while the Anglo-Polish alliance treaty was being negotiated during the previous months, the Poles had been actively training and arming terrorists to kill British troops in the Middle East. I don’t normally believe in convoluted conspiracy theories, but this one happens to be true. In the 1930s the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw wanted rid of 3.5 million Polish Jews. Initially they tried to pack them off to Madagascar. But then the Poles hit on the idea of helping Jews create their own state in British-occupied Palestine.

Imogen Russell Williams

Humour and horror for children

In the Californian town of San Bernadino, children are going missing; smiling faces grace a gallery of milk cartons. One September evening in 1969, Jim Sturges’s brother Jack rides under a bridge and never comes out. All that’s left is his Sportcrest bike, its front wheel spinning. Forty-five years later, 15-year-old Jim Junior lives in a state of reluctant siege. Traumatised by loss, his father has armour-clad their home, calling the cops if Jim gets home seconds after sunset. Jim has other problems, too; he and his friend Tub have caught the eye of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, the school bully. And now something nasty seems to be emerging from the sewers.

Helen Farish

A goddess, a city and a tree

Known for her strength, Athena can throw a spear like a dart, and on the day of the contest for Athens it’s a bull’s eye – not just Attica’s but the world’s first olive tree springs where her spear falls. Athena is surprised how at ease the tree is, the Saronic Gulf merely its backyard, the slopes of the Akropolis simply a source of afternoon shade. Athena’s competitor packs his bag, the fruit of the new tree glossy as his lost dream. On Philopappos hill – lizards seeing blindly into the distance, empty olive oil cans already being planted with geraniums in the city below – Athena throws her spear again through air she may as well begin polluting. A chair appears, a table, a bowl of olives, an ashtray.

John Jolliffe

The powers that were

Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on the lead-up to 1939, and the subsequent course of the war. Maisky’s commitment to communism was total. On 4 November 1934 he writes: Today, any man, even an enemy, can see that Lenin is an historical Mont Blanc… a radiant guiding peak in the thousand-year evolution of humanity, while Gandhi is just a cardboard mountain who shone with a dubious light for some ten years before disintegrating.

Frances Wilson

Come rain or shine

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra Harris reveals in this extended outlook, have always meant something else. Weatherland is a literary biography of the climate. Beginning with the Fall (in the Biblical rather than the autumnal sense) and ending with Alice Oswald, Harris condenses 2,000 years of weather ‘as it is recreated in the human imagination’.

Nigel Jones

Foaming with much blood

According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so, one wonders what Bacon made of Rome’s Julio-Claudian dynasty, the gore-spattered family that gave the empire its first five rulers, and the subject of Tom Holland’s latest popular history of the ancient world. Recounting one of the era’s many fratricidal civil wars, Holland rightly observes: ‘The aptitude of the Roman people for killing, which had first won them their universal dominion, was now unleashed upon themselves.’ And no one was more adept at such incestuous slaughter than the imperial family itself.

Tim Martin

Things left undead

In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a straight face ‘when I told her I’d written a book she’d known nothing about’. I doubt she kept it for long, because one of the many ways in which The Making of Zombie Wars differs from Hemon’s other work is that it is dreadfully, wrigglingly, antisocially funny: the sort of book that’s difficult to read in public without undignified honks of laughter.

Claire Lowdon

A karaoke version of Kafka

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’. Godley, presumably, is not the real-life economist Wynne Godley but the fictional mathematician Adam Godley of Banville’s The Infinities (2009), whose discoveries supplant relativity and quantum physics. So, the world of The Blue Guitar is a version of steampunk, straight out of genre fiction.

Cressida Connolly

Time out of mind

There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks writes in the grand tradition of realist fiction: a list of his themes might include the brutality and waste of war, France and, of course, romantic love. Self, meanwhile, has created dystopias in which to satirise different aspects of humanity, while conjuring with all manner of stylistic invention. The one area of shared interest has been the history of psychiatry. Here, with Faulks’s new book, their preoccupations further converge. A student of literature on the lookout for a dissertation topic could do a lot worse than The Psychotic Century: 20th Century Ideas of Mental Illness and the Traumatic Effects of War in mid-period Faulks and Self.

Ian Thomson

The trip of a lifetime

Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became the Newest Testament among the happening people. One spring morning in 1953 the 58-year-old Englishman ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescalin in his Hollywood garden and waited for the visionary moment. When he opened his eyes he saw pure California neon dust. ‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation.’ Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that Huxley had gone bonkers in his American exile. (‘Huxley has done more than change climate and diet.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Battle ready

For most of history, religion and war have been the most powerful social instincts of mankind and its chief collective activities. In the crusades, they combined to create a movement of great emotional power, which convulsed Europe in the 12th century and retained its appeal to the military classes until the end of the Middle Ages. One might expect people who embarked on a great war with such intense spiritual exultation to be unconcerned with practical planning. And there were some who believed that these mundane matters should be left to the Holy Spirit to sort out. But they tended to come to a sticky end. For most crusaders, holy war was a serious business, calling for professional organisation, ample finance and meticulous logistical preparation.

Jack Castle

The bitterness of Bacon

When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established, and perhaps even establishment. He had been the subject of retrospectives at the Tate and the Guggenheim, and the Marlborough Gallery had paid off several decades’ worth of gambling debts. No longer an authentically marginal figure, ‘mythologising his life’ was ‘at the very centre of his existence and painting’; and for 29 years Peppiatt became his scribe, drinking partner, estate agent, confidante, gatekeeper and admirer, and the recipient of lavish dinners, drinks, flats, paintings and acquaintances. Alienated from his own family, Peppiatt grew up in Bacon’s world and only belatedly grew out of it.

Alex Clark

Quiet desperation

Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an intensely curious affair; thick with material detail from the outset, it announces itself as a novel of closely observed and relished realism. But before too long, one begins to suspect that its specificity — much of it maritime, with excursions into other arcana such as rare guitars, or the pharmaceutical industry — is a blind, any literal reading liable to produce only bemusement. A clue comes very early on, when graduate student Maud Stamp falls 20 feet from a dry-docked boat; to her shocked companion, Tim, she briefly appears to have become a corpse.

Harry Mount

On the way to the Forum

It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral cats that stroll across the murder scene. Jochen Bleicken shrewdly begins this long, occasionally heavygoing but unequalled biography with that murder. It’s only because Caesar appointed his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (known later as Augustus) as his adopted son and heir that the latter rose to such heights. But for that crucial adoption, Augustus wasn’t that posh.

Andrew Taylor

Universal appeal

As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a dystopian vision of the 23rd century, scholarly espionage set in Cold War Oxford, and an Arts-and-Crafts pastoral called Anterwold, which involves swords and scholars and may or may not be the product of the imagination of one of the characters elsewhere. All this (and much else) is somehow connected to an 18th-century text known as The Devil’s Handwriting containing a mathematical formulation that wasn’t invented until five centuries later. Confused? It gets far more complicated. Arcadia is not so much a novel as a cornucopia of narratives. These unfold through three interlocking universes and involve the viewpoints of ten characters.

Lewis Jones

The history man

History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar, born and raised to the purple, in his mind he somehow was History, and of his many achievements the greatest was to persuade others to share that belief. His career presents the realised fantasy of the charismatic narcissist, which is to be taken at one’s own estimation. The American writer and academic Jay Parini, who was a friend of his from the 1980s, remembers him saying, ‘I might have been president’, but the presidency would not have been enough.

Thursday

Mario Reading

First-rate firsts

It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure the services of an agent or publisher that the opening of a novel is everything — the ne plus ultra of the writer’s armoury. If one can knock the reader’s socks off with the first few lines one is almost there. So I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. Before reading any of these four first novels to the end, I shall compare and mark their opening couple of pages. First in line (and chosen entirely at random) is Michela Wrong’s Borderlines. Miss Wrong (you’ll find no silly jokes from me here) has been writing non-fiction books about Africa for years. This is her first try at a novel.

Rian Malan

The day of reckoning is nigh

I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since this opens me to charges of bias, let me start by acknowledging that Professor Johnson (a former leader of the ‘Magdalen Mafia’ at Oxford and author of a witty book on the subject) is unpopular in certain circles down here in South Africa. In spite of his record — 12 books, platforms at several esteemed British publications and an engaging prose style — Johnson has been shunned by local book fairs and banished from our op-ed pages.

Dorian Lynskey

It happened one summer | 27 August 2015

Five songs, only three of which were amplified. Thirty-five minutes, including interruptions. That’s how long Bob Dylan played for at Newport Folk Festival on Sunday 25 July 1965. Even on its own merits, it was a messy, halting set with an inadequate sound system. ‘Why did that matter?’ Elijah Wald rightly asks. ‘Why does what one musician played on one evening continue to resonate half a century later?’ Cameras documented only the stage, and memories are unreliable, so nobody can say how many in the 17,000-strong crowd booed Dylan’s noisy rock’n’roll rebirth, but one eyewitness’s claim that it ‘electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other’ is broadly true.

Elisa Segrave

Life with old father William

This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s mother, of lung cancer in 1998: ‘She died with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month.’ Adam too is self-effacing, moving in while his mother was dying, then staying on as his father’s main carer. The second of three brothers, he explains away this generous act: ‘As an under-employed freelance, I had time to spare.’ ‘Dad’, diagnosed informally as ‘demented’, was by then a retired High Court judge granted a low rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn. Adam lived in the flat’s converted attic. Adam is thorough and, it appears, fair.