More from Books

Thursday

Matilda Bathurst

Short and surreal

‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection of short stories, The Dog. Two other new short story collections, Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem and Jellyfish by Janice Galloway, are less interested in asking the right questions than in the opportunities for missing the point. Livings draws upon his experience as a student in Beijing to create a compelling vision of China from the Cultural Revolution to the present day. Though inclined to excessive lyricism (a thief is ‘waste-water wrung from the sponge of the world’), Livings has a keen eye for detail and a knack for dialogue.

Carey Schofield

Common sense, moral vision — and the magic touch

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education is Tony Little’s valedictory meditation on his profession, published on his retirement as headmaster of Eton. In a series of loosely connected essays, erudite and eccentric, he contemplates issues of fundamental concern to us all. What are schools for? How should teachers be educated? How do good schools work? The book is rather oddly larded with insights from The Schoolmaster (1902) by A.C. Benson (brother of E.F. and Robert Hugh) who was, like Little, an Old Etonian who went back to teach at the school. Benson’s commentary on his own teaching experience is used as a touchstone, generally reinforcing Little’s civilising, rational approach to education. These essays reveal Little’s vigorous moral vision.

Jonathan Mirsky

Monster of misrule

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his successors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non-specialists, he has made me think. President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective historical memory and a great deal of forgetting’.

Rachel Redford

Lust for life | 20 August 2015

We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive Latham and Matthews nine-volume edition, published between 1970 and 1983, complete with Pepys’s coded sections and his inconsistent and archaic spellings? Certainly the only person in the world to have read it aloud in its unexpurgated entirety is Leighton Pugh, on this three-volume 116-hour Naxos recording released between January and May this year. Produced by Nicolas Soames and with prefaces to each volume written and read by David Timson, it is a superb feat. Pugh had recorded 30 full-length audiobooks in the two years before this gargantuan challenge, an experience which helped him cope with the 40 gruelling recording days with their 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. routine.

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

Rio’s rococo genius

The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed with. K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese at Yale, confines himself to ‘Machado’ and has invented an adjective ‘Machadean’. Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in the very Machadean town of Petropolis, called him ‘the Dickens of Brazil’ which is not true — he has not Dickens’s range or sustained ebullience.

Andy Orchard

Venerable father of English history

It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when its hero entered the monastery at Wearmouth, Northumbria at the age of seven and, as far as we know, never left. Not that Bede was entirely parochial, distributing what was then an exotic luxury, pepper, amongst his peers on his deathbed. But his was essentially a virtual and vicarious world, reliant on a network of informants and an unrivalled library largely collected by its founder, Benedict Biscop, here memorably described as ‘the “millionaire” monk’, even if the more than 200 books we know Bede knew will seem small beer to most of us with bigger bookshelves.

Emily Rhodes

Idolising Ida

Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old days’ of the publishing industry is palpable: a time when books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell … their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose, were liquor, perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. The halcyon days of print publishing were not, in fact, so very long ago, with the first e-reader going on sale only in 2004 and Amazon’s Kindle in 2007; it is astonishing that the digital revolution has taken only a decade to change the publishing landscape dramatically enough to inspire a novel so thick with nostalgia.

Paul Deaton

August

The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The tomatoes hang green and heavy, like water bombs. Everywhere the boughs bend, the elder with its black beaded bunches, its little popping mice eyes. The crooked old pear across the street is having a stellar season, lit up like a winter tree with row upon row of olive green light bulbs. No one comes or the boughs are too high. In disgust it is chucking them on the road.

Nigel Jones

Polymath or psychopath?

They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of his centenary, the obituaries — once they had expressed astonishment that this titan from the age of Attlee and empire had still been around —paid tribute to a polymath whose achievements could fill nine more ordinary lives. Freeman was a pioneer of television, virtually inventing the TV celebrity interview. He was a leading politician — the last surviving member of the 1945 Labour government; a diplomat — at one time our man in Washington and High Commissioner in India; a much decorated war hero; and — not least — a renowned swordsman between the sheets, boasting four wives and innumerable girlfriends.

Andy Miller

The lives of the artists — and other mysteries

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize and has become a bestseller in France — a promising start to a literary career, in other words. Wood’s new novel The Ecliptic is both an attempt to consolidate the success of his debut and also a meditation, among other things, on how to sustain such a career over decades while producing original and important art. On an island off the coast of Istanbul lies Portmantle, a remote community for painters, writers and musicians.

Kate Webb

The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left at birth in a rubbish bin) and a childhood of horrific abuse mean he is determined to draw a veil over his past, making him the most mysterious of the four male New York friends at the heart of Yanagihara’s story. However, his condition is only an extreme — and negative — version of the ambiguity that characterises all the people around him, among whom identity is continually in flux.

Mark Ford

A Broken Appointment

I opened the envelope: it contained a ticket in my name from London St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the 12th of the 12th, a Friday; coach 3 seat 27, non-smoking; and another for returning the following day, at 13 minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après- midi; and a postcard of Pierre Bonnard’s Le bol de lait, and there was just one word on the back — ‘Come’, followed by an ‘x’. Whenever I pour a dish of milk, or dwell on the loop in the ‘C’ of her flowing unfamiliar hand, I can’t help thinking — ‘Oh what a poem — what a poem Thomas Hardy might have written about this!

Thursday

Adam Nicolson

Poetic injustice

‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad first published in 1951. It was a doubt he was grateful his friends and family had refrained from expressing in the long labour of translating the Greek. But he had a response for any who dared: it was ‘a question which has no answer for those who do not know the answer already’. Homer exists to be translated, largely for what Peter Green has called ‘its uncanny universalist insight into the wellsprings of human nature’. Homer is one of the sources of truth; it demands to be known.

Matthew Walther

Saying nothing, very well

In June 2009, the good people of South Carolina lost Mark Sanford, their governor. Per his instructions, his staff told the press that he was ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’. When he turned up six days later at an airport in Atlanta, Georgia, he said that he had scratched the hike in favour of something more ‘exotic’. When it became clear that ‘exotic’ meant visiting his 43-year-old polyglot divorcée mistress in Argentina, things got bad. ‘I will be able to die knowing that I found my soulmate,’ he told the Associated Press, sobbing. Barton Swaim has written a memoir of his three years working as a speechwriter for Sanford, who is now a congressman.

John Sutherland

The cavalier Michael

Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but nothing ‘major’ over the past ten years. He’s now 75. But not, as this eruption witnesses, extinct. A cult has formed around him — Moorcockians who can discourse knowledgeably on the second aether and the ‘weirdness’ of Elric of Melniboné. Inexhaustibly inventive, Moorcock proudly calls himself a ‘bad writer with big ideas’. He is interested in ‘New Worlds’ (the name of the science fiction journal he edited which injected 1960s postmodernism into the genre, banishing little green men and spaceships); ‘Other Worlds’ (e.g.

Roy Kelly

Dreams

Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and two weeks before at this time, the season turning at the speed it must as the cars race or dawdle, and dark leaks through the porous heavens, and the stars climb to visibility in blue August early dusk, the beautiful headlight beams illuminating what leaves. Children. Dreams.

Michela Wrong

Our man in Africa

This novel comes with two mysteries attached, one substantial, the other superficial. The big mystery is the author’s identity. Gender-neutral, nominally Anglo-Saxon, almost provocatively bland, ‘C.B. George’ screams ‘pseudonym’ to any reader. A call to the literary agent confirms the suspicion: the author is keeping his identity secret ‘for personal reasons’, which may or may not be connected to Zimbabwe’s political situation. The second puzzle is why said author chose The Death of Rex Nhongo as his title. The preface explains that ‘Rex Nhongo’ was the nom de guerre of Solomon Mujuru, the Zimbabwean general whose body was discovered lying in the charred debris of a farmhouse he had seized from a white farmer in 2011.

Steven Poole

Was Keats right after all?

Mediterranean crockery has a lot to answer for. It famously spoke thus to John Keats: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Well, even if true, it’s obviously not all one needs to know. But then Keats was never one for irritable reaching after fact and reason. Any attempt at ‘cold philosophy’ would, as he wrote in another poem, ‘unweave a rainbow’. It would also, the poet groaned, ‘empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine’. Gnomed mine? Really? The Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, though, is determined to put the gnomes back into the mines. His eccentrically brilliant book is a ‘meditation’ on the possibility that beauty really is truth.

Rod Liddle

Bloated Biased Correct

The BBC was created out of the ether in 1922. Its first director general, Lord Reith, inhabited a cupboard some six feet in length and presided over a staff of four people, operating out of one long room. Reith confessed that he did not actually know what broadcasting was — an affliction which you might say, a little cruelly, has been shared by one or two of his successors over the years. The parsimonious approach was not to last, of course. Ten years on and the corporation was ensconced in the Stalinist art-deco edifice of Broadcasting House; today the BBC employs more than 20,000 people — some of them actually involved in making programmes — and struggles by on a budget of £5.1 billion.

Julie Burchill

A walk on the mild side

Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian? Mind you, these days so many chart musicians are privately educated bedwetters that, shamefully, this shouldn’t be a problem any longer. I look forward eagerly to the roman à clef which reveals the backstage Babylon of Mumford & Sons. It certainly couldn’t be more boring than this stinker.