More from Books

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

The Ghosts of Happy Valley, by Juliet Barnes – review

Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came from Kenya, he quipped, ‘Ah, still living in Happy Valley?’ We will never shake it off, this idea of a Happy Valley in the equatorial highlands where aristocrats supposedly indulged in orgies and drugs — what Cyril Connolly dubbed the three As: Altitude, Alcohol and Adultery. It culminated in Joss Erroll’s 1941 murder. ‘Perhaps Africa was to blame,’ Connolly wrote. ‘It insinuates violence.’ It is 30 years ago that James Fox, inspired by Connolly, resurrected these tawdry events in his book White Mischief. It has never been out of print since.

Wynn Wheldon

A Slap in the Face, by William B. irvine – review

A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to detail is bordering on the obsessive’. Aside from observing that an obsessive attention to detail might serve the health service well, this is an example of the kind of insult that Professor Irvine would ascribe either to low self-esteem or to narcissism (high self-esteem with no self-knowledge). The speaker wasn’t offering constructive criticism (my friend had been praised for his attention to detail only days before, by a perhaps less negligent superior) but rather emphasising her superiority, something she had no need to do, unless she felt it threatened. My friend’s attention to detail is clearly her problem rather than his. Irvine begins with examples of insult.

Emily Rhodes

Shire, by Ali Smith – review

Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is a wonderfully unexpected writer. In the first story, ‘The Beholder’, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a patient develops a growth on her chest — ‘woody, dark browny, greeny, sort-of circular, ridged a bit like bark, about the size of a two pence piece’. The doctors are mystified, but a gypsy recognises it as ‘a young licitness’, a pun of mishearing later revealed to be ‘a Young Lycidas’, a rose named after Milton’s pastoral elegy.

Charlotte Moore

The Son, by Philipp Meyer – review

Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of Texas, wrested from Mexico in 1836, Eli has miraculously reached the age of 100. Captured by Comanche Indians in boyhood, he mastered their survival skills, and was well on the way to becoming the most respected member of the tribe when smallpox struck. The all-powerful Comanches — ‘the earth had seen nothing like them since the Mongols’ — had no defence against this invisible enemy. But Eli/Tiehteti, immunised in infancy, survived. Eli rampages through the next few decades, including a spell as state ranger when he is obliged to hunt down what remains of the people to whom he once belonged.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Land of Second Chances, by Tim Lewis – review

This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about Rwandan cycling. Well, it is. Tim Lewis gives us the story of Adrien Niyonshuti’s attempts to qualify for the 2012 Olympics under the tutelage of American cycling legend Jock Boyer. Adrien and his teammates are desperate to put Rwanda on the world map for something other than the 1994 genocide. But while the tale has its dramatic moments, it never really bursts into life. It’s too messy for that; as Lewis himself says, ‘situations in Africa are rarely, if ever, neat’. For instance, one of the cyclists refuses to train, being too busy pirating videos for the profitable film showings he organises.

Joanna Kavenna

Niccolo Machiavelli, by Corrado Vivanti; The Garments of Court and Palace, by Philip Bobbitt

One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced his notorious work, The Prince. He wrote it after a significant career blip in 1512, when the Florentine Republic fell and the Medici regained power. Machiavelli was not merely sacked from his job — secretary to the Republic — but also accused of conspiracy, imprisoned and horribly tortured. In 1513, he was released into exile, and went to live on his family farm, south of Florence. There he walked, consorted with ‘vulgarity’ (the locals) and read classical writers, including Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch, Suetonius and Procopius.

John Sutherland

Looking at Books by John Sutherland – essay

The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two of which would put you over Mr Ryan’s weight limit. Sand, sun, surf — and Kindle. The traditional ‘beach book’ is as obsolete as the Victorian bathing machine. The printed codex has had a long run — it is half a millennium since William Caxton set up his stall around St Paul’s. Few inventions have lasted as long, or done as much good for humanity. But a tipping point has been reached for the ink, paper and board product. More precisely, it will be tipped into the waste-bin of history. Goodbye Gutenberg.

Susan Hill

The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist.

Alexander Chancellor

The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein – review

Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a century trying to find answers to the troubling theories and nagging questions that always swirl around notorious crimes. The more famous the crime, the harder it is to get at the truth, especially if the crime has political consequences. For example, John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was quickly proven to have been part of a conspiracy involving leaders of the defeated Confederate states; but when a reunited country was later seeking reconciliation, it was found expedient to suppress this fact and portray him instead as a deranged individual who had acted alone.

Cressida Connolly

Wreaking, by James Scudamore – review

An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a vast henchman, a mother who hears angels telling her she must harm her child: these are some of the places and people to be found in James Scudamore’s new novel. Dickensian excess is the name of the game here. It is as if Mr Murdstone and Steerforth and Magwich (and even the foggy salt-flats which herald his startling arrival in fiction) appeared in the same story as Fagin, together with a couple of lost boys, ripe for criminal exploitation. Scudamore’s relish for names, too, is Dickensian.

Lisa Brockwell

Waiting for the Train

Early spring cherry blossom by the tracks — so prim and so dirty, all at once. The bees must be dropping to their knees. For me, it’s after the harvest, only just but even so, a different season. There are elderly women on the platform in beautifully cut coats and expensive shoes. I know that’s where I’m heading, but not yet. I can feel the sap humming in my hips and legs; my hair taken by the wind is still a good thing. You surprise me with coffee and wait with me. It’s unexpected and lovely, your regard. Window box platonic but definitely that spark. Like standing in the sun on a bitter cold day, tasting the froth brim over the top of my cup. The station master recites where the train is going; no one cares where it has been.

Thursday

Thirza Wakefield

The World is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg – a review

‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the age of 84. Few directors understand this better — this matter of good and bad ‘timing’ — than the maker of Performance, Roeg’s debut film of 1970. Even starring Mick Jagger — then the centrefold of popularity — the film stunned critics by its experimental otherness: they hated it. By now, though, opinions have changed and Performance — once, out of its time — is upheld, along with Roeg’s other works, as among the greatest and boldest examples of British cinema. Roeg, however, has only ever been consistent in his commitment to pushing the boundaries of accepted practice in his medium.

James Mcconnachie

What do conductors actually do? Review of ‘Inside Conducting’ by Christopher Seaman

Conductors love telling stories, especially stories about other conductors, and every chapter of this otherwise determinedly pragmatic book begins with one. Perhaps the most telling concerns a ‘famous conductor’ who mistakenly gave a massive downbeat in a bar that was supposed to be silent. The orchestra, reading the score correctly, did not play. Voice from the back of the violas: ‘He doesn’t sound so good on his own, does he?’ The anecdote illuminates the driving question behind this book, the one we’ve all wanted to ask while fearing to sound ignorant: what do conductors actually do? Some are sceptical.

Marcus Berkmann

Across the Pond, by Terry Eagleton – a review

The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an admirable rate. Across the Pond (Norton, £9.99) is subtitled ‘An Englishman’s View of America’, and begins with a rigorous justification for the use of national stereotypes in writing about a country’s population. Eagleton then proceeds to make hay with these stereotypes in typically combative style and to consistently amusing effect. ‘America is a country where it’s difficult to do things by halves. Some people are surreally fat, while others are life-threateningly thin. Some think of nothing but sex, while others seem to regard sex as more reprehensible than genocide.

Daniel Hardisty

Siempre

After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by eternal weather — if you arrived with them all where I wait for you, I would not be jealous. We will always be alone. We will always be, you and I, alone on this earth to begin life.

William Leith

Sane New World, by Ruby Wax – a review

Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left town’. She says: ‘I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled.’ She tells us what it’s like to fall apart, why she thinks so many people fall apart, and what you can do if you start to fall apart yourself. ‘The feeling is that of being a corpse,’ she says. It happens because our brains are not adapted to live in the relentless global village we’ve created. And: ‘YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK.’ More on this last bit later.

Rachel Redford

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 4 – a review

This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time that an audio version has been produced. Granta’s American editor, John Freeman, introduces the collection:  three complete stories and 17 excerpts from work-in-progress from all 20 novelists, half of them read by the authors themselves. The result is a tremendous extra dimension of reality. Sunjeev Sahota quotes Salman Rushdie: ‘To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.’ These 20 novelists, including Sahota, have certainly done so,  with settings including Somalia, old Beijing, drug experimentation on the Burma-Thai border, Yorkshire in flood, Ghana and, in a quarter of them, the USA.

Andro Linklater

Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel – a review

During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish church of Sudbury in Suffolk: ‘We brake down a picture of God the Father, 2 crucifixes and pictures of Christ, about an hundred in all.’ The Taleban’s decision in 2001 to blow up two gigantic statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan was more spectacular but not different in kind. War gives licence to such subterranean urges. In an order issued exactly three centuries after Dowsing’s expedition, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, explained why great art needed to be protected. ‘Works of art are not like diamonds,’ he told the troops.

James Walton

The People’s Songs, by Stuart Maconie – a review

For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues, he’s proved himself a fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful — often all at the same time. In his previous book to this, Hope and Glory, he made a creditable if slightly heart-on-sleeve attempt at British social history. And, as anybody who’s listened to his radio shows will know, few people combine such a serious knowledge and love of pop music with such a refreshing lack of snootiness about it. Not only that, but in the introduction here he tells us that he’s always wanted to write ‘a reliable, authoritative one-volume history of British popular music that would avoid rehashing the received wisdom’.

Joanna Kavenna

The Long Shadow, by Mark Mills – a review

Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House of the Hanged. The Long Shadow is written in a different mode. It is set in a highly recognisable present; it is a clever, teasing hybrid of genres (psychological thriller, dark comedy, Pardoner’s Tale and dystopia); and it is fraught with tensions about money, class and the super-rich. The protagonist, Ben, is a well-nigh washed up screenwriter in his early forties. His wife has fallen in love with a successful businessman; Ben has been forced out into a seedy flat in a demoralising part of London. He passes the time enumerating the opportunities he has squandered and worrying about his relationship with his teenage son.