More from Books

Tuesday

Lee Langley

The past yields up its secrets: The Red Mouth, by Sheila Armstrong, reviewed

Sheila Armstrong’s strange and beautiful novel has 12 chapters, each named for a month of the year – though not always the same year or even the same decade. The author plunges us into archaeology, history, geology and complex human relationships. Time is fluid here: we might encounter an obscure neolithic weapon or stumble on a beer can left by a thoughtless 21st-century rambler. Occasionally Irish words dance across the page. The Red Mouth – an beal rua – introduces us to a group of strangers whose lives are linked by an Irish peat bog that yields long-buried evidence of past lives: an antler from an extinct species of deer, or an Iron Age woman, throat slashed, a rope around her neck, body curled into the shape of a question mark.

Ian Sansom

The appeal of asymmetry: Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, reviewed

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologising for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

Sinclair McKay

Good moaning: the subversive sitcoms of the 1980s revisited

The foundations of all British situation comedy were laid by Charles Dickens. If you were to remove that tiresome fun-sponge Little Nell and her wholly meaningless death from The Old Curiosity Shop, for instance, you would have before you, in more pleasing proportions, a rich array of recurring comic characters in a variety of scenarios. There are Kit Nubbles and his oyster-adoring family; Abel Garland and his anarchy-prone pony; the preposterous boulevardier Dick Swiveller; and of course the monstrous Daniel Quilp, at war with his wife, his mother-in-law, and the boy who walks on his hands outside the wharf window. The point is that you look forward to seeing them all; it’s not so much about wit as about foibles.

Tuesday

Ian Sansom

Buckle up for the smack-downs: the media behemoth that is modern wrestling

For British readers of a certain age, wrestling occupies a very particular place in the collective memory. Long before the triumph of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), long before the pyrotechnics and the Trump-adjacent billionaire promoters, there were those long-lost innocent Saturday afternoons watching World of Sport with your nan, as men with cauliflower ears, wearing improbable hand-stitched trunks, wrestled in grim, determined, municipal fashion in local leisure centres and town halls up and down the land. If your last points of wrestling reference are those great monoliths Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks lumbering around like coal-fired power stations, today’s wrestling world is almost unrecognisable.

Annie Walton Doyle

An ill-fated romance: Dark is the Morning, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed

As a prolific writer of literary fiction, Rupert Thomson has had plenty of practice in creating a good story. In Dark is the Morning, he seems drawn to the question of whether a satisfactory narrative structure can be imposed on life. The tug between the meaningless, chaotic nature of reality and the more conventional art of storytelling is at the centre of the novel, which concerns the ill-fated romance between the narrator, Gino, and the enigmatic Franca. Thomson even appears awkward about how neatly fabular this tale turns out to be in his opening chapter: ‘I still find the whole thing hard to believe.’ This self-consciousness is apparent throughout, with Thomson making repeated reference to the power of storytelling in his characters’ lives.

Christopher Shrimpton

The art of betrayal: Exhibition, by Alex Hyde, reviewed

Exhibition, Alex Hyde’s second novel, recounts the intimate, messy, ambiguous and ultimately ill-fated relationship between two fictionalised Young British Artists in the early 1990s. Rosie ‘Rabble’ Stone, the narrator, is a gifted but grounded Mancunian photographer, newly arrived in London to begin her studies at a prestigious art school. There she meets, and soon moves in with, a beautiful and accomplished (and throughout nameless) figurative artist destined for greatness. They are inspired by, though very different from, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas and the works they produced in this period. The story begins in Brixton, at an ‘upside-down’ house to which Rabble has been directed to find lodgings.

Christopher Harding

What precipitated a worldwide total war in the 1930s?

More than 80 years after it ended, we are still living through the aftermath of the second world war. When people use the word ‘postwar’ they invariably mean this war and the changes it wrought upon international relations, trade, economics, domestic politics, social values and much more besides. Yet it remains all too easy, certainly in the English-speaking world, to cleave to a rather parochial view of that conflict as something that ended up spreading to lots of exotic places while still ultimately concerning the great battle between good and evil that was the Allies vs the Nazis. Can there be any corner of Hitler’s psyche, any charming detail of the home front in Britain, which remains unprobed in books, TV programmes and museum exhibits?

Stuart Evers

Distant shadows: Frame 37, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed

In photography, balance, whether radial, conceptual or symmetrical, is critical to the success of a composition. An unbalanced photograph can confuse, obfuscate or otherwise diminish an image. It is the same for a literary writer (Nicholas Shakespeare has twice been Booker-longlisted) taking on the thriller genre. Finding an equilibrium between prose styling and fine plotting requires considerable skill and a gentle touch. In his second outing for the former journalist John Dyer, Shakespeare treads this tightrope nimbly. Following the events of The Sandpit (2020), Dyer is in Tasmania, engaged in research for a book on the Tupian peoples of the Amazon. He is soon interrupted by a voice from the past, that of Miguel Girondo de Belew, an Argentinian photo-journalist.

Nick Spencer

How does the Catholic J.D. Vance justify Trumpian policies?

‘Read Hillbilly Elegy,’ a friend messaged me a decade ago. ‘The author really gets it.’ So I did, and indeed he did. The young and then obscure J.D. Vance showed, through his family travails in Appalachia, how both Republicans and Democrats had in their different ways screwed blue collar, just-about-working-class families like his. The book went platinum and launched his public career. Three things saved the young Vance from the fate that awaited people like him: a fiercely defensive and religious grandmother (‘Mamaw’), enlisting in the US Marines, and evangelical Christianity. He fell away from this last, however, as he discovered that his fundamentalist faith may have had community love in spades but was very short on good answers to big questions.

Emily Goulding

Too close for comfort: Family Friends, by Chloë Ashby, reviewed

‘Across the courtyard the water glistens a pale blue, the sun’s rays shimmering on its surface. The surrounding garden is wild and overgrown with trees and bushes tinged reddish orange, overlooking a valley of scorched grass fields.’ This is the setting of Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. Taking place over one eventful holiday between old university friends in the south of France, it’s a sun-soaked work simmering with secrets that lurk just below the surface. First, a look at our cast of characters. There’s the ‘endlessly reliable’ Maggie, with weak, ‘beautiful in a boyish way’ Will and their two children, Alice and ‘gangly’ teenage Sammy.

Scott Bradfield

Southern Gothic: the horror story of Alex Murdaugh, paterfamilias and ‘family annihilator’

The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

The conspiracy of silence surrounding the Nord Stream bombings

Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs.

Lucy Moore

Our resentment of migrants is centuries old: the Little Englanders of the Tudor era

This Little World opens with a description of the riots of 1517, an explosion of pent-up hostility and resentment against ‘strangers and aliens’. Recently arrived migrants from France and the Low Countries were blamed for aggravating the poverty and want suffered by locals. That Easter, a rabble-rousing preacher had called for Londoners to remedy this injustice: ‘As birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weale.’ Soon afterwards, on the May Day holiday, apprentices gave drunken, unruly vent to their frustration in riots. Five hundred years flash by and so little has changed.

Stuart Kelly

Small, skewed pictures that cast a spell: the art of Mollie Douthit

In this clever, moving mosaic of a book, Sara Baume tells us she originally wanted to be an art critic and that she wrote exhibition catalogue copy. It has served her well, as Opening Night is an evolved form of that genre – including 39 excellently reproduced images of paintings by the subject, and one extra – but it is also a form of memoir. By that I do not mean ‘life writing’ or ‘autofiction’, as it is a work of remembering and memorialising, even if that involves recording the gaps and lapses. The lacunae operate like an undercoat: the occluded thing that changes how you see. Just before the pandemic, Baume states in the opening sentence: ‘I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie.

Robert Potts

Family Tyrant: The Anniversary, by Andrea Bajani, reviewed

Andrea Bajani’s short novel The Anniversary won Italy’s Premio Strega prize last year and has since become an international bestseller. It is narrated by a 51-year-old man who, ten years earlier, cut all ties with his family, and who, on the anniversary of that audacious and purifying move, looks back and tries to make sense of the events that led to it. It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father. References accumulate less to incidents than to the overwhelming atmosphere of dread between those incidents, ‘the looming threat that tightens our throats’; ‘a constant sense of impending danger...

Julie Burchill

Disability is becoming the new normal

Before I became confined to a wheelchair two years ago after an operation for a spinal abscess, I’d never read a book about disability. More remarkably, considering the tiny amount of time it would have taken, I’d never read a newspaper article about it either. The only media stories about disabled people I’d bothered with concerned famous sufferers, such as Christopher Reeve and Robert Wyatt. I’d also followed with voyeuristic revulsion the 2021 story of Giles Coren celebrating the death of the young, working-class, disabled journalist Dawn Foster after she’d had the temerity to cross him. So there you go. My concern with disability was confined to where it overlapped with showbiz and media.

Helen Barrett

Persistent gossip about Brian Epstein’s death risks defining his life

We know the facts about Brian Epstein’s death. The Beatles’ manager died in bed at his Belgravia home on 27 August 1967, six years after he struck gold in a Liverpool cellar, a month before his contract to manage the Beatles was due to end and four weeks after homosexual acts between men were partly decriminalised. At the time of his death, the 32-year-old Epstein was addicted, adrift and depressed – not least as a result of a long effort to hide his sexuality and the low-level anti-Semitism he encountered everywhere. One moment he was manically active, the next he was in despair, according to those around him. He had overdosed in the past and had been treated at a psychiatric hospital. On the day he died, his blood contained alcohol, antidepressants and barbiturates.

Olivia Potts

Do single women bother to cook for themselves?

‘Let us begin with cookbooks. Or, rather, with a rejection of them. I cannot look at mine. They remind me of a person I no longer want to be.’ This is a bold start for a book whose title contains the word ‘cookbook’; but then much of The Spinster Cookbook is a subversion of the domestic and the expected. It is, for starters, not a cookbook (though it does contain a few recipes) but sits in several different realms: it is Eli Davies’s personal narrative, edging into memoir; it is a review of spinster literature from the interwar period onwards, taking in everything from Lolly Willowes to Sex and the City; it is a meditation on what it means to make a home; and it is a manifesto on different visions for co-existing. It is not a paean to cosy solo domesticity.

Ian Sansom

The uncertainty principle: The Interpreter’s Secret, by Andrew Rosenheim, reviewed

You can’t really make this stuff up any more, political reality having long since outpaced fiction, but thank goodness there are people who continue to try. Recent history has supplied more than enough intrigue, misinformation, diplomatic doublespeak and sheer zone-flooding mad shit to challenge even the most inventive writer of political thrillers, but fortunately Andrew Rosenheim is more than up for it.

Stuart Jeffries

Are good people made by good surroundings, or the other way round?

How can Britain cut its spiralling benefits budget and the number of alienated youths spending taxpayer-generated monies on frivolous consumer goods, facing off against the police and making life unpleasant for those of us not involved in creating poverty porn documentaries? Traditional answers – such as colonising Africa or declaring war on, let’s say, Russia – are off the table. Drones, AI and our defence budget mean that there is no prospect of a Crimean War II, led by the kind of martial Britons who so frightened the Duke of Wellington on the Peninsular campaign. What then? Britain’s current problem is one that the heroes of Joad Raymond Wren’s scintillating book never had: a complete want of thinking outside the box.