More from Books

Thursday

Jeremy Treglown

‘Saul Bellow’s Heart’, by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow, a retired child psychotherapist in his late sixties, is the eldest of the novelist Saul Bellow’s offspring. Bellow Sr (pictured above in 1984), as we already knew from his part-autobiographical fictions and a readable, well-sourced critical biography by James Atlas published in 2000, was a fairly dutiful, not unaffectionate father but didn’t see affection as an impediment to truthfulness and always put his writing before anything else. He claimed that he had never heard of ‘an honest working man’ on either side of his Lithuanian Jewish family: ‘My forefathers were Talmudists. My maternal grandfather had 12 children and never worked a day in his life.

Thursday

Mark Mason

‘A Slow Passion’, by Ruth Brooks – review

Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She tries beer, but her young son drinks it. As for coffee grounds (normally a failsafe), the pests just eat them, then attack the flowers with even more vigour, off their snaily little boxes on caffeine. But A Slow Passion (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is more than just an account of Brooks’s battles to save her delphiniums. Her relationship with snails is love-hate, has been ever since she discovered a colony of them in the air-raid shelter in her childhood garden.

Ian Thomson

‘Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson’, edited by Jonathan Coe – review

B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On the evidence of the prose and plays collected in Well Done God!, however, it would be a mistake to consign him to the frivolous pastures of the literary bagatelle. Samuel Beckett, for one, enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of his writing, and the admiration was mutual.

Tom Rosenthal

‘The Birth of an Opera’, by Michael Rose – review

When, more than half a century ago, I was a student, deriving much of my education from the Third Programme, I was given, between 1955 and 1971, a crash course on opera by Hans Hammelmann and Michael Rose. The two of them were major opera historians and both were natural broadcasters, able to pass their enthusiasm on to the public; and more or less immediately I became a devoted operaphile. But, as the radio programmes grew fainter in the memory and one’s tastes were moulded by countless actual performances, so one craved the book of the series.Now at last Michael Rose (Hammelmann is dead) has written that book, and it is not only as scholarly, authoritative and entertaining as the broadcasts; it has also benefited by another 50 years of Rose’s study and mastery of the subject.

Candy Neubert

long back yard

This must be how we die, a Sunday train, late afternoon, November, Basingstoke. This must be how the heart falls out of reach where it won’t be warmed, too many faces at the window getting on, getting off, while we are all always between stations staring out at hedges in case a fox saves us. Here’s a row of blue trampolines in the long back yards, someone’s bath cleaner on an inside sill; here against this glass in front of each of us the self’s own shape delivers a skull. Then out through the town; an odd stark tree illuminates the dark, the smell of leaf on stone, a reprimand.

William Skidelsky

‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’, by Mohsin Hamid – review

In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of uplift. We first encounter Hamid’s unnamed protagonist in his filthy village compound, ‘huddled, shivering on the packed earth’, wracked by hepatitis E.

Caroline Moore

‘The City of Devi’, by Manil Suri – review

Manil Suri’s novel is like a ‘masala movie’ — a Bombay mix of genres, spicy, often subtle, often corny, and distinctly addictive. It is difficult to pin down its overriding flavour. A reviewer on the back cover notes that ‘Manil Suri has been likened to Narayan, Coetzee, Chekhov and Flaubert’; but there are twinkly sprinklings of Armistead Maupin and Frank L. Baum, and a strong dash of apocalyptic thriller. The City of Devi is the third and most flamboyant of a trilogy, each volume named after a Hindu deity. After The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva, readers who know the Hindu trimurti might have expected Brahma the Creator to complete the trinity.

Marcus Berkmann

Penguin Underground Lines – review

You don’t have to live in London to be faintly obsessed by the Tube, but it probably helps. At this point I should state my bona fides: born in Great Ormond Street Hospital (nearest station: Russell Square), babyhood in Marylebone (Bakerloo line, originally to be called ‘Lisson Grove’), grew up in Hampstead (deepest station on the network with 320 steps down to the platform), and now live on the scabby side of Highgate, yards away from the disused overground line that once went to Finsbury Park. I am not a train-spotter as such, or even at all, but I do know to sit in the final carriage if I am getting out at Warren Street (that’s where the exit is) and that ‘Pimlico’ is the only station name that contains no letters from the word ‘badger’.

Jane Ridley

‘Holland House: A History of London’s Most Celebrated Salon’, by Linda Kelly – review

Holland House, which was bombed in 1940, was a large, rambling Jacobean mansion off Kensington High Street. In 1800 it was still in the country, surrounded by leafy woods and fields. Here Lord Holland and his wife Lady Holland created a glittering and influential salon. For over 30 years before the 1832 Reform Act, Holland House was the headquarters of the Whig party. Lord Holland was the nephew of Charles James Fox, and at Holland House the Whig aristocracy — ‘they are all cousins’, as someone said — dined and talked and plotted. An intellectual nerve centre, Holland House was the place where the new men with the new thinking from Scotland met and influenced the Whigs. Byron was a favourite, and it was at Holland House that he first met Lady Caroline Lamb.

Anthony Howell

Grumarí

The leaves  hardly breathe   and snakes  loop round the branches,  soaking up heat   from cars parked  nose to tail outside  the seafood   kiosk by  this savage southern   beach where  the leaves hardly breathe  and snakes   loop round  the branches, soaking up heat  from cars parked   nose to tail  outside the seafood  kiosk by   this savage  southern beach.

Philip Ziegler

‘The Undivided Past’, by David Cannadine – review

David Cannadine detests generalisations and looks disapprovingly on any attempt to divide humanity into precise categories. The Undivided Past provides a resoundingly dusty answer to any historian rash enough to seek for certainties in this our life. It is highly intelligent, stimulating, occasionally provocative and enormous fun to read. Cannadine considers the six ways in which humanity is traditionally deemed to split into distinct and usually hostile groups — religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilisation — and demonstrates that these groups are neither distinct nor hostile — indeed, can hardly be said to be groups at all. ‘When I was coming up,’ said President George W. Bush regretfully, ‘you knew exactly who they were.

Thursday

Zenga Longmore

The Quickening, by Julie Myerson — review

The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister husband, Dan. Rachel’s ghostly journey begins when Dan suggests a holiday in Antigua. Even though Rachel has a creepy premonition when she sees a photograph of her Caribbean destination, she’s not deterred. Of course, strange things happen when they arrive. Psychic taxi- drivers mumble cryptic warnings. A clairvoyant waitress tearfully begs Rachel to leave the island. Light-fittings fly off the walls. Shadowy figures lumber along sunlit beaches. Locals are murdered in mysterious circumstances.

Jane Rye

The Undelivered Mardle: A Memoir of Belief, Doubt and Delight, by John Rogers — review

This ‘wry soliloquy’, as Ronald Blythe calls The Undelivered Mardle in his introduction, is quite unlike anything else, although its ostensible subject, the history of a small Suffolk farmyard church and its parish (accompanied by three excellent maps) might suggest otherwise. Asked to give a talk or ‘mardle’ to raise money for the priory church at Letheringham, and having established that he might ‘question the sense of preserving such relics’, John Rogers paid a series of meditative visits over several months. On the day he was to deliver the mardle he had a heart attack; afterwards, ‘feeling rather feeble’ and aware that as a public speaker he was ‘unpredictable’, he decided to write it down instead.

Andro Linklater

The Real Great Escape, by Simon Read — review

The scene is chilling. Four men stand in the snow, all in uniform. The men are in pairs, one in each pair holds a pistol to the head of the man in front. Behind them two parked cars, 1940s models; in front a snow-filled ditch. What happens next? The right answer depends on which scene you are watching. The one reproduced in both these books (and above) occurred in February 1946, and was a reconstruction staged by RAF police hunting for the killers of two men, Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green. Afterwards, all four participants and the man who took the picture got back in the cars and drove off. In the original scene, which had taken place two years earlier, there was no photographer.

Bevis Hillier

Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review

Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something missing: he had not adequately covered the years between 1935, when he was born, and 1967, when he became director of the National Portrait Gallery — as the Daily Mail put it in 1969, ‘Britain’s most improbable civil servant’. He has written this book to remedy the omission. That it is published by the Bodleian is yet another feather in Strong’s fedora. If you were in the anti-Strong faction (I am not, but it does exist), you might summarise the rite of passage chronicled in the book as ‘from geek to freak’.

Sebastian Payne

To Save Everything, Click Here, by Evgeny Morozov — review

Technology may not have taken over the world, but it is making quite good progress in taking over our lives. Thirty years ago, receiving a phone call was the height of communication stimulus. Now, we are programmed to expect several emails an hour and can become anxious if we don’t receive them. It’s worse than a bad habit. Scientists suggest the constant distractions offered by technology have even altered the chemical balance in our brains. The information revolution has made us more connected, switched-on and informed than ever before. Thanks to near-universal access to the internet, humans can access almost every piece of knowledge accumulated by mankind in the blink of an eye.

Candy Neubert

search party

the worst night coming the bloody dark covers our traces fanning across the grid worked out in the Ops Room section by section any place my heart is gone any direction beginning in the house and loosed off in mid air in some canal or building site or park the hinterlands behind are coded as we slot together drum and lock and screw over the downy skin of the child still held against the light soft as a miracle daring the stars and torches picking through this one o’clock and two o’clock and three.

Diana Hendry

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki — review

About halfway through A Tale for the Time Being I had the uncomfortable feeling that this was going to be a reincarnation story and that I would soon discover one of the main characters (Jiko, nun, novelist, anarchist, feminist and importantly great-grandmother) to have been reborn as Ruth Ozeki, author of this — this what? A novel with Japanese footnotes, six appendices and a bibliography; a memoir; a semi-autobiographical meditation on time, climate change, history, or all of these? It was a relief to find I was wrong, though fair play, Ruth Ozeki does happen to have a Japanese mother and to be both a novelist (My Year of Meat, All Over Creation) and a recently ordained Zen Buddhist priest.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian – review

‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country. British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense.

Marcus Berkmann

Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey – review

We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you’re going to be under three feet of snow every December.’ Perhaps appropriately, then, he has written quite a whimsical little book, scarcely longer than a pamphlet, exploring the glorious oddness of British weather with characteristic elegance and perspicacity. East Anglian gales, ‘ranting uninterrupted from the Urals’, are ‘a sight more brazen than the tree-top gossip of the Chilterns’.