More from Books

Thursday

Sarah Burton

Male-order bride

If you want to learn how to create the perfect wife, you should not read this book. You should make an emergency appointment with reality and remain under self-imposed house arrest until help arrives. If you are a man in search of a tolerably compatible partner, just keep looking. If you are a woman, read Caitlin Moran’s timely How to be a Woman (it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for anyone or not — just read it). In 1769 Thomas Day was a single man (aged 21), in possession of a good fortune who (therefore) must be in want of a wife. Though Day was charitable to the poor, opposed slavery and refused to kill a spider, these appear to have been his only merits.

William Leith

Destroying angel in the ether

A few years ago, James Lasdun wrote The Horned Man, a novel about Laurence Miller, an English lecturer in an American college who descends into paranoia. At first, he thinks someone is tampering with things in his office, and making calls from his phone. Then he thinks his colleagues are spying on him, and, perhaps worse, that they think he is spying on them. He worries that someone might think he is trying to plagiarise their work; that people can read his lascivious thoughts; that, whatever he says or does, he is leaving a damning trail of evidence against himself. Meanwhile, he is part of a sinister academic committee devoted to policing the behaviour of others.

Thursday

John Preston

Away with the fairies

There have been plenty of books in recent years in which apparently sane hacks go off in search of loonies to poke fun at. While The Heretics looks at first as if it fits neatly into the genre, there turns out to be rather more to it than that. Not that the book doesn’t come richly stocked with people who hold what my mother used to call very unreliable opinions. They include a regressive hypnotherapist called Vered who once treated someone who believed they’d been a twig in a previous life, and an NHS-funded expert on satanic rituals who insists that satanists regularly stitch babies inside the bellies of dying animals so that they can be ‘reborn’ to Satan. Apparently the satanists — when peckish — also snack on foetuses. ‘Raw or cooked?

Victor Sebestyen

What price freedom?

One of the best-known contacts for many Western reporters covering Poland and the Solidarity protests of the 1980s was Konstanty ‘Kostek’ Gebert. A fine journalist who usually wrote under the name Dawid Warszawski, he seemed to know everyone in Warsaw, liked to talk late into the night about ideas and gossip, wore his vast learning lightly and had an invaluable gift for putting complex issues into broad perspective. Gebert’s parents were Jewish migrants to the US in the 1920s. They were loyal members of the American Communist Party for years and returned to Poland in 1947 to build socialism from the ruins of the second world war. When Gebert, born in the Fifties, was old enough to think he knew he loathed communism.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Pyrrhic victories

In 193 BC, Scipio met Hannibal at Ephesus, and asked him who, in his opinion, were the greatest generals of all time. Since he’d personally defeated Rome’s most dangerous enemy a decade earlier, he rather expected to be on his list. But Hannibal first named Alexander the Great; then Pyrrhus (who like him had come within a whisker of sacking Rome); and for his third choice — one can’t help but feel he was taunting the self-important Roman — himself. And what, Scipio expostulated, if I hadn’t beaten you at Zama? In that case, the Carthaginian replied with a smile, I should have placed myself first. Of course, as Anthony Everitt observes in his excellent guide to Rome’s early history, this story is too good to be true. But who cares?

Connie Bensley

Painting the Fence

For the first coat she started at the house end, he at the garden gate. They worked towards each other meeting fondly in the middle. For the second coat they began in the middle and worked outwards;  he abstracted, murmuring,  tweaking his phone with a painty forefinger. By the shrubbery he put down his brush and the garden gate groaned, clicked shut. Now the tin offers her its tedious advice For a perfect finish, apply a third coat. The days pass.  The paint hardens.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Leaving Sussex

I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating. Then I saw what the publicity people meant. Nicholson has broken out of his small, square two inches of ivory. His previous three novels were set over the course of a few days in the southeast of England. A typical chapter was called ‘Saturday’. Motherland spans 11 years, set in Sussex, France, India, Jamaica and New Orleans. Part One is called ‘War: 1942-45’. The pivotal scene of the book is a seaborne raid on the beaches of Dieppe.

Cressida Connolly

Growing up the hard way | 14 February 2013

Like the gingerbread house, these three novels seem at first to be a delightful and innocent place, entirely suitable for the three not-quite orphaned young girls who are Holden’s heroines. But, just as in a fairytale, safety is never assured. The very grown-ups who should be offering protection — a governess, a head teacher, even their own mother — may become suddenly unstable and capricious. What looks bright and cheery and full of hope may turn out to be perilous, even sinister. Home is not a constant. Written with an engaging immediacy, these are stories about children but, with their dark secrets, their frightening reversals, their alarming glimpses of sex and death, they are certainly not for children.

Justin Cartwright

The tragedy of a hamlet

Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. The subjects Crace tackles are varied, from a microscopic study of death (Being Dead) to an eremitic retreat in the Judaean desert (Quarantine). They all deploy a terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read. Some of them are dystopian (The Pesthouse), some are set in very faintly demarcated places, or places that we recognise because we have dreamed of them. Yet this is not science fiction. It is rather a re-imagining of the world, using the available tools.

Thursday

Erica Mcalpine

Peonies

On an impulse, you could eat these flowers up the way they’re floating, stemlessly, side by side like scoops of ice cream in a crystal cup. White and softly drizzled with syrup (almost creeping down from the top) and shyly turning inward still, each closed bud leaks red along the seams and gleams like a hot sundae. What puzzles is how quickly these petals fan out, brown, flip, and fray along the edges. If only they’d stay put — if you could just keep peonies shut. Open, they frazzle.

Patrick Skene-Catling

A hero of folk

‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and after. A self-taught socialist, Woody wrote more than 3,000 songs, mostly in angry protest on behalf of millions of underdogs. As the ‘Dust Bowl Balladeer’, he became the legendary folk hero who inspired Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and many others. Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. When he was 15, his mother was institutionalised with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary cause of early dementia and other mental disabilities, which he eventually inherited. At 17, he moved to Pampa, a small town on the Texas Panhandle.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of recent crime novels

Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He is devastated by the death from cancer of his wife, Lydia, the much-loved matriarch; but his children and grandchildren console him. The clan gathers for the annual bonfire weekend at their Devon holiday home. It all goes horribly wrong when baby Edie, the youngest grandchild and apple of everyone’s eye, vanishes one evening, along with the newly acquired girlfriend of Rowan’s only son.

John Preston

Beautiful and damned

According to his mother, Neville Heath was ‘prone to be excitable’. He was that all right — and then some. In the space of two weeks in the summer of 1946, Heath murdered two women with such brutality that, as Sean O’Connor puts it with shuddering relish, ‘war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them’. The public were fascinated by him. Elizabeth Taylor reworked Heath’s story into a novel, Patrick Hamilton drew on it heavily for his Gorse trilogy and Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a film about the case, but had to ditch the idea when the studio decided it would be too revolting. Heath was fascinating mainly due to his ambivalence. Clearly capable of appalling brutality, he could also be tender and considerate.

Cressida Connolly

Love stories

Unfortunately for the reading public, most of Bernadine Bishop’s working life has been spent as a psychotherapist. Having published a couple of early novels, she put aside her pen, first to become a teacher, and then a shrink: it was only after cancer forced her retirement in 2010 that she turned again to writing. I sincerely hope she is in remission now, not only for the sake of her own health and happiness, but so that she can write as many more books as possible. Unexpected Lessons in Love is a wonderful novel, one of those rare books which leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of the human heart. It actually offers what its title proposes.

Catherine Ormell

Small Chat

I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob to his fly? His silence counts each snowflake; he is as secret as Switzerland. His strength gathers itself, cracks open his shoes, skitters through his jacket’s seams. Only his hands furl, last token of infancy, these he bunkers in his pockets.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Indian giver

A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new, 16 old) are moving and hilarious, and they amount to an education. Take the term Native American, for example. Isn’t this the accepted way to refer to the author’s ethnicity? You’d have thought. Yet Sherman Alexie avoids it, referring to himself and his characters as ‘Indian’. Everything he writes is imbued with a consciousness of the irreversible wrong visited on his ancestors, but this is as often wry as plaintive.

Michela Wrong

Change of heart | 7 February 2013

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return eight years later, bored and homesick.

Andro Linklater

Winning the war with wheezers

The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as expansive, but today the carpets are unmistakably worn and the bathrooms are beginning to peel. In its own small way, the hotel illustrates the central theme of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Professor Paul Kennedy’s epochal history now more than 20 years old, that a dearth of economic resources progressively enfeebles the mightiest of institutions.

Thursday

Kerry-Lee Powell

Ship’s Biscuit

After Mother scarpered It was ship’s biscuit With shrapnel sparkles. It was hot spurts and gristle And cold snaps with a wet towel For stealing a puff from Dad’s fag Or sneaking a peek at his titty mags. But we buggers deserved no better. It was us that made her run off, With our bickers and our bungles. It was our bloody cheek. It was his bleeding knuckles.

Mark Mason

Down to a T

There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while most people have only just got used to the fact that Traveller now has a capital ‘T’, the reviews must avoid those other words you’re not supposed to have in your head any more, though everyone does. Yes, even Guardian journalists and BBC editors; I once heard one of the latter breed say, after everyone had discussed a radio drama about Travellers using the ‘correct’ terminology: ‘Oh, you mean the pikey play?