More from Books

Thursday

Byron Rogers

More vindictive than merry

At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on a muggy summer afternoon in 1658.’ All it needs is the dusty main street of the frontier town with two men, one all in black, facing each other against the sky, with one of Dmitri Tiomkin’s lush orchestral soundtracks gulping away in the background. Another death — that of Charles I by execution on 29 January 1649 in Whitehall: carpenters are putting the finishing touches to his scaffold and, according to the authors, the sound awakens the King. Fair enough.

Mary Kenny

Sweetness and light

Yes, shamefully, I did immediately look myself up in the index, since I had known Mary Robinson (née Bourke) when we were both young feminists in Dublin in 1970. Indeed, she sat in my Dublin flat sharing ‘conscious-raising’ sessions, and I published one of the first political interviews with her — which has been cited in all previous biographies of the lady. Our paths, to say the least, have diverged. She became President of Ireland (and annoyingly, a very good one), and has graduated to being one of the world’s great panjandrums, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with 49 honorary doctorates from universities all over the globe and honours from half a dozen countries, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Obama.

Cressida Connolly

Contrarian to the last

We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the end. The foibles of the dying are life-rafts thrown to their friends and family: proof that their uniqueness and the force of their personalities are stronger than death itself. Christopher Hitchens died as he had lived, holding court, boasting, arguing on the side of logic and reason, dismissive of religion and superstition alike; with great intellectual curiosity, wit and panache. This little book was meant to be a longer one, but death came sooner than he had bargained for.

James Walton

Over-cooked

Starting with Lemprière’s Dictionary — an unexpected worldwide hit in the early 1990s — Lawrence Norfolk has never been a man for the slim novella. Complicated of plot and huge of cast, his books generally serve up a combination of almost obsessively researched history and somewhat arcane mythology. Now, 12 years since his last one, comes John Saturnall’s Feast —  a novel, I think it’s fair to say, that doesn’t mark a radical change of direction. The year is 1625, and in the Oxfordshire village of Buckland the puritans are on the march. For 11-year-old John Saturnall, this is particularly worrying, because his mother Susan is widely (and, it would seem, accurately) regarded as the local witch.

William Leith

An exercise in torment

In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the relationships he had with other soldiers. His brain is full of lurid visions, the memories he is constantly attacked and ambushed by. But he can’t make sense of them, because he can’t find a way back to the person he was before the war. His story is an exercise in torment. Why did he join the army? Why did his friend Daniel ‘Murph’ Murphy, who did not come back, join the army?

Wynn Wheldon

Pitch perfect

It is fashionable, in the wake of all those rowers and cyclists and runners, abled and otherwise, who do what they do for something — glory, pride, joy of physical exertion?  — other than for money, to disparage football, and to regard it as somehow vulgar and its practitioners over-indulged. Despite the fairytale exploits of Chelsea and Manchester City at the end of last season, football is seen as having a lot of catching up to do. It is, after all, almost impossible not to be cynical about a sport that rewards its players so extravagantly. This book reminds us that football too has its virtues.

Jason Goodwin

Spirit of the wild water

I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power of this book that I suppose Miriam Darlington must have summoned him for me. Here she is, evoking her own first encounter: I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent. He runs and makes a direct gallop for the shoreline. He moves quickly, but with the lumbering gait that, I learn later, otters always have on land.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Knowing your onions

Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston Blumenthal’s latest wheeze: instead the cure for piles advocated by William Buchan, 18th-century author of Domestic Medicine, now republished as Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (Bodleian Library, £14.99). The new title gives you a clue to Buchan’s general style (poultice again). He also recommended holding burns near a fire and rubbing salt on them, while mere bruising called for the application of cow dung. Gonorrhoea (‘the fruit of unlawful embraces’) could be defeated by rubbing mercury on the inner thigh.

Ben Hamilton

A way to somewhere else

Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact. Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T.

John Martin-Robinson

A Charlotte Brontë of wood and stone

Sarah Losh is not forgotten (as the subtitle of this book suggests) in her own village of Wreay (pronounced ‘Rear’), south east of Carlisle in Cumberland. The locals refer to ‘Miss Sarah’ as if she were still alive, rather as they speak about Lady Anne Clifford at Appleby. Anybody who has visited the village and seen the extraordinary church built in 1841-2 by Miss Losh at her own expense will know why. Travellers are met with the apparition of a small Roman basilica stranded on a village green, embellished with mind-blowing carvings. They are partly inspired by fossils, obscure natural history specimens and esoteric symbols. The Losh graves in the churchyard are strikingly odd and personal too.

Philip Hancock

Martini Man

Blondes, brunettes, ginger nuts, I’ve had ’em all, sunshine. Could be Janet the cleaner or that Irish cook at the day nursery. A dead cert’s Aunty Pat. What Aunty Pat? His wife puts two and two together. But in the back of his minivan? Unsnaring her heel from his bosun’s chair, ruining her Wolford’s on a gripper rod. From a dust sheet, wood slivers and flecks of paint adhere to her pasty arse, her perfume made nameless by linseed. He lies back thinking of cricket bats and summer fences. Tells her how it works for kneading old putty: softening it up, bringing it to life. Got to look after your hands: the golden rule for any tradesman.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 6 September 2012

Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a chilly self-awareness. The story opens when a seemingly perfect family becomes the victim of a murderous attack at their home. The two young children are smothered; the parents are stabbed in the course of a bloody fight in the kitchen that leaves the father dead and the mother wounded, perhaps fatally. The victims’ home is in Brianstown, a half-built coastal resort that fell victim to the Irish recession.

Anthony Cummins

A red rag, or just bull?

Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but to feed punchlines: Guy’s agent dies backpacking in the Hindu Kush only so Jacobson can say that ‘a literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation’. The gag is typical for the sense of moral and aesthetic collateral damage left in its wake. Overstatement is key to Jacobson’s style, as if he might become a comic writer simply by being a writer you can’t take seriously.

Alan Judd

The English inquisition

Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age as a confident and assured success story. But to those involved it was far more precarious, with victory anything but assured and survival a daily challenge. Alford dramatises this by imagining Elizabeth’s assassination in St James’s Park, followed by invasion by the superpower, Spain.

John Sutherland

Bloomsbury’s twin powerhouses

Rosemary Ashton has always been fascinated by the ways in which ideas ‘materialise’. Her first book, The German Idea, tracked the subtle filaments of Germanism in 19th-century British culture. In this, her latest book, she anatomises an area of London where more formative ideas have been conceived, and brought to fruition, than in any other of the metropolitan villages. Covent Garden is theatrical (and, bits of it, louche), Soho is bohemian (even more louche), Kensington is a home to science. In Bloomsbury it is the ‘march of mind’ that gives WC1 its distinctive character. Ashton sees Bloomsbury as a constellation of ‘progressive institutions’ — intellectual structures which have been as formative for Britain as the Revolution was for France.

Andro Linklater

Selective vision

In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable conclusion of Professor Jerry Brotton’s exhilarating book.

Adam Nicolson

A chronicle of brutality

In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of geese. So fierce was the demand for quills that many were pulled from living birds, a process that was agonising and sometimes fatal. Travellers in rural England occasionally found denuded goose bodies lying quill-less at the side of the road where the quill robbers had left them shocked to death. Only the invention of the type-writer released the goose population of Britain from centuries of pain.

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral home and Bechdel’s dawning realisation of her own lesbianism. The comic book does not immediately suggest itself as the ideal format for material of such intimacy and intermittent gruesomeness, but it worked. The dark humour of Charles Addams subverted the misery-memoir: Fun Home was hilarious, fascinating and very clever. Are You My Mother? is made from less gothic material. Where its predecessor brilliantly and unexpectedly wove Proust into the narrative, the current volume quotes a lot from Virginia Woolf and Freud.

Wynn Wheldon

The Heart Broke In, by James Meek

This is a big juicy slab of a book, as thrilling and nourishing as a Victorian three-parter.  It resembles its forebears thematically, too.  It asks a straightforward question: how does one know how to do the right thing when there is no moral foundation for our actions?  Where the Victorians had a forthright Christianity, modern secularism has no such set of rules, and its absence means that our notions of right and wrong have to be more or less made up as we go along. This is particularly true for Richie Shepherd. Formerly lead singer of The Lazygods, and now the producer of a TV show celebrating teen mediocrity, Teen Make-over, he is almost comically able to rearrange his vices as virtues.

Richard Davenporthines

Philida, by André Brink

The location of Philida is a Cape farm which used to be named Zandvliet and is now the celebrated vineyard Solms Delta, owned jointly by Richard Astor and the eminent neuropsychologist Mark Solms. It was Solms who brought to André Brink the story on which the veteran South African novelist bases his 21st work of fiction, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. The novel’s eponymous heroine is based on a real-life slave who in 1824-32 worked as a knitting-girl at Zandvliet, which then belonged to collateral ancestors of the author.