More from Books

Tuesday

Matt Rowland Hill

Living in a state of fear: a haunting memoir

The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to attempt.’ Finally driven outside by hunger, she ends up ‘wandering around a French supermarket wanting to die’. She finds temporary relief in stealing a housemate’s Diazepam pills, but the escape she longs for is love: ‘Nothing worked the way love did’; it was ‘the ideal, the solution, the cure’. Her consciousness of being ‘one more cliché in a city full of them’ only intensifies her agony. But this book is anything but an assortment of clichés.

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

How hardboiled detective fiction saved James Ellroy

Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this: Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written in blood, seminal fluid and napalm. Etcetera. This is his ‘demon dog’ persona, adopted many years before as a way of overcoming his native insecurities. At school, Ellroy adopted a persona whose main shtick was expressing a fondness for far-right politics He is quoted in this biography as saying that this persona is ‘about 3 per cent’ of who he is. I would say, and I choose the adjective carefully, this is a conservative estimate.

Susie Mesure

Strange encounter: The Gospel of Orla, by Eoghan Walls, reviewed

It’s been two months since 14-year-old Orla’s mother died of cancer, and the girl isn’t coping. Neither is her father. While he self-medicates with booze, she plots her escape, to her aunt’s in Northern Ireland, where her mum is buried: I am sad to go but it is time now and there is no point in hanging around any longer. I leave my phone under the pillow. I don’t leave a note because that is just for suicides. I don’t want to make them sadder than they will be anyway but I also don’t want them coming for me straight away. We are plunged from the outset into Orla’s head and her anguish.  Walls is a poet, who has translated Heidegger’s poetical works.

Diana Hendry

The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series. It’s a humble orphan girl, not one of the Lindisfarne monks, who is given a vision of Durham cathedral He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won.  He has been working the literary coal face for almost 20 years, trying every kind of genre while knocking on publishers’ doors and finding them shut.

Stephen Daisley

The wiliest politician in the Middle East is back – but not in charge

Bibi is back. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to the prime ministership of Israel two years after a motley coalition of his many enemies banded together to topple him. With him removed from power and facing trial on corruption charges, many assumed that the Netanyahu era was over. They under-estimated the wiliest politician in the Middle East. In last November’s elections, Netanyahu ousted his ousters and won for himself a sixth term in which to wreak vengeance on the leftist establishment he believes is ranged against him. The most powerful man in Israel presents himself as the helpless victim of ‘leftist’ journalists Victory did not come without a price. He had to team up with the disreputable right.

Michael Arditti

Carry on curate: scenes of modern clerical life

In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself. On New Year’s Eve he was taken for a drug dealer, and on Holy Saturday for a blind man The book is an account of a year in his life as a young curate at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Liverpool. It is loosely structured around the major church festivals, while at the same time making a case for some of the lesser known ones, such as Epiphany. Above all, it is a rich store of anecdotes, both sacred and profane. Butler-Gallie is careful not to reveal too much personal information.

Stuart Kelly

Postmodernism meets pulp fiction: Dr. No, by Percival Everett, reviewed

Perhaps Percival Everett’s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer he is. But there is certainly a great backlist. I am particularly fond of Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and American Desert in his satirical vein; and Suder, Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded in his more elegiac and contemplative tone. Dr. No seems to be in his Menippean form, until you realise just how seriously he is joking. I have often thought that a joke is not funny until it stops being funny, when it becomes hilarious, and this novel exemplifies that. The central character is not actually called Wala Kitu, two words from Tagalog and Swahili that both mean nothing.

Ian Sansom

How to be top: two new books promise the self-improvement Holy Grail

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.

David Wootton

The age-old debate continues: are science and religion compatible?

According to the census, there are more Christians in the UK than there are atheists and agnostics – yet the churches are empty. These Christians, it seems, don’t take their faith too seriously. Nor, I fear, does Nicholas Spencer, who has written a big book arguing that science and religion are fundamentally compatible. He’s wrong; but, surprisingly, he is more wrong about religion than he is about science. The great assault on Christian faith came not from science, not from a denial of creation, but from history Let me start by laying my cards on the table. I’m the son of a missionary. My father’s parents were atheists and scientists. He, in adolescent rebellion, became a Christian; I, ditto, became an atheist.

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

Living with the Xingu in deepest Amazonia

The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities. The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself. When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and then repeatedly change it As a journalist, she is used to asking people their age.

Michael Arditti

A father’s nightmare: What You Need From the Night, by Laurent Petitmangin, reviewed

The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group. The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in eastern France, near the Luxembourg border. It’s an insular part of the country, suspicious of the capital and devoid of employment prospects or cultural resources. The sole diversions appear to be football and alcohol. Petitmangin depicts a predominantly male world, accentuated in the narrator’s case by the death of his wife after her three-year battle with cancer.

Sam Dalrymple

The trials of England’s first ambassador to India

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organised and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the Earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England. So began Alex von Tunzelmann’s 2007 end-of-empire classic, Indian Summer. Now Courting India by Nandini Das traces the first encounter between these vastly different worlds, offering a fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire. The world into which we are dropped is in many ways eerily familiar.

Tessa Dunlop

What possessed the Duke of Windsor to visit Nazi Germany in 1937?

Bombs start exploding at the beginning of this book. Buckingham Palace was targeted by the Nazis early on in the war in an act of extraordinary audacity – and one that backfired. George VI noted in his diary: ‘We all wondered why we weren’t dead.’ Little did he realise that Hitler had gifted him his first wartime ace. But while George grew into the role of stoic monarch, his older brother never worked out how shake off the trammels of his birth. Edward was hurt, angry and rudderless – which resulted, if not in treason, certainly in disloyalty The Windsors at War is a follow-up to Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis, which explored the abdication of 1936.

Katrina Gulliver

Mass poisonings in a small town in Hungary

There is a small town in Hungary called Nagyrév. With a population of 800, it seems unlikely to make the news. But a century ago it turned out to be the centre of a murder ring, and suddenly it became the focus of news-paper reports across the world. The unlikely setting made the story. It was a backwater, literally: the redirecting of the Tiszaltiver river decades earlier had cut Nagyrév off. Forget cars: this was a town where it was notable in the 1920s if someone owned a bicycle. Yet the place had the murder rate of a violent city. By the time the authorities woke up to what was going on, they discovered dozens of homicides going back several years, and all traced to the town’s midwife, Suzannah Fazekas.

Andrew Lambirth

The European influence on modern American art

Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York is somewhat misleadingly titled, though its true content and focus are revealed in the subtitle: ‘Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism.’ Perhaps that sounds obscure and even academic. If so, it gives the wrong idea, for this is a very readable and accessible account of a hitherto unexplored area of mainstream art history. Many of us suspected the importance of European influence on what is always claimed as the thoroughly American art movement of Abstract Expressionism. This book sets out the situation in detail, and makes a convincing argument for giving credit not only to a bunch of European émigrés but to an Englishman as well.

Jamie Collinson

A deep mystery: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes, reviewed

Martin MacInnes’s third novel, In Ascension, is a literary sci-fi epic set in the 2030s. It centres on a Dutch marine microbiologist called Leigh Hasenboch. As a child she suffers from a violent, frustrated father and a distant, unavailable mother, and tries to protect her younger sister from the worst of it. One day, swimming in the Nieuwe Maas, she experiences a revelation: ‘Absolutely everything around me was alive.’ Her fascination with the marine world eventually takes her on a voyage to explore a newly discovered mid-Atlantic trench. Strange, harmful things happen to divers who approach it. It seems to repel the ship she is on, and its oval shape appears significant. But people who experience this alien, damaging space seem to be irresistibly drawn back to it.

Mia Levitin

Femicide in Mexico reaches staggering proportions

In July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old architecture student, was strangled to death at her home in a borough of Mexico City. Her suspected killer, Ángel González Ramos, an ex-boyfriend, fled and remained at large. Three decades later, buttressed by a movement protesting against violence towards women, her sister returned to Mexico in the hopes of finding justice. An acclaimed author and essayist, Cristina Rivera Garza is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Liliana’s Invincible Summer begins with her quest to track down the case files. When the paper trail hits a dead end, she turns her detective work to her sister’s personal archive, motivated to memorialise Liliana in the absence of an institutional record.

Tuesday

Duncan Fallowell

Karl Lagerfeld – from fashion icon to invisible man

Karl Lagerfeld was an icon when he died in 2019, but for most of his career he was unknown outside the fashion business. He was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, a distasteful coincidence, so Lagerfeld altered his birth to 1938. He was an only child, whose father did well by introducing condensed milk into Germany. His parents had been Nazi members, and Karl saw his future elsewhere. At 18 he left Hamburg for Paris. Short and chunky, he had simian good looks, with beetling brow and a smile that was wider than his eyes; and he didn’t want for admirers. In 1954 he won the young designers Woolmark Prize, but only in ‘the coat category’. The winner in the more prestigious ‘dress category’ was the several-years-younger Yves Saint Laurent – and that scorched Karl for life.

Elizabeth Goldring

A passion for painting at the early Stuart courts

Four years ago Roy Strong – one-time director of both the National Portrait Gallery (1967-73) and the V&A (1973-87) – published The Elizabethan Image: An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558-1603, in which he returned, after more than a 30-year hiatus, to the subject with which he first made his name: the imagery of Queen Elizabeth I and her court. Now 88, the indefatigable Strong has produced a follow-up volume charting the fate of portraiture (and painting and the visual image more generally) at the courts of Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and Charles I. Charles I would travel by barge to Van Dyck’s studio to pass the time with him and watch him paint The format of – and thinking behind – The Stuart Image is the same as in the previous book.

Lee Langley

Inside Warhol’s Factory: Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, reviewed

In 1965 Andy Warhol set out to record 24 one-hour audio cassettes focused on one of his ‘superstars’, the actor known as Ondine. The recordings later became a, A Novel, a Joycean distillation of a day in the life. Four typists, two of them teenagers, transcribed the cassettes verbatim – everything they heard on their headphones, every word, cough, gurgle, screech of chair or clink of glass. In his memoir POPism, Warhol mentions ‘two little high school girls’ who typed up his recordings. ‘The typists’ mistakes are all part of the process... that’s what makes it real.’ This is the inspiration for Nicole Flattery’s blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel, Nothing Special.