More from Books

Tuesday

Alys Key

The agony of grief: Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book. Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters who have appeared previously in her work as stand-ins for herself and her partner: Nell and Tig. The collection’s first third contains stories of the two together, while the end is about Nell on her own after Tig’s death. Between these is an interlude of unrelated tales, which makes Old Babes something of a patchy work.

Simon Ings

The eeriness of lockdown: To Battersea Park, by Philip Hensher, reviewed

We never quite make it to Battersea Park. By the time the narrator and his husband reach its gates, it’s time for them, and us, to return home. The narrator is a writer, living just that little bit too far away from the park, inspired by eeriness of the Covid lockdown regime but also horribly blocked. All kinds of approaches to fiction beckon to him in his plight, and we are treated to not a few of them here.  Each section of this novel embodies a literary device. We begin, maddeningly, in ‘The Iterative Mood’ (‘I would have’, ‘She would normally have’ ,‘They used to’) and we end in ‘Entrelacement’, with its overlapping stories offering strange resolutions to this polyphonous, increasingly surreal account of lockdown.

Alexandra Coghlan

The relationship between self and singer

The professional performer is the tree in the philosopher’s human forest. If there’s no opportunity to sing or act or dance in front of an audience, are they still a performer at all? In the spring of 2020, when most of his colleagues shrugged and started making banana bread, the tenor Ian Bostridge took an altogether more existential approach to isolation, writing a series of lectures for the University of Chicago exploring the relationship between self and singer, silence and song. Now they form the basis of his latest book. Song & Self is a slim volume. Early on, Bostridge invokes the essay’s origins in Montaigne – the idea of essayer (to try), the form as a space for experimentation and exploration, for provisional attempts rather than finished thoughts or arguments.

Alexander Larman

The chaos of coronations over the centuries

In January 1559 an Italian envoy wrote of Elizabeth I’s coronation that ‘they are preparing for [the ceremony] and work both day and night’. More than four and a half centuries later much the same could be said of the imminent investiture of Charles III – an event overshadowed, at the time of writing, by the uncertainty as to whether his publicity-shy younger son and wilting violet of a wife will be attending. But, as Ian Lloyd describes in The Throne, there have been many more dramatic build-ups to coronations, some culminating in injury or even death.

Philip Womack

No happy ever afters: White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link, reviewed

Kelly Link’s latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to a same-sex version of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and narratological) powers of her raw material, and makes thrilling shapes while also dissecting modern society, our fears and our fantasies. Each of these scintillating stories (not a dud among them) concerns lost characters in search of truth about themselves or the world. Sometimes they find it; more often they don’t. Link’s lucid prose moves the reader unerringly onwards through the forested thickets of her imagination.

Tuesday

Claudia FitzHerbert

What can we learn of George Eliot through her heroines?

‘I have... found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account. A reply from the family solicitor forced her to acknowledge that ‘our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond’. The funds were paid accordingly, but all contact was severed. Very soon, money from Evans’s novels – written under the pseudonym of George Eliot – also began pouring into Lewes’s bank account.

Allan Mallinson

Did the sinking of the Blücher in 1940 affect the outcome of the war?

In the conclusion to this forensically detailed book, the authors, one a naval historian, the other a retired naval officer who served in the Oscarsborg fortress outside Oslo – the cornerstone of the story – during the Cold War, ask: ‘What would have happened if Hitler had not unleashed his dogs of war on Norway in April 1940, or if Blücher had not been sunk?’ To which of course they reply that we shall never know. They do, however, posit that in the worst case, Churchill might not have become prime minister, and the evacuation from Dunkirk would not have been the success it was. That’s not entirely new, but it’s not always remembered – Dunkirk especially – or at least not outside the authors’ Norway. The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square isn’t merely a thank you.

Frank Lawton

The bittersweet comedy of ageing: Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, by Lore Segal, reviewed

Every family has its folklore. Apparently, as a five-year-old, I was on the floor playing when I looked up at my grandmother and told her matter-of-factly that she ‘was not the kind of granny I had been expecting’. I’m not quite sure what my foetal presumptions had been, but she is far from the hackneyed image society reserves for older women: no blankets or twee knitting for Norma. Sharp, glamorous, her face alive with mischief, she is a lady who lunches, a nonagenarian who shared stories, gossip and advice amid a riot of laughter. She would be familiar with much of the gentle drama in this collection of Lore Segal’s stories, which revolves around five women in their nineties dining on a monthly basis together.

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.