Book review

Thursday

Paul Binding

The making of a novelist

From our UK edition

Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged 13, because of his father’s higher-grade teaching appointment on the mainland. As they drove over the bridge linking the island with the southern Norwegian port of Arendal, ‘it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that… the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good.’ Only in a literal sense did they disappear. And the six-volume autobiographical novel sequence, My Struggle, on which Knausgaard embarked after the success of his first two books, demanded his coming to terms with his formative early milieu.

William Leith

The thrill of cutting into a human brain

From our UK edition

In the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, Henry Marsh, a consultant brain surgeon, says, ‘I often cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.’ What a compelling start! Marsh takes us through an operation. First, he looks at a scan. A middle-aged man has a tumour of the pineal gland, which means a very tricky operation. Brain surgeons, says Marsh, look at pineal tumours ‘with both fear and excitement, like mountaineers looking up at a great peak they hope to climb’. And with this, he sets the tone for the book, which is excellent. For Marsh, brain surgery is terrifying, but also addictive. You become obsessed. Cutting people’s heads open, it turns out, really does your head in.

Ben Hamilton

The talent and tragedy of Richard Pryor

From our UK edition

The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David Henry’s and Joe Henry’s addictive, frenzied book (Furious Cool, Algonquin Books,£17.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.19). The authors are fans who have the tendency to swoon, and they hold back from condemning Pryor’s numerous wrong turns (he was a serial wife-beater who fled responsibility wherever he found it). But that hardly matters when there’s so much to pack in.

Victoria Glendinning

Recycling Sackville-West style

From our UK edition

Here’s a book co-authored by one dead woman and one living one. Sarah Raven is the second wife of Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West. In 1930 Vita bought Sissinghurst, the ruins of a great 16th-century house, and with her husband Harold Nicolson created the world-famous garden. Tell me the old, old story. Vita died in 1970, and in 1983 Adam’s mother published a similar volume, co-authored ‘by Vita Sackville-West and Philippa Nicolson’; and there are several other good books about the making of this garden. So here is yet another well-illustrated hommage, from an intimate perspective, to Vita and to her gardening style. It is basically a compilation of large chunks from Vita’s gardening articles written for the Observer between 1946 and 1961.

Magnus Linklater

Fleet Street’s ‘wild Irish girl’

From our UK edition

In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African lawyer,  and later rode the ‘condom train’ to flout Ireland’s contraception laws. Some of these stories surface in her memoir, Something of Myself and Others; others she draws a veil over, with a Catholic reticence of which her mother would doubtless have approved. Or perhaps she simply cannot remember them all. ‘Like much of my misspent youth I have no recollection whatsoever of where we went or what we did,’ she says at one point.

Alan Judd

‘A public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak’

From our UK edition

Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million of us readers — knew the writings of Chapman Pincher. His frequent scoops, mostly defence- or intelligence-related, sometimes political, scientific or medical, were unusually well-sourced and headline-grabbing. Now, aged 100, he has written his autobiography. He writes as directly and vividly as ever. After an enjoyable Darlington childhood, he progressed through grammar school to King’s College, London, where he won prizes for zoology and botany and published research papers as an undergraduate.  He became a teacher and got into freelance journalism via the Farmer & Stockbreeder.

Sam Leith

Management consultancy! Sculpture park! Sports stadium! The many faces of the Delphic Oracle

From our UK edition

‘In ancient times ... hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people ... the Druids. No one knows who they were ... or what they were doing. But their legacy remains ... hewn into the living rock ... of Stonehenge.’ The unforgettable opening of Spinal Tap’s song ‘Stonehenge’ was much in my head as I read this scholarly history of Delphi. We use the word ‘delphic’ to mean riddling, ambiguous, difficult to parse. It applies just as much to the history of Ancient Greece’s most sacred site as it does to the pronouncements of its oracle. No one knows who they were ... or what they were doing.

Thursday

Katie Waldegrave

On the trail of a Victorian femme fatale

From our UK edition

Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate Summerscale before her, Colquhoun mines the rich seam of legal archives to give her readers the fascinating tale of a Victorian courtroom drama: that of Florence Maybrick, accused, in 1889, of murdering her husband. Colquhoun achieves expertly all the things one could hope to expect in such a historical account. She paints a picture not only of a woman on trial, but of the complicated world of late 19th-century England. We get a sense of a woman’s changing place in the world, we see Liverpool society on display, we learn about the press, about science and justice and politics.

Claudia FitzHerbert

Middlemarch: the novel that reads you

From our UK edition

The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about  Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch on ‘the melancholy acknowledgment of limitation’. She sets her vain attempt to re-attribute that sentence in apposition to Eliot’s story of  Lydgate, the doctor whose scientific ambitions are dashed in the wake of his marriage to the implacable Rosamond Vincy: ‘I had aspired to make a link in the chain of discovery, and had failed.

Lewis Jones

Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost

From our UK edition

In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches and some letters between Kerouac and his father, in an edition by a professor at Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s home town. The Haunted Life is billed as a novella, but turns out to be the first part — ‘Home’ — of a projected novel, to be completed by ‘War’ and ‘Change’. Set in 1941, it is a coming-of-age story.

Roger Lewis

The harrowing, inspiring life of Andrew Sachs

From our UK edition

Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative age they were tormented by appalling cruelty and neglect. Griff Rhys Jones had to leave Wales at the age of six days, for instance. Nevertheless, the Chaplin family could afford a maid in Kennington. The Leeds of Alan Bennett and the Morecambe of Victoria Wood always sound cosy — as does the Hadley Wood of Eric Morecambe; and there was not much wrong with Barry Humphries’s salubrious Melbourne, though I concede it has been knocked flat by ‘developers’ since. But with Andrew Sachs the horrors were very real. Aged eight, ‘I stood open-mouthed as a number of men, wielding wooden clubs, shattered the front of a shoe shop.

Jane Ridley

Queen Victoria with the naughty bits put back

From our UK edition

Queen Victoria was the inventor of official royal biography. It was she who commissioned the monumental five-volume life of Prince Albert, a controversial and revealing work. She wrote most of the personal sections herself. She also published bestselling volumes, such as Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. She was a gifted and prolific writer, penning an estimated 2,500 words a day. When she died in 1901, however, there was no authorised biography. Instead, the decision was made to publish her letters. People tend to assume that letters are the truth but, as Yvonne Ward shows in this original and engaging book, selection is everything. The idea of editing Victoria’s letters originated with Lord Esher.

Wynn Wheldon

A master craftsman of the anecdote

From our UK edition

One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to reveal the brilliancies too fully would spoil their effect. My copy is splattered with exclamation marks. For example, on page 65 the author is working on a piece of delicate silver jewellery that will become the ‘Two Turtle Doves’ of the title while singing along to ‘Hersham Boys’ by Sham 69, a punk band of the 1970s associated with skinhead violence. Exclamation mark. Two pages later, and years earlier, he is playing ping pong with Benjamin Britten. Two exclamation marks.

Mark Mason

What other job lets you swear in front of your parents?

From our UK edition

There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But Jonathon Green found one: compiling slang dictionaries. This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself. When a man loves reading so much that he does it even while brushing his teeth, material won’t be lacking. The ‘parents’ line is Green’s stock reply to the ‘why did you choose your job’ question. But the analysis goes deeper. ‘That Jew thing’, as he calls it, features heavily.

Simon Baker

Madness and massacre in the jungle

From our UK edition

In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject of his 1998 narrative poem, ‘Bill of Rights’. D’Aguiar often examines brutal historical episodes from the perspective of a survivor or escapee. In Feeding the Ghosts (1997), the drowning of 140 slaves in 1798 so that the Liverpool-based owners could claim on the insurance is told through the story of Mintah, the one slave who did not die. In the new novel we have Joyce and her daughter, Trina, Americans who, having fallen for the messianic allure of ‘the preacher’ (a figure based on Jim Jones) and followed him to a promised land in Guyana along with a thousand others, now question their decision and want to leave.

Ian Thomson

Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies

From our UK edition

In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story to Hotel de Dream. Yet White is no mere popinjay in thrall to high-flown campery; his mind is drawn to some very dark places. Between 1983 and 1999, as an ardent Francophile, White elected to live in Paris.

David Scott

Can anyone make a good case for the Stuart kings?

From our UK edition

Historians have generally not been kind in their assessment of Britain’s first two Stuart kings. Their political skills are regarded as meagre; their objectives malign; their one undisputed talent an unerring ability to alienate their subjects — with rebellion and civil war as the result. To his credit, Tim Harris, in his formidably large and well-researched new ‘study of the kingship’ of James I and Charles I, raises a voice in dissent. He is by no means blind to the Stuarts’ failings: James’s profligacy, and fondness for the sound of his own voice; Charles’s unbending self-righteousness and notorious aloofness from his subjects and even his own court.

Peter Parker

Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and pollution: the city where we’re all headed

From our UK edition

Rana Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Britain, moved to Delhi at the end of 2000, principally to pursue a love affair and to write his first novel. He soon found himself mixing in bohemian circles, spending his evenings in ‘small, bare and, in those days, cheap’ apartments, talking with ‘artists and intellectuals’. These are not the people, nor is this the life or the city that he describes in Capital. The book’s title is in fact a pun, since its principal subject is money: how it is acquired, how it is spent and what it has done to Delhi and its citizens.

Thursday

Richard Davenporthines

What E.M. Forster didn’t do

From our UK edition

‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings whom you think are sadly mistaken,’ said Penelope Fitzgerald in 1987. The South African novelist Damon Galgut has reversed this formula — with mixed results. He has written a novel about a fellow novelist, E.M. Forster, using episodes and quotations taken from a conscientious reading of biographies, diaries and letters. He salutes Forster as a writer and commends his humanity; but it is not clear whether he thinks Forster was sadly mistaken in his sexual bearings or lame in his choices.

Cressida Connolly

Sometimes one story is worth buying a whole book for. This is one of those times

From our UK edition

Any new book by Lorrie Moore is a cause for rejoicing, but her first collection of short stories for 16 years demands bunting, revelry and tap-dancing. She is one of a handful or two of writers (I’d nominate Anne Tyler, William Trevor, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro among the rest) whose work is always worth buying. With lesser authors a tepid review might discourage purchase, but Lorrie Moore can fall foul of critics yet still be immensely entertaining. So it is with Bark. The book begins with an absolutely marvellous long story, ‘Debarking’, in which almost every paragraph contains a fresh delight, something so funny and so true that the reader must exclaim aloud.