Book review

Thursday

James Walton

Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright – review

From our UK edition

Justin Cartwright is famously a fan of John Updike — and here he seems to owe a definite debt to one of his hero’s lesser known novels. In Memories of the Ford Administration, Updike interwove the sexual adventures of a 1970s history professor with substantial chunks from the professor’s notes on President James Buchanan, a man whose life Updike had earlier researched for his only play. In Lion Heart, Richard Cathar, an Oxford postgraduate and somewhat solemn philanderer, provides similarly lengthy extracts from his investigations into Richard I and the fate of the True Cross — which were also the subjects of a 2001 TV documentary by Justin Cartwright.

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Tangier, by Josh Shoemake – review

From our UK edition

This may sound a little orientalist, but Tangier has some claim to being the most foreign city in the world. Back in the day, its position at the northernmost tip of Africa was regarded as the edge of civilisation — more than that, as the edge of what was known, the edge of everything. Here were the Pillars of Hercules, which in addition to performing the important function of holding up the sky, were said to be engraved with the words ‘nec plus ultra’: beyond this, nothing. Since its foundation in the 5th century BC, the city has been variously controlled by the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Arabs, the English (for a couple of decades in the 17th century) and the Spanish.

Richard Ryder

A Classless Society, by Alwyn W. Turner – review

From our UK edition

The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement. John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was right: some animals are more equal than others — even in death. Orwell shares an Oxfordshire churchyard with Herbert Asquith. It was an insipid decade when managerialism triumphed over leadership. Ideas and intellectual rigour were kept in check, and institutions were repeatedly assaulted.

Hywel Williams

The Huguenots, by Geoffrey Treasure – review

From our UK edition

France’s early 21st-century Protestants are eco-friendly, gender-sensitised and respectful of the Fifth Republic’s laïcité. But their ancestors were a less accommodating lot. La réforme in the France of the 16th century was well-educated, predominantly urban and organised as part of a pan-European Protestant movement which set out to subvert the territorial sovereignty of Catholic princes. Its leaders included some of the French aristocracy’s boldest spirits, whose dynastic ambitions to exercise an earthly dominion blended easily with the dogmatic confidence of Protestantism at its most driven and alluring.

Anthony Cummins

Red or Dead by David Peace – review

From our UK edition

The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help explain why his new one avoids invention wherever it can squeeze interest out of such stony matters of record as team sheets and attendance figures. Red or Dead follows the legendary manager Bill Shankly from his arrival at Liverpool — second-division stragglers in 1959 — to his death in 1981, seven years after retirement, having built a league-winning team that went on to rule Europe. Seldom does a novel, dedicated at such length to a single life, venture so scarcely into the mind of its subject; the gamble is that Peace’s biblically iterative method is strong enough to sustain but not overwhelm you. All the novel’s effects depend on repetition.

James Kirchick

This Town, by Mark Leibovich – review

From our UK edition

Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two years before its release. Sparking that interest was the revelation that a young, ambitious Capitol Hill press aide, whom Leibovich had been cultivating as a source, was secretly forwarding him emails that provided an insight into how Washington really works.

Blair Worden

The Rainborowes, by Adrian Tinniswood – review

From our UK edition

Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of themes from his previous books together. The Verneys recounted the individual experiences of 17th-century members of a leading Buckinghamshire family. The Rainborowes, set in the same period, applies the same technique to a less substantial family of Londoners. As in his study of the great fire of London in 1666, By Permission of Heaven, Tinniswood takes us into the daily life of the capital, though here his emphasis is on the suburban world of commercial enterprise and religious dissent from which the Rainborowes emerged. Tinniswood’s previous book, Pirates of Barbary, showed Europeans doing battle with the corsairs of the Mediterranean.

Roger Lewis

A Rogues’ Gallery, by Peter Lewis – review

From our UK edition

Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a massage (‘I have this trouble, a hernia, you see. Gives me a lot of discomfort’); Diana Dors confessed to him that she’d rather watch television than go to orgies (‘but I had to become a sex symbol on tiger rugs and in mink bikinis’); and Samuel Beckett made his excuses and fled (‘Sorry, I just have to go to the lav’).

Thursday

James Yorke

The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, by Warwick Rodwell – review

From our UK edition

The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The sovereign has used this throne during the actual ceremony almost continuously since the coronation of Henry IV (1399). The oldest dated piece of English furniture (1297-1300) made by a known artist (Walter of Durham) to survive has been given the comprehensive study it deserves by Warwick Rodwell, with supplementary chapters on its most recent conservation by Marie Louise Sauerberg and its current display by Ptolemy Dean.

Peter J. Conradi

Migration Hotspots, by Tim Harris – review

From our UK edition

Consider for a moment the plight of the willow warbler. Russian birds of this species fly between eastern Siberia and southern Africa and back every year of their short lives, a distance of nearly 7,500 miles in each direction. Each weighs roughly as little as two teaspoons-full of sugar. But at least these tiny birds can refuel on their journey. Southern bar-tailed godwits are unluckier. These fly the 7,000 or so miles between New Zealand and Alaska over the immense Pacific Ocean — hence non-stop — twice each year. Moreover, Arctic terns migrate from the Antarctic to the Arctic and back again: a fledgling of this species, born on the Farne islands off the Northumberland coast, was recorded only three months later near Melbourne, Australia.

Jane Ridley

The Girl Who Loved Camellias, by Julie Kavanagh – review

From our UK edition

Verdi’s La Traviata is the story of a courtesan who is redeemed when she gives up the man she loves in order to preserve his family honour, and then dies tragically in his arms. Verdi based his opera on a novel by Alexander Dumas the younger, The Lady of the Camellias (1852). This work was inspired by a courtesan whom Dumas had known — and had an affair with — but she has been largely forgotten. Her name was Alphonsine Plessis — later changed to Marie Duplessis — and she was only 23 when she died. Julie Kavanagh has written the story of her extraordinary life. Alphonsine was born in 1824 in Normandy. Her peasant family could hardly have been worse. Today, social workers would have put her in care. She was probably sexually abused.

Richard Davenporthines

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell – review

From our UK edition

Willa Cather is an American novelist without name-recognition in Europe, yet she had a wider range of subject and deeper penetration of character than other compatriot novelist of her century. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow and Roth vie with, but never beat, her emotional force and the beauty of her prose. The great obstacle is that she is a woman, with a name that sounds silly. She knew more about survival in extreme conditions than other novelists, she wrote in 1913, ‘but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts and don’t shave’. As a young woman, Cather feasted on Virgil and Shakespeare — and it shows. In O Pioneers!

Ian Thomson

An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman – review

From our UK edition

Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the Treblinka death camp, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, remains a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity. Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented Hitler’s annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction. In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Jewish doctors and intellectuals.

David Sexton

Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, by Nicholas Lezard – review

From our UK edition

What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another day older and deeper in debt? These are questions that after a while begin to present themselves with uncomfortable force and persistence to those of us who have believed from our earliest youth that if literature will not save us, it will,  surely, at least do us some small, perceptible good. What answer can we make, surveying the ruins? Nicholas Lezard is useful here, as a test case, a case tested to destruction even. Not only does he have a thoroughly literary turn of mind, he is, as he says, probably the last remaining person in the world who makes ‘what could loosely be called a living from reviewing books’.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

As Green as Grass, by Emma Smith – review

From our UK edition

The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none of these is particularly enticing. But the book itself is a delight. Written in the crisp present tense by a 90-year-old with a remarkably clear recollection of the trains of thought of her teenaged and post-teenaged self, it draws you deeply in, so that by the end you feel that you, too, have been to a harsh girls’ school in Plymouth, and then to a keyboard-clattering secretarial college in Surrey and then — best of all — that you have manned canal boats carrying coal from Birmingham to London during the war years with your friends Kitty and Eve.

Ben Hamilton

A Bright Moon for Fools, by Jasper Gibson – review

From our UK edition

Harry Christmas, the central character of this bitterly funny debut novel, is a middle- aged, overweight alcoholic, with no friends and no prospects. After marrying a woman and running off with her money, he flies to Venezuela. He justifies this in two ways, the first sentimental, the second pragmatic. He wants to visit the country of his deceased first wife’s family, and he wants to escape the Rot. The Rot can be defined as everything that Christmas doesn’t like about England (or, we soon learn, about the world in general). This turns out to be a long and varied list. He despises the indoor smoking ban and sport, but he also can’t stand scatter cushions and people who make quotation marks with their fingers.

Tobias Grey

They Eat Horses, Don’t They?, by Piu Marie Eatwell – review

From our UK edition

Oh the French! Where would the Anglo publishing industry be without them? Ever since Peter Mayle first made goo-goo eyes at sun dappled Provence in 1990 and pocketed a pile of dough in the process, many a self- respecting hack with a smidgeon of French culture has followed in his train. Most have been purveyors of what the tastily named Piu Marie Eatwell dismissively terms ‘Froglit’: A highly commercialised and formulaic genre of lightly humorous fiction or non-fiction, generally written by Anglo-American expats living in France and usually with an autobiographical bias, dedicated to eulogising, elucidating, satirising or otherwise promulgating stereotypical ideas about the French. With They Eat Horses, Don’t They?

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer – review

From our UK edition

Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects: the Venerable Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Durham cathedral, where he was a canon. He died in 1980. Country Boy was originally published in 1966. It is a memoir of the author’s childhood, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of its salient events. However, using a pseudonym, and changing the name of the Buckinghamshire village in which he grew up from Hardwick to Byfield (even giving us the proper pronunciation — ‘Biffield’) and presumably the names of the people characterised so brilliantly, perhaps accounts for the book’s coherence and heft. It reads like a novel.

Ian Thomson

A Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing – review

From our UK edition

The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend; having hocked his typewriter for a quart of rye, the writer Don Birnam spends his lost weekend in a New York psychiatric ward, with a fractured skull. Where did he get that? The previous night’s drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and guilt. Of course, the illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay. Olivia Laing, in her study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring (the title is taken from a Tennessee Williams play), demonstrates that one hardly need drink every day to be alcoholic.

Melanie McDonagh

The Modern Peasant, by JoJo Tulloch – review

From our UK edition

You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger on the pulse of Middle England than most MPs. So when the company declared that it can barely keep pace with demand for home mincers it’s a sign of the times. It attributes the home-made everything trend to the horsemeat scandal and a food supply chain that looks like the Tudor family tree. Its line of cheesemaking products and sausage casing is doing well. The surge in the number of DIY/artisan cookbooks is telling too. The title of one of them sums up the mood: The Modern Peasant by Jojo Tulloh (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). She observes that city-dwellers are cut off from the countryside and the chain of production that served our ancestors so well.