Book review

Thursday

Joanna Wootten

Song Without Words, by Gerald Shea – review

From our UK edition

At the age of six, Gerald Shea had scarlet fever. The sounds of birds passed into memory to be replaced by the sound of locusts. Not only had Shea developed tinnitus, he had lost the ability to hear high frequencies.   Broadly speaking, he could only hear vowels, not consonants. If you can hear vowels, you can grasp the intonation and the feel of what is said, but not get much meaning. He calls this his ‘language of lyricals’. Neither Shea nor his family realised that he was now partially deaf, and thus slightly out of sync with the world. My own experience of deafness is different: I was born deaf, so having ears that don’t work is ‘normal’ for me. And unlike Shea, I always knew that most people could hear, whereas I could not.

Roger Lewis

What Fresh Lunacy is This?, by Robert Sellers – review

From our UK edition

Midway through this startling book, Robert Sellers asks himself a question with such apparent seriousness I barked with laughter: ‘Was Oliver Reed an alcoholic?’ A more pertinent enquiry would be: ‘Was the man ever capable of drawing a sober breath?’ What Fresh Lunacy is This? is the monotonous chronicle of a nasty drunk whose ‘explosions of pissed aggression’ filled every waking hour, culminating in a deranged session, while filming Castaway in 1986, when he attacked an aeroplane. Reed would gulp 20 pints of lager as a way of limbering up. He’d then switch to spirits and the cycle of fighting and carousing would begin.

Jonathan Mirsky

China’s War with Japan, by Rana Mitter – review

From our UK edition

The Sino-Japanese struggle that began in 1937, two years before the rest of the world plunged into war, is not as unknown as Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford, contends in this comprehensive new book. His copious notes, after all, display how well that conflict has been studied by many scholars. But in the sense that few Westerners under the age of 80 can string more than two sentences together about those terrible eight years, he is right. It is a big story, and for the most part Mitter tells it well. The scene — China — is vast. Two competing leaders, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, dominate it.

Emily Rhodes

Things I Don’t Want to Know, by Deborah Levy – review

From our UK edition

In her powerful rejoinder to Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, Deborah Levy responds to his proposed motives for writing — ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ — with illuminating moments of autobiography. Levy begins one spring when she was crying on escalators, ‘at war with my lot’. She flies to Majorca, where, stuck on a mountain the night she arrives, she takes comfort in ‘being literally lost when I was lost in every other way’. Reading her notebooks later, she alights on a Polish director’s advice to a young actress: ‘to speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish’.

Mark Mason

The Outsider, by Jimmy Connors – review

From our UK edition

As a teenager in the 1980s I liked Jimmy Connors. This meant parking my not inconsiderable jealousy that he’d once had Chris Evert as his girlfriend. Magnanimously, I agreed to do so. Not only did the star respond to a shout of ‘come on Connors’ with ‘I’m trying for Chrissakes!’, he was also, you sensed, the real thing: a genuine rebel. John McEnroe played at it, but — like Ian Botham in cricket — always had a faint air of the knob about him. Connors’s anger, he reveals in his autobiography The Outsider (Transworld, £18.99), stems from the day he was eight and saw his mother beaten up on a tennis court by two yobs who wouldn’t turn their radio down. She lost her teeth, needing hundreds of stitches in her mouth.

Thursday

Maggi Hambling

A Time by the Sea, by Ronald Blythe – review

From our UK edition

I first encountered Ronald Blythe at Benton End, a glowing oxblood farmhouse above the river Brett, poised on the edge of Hadleigh in Suffolk. This was the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, run by Lett Haines and Cedric Morris, and known locally as the ‘Artists’ House’ and for ‘every vice under the sun’. Ronnie describes the set-up brilliantly. I was a raw 15-year-old at the time, and the point of studying most subjects on the school curriculum had escaped me: painting alone had become my raison d’être. Indeed, art began for both of us in Suffolk. Its particular air, sea, sky and mud run through our blood — and possibly cause both our mops of curly hair.

Rupert Christiansen

Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis – review

From our UK edition

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well. Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces?

Julie Kavanagh

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

From our UK edition

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate the phenomenal impact of Nijinsky and Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet.

Nicky Haslam

Flappers, by Judith Mackrell – review

From our UK edition

I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both? Reference books don’t help much. The OED says the word means a fly-killer, and you really don’t want to know the Dictionary of Slang’s definitions. So what was, in the accepted vo-deyo-do-ing, headache-band-browed, fancy-dress costume and Baz Luhrmanesque image, a ‘flapper’? One might assume that in this substantial, erudite and detailed, but oddly humour-free book, Judith Mackrell would set out to enlighten us.

Timothy Mo

Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard – review

From our UK edition

Nothing in Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park betrays the fact that it is his first period novel: not its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit, or its choice of a narrator and material quite outside the author’s own experience. The 19th century is closing and the 20th is opening in a London seething with foreign sedition and the antics of its own wayward men of genius. The enchanted suburb of Bedford Park, a baroque gem created in 1875 as part of an architectural counter-revolution and renewal, houses W.B. Yeats and the novel’s narrator, Calhoun Kidd.  Kidd has fled Chicago and his domineering father. However, he enters London salon- society through the notorious Frank Harris, whom he knew as a hotel hop in America.

Joanna Kavenna

A Place in the Country, by W.G. Sebald – review

From our UK edition

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and that ‘literary greatness is still possible’ (Susan Sontag). Literary greatness it seemed, at times, was Sebald, and for a while after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, it was hard to find a work of fictive non-fiction that wasn’t riddled with grainy photographs of dubious quality integrated into the text.

Tobias Grey

Tales of Two Cities, by Jonathan Conlin – review

From our UK edition

In Jonathan Conlin’s Tales of Two Cities the little acknowledged but hugely significant histoire croisée of two rival metropoles gets a long overdue airing. For, like it or not, London and Paris would be much duller places if neither had deemed fit to discover the other. Oddly, up until now no historian has ever explored this fecund, though sometimes grudging, exchange of ideas and cultural mores. Perhaps it required an outsider such as Conlin (though resident in London, he originates from New York) to martial the necessary objectivity.

William Leith

Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson – review

From our UK edition

In this book, the French writer Sylvain Tesson spends six months, mostly alone, in a log cabin in Siberia. ‘Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will be more valuable than gold,’ he tells us. So, Tesson grabs these things while they are still relatively cheap. He is, you might say, a modern-day Whitman with the soul of a speculator. He escapes into discomfort, and finds it bracing and thought-provoking. In the end he’s quite sad to leave. But you never get the impression he wants to stay for ever. He packs vodka, cigars and ten boxes of painkillers to deal with his hangovers. He also takes along a mini-library — Tournier, Lawrence, Camus, Sade, Casanova, Mishima. Uh-oh. Required reading for the young man in crisis, you think.

Sam Leith

The birth of modern Britain

From our UK edition

‘Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?’ asked Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.’ Reading David Kynaston’s densely detailed new book — in a ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’ with the slightly magniloquent general title of Tales of a New Jerusalem — there isn’t half a whiff of onions.

Thursday

John Grimond

This Boy, by Alan Johnson- review

From our UK edition

This Boy is no ordinary politician’s memoir, still less a politician’s ordinary memoir. It ends where others might begin: when the author is barely 18, newly married and only just starting work as a postman. The trade unionism that he later took up and the career in politics that led to several cabinet posts in two Labour governments are not even hinted at. Yet however thrilling, their story, when it is told, will be dull by comparison with this. Alan Johnson had a childhood quite unlike most politicians’, and he describes it with a simplicity and power that make it easy to see why he came to be the potential Labour leader most feared by many Conservatives.

Lewis Jones

The Frontman, by Harry Browne – review

From our UK edition

According to a story which Harry Browne accepts is surely apocryphal, but which he includes in his book anyway, at a U2 gig in Glasgow the band’s singer silenced the audience and started to clap his hands slowly, whispering as he did so: ‘Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies.’ Someone in the audience shouted: ‘Well fuckin’ stop doin’ it then!’ The story is worth repeating because it reflects the way many people, even charitably disposed rock fans, feel about Bono. They think his name — born Paul David Hewson, he appropriated the stage name from a Dublin hearing-aid shop that advertised devices called ‘Bono Vox’ — is ineffably silly, and join Sinead O’Connor in preferring to call him Bozo.

Molly Guinness

Hairstyles Ancient and Present, by Charlotte Fiell – review

From our UK edition

The key thing in 18th-century France was to get the hair extremely high. Perching on a small ladder behind his client, a Parisian hairdresser could pull off all sorts of engineering feats. Once the hair was three foot in the air, the coiffeur could add props — ribbons, shepherdesses, feathers, mythical allegories. After a French naval victory in 1778, some of the more patriotic women took to sporting a ship riding on the waves of their hair. Extravagance was frowned upon after the Revolution, but innovation continued; some ladies of fashion took to wearing their hair very short like the hair of those condemned to the guillotine. The style was called ‘à la victime’.

Lloyd Evans

Strictly Ann, by Ann Widdecombe – review

From our UK edition

An oddball. And proud to be one. Ann Widdecombe has sailed through life with the same brisk, no-nonsense style that she brings to this highly readable memoir. She attended a school where God was taught ‘as a fact not a belief’. Her parents encouraged her to choose friends on the basis of ‘fun and kindness’ and nothing else. When she entered parliament in 1987 she suspected that her personal eccentricities would disbar her from high office while guaranteeing the loyal affection of the country at large. She embraced this fate cheerfully. Her ‘Doris Karloff’ tag was originated by the Labour MP Paul Flynn and she instantly adopted it as a personal signature.

Matthew Dennison

Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge, by Evan S. Connell – review

From our UK edition

A policeman encountering Mrs Bridge on the home furnishings floor of a Kansas City department store recognises her at once for what she is: ‘a bona-fide country-club matron’. Had she been asked to identify herself, Mrs Bridge would have said the same, after asserting unequivocally that she was first and foremost the wife of Mr Walter Bridge, successful Kansas City lawyer, as entirely constrained by her status as professional spouse as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath or Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver. Like Mrs Miniver, Mrs Bridge inhabits an interwar world shaped by a promise of certainties — domestic, social, cultural and sexual — which are never wholly realised and remain frustratingly elusive.

Charlotte Moore

The Spark, by Kristine Barnett – review

From our UK edition

Jacob Barnett is a youthful prodigy. His IQ tested off the scale. At nine he began work on an original theory in astrophysics; aged 12 he became a paid academic researcher. He can play complicated musical pieces or learn foreign languages almost instantly and without tuition. As one researcher puts it, ‘Jake’s working memory is a piece of paper the size of a football field.’ Jacob’s mother, Kristine, comes from an Amish family — ‘not horse-and-buggy Amish, but city Amish’; her faith has directed her along the path she has taken with her extraordinary son. (It would be interesting to know the religious views of the young quantum physicist, but we’re not told.