Book review

Thursday

John Burnside

Back to basics | 1 August 2019

From our UK edition

Anyone picking up a book by Wendell Berry, whether it be fiction, essays or a collection of his lucid and engaged poetry, will quickly find themselves in the company of one who is unafraid to tackle the larger subjects (time, place, environment, community) in terms familiar to Virginia Woolf’s ‘common reader’, a creature who seems scarcer by the year, but is not yet wholly extinct. Stand by Me is no exception and, by the time we reach the second of these 18 linked stories, we know just where we are, if not where we are going, as Berry sets out a history of everyday life in a small Kentucky town over 100 years of growth, loss and relentless change.

Viv Groskop

A far cry from Chekhov

From our UK edition

It would be hard to have better travel-writer credentials than Sara Wheeler. Here the author of The Magnetic North and Terra Incognita, a specialist in Arctic and Antarctic adventure, turns her attentions to the land mass that sprawls across eight time zones, where any traveller is guaranteed to receive an ostentatiously frosty reception — initially, at least. Wheeler’s task has been to capture Russia through a bifocal lens: first through the eyes of the classic Russian authors she loves, and second through the lives of contemporary Russians we rarely hear about, outside of the Moscow–St Petersburg axis. ‘I was searching for a Russia not in the news — a Russia of common humanity and daily struggles — and my guides were writers of the Golden Age.

William Leith

Closure at last | 1 August 2019

From our UK edition

This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s compelling: an almost perfect true crime story. Two sisters, aged ten and 12, disappeared from a shopping mall in 1975 and were never seen again. What happened to them was a mystery for 40 years. In The Last Stone, Bowden tells you about two things. He tells you how the mystery was solved, and he tells you what happened to the girls. The first thing is compelling. The second will make you sick. The girls, Kate and Sheila Lyon, went to the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in Montgomery County, Maryland on 29 March. They were supposed to be home by 4 p.m. They weren’t. They vanished. The police interviewed lots of people. They searched the surrounding area.

Paul Levy

Gluttons for punishment

From our UK edition

Do you regard fat as a noun, a food substance all humans eat and need? Or as an adjective, denoting something you want to avoid being? Though the subtitle seems to indicate that this disturbing, closely argued book has the olive oil vs lard culinary axis as its subject, Christopher Forth dispenses with the food attributes of fat in his first few chapters. For the ancient Hebrews, fat was usually olive oil. But for ritual sacrifices, Yahweh seemed to prefer animal fat, as do the Ashkenazi remnant of His chosen people, with their relish of salt beef and schmaltz. Much the same was true of the Greek and Roman religious rites, whose gods were offered not much more than the mouth-watering aroma of roasting meat.

Andrew Taylor

Light and dark | 1 August 2019

From our UK edition

Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and 25 novels, starred in movies, directed theatre and produced his own film. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He founded a right-wing militia to defend the emperor from Marxists and, in 1970, committed ritual suicide, aged 45, after the failure of his coup to overturn the constitution. Life for Sale is one of his lesser-known achievements. Though it’s littered with corpses, it seems almost humdrum when compared with its creator’s CV. Originally written for Japanese Playboy and published in 1968, this is, I think, the first time it has appeared in English. Hanio is young, solvent and single.

Emily Bearn

Cautionary tales

From our UK edition

It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma, deeper still: when we discover that the beloved books of our childhood were in fact thinly veiled political theses, laden with economic metaphors and turgid intellectual ideas. My youngest child is not yet two. How long will it be until some clever clogs blunders into the nursery and tells her that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz must be read as an allegorical representation of the debate surrounding late 19th-century US monetary policy — or that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an ode to Karl Marx? Fierce Bad Rabbits sells itself as ‘an eye-opening journey through our best-loved picture books’ — a prospect some readers might, like me, resist.

Mark Cocker

Thrills and trills

From our UK edition

In a sense, the song of the bird in the title of this short, hugely thoughtful and fascinating book is a measure of the gap between nature and human culture. On the one hand stands the most mythologised, celebrated and interrogated maker of natural sound on earth: the nightingale. On the other, the most densely populated metropolitan area in western Europe: Berlin. One might expect our light-winged dryad, in honour of its place in poetry, art, folktale and fiction, to sing in a sylvan glade by a brook full of beaded bubbles. Not a bit of it. It’s by traffic lights in a Berlin park. The bird itself is quite indifferent to the three millennia of cultural churn it has inspired. It is drawn to the German capital by insect biomass and the right vegetation density.

Thursday

Jay Elwes

The great betrayer

From our UK edition

When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby and the Cambridge Five, that preening group of loudmouths that still dominate our national history of Soviet treachery. In his own quiet, devastating way, Fuchs proved more significant than all of them put together. A brilliant but unassuming German refugee who found sanctuary in Britain, Fuchs rose to become one of the leading theoretical physicists of the Allied nuclear bomb project. As Frank Close, himself an Oxford nuclear physicist, writes: ‘By 1946, Fuchs knew more about the construction of the atomic bomb and the conception of the hydrogen bomb than anyone in the UK and all but a handful in the world.

Peter Carty

Guns and poppies

From our UK edition

My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked him what fighting in the jungle was like, his response was brief. ‘Grown men were crying for their mothers,’ he said, and would say no more: the worst combat theatre of that war was not a subject for children. Meanwhile, in India, my grandparents were taking in British refugees from Burma who had little to say either, being sick and traumatised after fleeing the Japanese over high mountain passes during the monsoon. Before 1939, Burma was one of Asia’s most prosperous countries. Yangon was the second busiest port in the world (after London) and the country the largest rice exporter. But after the war, its cities were mostly destroyed and its economy ruined.

Max Décharné

They just keep rolling along

From our UK edition

At the end of 1969, teenage Rolling Stones fans reading the new Fab 208 annual could be forgiven for thinking that time wasn’t on their side: After five years as Britain’s most controversial group, how much more moss can they gather before they call it a day? Will we ever see the world’s most exciting group ‘live’ again, and where do wicked Mick and Co. go from here on? Mick Jagger himself spoke of the dietary measures he had adopted to fortify his supposedly ancient 26-year-old body: ‘If you eat any old rubbish like lots of potatoes and take no exercise, then you end up looking like a potato — all knobbly knees and bloated.

Brian Martin

Cuckoo in the nest?

From our UK edition

You might think The Carer rather an unpromising title, but Deborah Moggach’s book delivers a wickedly witty entertainment. Towards the end, she describes the setting where a crucial event takes place — ‘somewhere as humdrum as a caravan park, toilet block, clock golf, Tupperware’. So very good at describing the ordinary, she transforms it into the unusual, shocking and fascinating. Behind the normality of people’s lives there often lies an extraordinary story. It’s this that Moggach tells with insight, acute observation of character and mordant humour. The carer is Mandy, ‘doughy-faced’, fat-legged, stout of person and of purpose: ‘I speak as I find.

Jeff Noon

Secrets and suspense

From our UK edition

Andrew Martin continues his quest to create uniquely interesting crime novels in The Winker (Corsair, £16.99). Lee Jones is a rock musician facing cultural extinction as the punks take over. It’s 1976. He wanders around London dressed to the nines, living his fantasies. His trademark move on stage was to wink at a member of the audience. He’s still doing that to people on the street, but what follows these days is anything but mutual admiration. And so begins the career of the winking killer. (The author has fun with vowels.) Charles Underhill, a wealthy Englishman living in Paris, has his own reasons for being obsessed with the Winker’s killing spree. He sets out to uncover the identity of the murderer.

Rupert Christiansen

Master of the grand spectacle

From our UK edition

Should the man on the Clapham omnibus ever turn his mind to ballet, he is bound to envisage the work of Marius Petipa. The  ballerina holding an arabesque on pointe shoes was his creation, as were The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, Don Quixote, most of Swan Lake, the concept of The Nutcracker and aspects of La Sylphide, Giselle and Coppélia — this being merely the cream of a vast oeuvre dreamed up over the half century he spent based in St Petersburg. When he died in 1910, one obituary claimed (in reference to Louis XIV’s view of l’état) that ‘with just reason, he could have said —“Russian ballet is me”’.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Bold venture

From our UK edition

In 2017’s Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker strewed pages with multicoloured text. The Cauliflower, her joyful previous offering, employed winky-face emoticons while telling the story of a 19th-century Hindu mystic. In her 13th novel I Am Sovereign, huge fonts careen, in the space of an exclamation, into tiny fonts. Bold and underlined text prickles on the page. Barker has many ways of presenting what one of her characters, an estate agent from Llandudno called Avigail, describes as ‘BASTARD WORDS’. And these bastard words are all that the novel’s three protagonists have when trying to distract themselves from their doubts, or break free from what is holding them back.

Caspar Henderson

The wilder shores of Britain

From our UK edition

After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland, and camping overnight on top of its cliffs, David Gange awoke to revelation. To the west he could see almost the entire length of the Outer Hebrides. To the north-east the mainland, with its distinctive peaks, stretched towards Cape Wrath. The British Isles may be diminutive on a global scale but, Gange realised, ‘just how small they really are depends on how you measure them’. Merely the first hundred miles of longitude on the mainland’s north-west coast hold thousands of miles of coastline, with mountains, bays, estuaries, cliffs and islets — ‘enough to repay a lifetime’s exploration’.

Philip Hensher

The brutal truth

From our UK edition

Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a group of individuals from larger society with a wall and a controlling mechanism, all sorts of interesting facts about the way people interact become apparent. Convents, hospitals, asylums, schools, universities and prisons all serve the purpose. But different nations tend to prefer one sort of institution over another. It’s a curious fact that where the British will enter into a novel of school life with gusto, Americans show a distinct preference for writing about prisons.

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Binding love

From our UK edition

In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced to cancel a string of gigs. Keith Richards, the ne plus ultra of rock’s wild men, had damaged a rib in a tumble from a ladder while trying to retrieve a book from one of the higher shelves in his Connecticut library. Hide that smirk: it could just be true. Keef, it turns out, has not one but two extensive libraries — on either side of the Atlantic — and even went as far as applying the Dewey Decimal System to bring his sprawling collections into some kind of order. An addictive personality by any measure, Richards clearly has the book-collecting bug — and bibliomania, as Stuart Kells’s entertaining history cautions, can be a cruel mistress.

Philip Marsden

Ideas are history

From our UK edition

Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool of evidence the past 800,000 years.

Anne Chisholm

Born to be wild

From our UK edition

It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception, they have been seen in glimpses, playing marginal parts on the Bloomsbury stage after about 1910. The exception was the youngest, Noel, who all her life and since has been stuck with her invidious role as the girl who turned down a national hero, Rupert Brooke. Even Sarah Watling cannot help beginning and ending her solid, thoughtful book with that piece of the jigsaw. But admirably, if a trifle laboriously, she goes on to consider each of them as an individual, and succeeds in placing them firmly in the vanguard of the slow progress of women towards a measure of personal and professional freedom. Their lives were not plain sailing.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Mastering rocket science

From our UK edition

Now that we are stupidly rendering Earth almost entirely uninhabitable by many species including our own (through overcrowding, failing political systems, chemical pollution and climate disorder), a few humans of means are looking forward to migrating soon to other planets, even though, as yet, there are no good hotels and restaurants there. Scientists, stimulated by international rivalry and their own ambitions during the past century, have put together the machines and propellants for interplanetary travel. Here are two excellent, microscopically detailed books about the most important individuals and organisations that achieved personkind’s first progress into space.