Book review

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

What you see is what you get

From our UK edition

The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a number of fine works. Its roots are in biomedical research, but those roots have, with modification, sprouted so many disciplines and areas of tangential enquiry that it makes perfect sense to have commissioned Iain Sinclair to write about the physical and psychological effects of buildings and places on the health of the people who inhabit them, pass through them, long to get out of them, represent them, think about them. Sinclair’s approach is not that of a sociologist, an off-the-peg analyst of urbanism (density good, sprawl bad) or a travel writer on a journey to ‘find himself’ (in the way that they wearyingly will).

Kate Womersley

The burden of freedom

From our UK edition

It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations and burnings are performed with languorous cruelty. Women give birth and are sent straight back to work after lying their ‘tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun’. Esi Edugyan’s third novel does not retreat to softer ground after her last, Half-Blood Blues, dealt with Nazi ideology. Both Germany and Barbados have chapters in their histories when humans were treated like mere creatures. Hope arrives with the plantation master’s brother, Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde, a scientist, inventor and abolitionist. Titch chooses a slave boy, George Washington Black, to be his apprentice.

Chris Mullin

That’ll be the day

From our UK edition

We’ve had Alan Johnson the lad from the slums of north Kensington, Alan Johnson the postman and Alan Johnson Member of Parliament and cabinet minister. Now comes the sequel: Alan Johnson the rock and roll years. Actually, it’s not quite a sequel since it covers much of the same territory as two of the previous volumes, albeit from a slightly different angle. Although Johnson went on to hold five cabinet posts, politics was never part of Johnson’s life plan. All he ever wanted to be was a rock star and, who knows, it was an ambition he might have realised but for the fact that his musical instruments kept being stolen. As recounted in This Boy, his wonderful and hugely successful first volume of memoirs, Johnson’s start in life was, to put it mildly, unpromising.

Michael Moorcock

In a forest dark and deep

From our UK edition

Brian Catling’s great trilogy takes its title from The Vorrh, his first volume. This final book fulfills all the promises of the first two. It has a place beside such modern masters of the imagination as E.R. Eddison, Tolkien or Peake, and it is as completely unlike them as those three-deckers are of each other. Again we visit the Vorrh, the endless forest based on Raymond Roussel’s in Impressions of Africa. Built on its outskirts, Essenwald, a crumbling colonial city, exists because of the timber it cuts with the labour of ‘the Erstwhile’, the forest’s enslaved, semi-human inhabitants.

David Crane

An age of paradox

From our UK edition

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ... in short,’ as Charles Dickens famously told the first readers of A Tale of Two Cities, it was a period very much like their own. Dickens was right. John Stuart Mill once claimed that the two great ‘seminal minds’ of the period were Coleridge and Bentham, and in that brilliant yoking of opposites — the warm, creative current of Coleridgean thought and the chillier stream of Benthamite utilitarianism — is summed up all the contradictions and paradoxes that the Victorian age was heir to. This is the fascination of the period.

Nicholas Lezard

We were all unwell then

From our UK edition

On the one hand, I am supremely qualified to review this book. In 1984, bored beyond endurance after graduating with one of those degrees that leaves you both over- and under-qualified for employment, I decided to take my dole money down to the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, where this magazine’s Jeffrey Bernard held court, and pay my respects to him, for I liked his prose style and his stories. I stayed there for three years or more, a postgraduate course in itself, only packing my bags at the end of 1987 when I met the woman who was to become my wife.

Tom Williams

No longer the tough guy

From our UK edition

Only to Sleep is the third Philip Marlowe novel written by someone other than Raymond Chandler and while the authors of Perchance to Dream and The Black-Eyed Blonde both found freedom to play with Marlowe and explore his potential, it is Lawrence Osborne who has run the furthest with the source material. The novel opens in 1988, with Marlowe living in retirement in Baja, Mexico. He is 72, and enjoying a leisurely life in the sun, when he is asked to take on one last investigation into insurance fraud. A Reagan-era Marlowe unlocks an aspect that Chandler never considered.

Wynn Wheldon

Curiosity – and cats

From our UK edition

To Jan Morris, I am anathema. That goes, too, for David Attenborough. It is a word that this unarguably great writer likes: ‘It rolls well off the tongue.’ Why are your reviewer and the great broadcaster anathema, you ask. Well, we have been to the zoo. In this almost entirely enjoyable book no-one comes in for quite so much disapproval as those of us who have been to the zoo.I mention David because, when I was young, he took me to the zoo. However, despite this sinfulness, I would be surprised if Morris, who is a year older than Attenborough, does not recognise in David a confrère in the war for niceness against nastiness, kindness against cruelty. This book, apparently written because Morris has ‘nothing much else to write’, is more weighty than it seems.

Peter Tatchell

Ever the trail-blazer

From our UK edition

This is the story of the ‘other’ Harvey Milk. We all know about Harvey the San Francisco politician who was tragically assassinated less than a year after he became one of the first openly gay candidates elected to public office in the US. But now, thanks to Lillian Faderman, we also know about Harvey the secular Jew, who renounced his faith but remained influenced and inspired by liberal Jewish values. The grandson of Lithuanian immigrants to the US, Harvey was, for many years, more out as a Jew than as a gay man. We also discover the restless, wandering Harvey, who moved from state to state, man to man and job to job.

Lucy Jones

Guns and roses

From our UK edition

During the civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Mr and Mrs Roami, a science professor and a nurse, sent their children away from Kabul to Europe for safety. Tragically, they lost the phone number of where the children had moved to and had no way of contacting them. The couple found solace in gardening. Despite the constant explosions of rockets and shells, they were unwilling to leave their home. They named flowers after their children, and tended and spoke to them. It gave them the hope that one day the family would be reunited. At one point, battle raged on all four sides and it was too dangerous to cross the road to fetch water from the stream. The garden was starting to die.

Robert Salisbury

A class act

From our UK edition

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Peter, but you were a famously successful Leader of Their Lordships and I wondered whether you had any tips before I took it on.’ ‘All you’ve got to remember is that you are the headmaster of a second-rate public school.’ Lord Carrington’s answer to my enquiry was entirely characteristic: funny, and flattering, as though he knew you would instinctively understand the joke. You and he, he implied, belonged in the same place. It was a technique which he lavished with great success on those who worked for him. He was much loved in Their Lordships, at the Foreign Office and at the Ministry of Defence — and with reason. He was fun to work for and loyal to those who worked for him.

Craig Raine

A recitation of wrongs

From our UK edition

In 1923, a Frenchman, Emile Coué, persuaded millions of Americans to finger a piece of string with exactly 20 knots. It was an exercise in auto-suggestion. At each knot of this secular rosary, the user intoned: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’ Sylvia Plath’s letters — until they implode on p.790 when she discovers the affair between Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill — are a similar numbing iteration of optimism and self-improvement. Thereafter, the story changes, darkens. Up until then, her story is cropped for improvement: she takes her finals at Cambridge but the letters are silent on her degree result (II: i). She explains to her brother Warren that she doesn’t write when her moods are black.

Thursday

Jon Jolliffe

Man’s true best friend

From our UK edition

This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to give a flavour of what our cattle do for us’. It then turns into a survey of the various British breeds of cattle. After poor A-levels, Philip Walling took odd jobs in his native Cumbria, such as building dry-stone walls, until he managed to acquire a small farm of his own. With great determination, he ran this single-handed, keeping both beef and dairy animals and raising poultry and a couple of pigs. They were, in retrospect at least, ‘ten years of almost undimmed joy’. But aged 30, discouraged by the daily grind, which included a milk round, and feeling he had missed out on a proper education, he gave it all up.

Jason Burke

Lines in the sand

One of the many pleasures offered by Lords of the Desert, which narrates the rivalry between Britain and the United States in the Middle East from the end of the second world war through to 1967, is the quotations that are liberally strewn across its pages. They have been culled from memoirs or official documents unearthed in British or US archives and testify to the research that has gone into this dense but consistently fascinating account. Some reveal the deep complacency of influential individuals. Ralph Brewster, an American senator who undertook a round- the-world tour in August 1943 to investigate the progress of the war and report to President Franklin D.

Travis Elborough

There be dragons

Reflecting on the genesis of Treasure Island, the adventure yarn that grew from a map of an exotic isle he had drawn to amuse a bored schoolboy on a rainy day, Robert Louis Stevenson observed: ‘I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find that hard to believe.’ It’s fair to say that Thomas Reinertsen Berg cares very deeply about them, and his book, sumptuously produced with lots of full-colour images, is a kind of potted treasury of cartographical history that gleams with pieces-of-eight-like snippets of information.

Brian Martin

All shook up

From our UK edition

The polymath writer A.N.Wilson returns to the novel in Aftershocks, working on the template of the 2011 earthquake which devastated Christchurch, New Zealand. He protests that the setting is not New Zealand but, as he admits, there are many recognisable similarities. This is a novel about true love, its agonies, ecstasies, and eventual fulfillment, told in the voice of a young woman, Ingrid Ashe. She is the daughter of the female local radio broadcaster, Cavan Cliffe; and the mother/daughter relationship is almost unhealthily close. Ingrid’s is a lesbian love story in which her passion cannot develop until the earthquake upsets the structure of the city, destroys the cathedral and causes an all-round upheaval in personal relationships.

Duncan Fallowell

Pondering the flowers

From our UK edition

This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an integrating purpose; approaching a subject via concentrated, separated stabs rather than extended unfolding text. In philosophy this is called the aphoristic technique. In wider literature, it can range from the concise notebook to prose poetry. It is a genre whose masterpiece in English is Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, but it is more often found in continental literature; and the French especially have made it their own, where its progenitor is usually said to be Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, described as prose poems and published in 1869 after the author’s death.

Olivia Williams

Something nasty in the coal cellar

From our UK edition

Literary non-fiction demands that a respectable household is not really a respectable household — and the Bastendorffs of 4 Euston Square fully oblige. The family take in lodgers at their elegant townhouse in Bloomsbury and, just as they are sprucing it up to welcome their latest in May 1879, a mystery corpse is uncovered in their coal cellar. It would not spoil anything to say that the Bastendorffs turn out to be a pretty kooky bunch, headed up by Severin, the paterfamilias who started life in rural Luxembourg. Thanks to Severin’s heritage, we skip past the well-worn Disney Victoriana of gas lamps and sooty urchins and into the more unusual territory of London’s burgeoning Germanic subculture.

James Bradley

A whiff of paranoia

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s. In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates, it most certainly has not stopped.

Andrew Taylor

A meditation on history

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon makes it clear that it has several. It’s about the shifting nature of history and the mysterious footprints of the past in the present. It’s also concerned with the myriad and biased interpretations that we place on past events. Another preoccupation is the ambiguities of spoken and written French. Modern Paris, the novel’s main setting, allows Sebastian Faulks to explore his themes through two main viewpoints. There’s Tariq, a precociously self-aware 18-year-old Moroccan from a middle-class family in Tangier, who comes to Paris in search of himself, his mother’s French family and an obliging woman who will help him lose his virginity.