Book review

Thursday

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.

Thursday

Frank Wynne

The translator as spy

Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible, and though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424. Meanwhile, bees, unaware of these deliberations, have continued to flit from flower to flower, and translators continue to translate.

Joanna Blythman

A pint of contention

For tens of thousands of years, humans have been domesticating other mammals — cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, camels, llamas, donkeys, yaks, horses — and keeping them for their milk. This has generated myriad products, from yoghurt and buttermilk through butter and cheese to toffee and ice cream, in many varied, culturally specific and resourceful forms. A sign of the elemental importance of this foodstuff is that our galaxy is called the Milky Way — and indeed the word ‘galaxy’ is derived from the Greek word for milk, gala. In Ancient Greek mythology, the Milky Way was formed when Hera, the goddess of womanhood, spilled milk while breastfeeding. Each drop became a speck of light, known to us as a star.

James Walton

The fault was in his stars

In 1957, aged 13, Jimmy Page appeared with his skiffle group on a children’s TV programme dedicated to ‘unusual hobbies’ — skiffle apparently qualifying as one. During the show, he was interviewed by Huw Wheldon who, following an old-fashioned BBC lunch, arrived in the studio with a hearty cry of ‘Where are these fucking kids then?’ Asked what he planned to do when he grew up, Page gave a perhaps unexpected reply: find a cure for cancer. As we now know, this plan failed — but already, it seems, the young Jimmy wasn’t lacking in the swaggering self-confidence that true rock stars are required to possess (or at least to fake convincingly).

Diana Hendry

Too much American angst

In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M. Homes (Granta, £14.99) — Tom Sanford, shopping with his family in Mammoth Mart, soliliquises (loudly and nostalgically) about the America he remembers, and finds himself with an audience of shoppers who nominate him as the People’s Candidate for President. Absurd? Not quite so absurd perhaps as in pre-Trump days. Days of Awe (the title comes from Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of repentance in the Jewish calendar) is Homes’s third collection and her first book since winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013. The stories balance on a narrative tightrope between reality and absurdity, taking the anxieties of the American elite to a satirical extreme.

Philip Hoare

When will the slaughter end?

Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not a ‘whale hugger’. ‘I didn’t fall asleep snuggling stuffed whales or decorate my room with posters of humpbacks suspended in prismatic light.’ Pyenson sees whales through their ancestral bones, and their contemporary entrails, digging up their past or scrying their future. Spying on Whales begins its surveillance in the fossil-rich site of Cerro Ballena (‘Whale Hill’) in the Atacama desert. Here, in the Miocene layers, he uncovers an entire pod of ancient, stranded whales, stilled in the moment of their deep-time death. It’s an Indiana Jones moment.

Stanley Wells

The play that goes on giving

The role of Hamlet is, Max Beerbohm famously wrote, ‘a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump’. In this book, and in its online supplement, Jonathan Croall charts the flight through that hoop of pretty well all of the ‘eminent actors’ — male and female, young and not so young, white and black — who have taken the leap in British performances, from Michael Redgrave with the Old Vic company in 1950 to Andrew Scott at the Almeida in 2017. The trajectory of the actor’s flight is of course different in every production.

Stephen Bayley

A barbarous view of modernism

When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest is much less cheerful. Like one of those innocents who re-enact the Civil War in embarrassing costume on Bank Holidays, Curl has been time-travelling backwards into a pre-modern world. He returns from the past with a crude message that has been familiar since Reginald (Menin Gate) Blomfield told us in the 1930s that modern architecture is a godless conspiracy of foreigners, Jews and Bolsheviks to eradicate an established culture of building, patiently evolved over three millennia. This is less than a half-truth. Yes, modernist principles, misunderstood by unimaginative planners, often led to atrocious results.

Emily Rhodes

The witching time

From our UK edition

All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the corn fields are ‘acres of gold like bullion, strewn with the sapphires of cornflowers and the garnets of corn poppies and watched over from on high by larks’. Our narrator, 14-year-old Edie, has finished school and her older brother Frank tells her: ‘Something will happen next, and you should choose it.’ In Edie’s provincial life, her choices are limited. Essentially, she can stay at home and help on the farm, marry like her older sister and ‘push out a baby a year’, or become a teacher — she is sufficiently clever, but finds children ‘exasperating’.

Thursday

Alex Colville

The woman in the shadows

Despite his having one of the most famous names in the world, we know maddeningly little about William Shakespeare. His private life was lost in the swirling debris of the early modern world. Buildings such as the Globe or New Place (the house he retired to in Stratford) were demolished in the centuries after his death. Not a single letter survives, no first drafts of the plays have surfaced and it is disputed whether his portraits even look like him. Scholars are forced to find other ways of peering into his soul. Some look to the plays and sonnets, boldly presenting fictional and contradictory poetry as concrete evidence. Others examine the objects he may have owned, but the results are hardly the stuff dreams are made on.

Dennis Zhou

You can’t go home again | 16 August 2018

If the 20th century popularised the figure of the émigré, the 21st has introduced that of the returnee, who, aided by a combination of Skype, social media and cheap air travel, doesn’t so much exchange countries as exist between them. ‘I was an émigré. I had left. Now I’d returned,’ announces Andrei Kaplan, somewhat incredulously, in Keith Gessen’s vigorously funny second novel. An inverted Pnin, Andrei is a Russian-American academic, making a living by moderating online discussion groups for a professor who, in due course, compares Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky to Kanye West. Failing to find a tenured job, Andrei moves to Moscow, where he was born, to care for his ailing grandmother. The city is unrecognisable.

James Stourton

The attributions game

From our UK edition

Many art historians have written their own story of the making of an aesthete: Ruskin, Berenson and Kenneth Clark to name just three in the Anglo-Saxon world. The pattern varies, but typically it might include being bullied at school, a mentor, an epiphany in Italy, and the de rigueur discovery of Piero della Francesca. The Eye has all the possibilities of being an appealing book in the same tradition — but for the author’s grating references to himself and his vocation as the ‘Eye’, as if this were some higher calling, a Glasperlenspiel in which the priesthood spends all day attributing Florentine paintings. ‘The Eye,’ we are informed, ‘is a miniature Christopher Columbus who roves over the world of art, alert to any surprises.

Suzi Feay

From Troy to the Troubles

From our UK edition

Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, focusing on the female slaves, and Colm Tóibín’s take on the aftermath of the Trojan war, House of Names. For his second novel, Michael Hughes attempts something more literal and more challenging: to transpose the narrative of Homer’s war epic as closely as possible to the Troubles. The story concerns Achill, a disenchanted IRA sniper, and his paramilitary boss, who fall out over a girl. Pig is just as unappealing as Agamemnon; Helen is local beauty Nellie; Hector is SAS man Henry; and Patroclus pleasingly, becomes Pat, Achill’s young protégé but not bed partner.

Kate Womersley

Unlucky in love

From our UK edition

‘The most interesting novels are a bit strange,’ Kirsty Gunn once told readers of the London Review of Books. ‘They reject the predictable progress of conventional plotlines in favour of something that feels more risky.’ It’s surprising then that Gunn’s latest novel-ish offering is about unrequited love — a middle-aged banker for his glamorous landlady — set in the moneyed comfort of London’s Richmond. It’s a storyline so conventional, so timid, chick-lit would be embarrassed to claim it. Evan Gordonston falls — at first sight, of course — for Caroline Beresford, familiar in PR and pony club circles, but who now spends her days mostly avoiding her husband, practising pilates, drinking cocktails and popping Ativan.