Book review

Thursday

Ian Sansom

Get lost

From our UK edition

When Boris Johnson resigned recently he automatically gave up his right to use Chevening House in Kent, bequeathed by the Earl Stanhope for the use of a person nominated by the prime minister, traditionally the foreign secretary. I think I’m right in saying that when she first came to office, Theresa May attempted to get Boris to share the place with David Davis and Liam Fox, but to no avail, which was surely a sign of things to come. Among its many attractions and allurements — 115 rooms, a boating lake, all the other usual country-house trimmings — Chevening has a magnificent maze, planted by the 4th Earl Stanhope, to a design by his great-grandfather, Philip Stanhope.

Thursday

Rodric Braithwaite

Knowing your enemy

Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track and outmanoeuvre their foreign and domestic enemies. So they place spies, suborn traitors, eavesdrop, decipher other people’s messages, subvert their governments, assassinate their servants and sabotage their property. The technology has changed massively over the centuries; the aims and the basic methods have not.

William Cook

Poetry in the back garden

From our UK edition

When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has led expeditions in five continents and is the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic.’ Oh no, I thought, not another gung-ho memoir by some posh explorer, chronicling his adventures crossing the Andes on a pogo stick or paddling up the Amazon in a bathtub. Thankfully, Wild Signs and Star Paths is nothing of the sort. It’s a thoughtful, lyrical book about the hidden connections between flora and fauna, the landscape and the weather, and most of its wise and wondrous observations are gleaned from the author’s rambles around the English countryside — mainly amid the woods and meadows of his beloved South Downs.

Michael Beloff

The real wizard of Oz

From our UK edition

What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job was in court and who moonlighted in the Commons — think F.E. Smith. But it is impossible today to double up with any distinction. As long as capital punishment survived, public attention also attached to those great defenders who rescued their clients from the noose — think Edward Marshall Hall. But English judges no longer don the black cap to pronounce the sentence of death. Geoffrey Robertson, the author of this riveting memoir, ticks the boxes which guarantee the reputation of the modern celebrity silk: chiefly, a concentration on the fashion-able area of human rights, with a special interest in press freedom, making him a hero of the left-wing media.

Jonathan Mirsky

The neighbour from hell

Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly. Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 and the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the diaspora of about 130,000 Tibetan refugees, battered by decades of Chinese oppression and ‘soft’ propaganda, is riven by confusion. Some cling to their hope that Tibet will again be sovereign and they will be able to return to their homeland.

Sara Wheeler

Via dolorosa

From our UK edition

Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The Crossway. It was a journey from darkness to light, as the author, who suffers from mental illness, looked for redemption. It was also a considerable feat, especially as Stagg proclaims lugubriously at the outset: ‘I’m not much of a walker!’ He stayed in convents, monasteries, in his tent, in disused schools or the homes of strangers, and, later, in mosques. He crossed the Alps in winter in order to make Rome for Easter, and it took him six days to clear the Apennines. On the trail, he reflectsa good deal on what he has been through — a breakdown, suicide attempts, the nature of mental illness.

Emily Rhodes

Ways of escape | 28 June 2018

From our UK edition

Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her first novel, Crudo, is every bit as intelligent and provocative, with a roar of energy that comes from having been written, remarkably, in just seven weeks. Perhaps the novel’s most unusual element is its narrator: ‘Kathy by which I mean I’ is a 40-year-old hybrid of the post-punk icon Kathy Acker and a fictionalised version of Laing herself. Acker died in 1997, but Laing brings her back to life for the politically turbulent summer of 2017.

Jeff Noon

Strewn with foreign bodies

From our UK edition

Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more apposite. The action takes place in 1967, when Inspector Bordelli of the Florence police force is called to a house where a wealthy industrialist has been run through with a sword. Each member of the family is acting suspiciously, as are the various colleagues and associates of the deceased. Bordelli’s life is further complicated when an old friend, Colonel Arcieri, turns up in dire trouble and needing protection. The case unfolds in a slow haze of interviews and recollections. Vichi takes his time to explore Bordelli’s mind, his thoughts and his feelings, especially concerning the past and love lost. The book yearns for a bygone age.

Thursday

Claire Kohda

Trouble for Lucia

From our UK edition

In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the novelist’s daughter. Many saw the destruction of documents pertaining to Lucia, who had spent the majority of her life in asylums and had been close to her father, as the destruction of keys to understanding her father’s work. Stephen replied: ‘No one was going to set their eyes on them [the letters] and re-psychoanalyse my poor aunt.’ Stephen, still alive today, appears — though with his name blacked out — in this novel, an imagining of the life and legacy of Lucia. ‘A silly old cunt,’ he is called by a character we are made to sympathise with.

Katrina Gulliver

When voters lose faith

From our UK edition

If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on the road to unfreedom, as Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian of Russia, argues in his new book. He sees threats to democracy in Europe and America as following the Russian model of oligarchic takeover: ‘The stabilisation of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.’ Snyder focuses on the Ukrainian crisis, noting how this conflict became a theatre of cultural memory: during the Russian invasion it was once again 1941, the enemies were Nazis, and tanks were even painted with slogans such as ‘For Stalin’.

Lucy Mangan

Miss Marple to the rescue

From our UK edition

Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in a squalid, dilapidated house in a Sussex seaside town. It contains her mother Ange, her aunt Di, her grandmother, an unspecified number of siblings and a variety of temporary inhabitants who joined the Zion-seeking cult that evolved around Ange and Di. There are also a few longer-lasting denizens, such as Uncle David (first encountered unconscious on the sitting room floor), the sinister Woman Upstairs, and Poor Sue, who later seems to come to some kind of Poor End.

Jonathan Steinberg

Coming of age in Nazi Germany

From our UK edition

The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived through his chosen period. Six dozen Germans — mostly from the generation born in the 1920s — testify through their memoirs to how it was to be Christian or Jewish, working-class or upper- middle-class, a young Nazi or a young anti-Nazi. The main characters constitute, as Jarausch explains it, ‘a stratified sample of individuals who represent a broad range of personal and collective experiences’ seen from the bottom. The book begins with the grand-parents of this generation, and the stability of Wilhelmine Germany with its pre-1914 confidence and prosperity.

William Leith

Soaked in blood and symbolism

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and envies her. Her pain is temporary; his is permanent.

Nicholas Lezard

Stories about stories

I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and an impermeable membrane between invention and reality — the novel, that is, being a box from which nothing can leap out, and into which nothing, except what the author has chosen to put there, can leap in? And does it conform to the conventions laid down by the great writers of the 19th century? That’s what I assumed, during my schooldays; and the little that had filtered down to me of Don Quixote, which is claimed by many to be the ‘first’ novel, did not alert me to the fact that it was anything more than a story. As opposed to — to put it very simply indeed — a story about stories.

Henry Jeffreys

How to infuriate the French

From our UK edition

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by Steven Spurrier, the man behind that notorious tasting, have been keenly anticipated. It was a glass of 1908 Cockburns port that Spurrier tried at the age of 13 that sparked a lifelong interest in wine. Rather than go to university, as expected, he worked in the cellars of a wine merchant, Christopher’s, in Soho. In his early twenties he inherited £250,000 (the equivalent of £5 million today) when the family gravel business was sold.

Philip Hensher

Manners maketh the Englishman

In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become, lies civility. Keith Thomas’s marvellous new book addresses the subject of ideal behaviour. It shows the way that early modern England formed notions of civilisation and proper conduct, in contrast to what was termed ‘the Other’. These alternative people were labelled ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’ when found abroad or on the Celtic fringe. If the unacceptable was found within England, rural or impoverished, they would be called ‘clowns’ or ‘clodhoppers’.

Thursday

Hamish Robinson

A cat, a dog and a ghost

From our UK edition

Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well understood — a child is lost — and the viewer, with certain advantages, rides through the unfolding events saddled up on the back of a questing protagonist, in Alison Moore’s Missing, as in her Booker-shortlisted first novel The Lighthouse, the reader is placed in a very different position. Jesse Noon, a divorced mother approaching 50, is followed round her house in Hawick in the Scottish Borders by a cat and a dog, and the reader follows too. Something is wrong — several things. One morning less than a year earlier, her partner Will, a train driver, upped and left, leaving a message written on a steamed-up mirror.

Rebecca Watson

The weight of womanhood

From our UK edition

‘I don’t think this was something I ever felt’, Sheila Heti writes in Motherhood — ‘that my body, my life, belonged to me.’ Heti’s narrator is childless, nearing her forties and living with her boyfriend. In semi-diaristic vignettes, she navigates the space of childlessness; the ‘sensation of life tapping its foot’. She reckons with the feeling that her body is not fully her own, that it exists to make space for another. The narrator encounters friends and strangers, speaks to psychics and, in regular passages, uses a method of flipping three coins (two or three tails — no; two or three heads —yes) to find answers. ‘I’m projecting onto you, coins, the wisdom of the universe,’ the narrator admits.

Max Décharné

Getting their kicks on Route 66

In 1973, four years before he disappeared down the Star Wars rabbit hole, George Lucas directed the film American Graffiti, eulogising his days as a teenage car fanatic in Modesto, California; parking at drive-ins, hot-rodding and cruising for dates. This vanished world was only a decade away —‘Where were you in 62?’ said thepublicity — the equivalent of someone today getting dewy-eyed about 2007. Yet the clashes and strife of the late 1960s in mainland America and the deepening quagmire of the Vietnam War had already made those days look like an age of lost innocence.

Dominic Dromgoole

As full of grief as age

From our UK edition

Why are rehearsal diaries so compelling? One approaches them with cynicism and then ends up reading with racing heart through to the early hours, hurtling with a shared terror towards the described first night. First and foremost, there is the gossip, the sense of being behind closed doors, and gaining off-guard glimpses into the nature of those who are frequently well-fortressed. The character of this gossip changes markedly as the actor-diarist grows older. In youth it is all about which tearaway deals the best cocaine to enable company shagging: in age it morphs into which besuited figure makes the most ruefully telling remark at the latest in a series of memorials for fallen comrades.