Book review

For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid "salaryman" business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight — but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now sixty-seven-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: "You’re limiting your field of vision to thirty years… Start bold and think 300 years ahead.

"Gliff" is a word which can mean "a short moment," "a wallop," and "a post-ejaculatory sex act;" to "dispel snow," "to frighten," and to "escape something quickly." It’s "really excitingly polysemous," says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its center are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of "Unverifiables.

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.

I wouldn’t have thought a book about America’s decline would cause me to laugh out loud, but having enjoyed its author Matt Purple’s work for years now (full disclosure: he’s a personal friend and former Spectator colleague), I should not have been the least bit surprised that his debut book is as funny as it is insightful. Decline from the Top: Snapshots from America’s Crisis and Glimmers of Hope is a veritable joy to read. Though he declares himself to be a “cranky conservative,” Purple’s humor and wit offer a diagnostic examination of the American condition that exudes warmth and obvious heartfelt concern for our nation’s wellbeing.

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate “catch-fart.” (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim.

Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels. Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age. Karla’s Choice opens in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the era when the Berlin Wall went up, the aftermath of Suez, the “candle-end days” of Empire. In East Berlin, a charismatic young man is carted away by the Stasi.

In May 1942, Agent Zo was in the home stretch after a long and risky mission that had placed her in Berlin, at the heart of Nazi Germany. As usual, she picked up a small stone and threw it at the second-floor window of her sister’s apartment in a grimy industrial city in occupied Poland, south of Warsaw. But no one in the flat turned on a light, the agreed signal. She threw another. Nothing happened. With a mounting sense of unease, she knocked at the door of a first-floor apartment, and a pallid face appeared. The terrified neighbor told her that the Gestapo had appeared two days ago and arrested the occupants. “Get away, by God. They are here!” she urged.

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him "you shall not go further on your way," at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: "What would Jesus do?" If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels.

An unusual disclaimer greets the reader on the title page of this memoir of an actor chiefly known for starring as the lovable goofball Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld. “Neither the US Army nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book,” it notes. But in the event the Pentagon probably needn’t have worried. Drafted into the army in 1970, the actor in question, Michael Richards, seems to have avoided any Sergeant Bilko-like shenanigans and instead separated from the service with a heightened appreciation for the punctuality, discipline and meticulous preparation that characterized his later career.