Book review

Thursday

Clare Mulley

The house that Alfred built

From our UK edition

This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which in 1927 was the first of many small wooden summer houses to be built in the village of Gross Glienicke. Both its situation, just outside Berlin in the lakeside area that would later abut Gatow airport, and its many occupants, from well-established German Jews to partying neo-Nazis, would expose the property to the more tidal waters of modern German history. But the house has not just provided a stage for human drama; arguably it has been integral to the action itself, helping to shape lives, just as it was itself transformed by Germany’s changing politics.

A.S. Byatt

A terrible beauty

From our UK edition

Good pottery appears to be cool and silent — something vulnerable that, with luck, can outlast many human generations. A white porcelain dish seems calm and decorous; one knows that skill went into its evenness, into the exact whiteness, into its lightness. But when I began to think about pots I had no idea of the extreme violence, happenstance and risk that are an intrinsic part of the maker’s art. The chemistry is complex; the potter needs to study it intimately — the composition of different clays, of glazes, of rare and valuable pigments (cobalt for instance), and of the firewood that makes the fire. Pottery-making can be poisonous from fumes, and tasting deadly dyes. The history of the art is littered with terrible disasters.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

Waiting for Utopia

From our UK edition

The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops. Cars were hard to come by, so a vast public transport network took up the slack. Buses not only bore workers to their labours, but also breathed life into the ‘union’ itself by taking travellers from town to taiga to desert to seaside. In remoter parts of the country, bus shelters mattered even more than buses, providing convenient places for people to gather, drink and socialise. They were caravanserai for the motor age, and while the empire they served no longer exists, most of them stand right where it left them. If they are in various stages of ruin now, they are all the more attractive for it.

Victor Sebestyen

The brutal mask of anarchy

From our UK edition

In September 1939 Britain went to war against Germany, ostensibly in defence of Poland. One big secret that the British government didn’t know at the time — and not until much later — was that while the Anglo-Polish alliance treaty was being negotiated during the previous months, the Poles had been actively training and arming terrorists to kill British troops in the Middle East. I don’t normally believe in convoluted conspiracy theories, but this one happens to be true. In the 1930s the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw wanted rid of 3.5 million Polish Jews. Initially they tried to pack them off to Madagascar. But then the Poles hit on the idea of helping Jews create their own state in British-occupied Palestine.

Imogen Russell Williams

Humour and horror for children

From our UK edition

In the Californian town of San Bernadino, children are going missing; smiling faces grace a gallery of milk cartons. One September evening in 1969, Jim Sturges’s brother Jack rides under a bridge and never comes out. All that’s left is his Sportcrest bike, its front wheel spinning. Forty-five years later, 15-year-old Jim Junior lives in a state of reluctant siege. Traumatised by loss, his father has armour-clad their home, calling the cops if Jim gets home seconds after sunset. Jim has other problems, too; he and his friend Tub have caught the eye of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, the school bully. And now something nasty seems to be emerging from the sewers.

John Jolliffe

The powers that were

From our UK edition

Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on the lead-up to 1939, and the subsequent course of the war. Maisky’s commitment to communism was total. On 4 November 1934 he writes: Today, any man, even an enemy, can see that Lenin is an historical Mont Blanc… a radiant guiding peak in the thousand-year evolution of humanity, while Gandhi is just a cardboard mountain who shone with a dubious light for some ten years before disintegrating.

Frances Wilson

Come rain or shine

From our UK edition

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra Harris reveals in this extended outlook, have always meant something else. Weatherland is a literary biography of the climate. Beginning with the Fall (in the Biblical rather than the autumnal sense) and ending with Alice Oswald, Harris condenses 2,000 years of weather ‘as it is recreated in the human imagination’.

Nigel Jones

Foaming with much blood

From our UK edition

According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so, one wonders what Bacon made of Rome’s Julio-Claudian dynasty, the gore-spattered family that gave the empire its first five rulers, and the subject of Tom Holland’s latest popular history of the ancient world. Recounting one of the era’s many fratricidal civil wars, Holland rightly observes: ‘The aptitude of the Roman people for killing, which had first won them their universal dominion, was now unleashed upon themselves.’ And no one was more adept at such incestuous slaughter than the imperial family itself.

Tim Martin

Things left undead

From our UK edition

In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a straight face ‘when I told her I’d written a book she’d known nothing about’. I doubt she kept it for long, because one of the many ways in which The Making of Zombie Wars differs from Hemon’s other work is that it is dreadfully, wrigglingly, antisocially funny: the sort of book that’s difficult to read in public without undignified honks of laughter.

Claire Lowdon

A karaoke version of Kafka

From our UK edition

The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people have ‘learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself’. Godley, presumably, is not the real-life economist Wynne Godley but the fictional mathematician Adam Godley of Banville’s The Infinities (2009), whose discoveries supplant relativity and quantum physics. So, the world of The Blue Guitar is a version of steampunk, straight out of genre fiction.

Cressida Connolly

Time out of mind

From our UK edition

There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks writes in the grand tradition of realist fiction: a list of his themes might include the brutality and waste of war, France and, of course, romantic love. Self, meanwhile, has created dystopias in which to satirise different aspects of humanity, while conjuring with all manner of stylistic invention. The one area of shared interest has been the history of psychiatry. Here, with Faulks’s new book, their preoccupations further converge. A student of literature on the lookout for a dissertation topic could do a lot worse than The Psychotic Century: 20th Century Ideas of Mental Illness and the Traumatic Effects of War in mid-period Faulks and Self.

Ian Thomson

The trip of a lifetime

From our UK edition

Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became the Newest Testament among the happening people. One spring morning in 1953 the 58-year-old Englishman ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescalin in his Hollywood garden and waited for the visionary moment. When he opened his eyes he saw pure California neon dust. ‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation.’ Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that Huxley had gone bonkers in his American exile. (‘Huxley has done more than change climate and diet.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Hero or collaborator?

From our UK edition

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Battle ready

From our UK edition

For most of history, religion and war have been the most powerful social instincts of mankind and its chief collective activities. In the crusades, they combined to create a movement of great emotional power, which convulsed Europe in the 12th century and retained its appeal to the military classes until the end of the Middle Ages. One might expect people who embarked on a great war with such intense spiritual exultation to be unconcerned with practical planning. And there were some who believed that these mundane matters should be left to the Holy Spirit to sort out. But they tended to come to a sticky end. For most crusaders, holy war was a serious business, calling for professional organisation, ample finance and meticulous logistical preparation.

Jack Castle

The bitterness of Bacon

From our UK edition

When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established, and perhaps even establishment. He had been the subject of retrospectives at the Tate and the Guggenheim, and the Marlborough Gallery had paid off several decades’ worth of gambling debts. No longer an authentically marginal figure, ‘mythologising his life’ was ‘at the very centre of his existence and painting’; and for 29 years Peppiatt became his scribe, drinking partner, estate agent, confidante, gatekeeper and admirer, and the recipient of lavish dinners, drinks, flats, paintings and acquaintances. Alienated from his own family, Peppiatt grew up in Bacon’s world and only belatedly grew out of it.

Alex Clark

Quiet desperation

From our UK edition

Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an intensely curious affair; thick with material detail from the outset, it announces itself as a novel of closely observed and relished realism. But before too long, one begins to suspect that its specificity — much of it maritime, with excursions into other arcana such as rare guitars, or the pharmaceutical industry — is a blind, any literal reading liable to produce only bemusement. A clue comes very early on, when graduate student Maud Stamp falls 20 feet from a dry-docked boat; to her shocked companion, Tim, she briefly appears to have become a corpse.

Harry Mount

On the way to the Forum

From our UK edition

It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral cats that stroll across the murder scene. Jochen Bleicken shrewdly begins this long, occasionally heavygoing but unequalled biography with that murder. It’s only because Caesar appointed his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (known later as Augustus) as his adopted son and heir that the latter rose to such heights. But for that crucial adoption, Augustus wasn’t that posh.

Andrew Taylor

Universal appeal

From our UK edition

As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a dystopian vision of the 23rd century, scholarly espionage set in Cold War Oxford, and an Arts-and-Crafts pastoral called Anterwold, which involves swords and scholars and may or may not be the product of the imagination of one of the characters elsewhere. All this (and much else) is somehow connected to an 18th-century text known as The Devil’s Handwriting containing a mathematical formulation that wasn’t invented until five centuries later. Confused? It gets far more complicated. Arcadia is not so much a novel as a cornucopia of narratives. These unfold through three interlocking universes and involve the viewpoints of ten characters.

Lewis Jones

The history man

From our UK edition

History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar, born and raised to the purple, in his mind he somehow was History, and of his many achievements the greatest was to persuade others to share that belief. His career presents the realised fantasy of the charismatic narcissist, which is to be taken at one’s own estimation. The American writer and academic Jay Parini, who was a friend of his from the 1980s, remembers him saying, ‘I might have been president’, but the presidency would not have been enough.

Peter Parker

Action this day

From our UK edition

‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life,’ Philip Howe recalled, with characteristic English dryness, half a century after taking part in the most catastrophic 24 hours in the history of the British army. Howe had been a lieutenant in the 10th West Yorkshires, which had the grim distinction of losing more men during the first day on the Somme than any other battalion: of the 1,050 that went into battle, 710 became casualties, 60 per cent of whom were killed. At the end of the day Howe was the only officer left standing, and many other battalions had suffered almost as badly.