Book review

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Blown to blazes

From our UK edition

The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the dangerous and difficult task was remote Kent. A fire broke out and led to a series of huge explosions. Deaths and injuries were not widely specified at the time for reasons of morale, but 109 men and boys were killed. The explosives industry was a necessary, profitable but immensely dangerous one. It took the 1654 Delft explosion — in which Carel Fabritius was killed — for society to realise that explosives should probably not be manufactured in cities. The Kent disaster took place a couple of miles from Faversham, and the works had been built at a safe distance from the town precisely to limit the number of casualties in case of disaster.

Richard Davenporthines

Wilde about the boy

From our UK edition

The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The facts have been rehashed in numerous biographies, and dramatised by such actors as Robert Morley, Peter Finch, Rupert Everett and Stephen Fry. The only way to attack the subject with any hope of surprise is by an oblique sideways move from an unexpected angle. This was Robert Maguire’s method in Ceremonies of Bravery (2013), an intriguing account of Wilde’s friendship with the man-about-town Carlos Blacker and their connection with the Dreyfus affair in France. Another enjoyably tangential contribution is Linda Stratmann’s recent The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde’s Nemesis.

Thursday

Eric Anderson

Full of sound and fury

From our UK edition

John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness’. Yet this awkward cuss, son of a merchant in Haddington and initially a young Roman Catholic priest, became a pillar of the Reformation in Europe and the inspiration for Presbyterianism in Scotland. The recent Scottish political television debates remind us also that his strident tone is still fashionable in Scotland. The black and white judgments proclaimed rather than discussed, and the winning of arguments by out-shouting opponents, are exactly in the style of Knox. He knew precisely what reforms were needed in the church.

Philip Womack

A break from sabre-thrusting

From our UK edition

Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not too clever; where the only sensible vote is Tory; where Moors make ‘uncommonly good cymbalists’. Everything gleams, buffed up to a shining surface: it is a fantasy of empire and glory. Two thirds of the way through this, the 12th book, our hero finds himself at the site of the Battle of Waterloo. He himself had fought there as a young cornet; now, almost 20 years later, and in command of his own regiment, he reconsiders the scene.

Chris Fletcher

Blitzed on Benzedrine

From our UK edition

Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance. Such pastoral care may be advisable for any institution ending up with the private archive of letters, diaries and artwork from which Joscelyn Godwin compiles this eccentric and nicely produced account of his parents’ lives from 1940 to 1948. Edward Fell Scott-Snell and Stephani Mary Allfree met in 1935 and set about cultivating Thessyros, a fantasy land Edward had already sown with overripe imagery and peopled with priapic cupids, ageing debauchees and, Godwin explains, ‘assorted gardeners, priests, and organists who gleefully seduce their willing, under-aged charges’.

Stanley Wells

Sher force of character

From our UK edition

Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays had a long period of gestation before it emerged, fully formed and laughing, from under the covers of a bed also occupied by Prince Hal and a couple of prostitutes. Sher tells the story in diary form, as he did that of his Year of the King (1985), in which he described how his sensational Richard III arrived ‘before his time into this breathing world’. Falstaff was not obvious casting for one who does not profess to be a comic actor.

Jane Ridley

Songs of innocence and experience

From our UK edition

We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can’t afford to leave home and can’t get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature. Both sides of the generational divide should take comfort from this timely, thoughtful work by Steven Mintz, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. In Mintz’s view, no one is to blame for these changes, neither the selfish baby boomers nor their Peter Pan offspring. What is happening is a shift in the nature of adulthood, and to understand this we need a historical perspective.

Sarah Churchwell

Snow White or black beauty?

From our UK edition

God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it is a story of internalised racism and paedophilia; like Tar Baby it is a fable about sexual and racial autonomy in the form of a love story between a beautiful, vain woman and a man who thinks she has lost her moral compass. But unlike those earlier efforts, Morrison’s latest book offers only the most inconsequential answers to questions of grave consequence. Her abiding interest has always been self-possession and self-recovery, an especially charged problem for black people in a racist culture; but this novel reads like a précis of those themes, in which conviction substitutes for complexity — a colouring book that no one bothered to colour in.

Ali A.

The sick man of Europe finally succumbs

From our UK edition

In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai, China’s premier on the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ was Zhou’s answer. Zhou was not simply being enigmatic. His answer had a great deal to do with the enormous consequences that flow from cataclysmic events such as revolutions and wars, which influence the course of peoples and nations in ways that cannot be easily foreordained or traced. The Great War led to the dissolution of three European empires — Russian, Austrian and German — from which emerged unimaginable consequences for the future of Europe and indeed the world.

Craig Raine

The raw material of fiction

From our UK edition

Saul Bellow died in 2005. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The first installment of Zachary Leader’s exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling biography runs to over 800 pages and takes us only as far as 1964. The length is important. It allows Leader to adjudicate calmly, weigh the evidence — sometimes remaining undecided — and quote Bellow freely, so that the biographical narrative is enlivened by Bellow’s prodigally gifted prose, little injections of bliss.

Thursday

Steven Poole

Indulge your inner reptile

From our UK edition

What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question no one in their right mind would ask, but this book represents a kind of answer anyway. Offering a rambling pseudoscientific argument that some countries are better than others at enabling their citizens to flourish, it affects to have uncovered archetypes of the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ that are characteristic of each nation. Meanwhile, cultures get a gold star if they indulge, rather than repress, the ‘reptilian’ part of our brains, which is mainly interested in food and sex, as opposed to the ‘limbic’ brain (emotions) and the cortex (higher reasoning). As the authors repeatedly insist, ‘The reptilian always wins.

Duncan Fallowell

Toujours la politesse

From our UK edition

Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then transported to terraces of cypress and statuary, sunshine and high art, Edith Wharton and Paul of Yugoslavia cooing over a balustrade. Clark was 22 and had just finished at Oxford; he was ‘doing’ Italy with Charles Bell, Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean. Lunch at I Tatti, Berenson’s citadel of aesthetic endeavour near Florence, was arranged. By the end of it, Clark had been taken on as Berenson’s assistant for the revision of the master’s classic The Drawings of the Florentine Painters.

Tim Bouverie

Passionate pioneers

From our UK edition

If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even greater reason could be said of her daughter Mary Shelley. Not only was she the child of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was also the daughter of William Godwin, the radical political philosopher. Given this auspicious pedigree, it is perhaps not surprising that Shelley would lead a life every bit as daring as her mother, and in Frankenstein produce a masterpiece of equal fame. A joint biography of this most famous mother/daughter combination is, therefore, a good idea.

Julie Burchill

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…

From our UK edition

Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have been occasions during the past three years, since I was given the heave-ho from my last regular newspaper column, when I’ve felt that I didn’t exist any more, despite having a happy marriage and more than enough money. Then I recently returned from a carefree holiday, realised that I had four deadlines over the next four days (including this one) and momentarily wished for those wilderness times. But on balance I know I would rather work than not. That is, of course, if one can call reading a book about work, and then scribbling 700 words about it, ‘working’ at all.

Andrew Taylor

Gore blimey

From our UK edition

Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had brought him into critical disfavour, he turned to writing sprightly detective fiction under the name of Edgar Box. It’s much less well-known that he also took a dip in the far murkier waters of the pulp thriller. Thieves Fall Out, originally published in 1953 and then deservedly forgotten, centres on Pete Wells, ex-wildcatter and former war hero, who turns up in King Farouk’s Egypt for no very good reason. Mugged in a Cairo brothel, he’s forced to look for work. Naturally he goes to Shepheard’s hotel (‘where the biggest operators lived’).

Lee Langley

A peephole into Peru

From our UK edition

Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came the soufflé of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter with its mischievous nod to TV soaps, followed by The Feast of the Goat, a searing portrait of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. Sixteen novels on, The Discreet Hero is Llosa-lite. Nobel laureate, academic and politician (he ran for president in 1990), Peru’s most celebrated writer has acknowledged Flaubert as his spiritual mentor. In The Perpetual Orgy, a critical study, he put forward his theory of Flaubert’s style: the manipulation of narrative and time, obsession with pairs, humanising of objects. All are here, in abundance, in the new book.

William Cook

Bitten by the bug

From our UK edition

‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at night, which may be why, like the author of this book, I never thought bedbugs were real. ‘Bedbugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing,’ Brooke Borel told her father (a pathologist who specialises in skin conditions). But as Mr Borel told his disbelieving daughter, bedbugs are real all right. They even have a fancy Latin name: Cimex lectularius. So, having been bitten to buggery (moral: never share a flat with someone who bought a used futon off the internet) Brooke Borel did what virtually every journalist ends up doing, eventually, and wrote a book about her misfortunes.

Mark Mason

Dirty dealing across the board

From our UK edition

I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known antidote to the will to the live. There is a 12 per cent chance that any given game of Monopoly will go on for ever (the other 88 per cent just feel like that). In fact I’m still not convinced that the name isn’t a spelling mistake. The story of Monopoly, on the other hand — now there’s a thing. Specifically, the story of how it was invented. For decades the accepted version had down-on-his-luck Charles Darrow creating the game in the 1930s, as entertainment for his impoverished family and a reminder of happier times when they’d holidayed in Atlantic City.

Michael Moorcock

Gunning for freedom

From our UK edition

Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as a boy. As an adult I joined a campaign to monitor, curb and limit the arms trade. I taught my children good gun protocols and how to shoot. There is an undeniable pleasure in shooting. When I moved to Texas I immediately bought a black powder Navy Colt with which to practise the cowboy spins, rolls and shifts I had learned as a boy. The thing Bible-belt Baptists, Bedouin tribesmen, Brazilian drug-barons and Boer farmers have in common is a love of guns. Guns are in our DNA. Yet statistics prove that, wherever they proliferate, murder and suicide rise and children are killed.

Christopher Bray

What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him

From our UK edition

Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break is the fact that Ed Miliband is a snooker fan. Which doesn’t mean he was a Steve Davis fan. Davis was ‘boring’, Miliband told the Guardian recently. The sentiment was widely shared during Davis’s 1980s heyday. Indeed, the writers of Spitting Image found him so dull they nicknamed him ‘Interesting’. Hence the hostage-to-fortune title of what is by my count Davis’s third volume of autobiography. Will the leader of the opposition find anything in the book’s turgidly ghostwritten pages to modify his opinion? One fears not. Yet if Interesting isn’t exactly unputdownable, nor is it unpickupable.