Book review

Thursday

Charlotte Hobson

Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

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Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re- imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick Gale’s work — it feels entirely convincing that his secret should be ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

Charlotte Moore

Monstrous, beautiful, damaged people make for tiresome company in Polly Samson’s The Kindness

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Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a mother who wants to mother him even more than they do. Part of his appealing vulnerability is that he has no father; another part is that he has a potentially fatal allergy to wasps. One hot summer day he is saved from anaphylactic shock by Karl, a medical student who is researching sperm motility. They become friends. Julian provides samples for Karl’s research, and — well, what Karl notices under the microscope provides the basis for the plot. You can see it coming, as the actress said to the bishop. Julian meets Julia, eight years older, married to an abusive husband with amber eyes, a hawk called Lucifer and a freezer full of baby mice.

Hermione Eyre

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

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They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’ he observed. ‘It is wanting more.’ Those in need might disagree. But from where Seneca was sitting, in his personal banqueting suite with 500 ivory-legged tables (all matching, no less — matching furniture in Rome was considered staggeringly smart, due to the lack of means of mechanical reproduction) he was able to cultivate the elegant indifference to luxury that speaks to our age so vividly.

Will Nicoll

British colonialism is once again under attack in Aatish Taseer’s sprawling Indian epic

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Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of Delhi. The city’s bright bazaars and bald communal gardens, among them ‘the occasional tomb of a forgotten medieval official’, are ‘stitched together with the radial sprawl of Lutyens’s city’. Taseer acknowledges the landscape’s beauty, but buried in his description, with its reference to the British architect who designed much of Delhi during the empire, is the painful and stifling legacy of history. For Taseer, it is an atmosphere that infects Delhi — simultaneously a ‘submerged necropolis’ and a city where ‘the dense cold air, sulphurous and full of particles, closes over old wounds’.

Jonathan Beckman

Symbolism and a man called U: more avant-garde fiction from Tom McCarthy

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In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction, comparing it favourably to Joseph O’Neill’s lush Netherland, which she deprecated as incarnating the worst delusions of realism. Funny how rapidly Smith’s distinction has disintegrated: McCarthy’s latest, Satin Island, bears an uncanny similarity to O’Neill’s recent novel The Dog. Both are narrated by an affectless young male professional known only by a single initial (X in the case of O’Neill, U in McCarthy’s); and both dramatise the moral and intellectual contortions imposed by commercial environments on people whose sympathies are with the left.

Mark Cocker

Why the cheating cuckoo may finally be getting its comeuppance

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In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with emotion, while the descriptions of place and wildlife often serve as a hazy green backcloth against which the author depicts the main subject —their own personalities. It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to find a new nature book that returns to a traditional format. It’s one in which the character of the writer barely intrudes and the real subject, picked apart in meticulous detail, is nature itself. In the hands of a scholar who is also a first-rate storyteller, you realise just how entertaining such a work can be.

Simon Heffer

The art of political biography remains in intensive care if Giles Radice’s latest book is anything to go by, says Simon Heffer

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With the odd exception — I think principally of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher — the genre of political biography has known hard times lately. There are few faster routes to the remainder shop, other, of course, than the political memoir, most of which I presume are now written to create a tax loss for their publishers. This decline is not down to poor scholarship, but, I suspect, to the general distaste so many literate and inquiring people feel for politicians. Reading accounts of the New Labour years in particular is rather like touring an abattoir before the cleaners have been in. So those who want to write about politicians must find new ways to do so, and Lord Radice, a former long-serving Labour MP, has chosen to look at partnerships of politicians.

India Knight

This terrifying book puts me off going online ever again —except maybe to Ocado — says India Knight

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Jeremy Clarkson has been getting it in the neck from Twitter’s (I was going to say) tricoteuses — but social media is both thicko mob and gleeful, literal-minded public executioner. A couple of weeks ago it was George Galloway; and the week before that — oh, I can’t remember. I had a theory about 21st-century shame before I read Jon Ronson’s book — namely that it passes quickly. A Profumo would atone for a lifetime; a Huhne leaves jail to book deals and newspaper columns. The internet fire burns more intensely but turns to ashes faster. Yeesh, was I wrong. Ronson thinks it all started well.

Ian Thomson

Life in the LA ghetto was nasty, brutish and short — until one brave detective took on the gangs

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Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit. Black Angelinos can be — and for a period in the 1980s and early 1990s, were — murdered for a trifle. The slightest act of ‘disrespect’ may call for a tit-for-tat killing, where an entire family is rubbed out to avenge a perceived affront. Such disregard for human life is unknown in the white neighbourhoods of LA. Is there a specifically black predisposition to gun crime? Or is that too narrow an assumption? The violence endemic to Watts, Compton and other black LA suburbs is reckoned (by some) to be a delayed response to the cruelty of plantation life.

Melanie McDonagh

Love child or bastard: the lottery of being born on the wrong side of the blanket

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My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass him off to a hospital and couldn’t find any takers so she brought him into a draper’s shop, put him down on the counter and declared she didn’t know what she was going to do with him. The shop assistant piped up to say that her sister didn’t have any children of her own and would quite like a baby. So off she went to fetch her sister, who took him off, tucked inside her cardigan, and that, dear reader, is how he ended up with his mother and father. I mention this prior to discussing In the Family Way because it’s about illegitimacy and some bits ring true to my father’s experience in Ireland before the war.

James Mcconnachie

Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters

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In England, walking about at night was a crime for a very long time. William the Conqueror ordained that a bell should be rung at 8 p.m., at which point Londoners were supposed to put their fires and candles out and their heads down. Again and again, until modern times, Matthew Beaumont tells us, specifically nocturnal laws were promulgated against draw-latchets, roberdsmen, barraters, roysterers, roarers, harlots and other nefarious nightwalkers — including those ‘eavesdroppers’ who stood listening in the close darkness where the rain dripped from a house’s eaves. Beaumont reads such laws as being designed to exert political and social control.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree

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In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight adults with a bomb attack. His hatred was directed at the children of Norwegian politicians who had allowed immigration to contaminate the sturdy bond (as he saw it) of Nordic race and nationhood. ‘You will all die today, Marxists!’ he hurrahed as he stalked and shot his way to infamy. Inflated with self-importance, Breivik was a self-styled ‘Justicious Knight Commander’ come to cauterise Norway of bloody foreigners. He advocated the racial rejuvenation of his homeland through the expulsion of Muslims, and to this end he photographed himself in masonic Crusader regalia, sumptuously gold-braided and primed for holy war. Was he mad?

Alex Clark

Hock and partridge help fascism go down in 1930s London

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Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an anguished protagonist sits in lonely contemplation for 80 pages at a stretch. It moves along at a clippy pace, introducing us to a succession of appealing characters and throwing in a lurid murder for extra oomph. But despite its wealth of detail — the lino-clad corridors and ‘mournful furniture’ of a Marylebone boarding-house, lamplighters doing their rounds, actresses wearing Guerlain’s Jicky — it is more substantial than a period romp.

Hilary Spurling

John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines

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John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to how to cure the fungal infection thrush by jamming a live frog into a child’s mouth (you hold it there until it — the frog — suffocates, then replace it with a fresh frog). He seemed half-cracked as often as not to less empirical 17th-century contemporaries, and for most of the next 200 years posterity forgot him. His astonishing renaissance in the last century owed much to two novelists: Anthony Powell, who published a biography, followed by a selection of Aubrey’s Brief Lives in 1949, and John Fowles, who brought out his Monumenta Britannica for the first time in 1980.

Richard Ingrams

Ancients on oldies: tips on ageing from the Romans are all Greek to Richard Ingrams

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A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th birthday of my Ancient History tutor George Cawkwell. There were toasts and speeches, including one from George himself and my fellow student Robin (now Lord) Butler, who did a brilliant imitation of George getting all excited when describing the battle of Marathon and reverting, temporarily, to his native New Zealand accent. In the company of such men, not forgetting another fine speechmaker, Edward Enfield, also one of George’s pupils, I felt ill at ease. There they were, overflowing with classical allusions, and there was I, wondering how I could have forgotten almost everything I had known about the ancient world including the battle of Marathon.

Juliet Nicolson

Sex, rebellion, ambition, prejudice: the story of 1950s women has it all

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Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn was the exuberant 15-year-old daughter of ‘a sharp-tempered, anti-social’ mother riddled with ‘neurotic restrictiveness’. But Valerie had fallen in love. She had met Brian in 1949 at the local ballroom in Leicester, her sole permissible social excursion of the week. Prevented from continuing her education by parents who insisted she earn her living at the city’s knitwear factory, Valerie’s early ambition to start her own business was crushed by the demotivating monotony of her job. Romance offered an emotional if not a physical escape.

William Dalrymple

British India — the scene of repeated war crimes throughout the 19th century

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‘Sometimes, strolling through the ruins of earlier civilisations, we idly wonder what it must have been like to live through the end of one of them,’ writes Ferdinand Mount at the end of The Tears of the Rajas. ‘Now we know for ourselves.’ This is a long, wonderfully discursive and reassuringly old-fashioned book which tells the story of the British in India through the lives of one British family — the author’s ancestors, the Lows of Clatto in Fife. The Lows also happen to be the ancestors of Mount’s cousin, David Cameron. The action opens in 1805, in the aftermath of the Second Maratha War, when the East India Company had established its dominant military position through most of the Indian interior.

Nicky Haslam

Madly Modern Mary overcomes childhood hardships to become the Queen of Shops

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In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her countrywide progress as monarch and oracle of retail, but conjures a nostalgic cornucopia of the mid- 20th-century brands and frankly cheesy TV personalities (she often dressed up as Jimmy Savile) that dazzled her youthful Hertfordshire eyes. These were rapturously set on future journeys, of which we get only one — her great leap forward from North Watford to Knightsbridge, where her undoubted brilliance as a window-dresser eventually blossomed at Harvey Nichols.

Thursday

Christopher Bray

Jean-Paul Sartre was perhaps the 20th century’s most famous thinker – if you can get beyond the verbiage

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Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if not an intellectual — so much so that one struggles to think of him as anything but an intellectual. Albert Camus, Sartre’s great rival for the title of the 20th century’s most famous thinker, was a strong swimmer and a stronger soccer player. A little adolescent boxing aside, Sartre did little but sit at zinc tables necking coffee and Corydrane (the amphetamine-based painkiller he was addicted to).

Tibor Fischer

John Gray’s great tour-guide of ideas: from the Garden of Eden to secret rendition

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You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft of content, so painfully thin that they’re transparent, and you wonder why anyone would publish them. I can imagine Gray’s editor begging him to jettison some profundity. The reader is bombarded with boulders of philosophy and politics. Religions are gobbled up. Whole civilisations whizz past. It’s the ontological kitchen sink coming atcha, or to paraphrase Joyce, Here Comes Everything. Not just the past, but the future too.