Book review

Thursday

Leyla Sanai

When two young Britons go camping in Yosemite their lives are changed for ever

From our UK edition

The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two British men who befriend each other in their early twenties in 1993 when in the US. Among the sights they see on a tour of Yosemite is a pair of old trees with a conjoined trunk known as ‘The Faithful Couple’. Neil lost his mother as a child, and his father owns and runs a stationery store. He is the only one in his family to have been to university. Adam comes from a more entitled background and is full of confidence. When he speaks of his career ambitions in TV it is with certainty, not hope. Despite their differences, the two strike up a friendship.

Viv Groskop

The Dear Leader’s passion for films — and the real-life horror movie it led to

From our UK edition

Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un, North Korea interpreted the film as ‘an act of war’. Sony Pictures were hacked by a group linked to North Korea and hundreds of humiliating titbits about spats between celebrities and Sony execs made public, most memorably the description of Angelina Jolie as ‘a minimally talented spoilt brat’. The film was first cancelled and then given a limited release. Kim Jong-un had the last laugh when the reviews came out, however. ‘About as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted,’ said Variety.

Louis Amis

A Father’s Day tragedy: what exactly happened when a car plunged into a reservoir in Australia in 2005?

From our UK edition

When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged into a reservoir.Why wouldn’t that be an accident? But Garner seems to have had a premonition. This House of Grief is her account of the murder trial, and ultimate conviction, of the car’s driver, Robert Farquharson, who had escaped and swum ashore while his three young sons drowned.

Nick Cohen

If ‘incorrect’ English is what’s widely understood, how can it be wrong?

From our UK edition

In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys). At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them company. A leader-writer for the Times and its resident authority on style, Kamm is the most small ‘c’ conservative man I know. If he has ever left home without cleaning his shoes — and I doubt that he has — he would have realised his mistake before reaching the end of his road, and rushed back to apply the polish. Instead of joining the pedants, however, Kamm batters them.

Tim Butcher

Both Belgium and the United States should be called to account for the death of Patrice Lumumba

From our UK edition

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even still alive and being held hostage in the Ituri rain-forest. So radiotrottoir assured me variously in January 2001 when I made my first visit to Kinshasa around the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s disappearance. The reason for my trip felt darkly familiar: one of Lumumba’s successors as national leader, Laurent Kabila, had himself just been assassinated by a ‘turned’ bodyguard.

Mark Mason

2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)

From our UK edition

My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per year and the average British dog walker 676. Eric Chaline’s history of the institution has offered up some competition on the fact front — but my cynicism remains undimmed. Chaline, a personal trainer and weightlifting instructor, certainly shows that ‘gym-bunny’ doesn’t have to equal ‘numbskull’. The book is learned and well-researched, and although this sometimes gives us sentences such as ‘The body plays a central role in the transformation of abstract social discourses into lived actions and identities’, it also furnishes some pretty interesting history.

Peter J. Conradi

Another enemy within: Thatcher (and Wilson) vs the BBC

From our UK edition

In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of ‘pinkoes and traitors’. That drollery points to the corporation’s paradoxical place in British life: an essential part of the establishment (‘Auntie’) yet sometimes its most daring critic, willing to put impartiality above patriotism. Jean Seaton makes one wonder at this impressive balancing act in a book that continues Asa Briggs’s magisterial history of the BBC up to 1987. After the war many from newly liberated Europe thanked the BBC Overseas Service for keeping hope alive during the Occupation; this was reprised after the Berlin wall fell.

Philip Hensher

A strain of mysticism is discernible in the floating colour fields of Mark Rothko’s glowing canvases

From our UK edition

One of the curiosities of western art is that, until the 20th century, few visual artists were of Jewish ancestry. With odd exceptions such as the Pissarros and Simeon Solomon, the culture tended to produce verbal rather than visual imaginations. With the 20th century that changed. The important group of abstract expressionists that came out of New York after the second world war centred on at least two Jewish artists — Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Both possessed a specifically Jewish imagination, and both narrowed down their pictorial language to forms that expressed mystical aspects of their ancestral culture and faith. In Newman’s case it was the ‘zip’, a thin vertical stripe in a colour field connecting Earth and Heaven.

Thursday

Will Self

Don’t buy The Glass Cage at the airport if you want a restful flight, warns Will Self

From our UK edition

Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner. In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows. The title does indeed say it all: Carr’s view was that our increasing use of these technologies is having an impact on our cognitive and other physical faculties, and that by and large it’s a negative one.

Harry Mount

The first Lord Dufferin: the eclipse of a most eminent Victorian

From our UK edition

The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the Victorian age. In the second half of the 19th century, Dufferin zoomed around the empire, hoovering up the sweetest plums in the diplomatic service: Governor-General of Canada, ambassador to the courts of Russia, Turkey and Italy, ambassador to France, Viceroy of India. Why did Queen Victoria’s proconsul slip into oblivion? Andrew Gailey, the Vice-Provost of Eton — until now best known as housemaster to Princes William and Harry — answers the question, telling not just Dufferin’s sad, dazzling story but the story of the empire at its high point, before the fall. Practically all the good fairies gathered for Dufferin’s birth in 1826.

Lucy Beresford

Michael Arditti is the Graham Greene of our time

From our UK edition

Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s utter contempt, Duncan is also the eloquent yet mild-mannered editor of the Francombe Mercury, a local newspaper on its last legs. Francombe too has seen better days, not least since its pier burnt down in 2013 (an event covered fulsomely in the Mercury). While Duncan negotiates a good take-over deal for Mercury staff and their pensions, he’s also trying to prevent the ruined pier from being developed into a sex theme park by his schoolboy nemesis Geoffrey Weedon. The fact that Duncan’s ex-wife Linda is married to Geoffrey’s brother doesn’t help. Thank goodness then for Ellen, a new arrival to Francombe after the jailing of her fraudster husband.

Daniel Hahn

Reading one book from every country in the world sounds like fun – until you come to North Korea

From our UK edition

One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial. No worse than most English-language readers’, perhaps, but still with dramatic, unnecessary bias towards the Anglophone, with only Freud and a single battered Madame Bovary representing the other 90-odd per cent of the global population. Morgan prescribed herself a corrective, embarking on a 12-month course of reading one book from each country of the world. (Which is how many, exactly? We’ll come to that…) The experience was recorded on her blog, ayearofreading-theworld.com, and is now synthesised into this brilliant, unlikely book.

James Walton

Ogres, pixies, dragons, goblins… Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years is a strange beast indeed

From our UK edition

If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon called Querig, I suspect you might have taken a while to guess that the answer was Kazuo Ishiguro. Admittedly, since his career-establishing 1980s triumphs with An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro has been at some pains to distance himself from poignant, perfectly-wrought narratives by uptight self-deceivers who find themselves on the wrong side of history. There was, for example, the long, dream-like and famously punishing The Unconsoled. More rewardingly, Never Let Me Go — published ten years ago — took place in an alternative Nineties world in which clones were created to act as organ donors.

Alexander Masters

How could anyone enjoy Cédric Villani’s ‘Birth of a Theorem’? I think I’ve worked it out

From our UK edition

I’ve got a mathematical problem. Birth of a Theorem is by one of the great geniuses of today, a cosmopolitan, liberal-minded man who helps his wife look after their children, likes big-hearted folk songs, welcomes diversity and wears the same jewellery as I do. But as a contribution to the genre of popular maths, the book stinks. To give the problem extra calculus, my favourite maths writer is a sour-faced white supremacist with a mouth the shape of staple, who thinks women in America should be deprived of the vote and apparently calls himself ‘Derb’.

Adam Nicolson

Fizmer, feetings, flosh, blinter – enjoy these words and forget them immediately, advises Adam Nicolson

From our UK edition

Wolfsnow is a dangerous blizzard at sea; slogger the sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s sides; ammil the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost; af’rug the reflection of a wave after it has struck the shore; blinter is a cold dazzle; sutering the cranky action of a rising heron; èit, a Gaelic word, is a piece of quartz placed in a moorland stream so that it glimmers in the moonlight and in that way attracts salmon in late summer and autumn; summer geese is steam that rises from the moor when rain is followed by hot sunshine; fizmer the noise of wind rustling in long grass; may-blobs are kingcups; zwer is the whizzing of partridges as they break cover; feetings are footprints of creatures as they appear in the snow; twindle is stream foam; an after-drop.

Thursday

David Crane

Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend

From our UK edition

In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the Caspian sea, came to an unscheduled standstill among the lonely desert dunes of Transcaspia. From one of the two carriages stumbled a group of bound and blindfolded prisoners, who were pushed and dragged up to the crest of a nearby dune, and there gunned down and their bodies hastily covered with sand. In the context of the times and the area — 15,000 men, women and children had just been slaughtered in Baku on the other side of the Caspian — the political execution of 26 Bolsheviks might not seem a major event, but it was a murder that would resonate down through Soviet history.

Marcus Berkmann

Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Elvis, Bob Dylan – all the greats ultimately owe their fame to the faceless ‘record men’

From our UK edition

The crucial thing to remember about the music business is that it’s a business. If you happen to be creating great art as well, that’s a bonus, but it has never been compulsory. Only in the music business could someone who hates music as much as Simon Cowell clearly does become so rich and powerful. And for a group like Westlife to have enjoyed a 15-year career of uninterrupted chart success without recording a single song anyone can remember, or even name, is something we have to admire. It was only ever about the money. To be fair to them, they have never pretended otherwise. At the same time, though, where would we be without the ‘record men’, the entrepreneurs and executives who live and breathe music, eat and drink it?

Susie Boyt

‘Another terrible thing…’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style

From our UK edition

Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related to Berryman’s strange sense of guilt over his father’s suicide. At the heart of Catherine Lacey’s novel there is another suicide that brings with it enormous pain and grief, that of the heroine Elyria’s adopted sister Ruby, six years earlier. This is a novel of extremes — to put it mildly — charting Elyria’s slide into a derelict state. It is a witty, knowing and lyrical work that takes as its subject the thoughts and feelings of a woman who has suffered more misery than most humans can take. The bulk of the novel’s action takes place in New Zealand, but it could happen anywhere.

Julie Burchill

Emer O’Toole is a joyless bore compared with my heroine Caitlin Moran, says Julie Burchill

From our UK edition

Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word ‘gender’, my heart sank. When I was a kiddy in the early 1970s, the word (especially when combined with ‘bending’) seemed full of fun and flighty possibilities — David Bowie in a dress, Marc Bolan flouncing about on Top of the Pops like a little girl at her birthday party, Danny La Rue making my mum snort Snowball down her nose on a Saturday night. Now gender-bending appears to have boiled down to a bunch of hatchet-faced transsexuals demanding to use the Ladies, ‘no-platforming’ veteran feminists who have worked all their lives to better the lot of women and children, and generally telling born females what to do.

Alan Judd

The gripping story of the failed NKVD officer who fooled the FBI and the CIA

From our UK edition

This is not quite another story about a man who never was. But it is about a man who certainly wasn’t what he said he was. The context is Russian intelligence operations of the 1930s, especially those of the NKVD (known later as the KGB) during the Spanish civil war. In Britain we tend to see 1930s/1940s espionage through the prism of the Cambridge spies — Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Blunt, the so-called Ring of Five — but, as Boris Volodarsky points out, the full picture is much wider. By 1937, he reckons, the Russians had over 100 agents and collaborators in Britain alone, with many more in other western countries. And they were ruthlessly active in Spain.