Book reviews

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Hand over fist

From our UK edition

When King Abdullah first started work on this political memoir two years ago, he can hardly have imagined how different the Middle East would look by the time of its publication. Change in this region, which prizes stability above all else, mostly occurs at a glacial pace, if it happens at all. Yet the region has been turned upside down so quickly, with the popular revolutions that began in Tunisia and Egypt, that one can reasonably wonder what other surprises may lie in store before this review is published. Change is no longer a political slogan voiced by a distant American president. It’s real. It’s happening now. Tunis and Cairo have proved to be only the start. Stability, all of a sudden, doesn’t look so stable.

Lloyd Evans

The messiah is betrayed

From our UK edition

A monsoon of literature will eventually be written about the WikiLeaks story. Here are two of the first droplets. David Leigh and Luke Harding have delivered an enjoyable account of the Guardian’s fraught dealings with Julian Assange and the publication of the secret US cables. The WikiLeaks founder comes across as a shadowy, manipulative character with the habits of a tramp and the brain of a chess grandmaster. When it suited him he displayed an absurdly possessive attitude towards documents he couldn’t possibly claim legal title to. The story is blown dramatically off course by the assault charges filed against Assange by two Swedish women last year. In Leigh and Harding’s account the allegations amount to very little.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

The call of the wild

From our UK edition

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. (Her father’s ancestors, who left Anjou for Canada in the 17th century, were called Prou or Preault; her mother’s arrived in New England soon after the Mayflower.) Her fiction tends to be about hard times in rural America, and though her new book is a memoir it runs true to form.

Cressida Connolly

A world of talking trees

From our UK edition

Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger? The sad answer is Henry. The trees and the wind tell him to remove his clothes and swim in freezing water: fished out of the sea at Newhaven in February, he is taken to hospital and subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. This book is an account of the next seven years of Henry’s life, both from his father’s perspective and his own.

Jonathan Mirsky

Hothouse hell

From our UK edition

Amy Chua, Tiger Mother and John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale, was born in the Chinese year of the tiger, and a tiger, she says, ‘the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect’. She describes her own personality: ‘Hot- tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving’. Amy Chua, Tiger Mother and John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale, was born in the Chinese year of the tiger, and a tiger, she says, ‘the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect’. She describes her own personality: ‘Hot- tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving’. I missed the last quality in this disturbing book; she should have written ‘monomaniacal’.

Robert Stewart

Poetic licentiousness

From our UK edition

Reprobates were, in the Calvinist lexicon, those unfortunates not included among God’s elect and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation. Reprobates were, in the Calvinist lexicon, those unfortunates not included among God’s elect and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation. For stern English puritans it was pleasing to think that Royalist ‘cavaliers’ were among them. Alas, there was no way of knowing. Gallingly, since life everlasting could be bought neither by good works (in the Roman tradition) nor by belief alone (in the Lutheran disposition), cavaliers had an equal chance of it with anyone else. But then, confusion reigns everywhere in the entangled mesh of roundhead versus cavalier.

Jonathan Croall

A serious man

From our UK edition

For much of the second half of his life Arthur Miller was a man whose future lay behind him. The acclaimed American playwright, celebrated for classics such as The Crucible, All My Sons, A View from the Bridge and Death of a Salesman, struggled to get his later plays staged in his own country. When occasionally they were put on they were fiercely attacked by most critics, who thought them tedious, preachy and ill-written; as one typically said of Incident at Vichy, it was ‘the same old noisy virtue and moral flatulence’. Miller, they decided, was a relic of the postwar era, stuck in the ideological struggles of the past, and totally out of touch with the modern theatre.

Philip Mansel

The battle for the holy city

From our UK edition

In a tour de force of 500 pages of text Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian of Stalin and Potemkin, turns to a totally different subject: the city of Jerusalem. Founded around 1000 BC by Jews on Canaanite foundations, it has been, in turn, capital of the Kingdom of Judah; scene of the crucifixion of Jesus and of Mohammed’s night ride to heaven; a provincial city in the Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and British empires; and finally the capital of Israel. Using the latest archaeological evidence, Montefiore recounts with verve the manias and massacres of the different dynasties which ruled the city. The line of David, the blood of the Prophet, the Crusader dynasties of Flanders and Lusignan dominated the city as well as competing religions.

Anthony Cummins

Dark, moral and lyrical

From our UK edition

A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. But the afternoon is a washout: their haughty hostess has a neck rash and is too distracted for chit-chat. Trudging home, the girl suddenly craves tinned peaches. No, says her mother, ‘it would be an extravagance’; perhaps another day.

Saturday

Andrew Petrie

Bipolar exploration

From our UK edition

'I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent. Paradoxical Undressing (Atlantic Books, £18.99) is a memoir based on the diary Hersh kept as a teenager in the mid-Eighties, and tells a good story: precociously bright girl attempts suicide, lands a record deal and finds herself pregnant, all within the space of a year.

Philip Hensher

Why the heck not?

From our UK edition

Philip Hensher recounts how a handful of British mercenaries in the 1960s, headed by the Buchanesque Jim Johnson (pictured above), trained a rag-tag force of Yemeni tribesmen to defeat the full might of the Egyptian army in a conflict that Nasser later referred to as ‘my Vietnam’ ‘Enormous fun and a tremendous adventure,’ one of the participants called it afterwards, voicing the sentiments of every British soldier running amok since the beginning of time. Probably there were soldiers under Boadicea who said exactly the same thing. This little known story from the very end of the imperial adventure is redolent of cheek, bravado and the undertaking of a challenge for no other reason than thinking ‘Why the heck not?

Jasper Becker

Tibet should not despair

From our UK edition

Surely no political process in the modern world is more shrouded in mystery than the way the Chinese select a new supreme leader — except perhaps the occult divination practised by the Tibetans. Surely no political process in the modern world is more shrouded in mystery than the way the Chinese select a new supreme leader — except perhaps the occult divination practised by the Tibetans. We may already be sure that Xi Jinping will succeed the dour and uncharismatic Hu Jintao as the 14th General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, but precious little is known about him or his views. By contrast the 14th Dalai Lama is a global celebrity, as venerated as Nelson Mandela, welcomed by kings and presidents as if he were indeed the head of state.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Beatrix Potter meets the Marquis de Sade

From our UK edition

Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. The typescript he inherited, though ‘unedited, repetitious and often excessively scatological’, he writes, ‘appealed to me immediately . . . I found it screamingly funny.’ In this affectionate expression of sibling adulation, he describes Jonathan’s style as ‘part journalese, part satire, part Beatrix Potter, part Marquis de Sade’.

Fay Maschler

Bruising times

From our UK edition

In a market town in Kent at the time of Thatcher’s Britain, Charles Pemberton attends the town’s minor public school where his businessman father is a governor. In a market town in Kent at the time of Thatcher’s Britain, Charles Pemberton attends the town’s minor public school where his businessman father is a governor. Back in the 1930s, his grandfather Clarence had had ‘the right idea’, which was to build an eight-foot wall across a residential road in Oxford to separate his family home from newly built council houses. There is no such fortification available against the arrival at the school of Clark Rossiter, ‘a London chuck-out’ from a fringe estate, thanks to his sports scholarship, boxing being just one of his talents.

Sebastian Smee

Cross-cultural exchanges

From our UK edition

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. There’s great comedy — and also artistry — in this because almost every story actually describes some degree of false consciousness, wrong-headedness or pathetic illusion.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Names to conjure with

From our UK edition

Golly gee. Academic literary critics are going to hate Faulks on Fiction like sin. Here is Sebastian three-for-two Faulks, if you please, clumping onto their turf with a book of reflections on a couple of dozen great novels. And he declares in his introduction, with some pride, that he intends to take ‘an unfashionable approach’ and examine characters in these books ‘as though they were real people’. And he then divides them into four character types — Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains — without so much as footnoting a structuralist ethnographer, instead declaring ex cathedra that these are ‘the four character types that British novelists have returned to most often’. And he blithely describes how ‘we’ react to books.

A.N. Wilson

Perchance to dream

From our UK edition

This book reads like an interesting after- dinner conversation between intelligent friends. That said, it is a rambling conversation, and although it is extremely entertaining, it does not add up to much. Its ostensible subjects are two instances of scientific intelligence being brought to bear on the possibility of defying, or surviving, death. In the first case, John Gray investigates those, such as Freddie Myers and Henry Sidgwick, who formed the Society for Psychical Research. In the second instance, Gray tells again the bizarre story of the cult of Lenin, and Leonid Krasin’s belief that, if Lenin’s body could be kept in a state of cryonic suspension, there might dawn a glad day in which Comrade Lenin could return to life.

David Crane

Consummate con artist

From our UK edition

‘Taylor, I dreamt of your lecture last night,’ the polar explorer Captain Scott was once heard to exclaim, after sitting through a paper on icebergs by the expedition physiographer, Griffith Taylor, that had reduced even its author to the edge of catalepsy: ‘How could I live so long in the world and not know something of so fascinating a subject!’ The True Story of Titanic Thompson is not going to be everyone’s book, but for those who can get beyond the child-brides and casual killings, Kevin Cook’s biography of a great American hustler might well provoke the same sense of wonderment.

Jervoise Andreyev

Care or cure?

From our UK edition

Cancer is usually associated with death. For the cancer specialist, however, cancer is more about life: not just patients’ lives; the cancer itself often lives the life of Riley. If it has a life, then, it is entitled to a biography. Here, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an obviously compassionate oncologist, provides that biography. The basis of any biography is the story.

James Walton

Morphine memories

From our UK edition

Chapman’s Odyssey became quite famous before it was published, largely because it nearly wasn’t. Chapman’s Odyssey became quite famous before it was published, largely because it nearly wasn’t. Paul Bailey’s long and distinguished career, complete with two appearances on the Booker shortlist, apparently counted for nothing last year when he was reduced to what he called the ‘sheer hell’ of touting the book unavailingly round town, while living off grants from the Royal Literary Fund. Yet, sad though this undoubtedly was, when Bloomsbury finally rode to his rescue, one heretical thought was hard to suppress.