China

This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase, let alone unpack it. It closes at the opposite end of the social scale with a small girl squatting on a plank over a village cesspit, watching the maggots seething and squirming far below as they struggle to climb the sides of the pit towards the light. The cesspit was the only place where a child of five could find refuge from back-breaking labour in the fields. ‘Granny said girls who don’t work get no food,’ she tells Xinran, who meets her two decades later as a student working for her doctorate in Europe.

Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world’s ecosystems. The case he lays bare with moving clarity in the opening chapters is compelling stuff. Essentially he argues that the world of wild creatures, plants, trees and whole habitats — you name it — is going to Hell in a handcart as a consequence of what he calls ‘the human project’.

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and certainly addicted in my need to have a daily bike ride. But I can see why people — and drivers in particular — hate some of us: for our smugness, our need to keep on moving through red lights and along pavements. It isn’t like this in Holland, where bicycling is so embedded in daily life that most drivers are bicyclists and vice versa; where mutual understanding leads to mutual respect. Why do bicycles have this effect? Of intense affection among some, hatred among others; of mass use in some countries, limited use in others? Paul Smethurst could have answered the question. And his book does have some juicy little statistics in it.

Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively pulls the rug out from under the other? Of course Gyalo Thondup is entitled to tell his story, beginning with his life as a boy in a small town near the Tibet-China border where, in 1937, his younger brother was identified as the 14th Dalai Lama. He recalls everything from then on without a shadow of doubt: his family’s long overland trip to Lhasa, their transformed, luxurious life there, his trips to China, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong, learning Chinese and about China, and marrying a Chinese woman.

As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless enterprise involved things like staining paper with tea or vinegar, together with plenty of burning, and creasing, and copying of random texts with a scratchy old inkwell pen. Typical silly small boy stuff. Reading this book on a collection of maps supposedly derived from Marco Polo suddenly brought it all back — especially the silliness. Now Marco Polo is a figure wreathed in some mystery. He was known from the 14th century as the first European to report in detail and from personal experience on that fabulous world called ‘Cathay’, the land of the fabled Kublai Khan. But many have asked if what he reported was true. Did Marco Polo really visit China?

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by Mikita Brottman (William Collins, £16.99). I have read thousands of books in my 81 years and this is the only one that has made me happy. Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the real world out there, towards which I am increasingly ambivalent’. This book deals frankly and unsentimentally with the question of whether dogs really love us and describes close relationships between dogs and their owners, going back to Alexander the Great and including Virginia Woolf, Galsworthy and Dickens. And into each learned, sprightly chapter pads Grisby. The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China by Kerry Brown (I.B.