Books Archives

Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?

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Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In The Music of Time, his new study of poetry in the 20th century, John Burnside makes a rather more modest claim: that to write a poem at all is an act of hope. By any standards, Burnside’s own career seems cause for hope in poetry’s capacity to transform at least one individual life. Born in 1955, into a working-class family in Dunfermline, he did not start publishing until he was in his thirties, following an addiction-fuelled breakdown and a subsequent attempt at a commuter-belt career in computing.

Philip Hensher

Satire misfire

Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has written one about a beetle that is transformed into a man. He’s not the first writer to have thought of doing this, but he might be the first one who thought it was a good idea. Readers will remember that in Randall Jarrell’s classic comedy of a creative writing faculty, Pictures from an Institution, the heroine has a student called Sylvia Moomaw (‘I had remembered her name but had forgotten her’). One day, she hands in a story ‘about a bug that turns into a man…it’s influenced by Kafka’. The hero reads it (‘There was a part where the man said “Could I have ever really been a bug?

Amanda Craig

As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker

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Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited sequel, The Secret Commonwealth. Set ten years after the end of The Amber Spyglass, it follows the further adventures of Lyra, now a 21-year-old student at St Sophia’s College. Oxford. No longer a child, orphaned and (as she is about to discover) penniless, she has bigger problems even than her yearning for Will. She is estranged from her daemon, Pantalaimon (or Pan). Part of Pullman’s striking originality lies in his conception of a world like and unlike our own, in which human souls are visible as animals. Everybody must stay close to theirs, but Lyra has learnt to separate from Pan — something that makes her a terrifying freak.

Simon Heffer

It’s easy to forget how undemocratic Europe was 50 years ago

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The subtitle of Simon Reid-Henry’s substantial work indicates its thesis: ‘The remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971–2017.’ The Cold War had started in 1945, and the author takes us through the upheavals of the 1960s before the advertised start of his narrative. He describes a western world that, by 1971, had undergone the student-led convulsions of 1968, and that, as well as facing challenges from the Soviet Union, China and their satellites, would have new ones to grasp: notably those presented by the 1973 oil crisis and the resulting delinquency of western treasuries as they sought not to disappoint societies — and electorates — used to rising real wages and the indulgences of consumerism.

Claire Kohda

Round North Korea with Michael Palin in rose-tinted spectacles

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Michael Palin in North Korea, a two-part documentary in which the Python is given a tightly choreographed tour of that country, aired on Channel 5 last year. Palin dances with cheerfully drunk residents of the country on International Workers’ Day; picnics with his guide, a woman called So Hyang; plays catch with an inflatable globe with some children; learns Taekwondo; sees some beautiful scenery — mountains, rivers as well as cities comprised of coordinated, colourful blocks, with monuments dedicated to the Great Leaders (as the rulers of North Korea past and present are collectively called). But there are some more sinister sights, such as a road lined with huge concrete pillars, ready to be knocked down to obstruct it in the event of an invasion from the south.

Cressida Connolly

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is even better on second reading

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Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking of higher things they can’t be expected to do prosaic stuff like take the rubbish out or pay the gas bill. They tend not to enjoy jokes, much less teasing. Worse still, they’re convinced they’re right about everything. Street angel, house devil, as the old saying has it. Do-gooders crop up here and there in fiction, from Dickens’s bustling, bossy Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House through to the long- suffering Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited to Ian Bedloe, the miserably stubborn hero of Anne Tyler’s brilliant Saint Maybe.

Stuart Jeffries

A dog’s life is infinitely superior to our own — so let’s embrace it

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The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a puppy playing nearby. Seeing the little dog amusing itself with a dirty cloth gave the friar an epiphany. Suso realised that redemption is granted not to those who mortify their flesh — for to do so is merely to glorify oneself. Rather, one shows love for God by living in grace, simplicity and sportive celebration of the world. Like dogs. Those who have seen dogs in action might well demur. Once, in a pub, I was giggling with a friend as the publican’s Welsh spaniel humped the leg of a man at the bar. ‘More drinks?’, my friend asked. As she placed the order, the spaniel transferred his allegiance to her leg.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Visiting the world’s masterpieces is a quixotic undertaking

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From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has interviewed and sometimes befriended many leading artists and scrutinised their works close up in their own environment. He has found that artistically creative men and women are not really very different from normal people. The text of this informative and entertaining book is comprehensively balanced, fair, lucid and subtly witty, although some of the illustrations are handicapped by the smallness of the format. Art criticism itself can be an art. Gayford’s curiosity is wide and his judgments are tolerant, no matter how onerous the investigations can be. He explores remote, uncomfortable places, often accompanied by his wife Josephine, to whom the book is dedicated.

Emily Rhodes

Jessie Burton’s The Confession is, frankly, a bit heavy-handed

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Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s written her third, The Confession. Like The Muse, it is a double narrative, moving between the early 1980s and 2017 (a departure from the historical settings of her previous books). In 1980, 20-year-old Elise meets Connie — ‘a vixen, upright on her legs’ — on Hampstead Heath. Elise soon forms an intense relationship with this older woman, a successful writer, but when they go to Los Angeles for the filming of Connie’s novel, cracks begin to show. In 2017 we are with Elise’s daughter, Rose, who’s spent her life inventing stories about her mother to try to fill her absence, unexplained since she left her as a baby.

Horatio Clare

Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea

Lead book review

Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities, 320 miles apart, ‘massive and tightly planned, very similar in layout’, their bricks and measures standardised, evidence of rigid authority. Their trade goods included Afghan lapis lazuli, Omani vases, legal seals from Sumeria, carnelian beads, packed for dispatch to Sumer — and that is almost all that is left of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and more than we know of them. Their names are modern labels. This section of The Boundless Sea, David Abulafia’s fascinating ‘human history of the oceans’, is one of many moments of thrilling implication. (Do not assume anyone will know the name of London in 5,000 years’ time.

2 October 2019

Sam Leith

Spectator Books: who was Susan Sontag?

My guest in this week’s books podcast is Benjamin Moser, author of an acclaimed new biography of one of America’s most celebrated (and controversial) intellectuals of the twentieth century: Sontag: Her Life. I asked Benjamin how he sorted fact from myth, about tracking down the inventor of that haircut, and about Annie Leibovitz’s take on their stormy love affair. Why could someone as brave as Sontag never come out? Did she have a sense of humour? And what of her will last?

26 September 2019

Roger Lewis

Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy

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Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head for the screen. They also developed Lucky Jim as a television series and found Kingsley Amis pie-eyed, maudlin and testy, ‘jealous of his son’s success’. They wrote The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks for the disgusting Michael Winner (who once told a starlet: ‘What this part does not require is a diploma from Rada. What it does require is a great pair of tits.

Katrina Gulliver

How the Lyons Corner House became a haven for the single working woman

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In Whitechapel, in the mid 19th century, rolling and selling cigars was a way for a newly arrived immigrant to scrape a living. This is what Samuel Glückstein did, after he landed in London from Belgium in 1843. He built up his cigar business until he could send for his parents and siblings. One of his sisters married a man named Salmon (also in the tobacco trade) and thus the Salmon & Gluckstein firm was born. The fortunes of these intertwined families and their business empire are traced in this book. Within 20 years they had a large chain of tobacconists, and their brand was known across the country.

Stuart Kelly

Haunted by a black cat: Earwig, by Brian Catling, reviewed

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Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist, the wacky, the mimsical and the nastily satirical. But Brian Catling is a genuine surrealist novelist, and it no doubt helps that his artwork is surreal (he is professor of fine art at Ruskin College, Oxford: how Ruskin would have loathed him). He has previously written a trilogy of novels, The Vorrh, which has been among my highlights of the past few years. This is a more slender book, but it is slender like a stiletto. If there is one defining feature of truly surreal literature, it is that it defies the imposition of meanings while retaining an affective hold on the reader. Oh, and horrifying them.

Kate Womersley

Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s

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Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s the hope. In a large university lecture hall, I remember a consultant standing in front of a PowerPoint slide showing two triangles, one widening to its base, the other tapering to a point. They represented how our clinical knowledge would expand with time, while our compassion would very probably diminish. It was a warning, but one delivered with a tone of inevitability. As a student I deeply resented this idea, but also worried it might prove necessary for survival. Doctors and their patients are surprised when training’s protection proves not to be that of an alloy but rather a metal paint that can be scratched and worn away.

Boyd Tonkin

In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of

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Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her own life aged 58, and you may have one or two prior expectations. They will probably not include a flirtatious dinner with an enthralled Evelyn Waugh (‘so attentive and kind’) in a Copenhagen restaurant so quiet that ‘we could hear the thumping of ships’ motors far out on the water’. Tove Ditlevsen and the ‘vibrant, youthful’ Waugh have their evening spoiled when her third husband — a crazy, drug-pushing medic — turns up in his motorcycle leathers to drag Tove away for her bedtime injection, plus a bout of rougher than usual sex that leaves her spaced-out, ‘limp and blissful’.

Douglas Murray

An uncanny gift for prophecy — the genius of Michel Houellebecq

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The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’ There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust.

Sara Wheeler

Gales and Gaels — sailing solo from Cornwall to the Summer Isles

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This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his sloop along the west coast of Ireland, then the west coast of Scotland. The Summer Isles lie at his journey’s end, but in fact he is unable to land, owing to unfriendly headwinds — hence those islands ‘must remain in the imagination of the book’s subtitle’. An award-winning writer whose previous books include Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, Marsden was a competent sailor before the off (his grandfather taught him), but ‘had never skippered a boat to anywhere I couldn’t reach by lunchtime’. His achievement is all the more impressive as he claims to be ‘not naturally practical’.

Alan Rusbridger

Everything you always wanted to know about classical music but were afraid to ask

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Novelist, essayist, painter, poet, composer. Oh yes, and pianist: Stephen Hough does all of these things very well — and one of them superlatively. Most of us will know Hough as a dazzling but thoughtful concert pianist, at home with almost all repertoire, but with a special affinity for 19th- and early 20th- century works. He recently played a gilded royal piano at the Proms — and before that published his first extended work of fiction. But don’t call him a Renaissance man. He flinches — and points out he’s not much cop at maths or science. That makes the rest of us feel only marginally better. A pianist has to do something while on the road — all those flights and lonely nights in distant hotel bedrooms.

19 September 2019

James Hawes

Hitler’s legacy: two books examine different aspects of the horror that was Germany, 1945

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Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising. Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins.

Frank Trentmann

The tsunami of stuff we have and want is based on culture and economics

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In 1993, the photographer Peter Menzel travelled across the globe to capture our material world. In each country, he asked a family to empty their home and pose in front of their possessions. In Texas, the Skeen family held up their large illustrated Bible, surrounded by their Ford pickup truck, their mini-van and their dune buggy, their two TVs, multiple electrical appliances, shelves and storage cabinets filled with clothes. But even households in poorer countries revealed more things than one might expect. In Mali, the Natomo family had to make do with $250 a year but had a cassette player. In Ethiopia, the even poorer Getu family lived in a straw hut, yet owned an umbrella. Possessions have been a central feature of human life since the beginning.

Lucasta Miller

Rushdie at his best – Quichotte reviewed

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It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s a literary embarras de richesse, whose centre can’t really hold, yet it’s written with the brilliant bravura of a writer who can really, really write. More to the point, it’s also funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero. His name is taken from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, via its Frenchified version, courtesy of the composer Massenet (one cultural allusion at a time is never enough for Rushdie, whose references range from Prospero to Pinocchio, from Ionesco to Oprah, from Wordsworth to The Wizard of Oz).

Jason Burke

The best of journeys: Justin Marozzi’s monumental trek through the history of the Muslim world

Lead book review

This impressively clever, careful, and often beautiful book is the best sort of journey. It takes us through 15 cities that represent Islamic civilisation, but also through 15 centuries of Islamic history. Our voyage takes us through the core of the Middle East, but also to Fez in what is now Morocco and to Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan. We are introduced to very attractive characters such as Akbar, the tolerant and cultured warrior-poet who was Mughal emperor in the 16th century, and Harun al-Rashid, who turned Baghdad into a cultural and commercial centre so rich and powerful that its fame resonates more than a millennium later.

James Delingpole

Letting China join the WTO was the worst decision the West ever made

Columns

It’s not often that you come across a book that completely transforms your understanding of the world. Just recently I’ve read two. One, Tom Holland’s Dominion concerns the debt we all owe — not just vicars and popes but atheists and social justice warriors — to Christianity’s revolutionary (and frankly still shocking) message that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The other, China, Trade and Power by Stewart Paterson, is about a seismic event in 2001, three months to the day after 9/11, which shook the world to a degree few remotely comprehend.

Toby Young

Two faces of a single calamity: how the war against inequality backfired dramatically

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In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of the cathedrals of the meritocratic church — students at Yale typically score above the 99th percentile in the nationwide Law School Admissions Test — was a kind of heresy and it attracted enough attention for him to secure a book deal. Four years later, The Meritocracy Trap is the result.

Harry Mount

Rod Liddle on Brexit: The Great Betrayal reviewed

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Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’ Liddle agreed. ‘Betcha we don’t leave,’ he said. And that is the book’s principal argument: we’ll never leave the EU. The Great Betrayal was published in July and, so far, Liddle is right. But what about on 1 November: will this book be massively outdated and will Britain be out of the European Union? It’s anyone’s guess. Even now, quite a few of the references in the book are dated. It was published before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.

A.S.H. Smyth

The great American trauma in minute detail

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Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well... everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.

Ruth Scurr

Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work

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‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, at a time when young girls, carefully and modestly brought up to become wives to the regime’s male elite, are beginning to rebel; some would rather die than get married and there has been an attempted suicide via secateurs in the flower-arranging class. ‘Perhaps we need to change our educational curriculum,’ Aunt Lydia thinks, ‘less fear-mongering, fewer centaur-like ravishers and male genitalia bursting into flame.

18 September 2019

Sam Leith

Spectator Books: Elif Shafak on life after death

My guest in this week’s podcast is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, whose latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has just been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Elif talks to me about living in exile, writing in a second language, her relationship with Istanbul, and how the West’s culture war over 'free speech' looks to someone from a country where free speech can get you thrown in jail, or worse.