Books Archives

Feeling sorry for Frankenstein’s monster is hardly new

In the last couple of days my Twitter feed, always a cheerful place, has been more full of jokes than usual. The source of the mirth is Exeter University academic Nick Groom, and his ex cathedra pronouncements on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. According to Groom, it is possible – gasp – to read Frankenstein’s creature as a sympathetic character. Whatever next? Will the Times and the Sun hold the front page while Groom invites us to see Mr Darcy as sexy or, going out on a limb, Oliver Twist as an intensely sympathetic portrayal of an abused and abandoned child? Journalists have long rubbed their hands in glee at “don states the obvious” stories.

Stuart Evers

Shadows of the past

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The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section turns in on the next, binding them together with devastating effect. It is one of the oddest and most radically structured moments in pop, and one that came to mind when reading these three very different debut novels. With similar temporal concerns to the Lieber-Butler-Morton lyric, each traces the implications of past action on the present —and how these in turn could shape the coming years. The future is most notably explored in Danny Denton’s brilliantly conceived The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow, a polyphonic trawl through the murky waters of a permanently raining Irish dystopia.

Amy Sackville

A time for reflection | 8 March 2018

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The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an uncomfortable one — for reflection. She sifts through her own immediate and past experience: caring for her dying mother in her early twenties; her relationship with her partner Johannes; her childhood; the birth of her first child. This fragmented narrative is intercut with the stories of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the inventor of the X-ray; Sigmund and Anna Freud; and the 18th-century anatomist, surgeon and empiricist John Hunter — along with other brief cameos from the history of science, from the Lumière brothers to the engraver Jan van Rymsdyk.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Wendy Cope

In this week’s Books podcast, I’m joined by the great Wendy Cope, whose new collection Anecdotal Evidence is just out. I talk to her about why she’s funniest when she’s most serious, the fascination of writing in form, the disappearance of Jake Strugnell, the recent row over whether the spoken-word work of Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest counts as “real poetry”, and get the scoop on her second-worst marital row ever — plus, she reads some poems from her new book. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this.

Sara Wheeler

Flitting from flower to flower

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‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book with this assertion by Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and it rather sums up the whole endeavour of the volume. Feigel weaves close readings of Lessing’s prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with accounts of her own self-stretching. Feigel, an academic, had read Lessing as an undergraduate, but, returning to her in her thirties, she discovered in the books a stimulating discussion about ‘how as a woman to reconcile your need to be desired by men with your wish for sexual equality’. She is particularly interested in the way Lessing ‘placed sexual fulfilment at the centre of women’s lives’.

Tibor Fischer

They fill you with the faults they had

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You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a degree of fondness for an anthology put together by a magician who has performed in North Korea. Dale Salwak also has a sideline as a professor of literature at Citrus College in Los Angeles, and Writers and their Mothers is a collection of 22 pieces he has edited, by novelists, poets and literary critics, some biographical and analytical, some autobiographical. In his introduction, Salwak makes reference to an assertion by Georges Simenon that writers are ‘united in their hatred of their mothers’, an assertion, I’d suggest, that tells you much more about the whore-mongering Simenon than about writers in general.

Juliet Nicolson

Listing or sinking?

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The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century was no glamorous picnic, as she grappled with a ceremonial sword in a golf bag, three months supply of toothpaste, a crate of hot water bottles and enough safety pins for every emergency. Born in 1915, and having lived in Brussels, Paris, Latvia, Persia and China as a diplomat’s daughter, Elisabeth Knatchbull-Hugessen, aged 24, married Gerry Young, a man from her father’s profession. With marriage she continued the familiar routine of packing and unpacking, and arriving at, and departing from, different countries.

Claire Kohda

Going down in glory

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In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission. The ship sailed to Okinawa, where a huge American assault was taking place. Under extensive enemy fire, it sank, as was expected, to the bottom of the Pacific. With it, it took 2,280 of its crew. Survivors’ accounts exist and continued to be taken until very recently. They describe seamen lost even on board, unable to find their living quarters because of the sheer size of the vessel; arrows painted on decks to indicate the direction of the bow or stern; and the testing days before what the crew knew would be the battleship’s last mission. Jan Morris, however, does not include the human stories of the Yamato.

Sam Leith

Getting so much better all the time

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Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at any point in human history, only a stone-cold idiot would choose any time other than the present. On average, humans are by orders of magnitude healthier, wealthier, nicer, happier, longer lived, more free and better educated than ever before. Moreover, as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure noted: ‘Bowling averages are way up, minigolf scores are way down, and we have more excellent waterslides than any other planet we communicate with.’ Some of the many graphs in this book slant from the bottom left towards the top right, showing the rise of Good Things, and some of them (charting the decline of Bad Things) go the other way.

Clare Mulley

Delusions of the deserters

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‘Keep my name out of it’, was the fairly standard reply when Matthew Sweet started researching the story of the GIs who deserted from Vietnam. People’s concern, it turned out, however, was not about being associated just with desertion, but with a more complex story of duplicity, abuse and insanity. Over time, the American Deserters Committee (ADC), the welfare group established to support the deserters in neutral Sweden, developed into a series of increasingly militant organisations. These were then infiltrated by the CIA. Sweet tracks the changing nature of desertion ‘from an individual act of conscience or cowardice to a political step that GIs could take together’.

Kate Womersley

A man, a boy, a bed

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Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards after repeated suicide attempts, in therapists’ offices, at Oxford University — he has sought protection and cure. Some institutions woefully failed, while others revived Bernard from the appalling child abuse inflicted by Canon T.D. Fogarty, Latin teacher, priest and rapist. An account of the open wounds left by years of assault, Paper Cuts is also a memoir about the anxiety of seeking to belong, yet as a survivor never quite finding a part. We follow Bernard for a day, now aged 40 and an Academic Visitor at Oxford’s Faculty of English. He has a looming deadline to finish an article for the TLS.

Jesse Norman

Polemicist of genius

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‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines a leitmotif of his 1980 presidential campaign, knowing its radicalism would highlight his energy, personal optimism and desire for change. As it duly did. The astonishing power over words of its author, Thomas Paine, persists to this day. In a letter of 1805, the former president John Adams said of Paine that there can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief.

David Crane

Riding for a fall | 8 March 2018

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On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the Emperor Napoleon ordered his chief-of-staff to ‘embark everything’ for the invasion of England that he had been dreaming of for two years. ‘My intention is to land at four different points,’ he explained to Berthier, ‘at a short distance from one another... Inform the four marshals there is not an instant to be lost.’ While there is possibly no saga in his whole astonishing career — Russia included — that so vividly exposes the curious and almost wilful blind spots in Bonaparte’s make-up, his enemies would have done well to pay closer attention.

7 March 2018

Sam Leith

Angela Carter biography wins award

I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought it might be worth reposting the remarks I made in running over the shortlist, and linking, where possible, to the Spectator’s coverage of the books in question. (It’s to my shame that we didn’t review Gareth Russell. As I mention, popular Tudor history books come thick and fast and sometimes the good ones slip through.

1 March 2018

Francis Ghilès

An insight into the medieval Muslim mind

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At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known as supply-side economics. Although the 14th- century politician and thinker wrote extensively about economics and was almost unique among medieval Arab writers in so doing, it is quite ‘marvellous’ writes Robert Irwin, the author of a new intellectual biography of this famous North African, that he ‘should have anticipated American Republican party fiscal policy’.

Chris Mullin

Team spirit and terrorism

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Alastair Campbell is a man of many parts. Journalist, spin doctor extraordinaire, diarist and now novelist. For this, his third novel, he has teamed up with the former professional footballer Paul Fletcher to produce a very readable thriller. The division of labour seems to be that Campbell has done most of the writing while Fletcher has supplied behind-the-scenes colour. The late Martin McGuinness is among those credited with having advised. It is set in February 1974, around the general election that brought Harold Wilson back to power and also the year when the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign reached its height.

Tim Martin

Should he stay or should he go?

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This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear since he announced his retirement from writing in 2013. Like much of his other work, it lays its scene in a topographical and temporal bubble of the author’s own devising, where recognisable aspects of society and geography are almost imperceptibly twisted away from true.

Hugh Thomson

A drizzle of nature writers

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A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the army that has recently advanced over the literary landscape? Perhaps a drizzle of nature writers? Here they come, heads down in the rain, turning out their pockets for the samples of fungi and moss they have collected on the outskirts of our cities. Bookshops now have whole tables dedicated to contemporary British nature writing. The first wave of this literary phenomenon was far more cheerful: the late lamented Roger Deakin sitting in his pollarded hornbeam and imagining himself at sea; Richard Mabey, the godfather of it all, with his wonderful Flora Britannica; Robert Macfarlane striding across wild places with lyrical intensity; Helen Macdonald eulogising her hawk.

Mick Herron

Carry on spying

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That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into his study to reveal that he worked for MI5, she was terrified that he was about to explain the facts of life, many of which had already been revealed to her by a friend on Bognor beach: ‘I thought I was going to pass out with the horror of what was to come.’ But the particular facts he reveals are no less life-altering.

Leyla Sanai

Cutting up rough

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Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under the Knife and Anaesthesia admit to the fallibility of medicine and the responsibilities, flaws and complex emotions of its practitioners. Arnold van de Laar does not rely on personal experience. Instead, he explores the world of surgery through 28 clinical conditions; its historical scope makes for a fascinating book.

Roger Lewis

Biografiends

Lead book review

I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of Gary Oldman or Sacha Baron Cohen, had been cast instead of Geoffrey Rush, who was muffled under prosthetic make-up. But my point is, biopics seldom come off, and nor do biographies. Indeed, it is a reprehensible and misguided genre. Privacy is violated, creative achievements are explained away, and great men and women are unmasked as sneaky, predatory, cruel and ordinary. Humphrey Carpenter wrote all his biographies — of Auden, Britten and Ezra Pound — in this way.

22 February 2018

Oliver Balch

The Little Matchstick that ignited civil war

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Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the Spanish-born waiter in Bonn’s Casa Pepe approached my table, it struck me as an opportune moment to solicit his opinion about the former dictator. ‘No sé mucho,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know a whole lot.’ Just imagine it: an unexceptional army cadet becomes a general in his mid- thirties, leads the Nationalists to victory in a bloody civil war, wields absolute power for close to three decades, and then, barely a generation later, his memory is reduced to an indifferent shrug. The contrast with Germany’s treatment of its totalitarian past could not be greater. Students are compelled to study every angle of the Third Reich.

Mike Cormack

Ray of light

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Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of...’). The Adulterants, however, talks of ‘the modern everyman... stubbornly ensconced in an adolescence that has extended well beyond his biological prime’. We thus expect a man-child, resiling from responsibility and dependent on internet porn and gaming — basically the Simon Pegg character in Shaun of the Dead. But the protagonist, Ray, is really ‘mostly’ a good guy: he mostly loves his pregnant wife Garthene, and looks forward to being a father; and the youngish couple are striving to buy ‘a horrible maisonette’ in the brutal London property market.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Steven Pinker

This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that - despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at any previous point in history. And he attributes this to the values of the Enlightenment. I asked him: which Enlightenment? Can morality really be based on reason alone? And what’s a professor of cognitive science and linguistics doing in this subject area anyway? You can hear his answers below. And if you enjoyed that, please do subscribe on iTunes.

Anna Aslanyan

Close to the bone

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Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines a society better described by the formula ‘the future = technology – sex’. There is no procreation in it, and any manifestation of sexuality is a crime. Its inhabitants have left Earth for a space station, a hi-tech prison only the rich can afford, moving away from ‘a lunar landscape of jagged rocks, treeless mountains, or scorched dirt’, the scene of endless wars fought by child soldiers, where ‘technology is seized by those who kill best’.

Nick Lezard

A comedy of violence

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The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely it. However, we now have a new contender: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series. It was a brief but intriguing review in the TLS that first alerted me to the books, with their sidelined spooks, contemptuously nicknamed ‘slow horses’, sent to an oubliette next to the Barbican on having screwed up, and their appalling boss, the veteran Jackson Lamb, a monster of flatulence, astonishing drinking habits and withering put-downs (on requesting ‘an educated guess’, he says, on hearing what’s offered: ‘I said educated.

William Leith

Drugs, guns and blood

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The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning I counted down the days until I could leave’. So: Honduras, says Arce, is bad. How bad? He tells us that ‘Tegucigalpa is the most dangerous capital city in the world without a declared war.’ And that ‘in 2012 and 2013, more people were murdered in Honduras than in Iraq, even though the population in Honduras is three times smaller’. Also that in 2012, there were 7,100 murders.

Ruth Scurr

The only word that hurts

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It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious.’ In her first book, the literary critic and art historian Laura Freeman is determined to tell the truth about her recovery from the illness that ravaged her adolescence and early adult life. The result is the reverse of a misery memoir. Freeman’s celebratory book is about getting better and learning to savour life again by doing what she most loves: reading. Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia when she was 15 and had already been ill for two years.

Philip Hensher

Music for my own pleasure

Lead book review

At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries tend to be popular. We generally think of radicals as being primarily like Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, whose works, after decades, still mainly appeal to a small group of sophisticates. But if one takes the larger view, there is no doubt that most composers who transformed the art of music were almost always immediately popular. Monteverdi, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner commanded substantial audiences, with often beguiling surfaces and revolutionary substance. Schumann said that Chopin’s music was ‘a cannon buried in flowers’. The same might be said of Debussy, who could not have broken more decisively with the past.