Books Archives

A quest for retribution: Fire, by John Boyne, reviewed

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At the end of John Boyne’s novel Earth, Evan Keogh, a conscience-stricken young footballer, hands evidence of his connivance in a rape to the police. Two years earlier, he and his teammate Robbie had been found innocent of the charge by a jury, whose foreperson was Dr Freya Petrus. Freya, a consultant in a hospital burns unit, becomes the protagonist of Fire, the third of Boyne’s Elements quartet. Like its predecessors, the novel is dominated by issues of aberrant sexuality. As a 12-year-old girl on a summer holiday in Cornwall, Freya was first raped and then buried alive in a sadistic ritual by 14-year-old twins, Arthur and Pascoe.

Sam Dalrymple

South Asia in a time of the breaking of nations

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Early on Christmas morning in 1962, the Indian diplomat S.S. Banerjee heard a mysterious knock on his door in Dacca, East Pakistan. Standing outside in the darkness was a 14-year-old boy, who beckoned to him to follow, and minutes later Banerjee found himself opposite the firebrand politician Mujibur Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali activist who had recently transformed from a Pakistani nationalist into one of the country’s fiercest critics. For the next hour, the two men engaged in small talk, with Banerjee growing increasingly mystified as to why he had been summoned. Then, just as he was about to go home, he was handed a small envelope intended for the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Anne de Courcy

The ambassador’s daughter bent on betrayal

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In June 1933, the 24-year-old Martha Dodd, the daughter of the newly appointed American ambassador to Berlin, arrived in the German capital with her parents and older brother. She knew little and cared less about politics. To her, Adolf Hitler, who had just seized supreme power in Germany, was merely ‘a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin’. To all her friends in Berlin, Martha would show odd bits of information from her father’s office The Berlin in which the Dodds found themselves was a ferment of intrigue, uncertainty, plots, counterplots, sudden disappearances and febrile gaiety.

Sinclair McKay

Seeds of hope in the siege of Leningrad

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The idea was revolutionary – yet there was something ancient at its heart. The scientist Nikolai Vavilov, arriving in Petrograd in 1921 to take the helm of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, was on a sacred mission: to make, in his words, ‘a treasury of all known crops and plants’. The world’s first seed bank would shape the future of agriculture – possibly even eliminate failed harvests and hunger. This was gleaming scientific idealism, but there was also an element of the Old Testament Ark about it. Throughout the siege, the botanists had to find the superhuman strength not to eat the seeds themselves The vision would collide with the brute reality of Stalin’s own efforts to bend nature to his will, and then the nightmarish Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941.

Philip Hensher

Reading the classics should be a joy, not a duty

Lead book review

Writing the history of the novel, even covering a limited period, is a challenge. No one could possibly read every novel that has been published. Even if you read 100 a year you would scarcely scratch the surface. It isn’t like writing a history of most other subjects, where the important matters select themselves. You wouldn’t guess from this book how hilarious Lolita is, or some of the best passages of Ulysses No one could say with certainty that the most noteworthy novels are those which once made, or now make, the most impact. Indeed, a history that included many of the bestsellers of the day would be unusual – one, for instance, that took in G.W.M.

5 November 2024

Juliet Nicolson

The shame of being an alcoholic mother

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Recollections of crimes, misdemeanours and shameful stories can pall, especially when viewed through the bleary-eyed lens of alcohol. But In the Blood, a memoir of devastating clarity – the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a mother and daughter whose alcoholic gene was ‘baked into them like a curse’ – provides a frightening insight into the labyrinthine workings of the addict’s devious mind. The illness had run riotously through many generations until Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne both rejected what had ‘zig-zagged through [their] family like a knight in chess’.

Leaf Arbuthnot

The agonies of adolescence: The Party, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

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My husband and I like to play Tessa Hadley bingo whenever she has a new book out. You get a point if one of the characters is dressed in a bad outfit, which the author seems rather to admire – a purple jacket with orange tassels; a long felt skirt; a beret, maybe at an angle. You get another point if a beautiful boy-man steals the heart of the story’s older heroine; bonus points if he is unaware of his beauty, a little callous, elegant or golden-skinned. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Sally Rooney said she thought originality was overrated: that she didn’t much mind the idea that she might end up producing variations on the same novel for the rest of her writing life. The 68-year-old Hadley has more or less done this, and her fans are grateful for it.

Caroline Moorehead

‘Life was good, very good, almost too good’ – Wallis Simpson’s year in China

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Few women have had more written about them, mostly of a critical, salacious nature, than Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward VIII gave up his crown. Much of the gossip has fed on what became known as the ‘China Dossier’, a supposed compendium of the year Simpson (or Spencer, as she then was) spent in China in the mid-1920s while she was trying to get a divorce from her heavy-drinking, abusive, naval first husband. As Paul French sets out to prove, the story of what she herself called her ‘lotus years’ is more prosaic, but no less fascinating. The ‘China Dossier’ was said to include details of opium addiction and a technique called the Shanghai grip Simpson arrived in Shanghai in the summer of 1924, hoping to make a fresh start. She was 28.

Travis Elborough

Kate Bush – always quite hippy, dippy, ‘out there’

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In 2019, Kate Bush felt the need to issue a statement on her website clarifying that she was not a Tory supporter. Nearly three years earlier, in an interview with a Canadian magazine, the singer-songwriter had appeared to express her admiration for Theresa May, stating: ‘I actually really like her and think she’s wonderful... It’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time.’ This rare foray into British politics from a performer whose reticence about her private life has bordered on the Trappist went down about as well as David (‘Scotland Stay with Us’) Bowie’s contribution to the Scottish Independence Referendum debate. Taylor Swift may have Eras, but Kate Bush is more of an aeons artist, operating in glacial deep time But Twitter (as was) be damned.

Joseph Hone

‘If you steal this book I’ll beat your brains out’

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‘I would lend you my copy, but the fucker who previously borrowed it still hasn’t given it back.’ Those precise words were uttered to me by an eminent churchman, more in anger than in sorrow, while chatting at high table about a book he believed I might find useful. Its title has long since slipped my mind, but I remember thinking at the time: who lends a book to a friend and seriously expects to get it back? Few things can be so often borrowed and so seldom returned.

Christopher Harding

Stalemate over Taiwan is the best we can hope for

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The United States of China, anyone? The idea that a federal China might be able to accommodate within it a relatively autonomous Taiwan is one of the more radical solutions mooted to the thorny problem of Taiwan’s status. The difficulty, of course, is that neither the Chinese Communist party nor Taiwan’s leaders would find such an outcome remotely acceptable. The CCP will not countenance a loosening of its control over mainland China; the Taiwanese, for their part, see in Hong Kong’s recent sad trajectory a vision of their own future should their politicians ever accept an offer of special status within China.

Simon Parkin

Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit

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Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters from, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Simpsons, or even, bewilderingly, M&M chocolates. Play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world Sometimes the new metaphor imbues the game with a socio-political frisson. A recent example pitches rockers – white men in leathers holding screaming guitars – against jazz musicians – black men in white suits nursing saxophones.

Andrew Taylor

The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed

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Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products. And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers and authors’ estates. In the past 60 years, there have been few bigger brands than the late John le Carré, so it’s no surprise to find a posthumous outing with the words ‘A John le Carré novel’ plastered over the cover. Its author, Le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway, is a well-established novelist in his own right, albeit in a different genre. He served his apprenticeship by completing his father’s last book, Silverview (2021).

Frances Wilson

Saint Joan and saucy Eve: a single woman split in two

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Fresh out of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz introduced herself to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.’ It was 1960, and while her writing was the sheerest bliss, ‘Eve Bah-Bitz with the Great Big Tits’, as she was known, was herself a work of art. Beauty, she learned at school, was power and ‘the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty’. So it was her stack (36 DD) that opened doors for her until, in 1972, her friend Joan Didion told Rolling Stone magazine to publish Eve’s first story, ‘The Sheik’. That same year, Didion also got Eve’s art into Vogue. As a result, Eve was ‘fucked up in the extreme’ about Joan. When, in 2016, Lili Anolik wrote about Didion’s L.A.

Alan Judd

Were the Arctic convoy sacrifices worth it?

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You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing ships hundreds of miles apart and playing havoc with communications. That’s not to mention enemy action by submarine, air attack and large surface raiders such as the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. Some 4.5 million tons of aid were delivered at the expense of 119 ships and 2,763 lives lost. Was it worth it? Opinion at the time was divided.

Stuart Evers

Doppelgangers galore: The Novices of Lerna, by Angel Bonomini, reviewed

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Resurrection has become its own literary genre. Though hardly a new phenomenon (Moby-Dick, for example, was out of print at the time of Herman Melville’s death), the success of such ‘forgotten’ classics as Suite Française, Stoner and Alone in Berlin proved that an author’s death and/or obscurity were no barrier for readers. So publishers from Faber to Virago, from the British Library to Penguin Modern Classics are hunting through back catalogues looking for writer recommendations, searching for the next unjustly lost voice. In Angel Bonomini, Peninsula Press has found an ideal candidate. How can such a powerful story have remained un-rediscovered for so long?

Thomas P. Lambert

Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre

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On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred. The subsequent trial was not just a gargantuan administrative undertaking (20 defendants faced around 2,000 plaintiffs, and the proceedings occupied the purpose-built courtroom for the best part of a year); it was a cultural phenomenon.

Rose Prince

Turkish delights: the best of the year’s cookbooks

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‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be as revolting as it sounds. Not much hope of that, I’m afraid – but this is more of a book to enjoy reading without tasting. Some of the writers confess to failing miserably in the food department. ‘I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it,’ warns Beryl Bainbridge, as she launches into a heartless recipe for violently boiled mince.

Oliver Balch

Freedom fighters of the ‘forgotten continent’

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On 18 May 1781, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion came to an abrupt and grisly end. Seized by Spanish forces, the Peruvian muleteer-turned-popular-revolutionary knew the game was up. Still, he refused to go quietly. After Tupac’s captors’ horses failed to wrench off his limbs, the executioner reached for his axe. ‘You kill only me,’ legend has Tupac shouting as the blade descended. ‘But tomorrow I will return as millions.’ As Laurence Blair’s Patria assiduously demonstrates, death rarely has the last word in the ‘forgotten continent’ of South America. In the case of Tupac, his narrative of a ‘Peru for Peruvians’, free from colonial oppression, would later be resurrected in radical leftist movements from Uruguay to Venezuela.

The Spectator

Books of the Year II

Lead book review

Peter Parker The New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey ought to be much more celebrated in this country than she is. Do not be put off by the fact that The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa, £14.99) is narrated by a magpie; whimsy is entirely absent from this highly original, thrillingly dark and often very funny novel. The bird is adopted by the wife of a cash-strapped farmer and learns to speak, becoming an internet sensation and so providing useful income. At the same time, its guileless chatter includes picked-up phrases that inadvertently expose what is really going on in the household where it has made its home. Treat of the year was Sheila Robinson’s Balance, Humanity and Nature (Random Spectacular, £27.

31 October 2024

Henry Jeffreys

From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker

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One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a poetic meditation on the public house, its history and place in our culture with some memoir deftly thrown in. Most of all it’s an appreciation of what makes a pub great: the layers accumulated by decades – centuries, sometimes – of human interaction. ‘The perfect pub,’ he writes, ‘is a kind of metaphysical palimpsest which we should try to imagine as a constantly evolving space.

29 October 2024

The Spectator

Books of the Year I

Lead book review

Jonathan Sumption Barbara Emerson’s The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, £35) is an outstanding account of Britain’s relations with Russia at a time when ambassadors mattered and Britain was the only world power. No one has explained the Great Game in Central Asia or the intricacies of European dynastic politics so well. Anne Somerset’s Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers (Collins, £30) overlaps with it, since one of the abiding themes of the queen’s relations with the eight men who occupied No. 10 in her long reign was her enthusiasm for going to war with Russia. Victoria was opinionated and outspoken, but easy to manipulate if you knew the codes.

Francesca Peacock

Waifs and strays: Gliff, by Ali Smith, reviewed

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‘Gliff’ is a word which can mean ‘a short moment’, ‘a wallop’, and ‘a post-ejaculatory sex act’; to ‘dispel snow’, ‘to frighten’, and to ‘escape something quickly’. It’s ‘really excitingly polysemous’, says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its centre are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of ‘Unverifiables’.

Michael Moorcock

The mystery of Area X: Absolution, by Jeff VanderMeer, reviewed

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I have to confess that I am not a fan of horror fiction. I have a stack of unread H.P. Lovecrafts sent to me by enthusiasts. M.R. James scares me silly. Even Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories remain neglected among her other much-loved books. I have, however, been impressed over the years by writers usually identified as belonging to the movement described in the late 1990s by M. John Harrison as the New Weird, which marries chiefly supernatural themes to realism or naturalism. As a stylist, Harrison remains the greatest of these writers. They included Angela Carter, China Miéville and Jeffrey Ford. The movement is naturally associated with the science fiction New Wave, whose best known practitioner was J.G.

Lynn Barber

Truly inspirational: the hospital diary of Hanif Kureishi

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You’d think a book about a paralysed man lying in hospital for a year would be bound to be depressing. It never is. Hanif Kureishi is such an exhilarating writer that you read agog even when he’s describing having his nappies changed or fingers stuck up his bottom. It all started on Boxing Day 2022 when he was sitting watching television in his girlfriend Isabella’s flat in Rome. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t stoned, but suddenly he felt a bit dizzy, put his head between his knees and fell off the sofa. In doing so, he somehow broke his neck and became tetraplegic. As a result, he cannot move his arms or legs, he cannot feed himself or scratch his nose or hold a pen. If he cries, he cannot wipe away his tears.

Guy Stagg

The many passions of Ronald Blythe

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In Regency Britain, balls were often timed to coincide with full moons. Provided there was no cloud cover, moonlight made it safer to send out carriages. When Ronald Blythe accepted social invitations, he also took the lunar calendar into account – because a full moon was ‘best for a merry bicyclist wheeling homeward along unlit and potholed lanes’. This vignette captures much of Blythe’s magic. He was born in Suffolk in 1922 and his life and his writing became vessels for centuries of rural wisdom. With his death last year, that link to the distant rhythms of the English countryside was lost, but Ian Collins’s biography attempts to preserve the magic.

Suzi Feay

Out of the depths: Dante’s Purgatorio, by Philip Terry, reviewed

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Many readers of Dante get no further than the Inferno. The inscription over the gates of Hell, the demon-haunted circles, the howling winds that buffet the lovers Paolo and Francesca, even the poet’s grim profile and bonnet, are part of the world’s literary and artistic heritage. Several translators also stop at the point that the dazed poet and his guide Virgil emerge from the bowels of the Earth into the astonishing starlight. It’s no surprise that Inferno seizes the imagination, but it’s only a third of the story; and possibly for Dante himself just the part you have to plunge through before you get to the good bits. Philip Terry’s witty, transgressive canto-by-canto Dante’s Inferno came out in 2014.

Caroline Moorehead

You didn’t mess with them – the doughty matriarchs of the intelligence world

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As Hilary Mantel memorably noted, history represents what people try to hide, and researching it is a question of ferreting out what they want you not to discover. Claire Hubbard-Hall’s plan to unearth the identities and lives of the legions of women who have worked unheralded in the British secret services was bold: looking for secrets in a doubly secret world. Miss Pettigrew was a ‘formidable grey-haired lady with a square jaw of the battleship type’ The first bureau was founded in 1909. It is perhaps not altogether surprising to learn that neither MI5 nor MI6 were very good to the female employees on whom they came increasingly to depend.

Oliver Soden

A geriatric Lord of the Flies: Killing Time, by Alan Bennett, reviewed

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Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’ It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the first time, he tried to show Audrey his willy’.