Books Archives

Troubled waters | 2 October 2010

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This is the fifth in C. J. Sansom’s engrossing series of Tudor crime novels. This is the fifth in C. J. Sansom’s engrossing series of Tudor crime novels. His hero is Matthew Shardlake, a middle-aged, hunchbacked property lawyer who lives on the fringe of Henry VIII’s dangerously magnetic court. In his youth a zealous Protestant, or Reformer, the excesses of the revolution we call the Dissolution have led him to distance himself from all factions. He seeks a wife and a quiet professional life, but in a world where the religious is political and the political religious, his insistence on justice invariably leads him into troubled waters.

Paul Routledge

Straining for effect

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A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. This was plainly not the case, as the 443 pages of his second volume, Decline & Fall, demonstrate. Whatever the fate of those he writes about with such sardonic charm, obscurity is unlikely to overtake the former Member for Sunderland South, though he will be better remembered for what he wrote than for what he did.

Ian Thomson

In a Greene shade

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Some travel writers, in an attempt to simulate the hardship of Victorian journeys, like to impose artificial difficulties on themselves. A glut of memorably foolish yarns with titles like Hang-Gliding to Borneo or To Bognor on a Rhinoceros discredited the genre in the 1980s. In every case it would have been quicker for the authors to take the train. Why wind-surf across the Mojave when there’s a serviceable coach service? Tim Butcher, formerly a Telegraph war correspondent, is biased towards old- fashioned travellers in the Redmond O’Hanlon mould who, with their bushy side-whiskers and squire-naturalist curiosity, continue a tradition of Victorian exploration.

Peter Hoskin

Self-awareness

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Will Self loves to go a-wandering; this much we know. For the past few years, he has followed the lead of authors such as Iain Sinclair, and undertaken huge, looping walks around city and country, before writing about the experience afterwards — in his case, in a column for the Independent. This ‘psychogeography’ (for such is it called) is meant to be an exercise more for the mind than for the legs. The dedicated psycho- geographer stomps across ground that is soaked in human interaction, history, myth and potential. His pen seeks out the significance in it all, cosmic or otherwise. And so we arrive at Self’s latest book, Walking to Hollywood — whose title tells you everything and nothing about its contents.

25 September 2010

Philip Hensher

Family fallout

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Philip Hensher salutes ‘Freedom’, Jonathan Franzen’s latest great American novel Family is the engine that drives the novel. Relationships which are both fixed and constantly negotiated are what the novel, as a form, is about. We don’t choose our siblings, our parents, our children, but from day to day we choose, with the full volition of our existence, how those relationships will shape us. The interplay between our free will and the world which is wished upon us is the core, irreducible territory of the great novels. Perhaps now that family ties are growing more dependent on volition and goodwill (or bad) rather than on duty and obligation, family is becoming more of a fruitful territory for the novelist’s investigations, rather than less so.

Christopher Howse

Sweeter than honey

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The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The suggestion was not that wicked people alone shop at Tesco’s. Nor was the phrase intended as a pious invocation of the Bible, its source, Isaiah, 57:21. An anthropologist describing the clichés, or tropes, of Western cultures might form the idea that biblical religion played a lively part in daily discourse.

Jasper Becker

Systematic genocide

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You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. It is a measure of people’s continuing admiration for Chairman Mao that last year the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, unashamedly described him as a ‘favourite political philosopher’ because, as she told an audience of American high- school graduates, Mao showed that You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path.

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading | 25 September 2010

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The cover of On Snooker shows the Queen Mother sizing up a shot, making a passable bridge but rather failing to get behind the cue. The book is by Mordecai Richler, the great Canadian novelist and essayist, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version, who died in 2001. On Snooker takes in all the major figures of the late-20th-century game, and is unafraid to bring out its juicier side, particularly the depredations of its bad boys: Alex Higgins trashing hotel rooms, urinating in plant-pots, whaling his cue at the spectators, ending up broke, drinking from left-over beer glasses; Ronnie O’Sullivan and his dad, Ronnie O’Sullivan Sr.

Lewis Jones

Merging poetry and song

The best book so far about Bob Dylan, the only one worthy of his oeuvre, is his own astonishing Chronicles, Volume One (2004), but while we wait for the next fix, Bob Dylan in America will keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay. Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton, and author of books about Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan. He is also a second-generation hipster and a Dylan fan since 1964, when he first saw him play. Wilentz planned this book, he explains, as ‘a coherent commentary on Dylan’s development, as well as his achievements, and on his connections to enduring currents in American history and culture’.

David Sexton

A strict, controlling vision

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Thoughtful Gardening, twice as long as the first two, beautifully produced in Germany, is a summation of the Lane Fox gardening doctrine, this time mixing more or less practical advice on particular plants — Later Clematis, Sociable Deutzias, Desirable Dahlias, the Etna Broom — with more discursive essays, recalling great gardeners, visiting gardens from Texas to Odessa, all these pieces, which are organised seasonally, being deftly linked to make an easy continuous read.

John Preston

What lies beneath

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There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. It even has the added cachet of having been written in Spanish by a Canadian and then translated into English. If ever there was a book that demanded to be hurled across the room by anyone who’s not a regular user of the word ‘ludic’, this surely is it.

Bevis Hillier

Oh Brother, where art thou?

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Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. That is roughly what has happened with The Buildings of England guide to Hampshire. The guides used to fit into an overcoat pocket; now you’d need the glove compartment of a car. High praise is due to the authors of this volume for careful scholarship, an outstanding array of colour illustrations, and a literary style which is not drily academic, but relaxed and colloquial.

Cassandra Jardine

Cambridge and after

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My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake. Having left the year before he came up, I could have reassured him there was little danger. Everyone, as he puts it, was in the same punt. Cambridge in the late 1970s featured only the usual sprinkling of genuine intellectuals and egregious talents — of whom Fry was an outstanding example. His opinions were perfect for the time and place. He considered F. R. Leavis a ‘sanctimonious prick’, abstained from D. H. Lawrence and Hardy, wallowed in T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and took an informed, but sceptical, line on the ‘Parisian post-structuralists and their impenetrable evangels’.

Mark Mason

Bookends

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Nigella Lawson is not sexy. She is the sort of woman who women think men think is sexy. No doubt some do: men who watch Top Gear and like all their pleasures to be equally obvious. But more men than you’d credit take one look at Nigella and hit an immediate problem: in spite of her physical charms, how can you fancy someone who so clearly fancies herself? Assessing any other author on these grounds would be unfair, but they’re the grounds Nigella has chosen. To distinguish herself from Sweary Gordon, Matey Jamie and Psycho Heston, Chesty Lawson plies not so much food porn as porn porn. Even by her standards, though, parts of her latest book (Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home, Chatto, £26) are invitations to ridicule.

22 September 2010

Alex Massie

Obama vs Petraeus vs Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward is the best (and perhaps nastiest) blackmailer in Washington. Sure, you don't have to co-operate with him but you know what will happen if you don't. Those who talk to Woodward are always treated kindly by the great stenographer; those who decline his advances invariably become the villains. Each time this happens it becomes easier for Woodward to persuade people to talk to him for his next book. And since his slabby books (really, like Thomas Friedman's works they merit being called "tomes") have become some kind of quasi-official instant history it's always necessary to work out who has been talking and who has not and read between the lines* accordingly. His latest, Obama's Wars, is going to cause trouble.

18 September 2010

Paul Johnson

Welsh wizardry and venom

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Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs.

Dan Jones

The match that sparked the Civil War

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There are turbulent marriages. And then there are turbulent marriages in which the husband ends up getting beheaded on a stage. This book describes the latter. One doesn’t normally need to encourage publishers to hyperbole, but in the case of Katie Whitaker’s subtitle, there might have been a case for giving it a bit more welly. The story begins with a prissy 15-year-old French princess being taken to England, to a husband whom she’d never seen. It ends with that husband losing his crown and his head to Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian taleban. The sad coda is the princess living out her days back in France, estranged from most of her children: older, wiser, but not much happier.

Penelope Lively

Shop till you drop

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Within the past month I have been to an 80th and a 90th birthday lunch, both of them highly festive occasions. And now here is an entertaining, erudite and thought-provoking meditation on the matter of age by Jane Miller (aged 78). The so-called twilight years are no longer quite that, for some of us. This book takes a look at the experience of age, and the perception of age, using the writer’s own engagement with it for the former, and for the latter the promptings of a well-stocked mind to demonstrate how literature has reflected life. Those called in range from Simone de Beauvoir through Bellow, Updike, Roth to Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Interconnect

This mortal coil

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Among the most famous of all living poets, Nobel Laureate, highly educated, revered for his lectures and ideas as well as for his poetry, Seamus Heaney has a daunting reputation. He remains, however, enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers, accessible, song-like, direct, concerned with everyday details and human relationships. Essentially, Heaney’s poetry strikes to the heart through its central metaphor — the very mechanics of being human. Human Chain, his latest collection, makes this familiar territory absolutely explicit, right from the title.

Lloyd Evans

Double exposure

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I never thought I’d write these words. I never thought I’d write these words. This book is unclassifiable. It belongs to a whole new genre. The field of literature has been extended! And I saw it happen. Martin Gayford, who writes for The Spectator and whom I’ve never met, kept a diary during the seven months he spent sitting for the painter Lucian Freud in 2003/4. The book is a journal, an act of confession, a character study of Freud, a piecemeal survey of art history and an investigation into the practicalities of portraiture. It’s also a hostage drama. Gayford has no idea how many months or years the painting will take, and his abductor-cum-immortaliser asserts his right to abandon the project at any moment, without warning.

Francis King

The witch in the machine

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If one asks Albanians who is their greatest living writer, the immediate answer is Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005. But the tone of any discussion that follows is all too often grudging or even hostile. The books themselves are hugely popular, their author far less so. The reason for this is that throughout a period when many Eastern European writers were suffering persecution for their opposition to Stalinist regimes, the worst that ever happened to Kadare was an embargo on his work for three years. A Marxist, he managed to remain on friendly terms with the Albanian dictatorship until two months before the toppling of Enver Hoxa. It was only then that he announced his surely long overdue defection.

James Walton

Learning to listen

How Music Works opens with a blizzard of reassurances. First, John Powell establishes his ordinary-bloke credentials by means of a slightly tortured analogy between many people’s attitude to music (‘pleasure without understanding’) and the time he went to the chip shop after the pub and realised he couldn’t tell the Chinese owner exactly what gravy was. He then lays out in some detail what prior knowledge of musical theory, maths and science we’ll need for what follows: absolutely none. The message, in other words, is a firm ‘Don’t panic’. This might be a book of musicology by a classically trained composer and physics professor, but it’s aimed squarely at the novice. And from there, Powell proves as good as his word.

Michael Carlson

The Hillicker Curse

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By now, the crucial details of James Ellroy’s life, particularly the unsolved murder of his mother when he was ten years old, may be known better than his books. He emphasised the connection himself when The Black Dahlia, based on a more famous unsolved murder, became a bestseller, constructing a ‘demon dog’ persona to promote the novels which followed. Finally, in his memoir, My Dark Places, Ellroy investigated his mother’s death, and seemingly offered her a benediction, but as he said ‘closure is a preposterous concept’. He had rejected his mother before she met her end, preferring his slick but shallow father’s indulgence. This youthful cruelty is the root of the Hilliker (his mother’s maiden name) Curse.

Andrew Taylor

Innocents abroad

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In John le Carré’s fiction, personal morality collides messily with the grimly cynical expediencies of global politics. In John le Carré’s fiction, personal morality collides messily with the grimly cynical expediencies of global politics. Loyalty is never something to take for granted. That is the issue at the heart of his new novel, his 22nd, as it is in so many of his other ones. The plot centres on a pair of innocents abroad, both literally and figuratively — Perry, a left-leaning Oxford don who yearns to replace the dreaming spires with what he thinks of as real life; and his girlfriend, Gail, a young barrister hesitating between her career and the possibility of six children with Perry.

11 September 2010

Sam Leith

Beating his demons | 11 September 2010

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Some of us are still startled that Wallace Stevens was 44 when he published Harmonium. So what to make of the fact that Roald Dahl was past the midpoint of his forties when he wrote his first children’s book in 1961, James and the Giant Peach? At the time, he was known as a dark little adult fabulist; macabre like Saki, twisty like O. Henry. A hint as to his view of children’s writing thereto is found in a letter anticipating the birth of his first child: ‘Parenthood is a great strain. I can see it all. Nursery books for Knopf. Once upon a time there was a dear little bunny . . .’ He did indeed end up writing nursery books for Knopf, but dear little bunnies were thin on the ground.

Alexander Waugh

A plague of infinities

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Stephen Hawking is the most distinguished living physicist, who despite the catastrophe of motor neurone disease has been twice married, is a bestselling author and a media super-star. He is blessed with an extraordinary intellectual energy and fearless resilience. One might also add chutzpah. In The Grand Design he aims to give a concise and readable answer to the ‘Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ In fact he offers three such questions: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?’ It will come as no surprise to learn that he fails to provide a satisfactory solution to any of them. Had he succeeded, you would have already heard it on the news.

Andrew Taylor

The child is not there

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The ghost story is a literary form that favours brevity. Its particular emotional effects — the delicious unease it creates, the shapeless menace and the unsettling uncertainty — work particularly well in concentration, as both Henry James and M. R. James knew so well. A ghost story does not need distractions. Susan Hill has already established herself as a distinguished modern exponent of the genre with The Woman in Black and The Man in the Picture. She returns to it in her latest novel — or, rather, novella, The Small Hand. It is set firmly in the present, in a world with emails and trips to New York; but, as so often with a ghost story, it is also full of echoes from the past. Adam Snow, the possibly unreliable narrator, is an antiquarian bookseller.

Charlotte Moore

Land of lost content

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Tom Frayn, says his son Michael in this admirable memoir, trod lightly upon the earth. He belonged to a class and a generation who didn’t think their story mattered. Even his profession — he was an asbestos salesman — has ceased to exist. At the request of his own children, who felt that they had ‘risen from an unknown place’, Michael Frayn has collected the few scraps of evidence and pieced together this unobtrusive life. His father was a ‘smart lad’, youngest of a family of seven housed in two rooms off the Holloway Road, and the only one not born deaf. (He suffered hearing loss later, but, characteristically, used it to enhance his comic timing.) Tom’s wit and charm found plenty of customers for his toxic wares.

Andrew McKie

Architect of cool

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More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened. Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on Nineteen Eighty-Four) and William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, which popularised the idea of ‘cyberspace’, a term he had minted. Both seemed like science fiction then. Apple’s machine, with its 128 kilobytes, now seems antediluvian.