Book Reviews: 14 September
OUT NOW
THE HEART BROKE IN by James Meek (Canongate, £17.99)
The Heart Broke In, described on its cover as an old-fashioned story of modern times is, like James Meek's first novel, expertly written and researched. 'Be sure your sins will find you out' is not a maxim that applies in the opening chapters to the peccable Ritchie – erstwhile rock god (and now a TV director of the Cowell variety), husband and father, whose current liaison with a knowing underage teen is causing ripples of unease at home and at work.
With the introduction of Bec, Ritchie's beautiful younger sister, a scientist whose work on a cure for malaria involves experimenting on herself, Meek raises the issues of medical ethics and moral obligations; and addresses the themes of retribution and justice.
Thus misguided choices made with good intentions bring about unhappy consequences; secrets will always be discovered. Bec has two suitors – Alex, a fellow scientist and ex-drummer, and the rather pantomimic Val, a newspaper editor who, rejected by Bec, pushes the siblings' increasingly antipathetic relationship into meltdown.
Among the women is Alex's mother Maureen, 'a virtually atheist churchgoer with Gaian leanings', and the stand-out male is the dying Harry, ironically head of a research establishment investigating cancer cures. Meek's narrative skill is shown to vivid effect in the breathtaking description of an epic bike ride from east to west London in the pursuit of love. The burning desire to discover how it all pans out propels one to fi nish this bravura book by a remarkable writer.
Sarah Crowden
JOHN SATURNALL'S FEAST by Lawrence Norfolk (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
On the cusp of an autumn glut, the publication of a novel about a sublime cook in a great house 380 years ago is perfectly timed. At its heart is a love story – the unlikely alliance between John Saturnall, red-liveried servant, and the daughter and eventual mistress of the household, the Lady Lucretia. He is a casualty of religious extremism, left at the house following the harrying, and death, of his mother, an alien presence in their village. Before she dies, she teaches John to read and memorise recipes from the book she consults. Those recipes head each chapter and, though challenging, are no more complex than Heston Blumenthal's.
John Saturnall rises through the ranks from kitchen boy to assistant cook, his talent for separating ingredients in a dish through his heightened senses of taste and smell elevating him to a seat beside the 'sad-faced' King Charles I in times of plenty.
In contrast, the finding of meagre ingredients and the quasiritualistic cooking of starvation rations after a Puritan purge during the Civil War are two lovely set pieces. The kitchen vocabulary is rich, and Norfolk relishes it – his listing of arcane ingredients and the creation of the dishes in tough conditions are the high point in this novel. Differences between insipid masters and rugged servants are over-egged at times and exposition and pace, initially well balanced, are truncated in the rush to resolution, but the feast itself is a triumph.
Sarah Crowden
UMBRELLA by Will Self (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
This is an extremely ambitious novel and a bold departure from Self's well-trodden path as Britain's most Swiftian of satirists, whose ability to probe our contemporary world by making it seem strange has depended on exploiting the logic of impossible situations – depicted with comic dynamism and coruscating wit.
Self's gifts as a great prose stylist shine through Umbrella, but this is a self-consciously modernist novel which, in ranging between 1918 and 2010, attempts to explore Britain's 20th century as a fragmented totality.
Audrey Dearth is a feminist munitions worker and it is principally through her and her brothers that we see the effects of the mechanised insanity of the First World War. She is to become a 'sleeping beauty' due to the post-war influenza epidemic of encephalitis lethargica and will be rescued in 1971, Oliver Sacks style, through physician Zack Busner's experiments with the drug L-dopa. As an old man he will revisit the hospital he worked in, and his younger self, and consider his past.
The title alludes to James Joyce and, like Ulysses, Self's novel is visceral, depicting the sights, sounds and smells of London while seeking to grasp his characters through a polyphonic array of voices: memories as unreliable as dreams, and narration that leaps between different narrators and time-streams, like diachronic versions of cinema jump-cuts. It is as rewarding as it is demanding – the novel Self's readers have been waiting for – though its fi nal vision is a sad, uncompromising and austere one of the Britain created after 1918.
Steve Barfield
MUST READ
The sad waste of war
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Sceptre, £14.99)
War is often said to bring out the best and worst in humans, as shown in this disturbing, beautifully written debut novel about American soldiers during the occupation of Iraq.
It's the story of two close friends: Private John Bartle, who rashly promises the mother of fellow recruit, Private Daniel Murphy, that he'll bring him safely home from the war. It brilliantly evokes the dusty, often pointless, dangerous patrols that the soldiers undertake as they become inured to horror.
Powers has a poet's eye for the minute details in the wartorn landscape and the tension of conflict with an elusive enemy. The novel moves back and forth between Iraq and Bartle's subsequent – traumatised – life in the US, haunted by Murphy's fate. This is a harrowing and pitiful story of the sad waste of war. SB
BOOK OF THE WEEK
We plough the fields...
Theo Walden looks back at wartime farming lore
WARTIME FARM by Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman and Alex Langlands (Mitchell Beazley, £20)
The Second World War nostalgiafest continues with the current BBC programme The Wartime Farm. This is the accompanying book, credited to the three 'farmers', Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman and Alex Langlands, who, for the purposes of the programme, set up as wartime farmers at Manor Farm, near Botley in Hampshire. Originally, the Warwick family had bought Manor Farm in 1941. Mr Warwick was charged with improving the farm's output in accordance with 'Min of Ag' stipulations (ie, turning grazing land into arable).
He had a foreman and stockman, and a troupe of land girls to help him. Gypsies and Italian prisoners of war provided extra labour. You can see why the BBC leapt on this chance to reenact life in wartime Britain: animals, 'experts' and 'enthusiasts' getting to grips with mud, rationing, dieting and air-raid precautions, and a lack of Lycra and heating, will make brilliant telly, especially if it goes wrong...
So the book is huge fun, providing loads of photos of baffled 21st-century 'experts', dressed in coupon-rationed clothing, marvelling over 1940s agricultural technology. It's also very informative – a much livelier introduction to our recent history than that afforded by the A-level syllabus; and full of handy tips and hints on making do and mending that could be employed in our own straitened times. For instance, homemade shampoo... As the war progressed, soap became rationed, so 'farmer' Ruth includes a recipe for soapwort shampoo, noting that, 'no shampoo I have ever used was quite so vividly green as this... It was wonderful... my hair has never felt so soft and I didn't need to use any conditioner'.
There's also a section on improvised toys, including instructions on making a tin Spitfire that looks so artisan it could have come straight from The Conran Shop. Fruit and veg play a major part of course, as do growing seeds, harvesting, storing, bottling and preserving, beekeeping, sheep shearing and making stooks of flax.
By the end, the 'experts' are looking quite lithe and healthy – proof, if any more were needed, that the 1940s wartime rationing, restricted diet and outdoor ethos, is a much healthier way of life than the one we currently pursue.
PAPERBACKS
A CRUEL BIRD CAME TO THE NEST AND LOOKED IN by Magnus Mills (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
A dazzling prose stylist as well as an original contemporary voice, Mills is as much the heir of English fantasist Mervyn Peake as of Kafka. This is a beautifully wrought tale of the declining empire of Greater Fallowfields, and of the threat facing the Empire. Mills has created a fantasy world, which uncannily reminds us of our own society. SB
THE SNOW CHILD by Eowyn Ivey (Headline Review 2012, £7.99)
Based on a Russian fairytale of a childless couple who create a snow girl who magically comes alive, this first novel is set in the pioneering society of 1920s Alaska. The wife is depressed, her husband is ground down by the farm. Ivey superbly evokes the harsh landscapes and the ways deep yearnings dislocate the boundary between reality and fantasy. Is the girl real or not? This moving tale is as evanescent as melting snow. SB
NIGHT FALLS ON THE CITY by Sarah Gainham (Abacus, £8.99)
Gainham was born in 1915 in London, but settled in Vienna in 1947 – her Night Falls On The City was published to acclaim in 1967. It opens in Vienna in 1938 on the eve of the Anschluss between Hitler's Germany and Austria, and centres on Julia, her Jewish husband Franz, and friends. How will they cope with the Nazi occupation? You adapt, but at what cost, is the message of this courageous book.
Lola Sinclair
ALSO PUBLISHED
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess (Heinemann, £20)
This month sees the 50th anniversary of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. An underground hit almost as soon as it was released in 1962, it was immortalised in Stanley Kubrick's controversial film in 1971 – with its shocking vision of the future, containing violence, sexuality and dark humour. This special edition includes extra material from various editions of the book, including six of the original illustrations, and the typescript.
CYCLING TOURING GUIDES
Cycle of life
Clare Russell revels in Harold Briercli e's reissued 1940s biking tour guides
So, it's official... Team GB is great at cycling. Two wheels good, four wheels bad, to paraphrase. And, judging by the increased biking traffic on the road, everyone wants to get in on the action – to such an extent in Box Hill, Surrey, venue for the Olympics biking marathon, that the inhabitants are up in arms at an invasion of amateur wheels trying to emulate the winning riders.
Cyclists need a place to cycle – space not always afforded by British roads. But help is at hand. Batsford has reissued Harold Briercliffe's guides, published in the 1940s, and the inspiration behind the Britain By Bike TV series. Briercliffe, 'the Arthur Wainwright of cycling', wrote for Cycling magazine and his books, lightweight, designed to fit into a saddlebag, are a distillation of his desire to map the countryside for cyclists. These three guides explore southern, northern and central England and make good use of the 1940s illustrations.
Although you get a flavour of Briercliffe's style – the scenery of southern England, he notes, 'apart from a few blots... is pleasing rather than noble, soothing rather than inspiring. It has few hills higher than 900ft, its coastline nearly all spoilt'. But, he adds, 'There are splendid examples of ecclesiastical, military and domestic building'.
Batsford has updated some routes, steering you into quieter roads when possible. Inhabitants of Box Hill will be pleased that they are mentioned only in passing along the route from Hyde Park to Arundel, via Leatherhead, Billingshurst, Pulborough and Bury before arriving in Arundel itself – 'one of the most interesting towns in the south of England'.
Cycling Touring Guides by Harol Briercliffe (Batsford, £9.99 each).