Book Reviews: 4 January
OUT NOW
WINTER by Adam Gopnik (Quercus, £18.99) Winter begins with a snowstorm – on 12 November 1968, in Canada, when the author, Adam Gopnik, was a small boy.
He stood at a window and watched the snow falling ‘so it first italicised the plants and trees and the lights, drawing small white borders around them, and then slowly overwhelming them in drifts and dunes. I knew that I had crossed over into a new world… the world of winter.’
This new world is wonderfully described here, in five essays Gopnik originally gave as lectures at CBC. He looks at this bleak season through the eyes of artists, composers, poets, scientists and explorers and reveals how our attitude to winter has changed, as technology – largely in the form of coal and gas – has progressed.
We can now revel in snow, wind and ice because, if we’re lucky, they’re outside, while we’re safely between four walls in a centrally heated house.
The domestication of winter came about towards the end of the 18th century, so this book is both a biography of a season and a social history rolled into one.
Gopnik’s essays transport you from the Romantic poets to games of ice hockey, taking in subjects as diverse as ice fl owers, winter festivals, Anderson’s snow queen, department-store windows and polar bears, on the way.
Theo Walden
HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE by Emma Chapman (Picador, £12.99) How To Be A Good Wife is the title both of this Room-indebted psychological thriller, and of the domestic bible Marta receives on her marriage to schoolteacher Hector. Despite the fact that the giver of this gift is Hector’s doting mother, Marta fails to run a mile and instead learns its strictures by heart. This, then, is a novel in which an early suspension of disbelief is necessary, although that task is made easier by Emma Chapman’s choice of location: an unidentified, isolated part of Scandinavia, where the year is tipping into the perpetual dark of winter, and where all manner of strange and sinister things consequently seem possible.
Chapman mines this vein of claustrophobic creepiness to great effect as we learn more about Marta: about the amnesia fogging her past; the illness against whose return Hector keeps her sedated; and the hallucinations – of a dishevelled blonde girl, a concrete cell – that point to a terrible buried trauma.
But when the clockwork routines of Marta’s marriage are one day broken, she decides to determine the truth: is Hector the good husband that he appears to be, concerned only for her health, or something nearer to her jailer? A confi dent, if not entirely successful, debut.
Stephanie Cross
INTO THE SILENCE: THE GREAT WAR, MALLORY AND THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST by Wade Davis (Vintage, £12.99) This impressive book won the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize and while many have explored the fateful and sacrifi cial expedition of Mallory in 1924, when he and Irvine died on the ascent of Everest, few have attempted Davis’s thoroughgoing, detailed group biography as cultural history. He sees the climbers as haunted dreamers, harrowed by their desperate experiences in the First World War, living amid romantic dreams of Imperial grandeur and the elemental, sublime grandeur of the mountain.
Steve Barfield
MUTTON by India Knight (Fig Tree, £12.99)If this didn’t appear in your Christmas stocking, now may be the time to nip out and buy it. It’s the latest novel by Sunday Times columnist India Knight – an amusing story lamenting encroaching age. Or, rather, middle age and the things one fi nds oneself doing ‘due to age’: being increasingly interested in the weather, drinking copious amounts of tea and fl irting with waiters who clearly think you could be their mother. Yes, we’ve all been there, which makes the adventures of Knight’s heroine, Clara Hutt, excruciatingly familiar, and very funny. And then Clara’s friend Laura arrives to upset applecarts. She used to be older (and plainer) than Clara; now she looks about 30, is impossibly glamorous, has a toyboy, is au fait with Botox and wants Clara to join in the fun. Should she? Knight’s resolution to this tricky question throws up some surprises.
Lola Sinclair
BOOK OF THE WEEK
A winter’s tale
Peony Makepeace enjoys Maeve Binchy’s fittingly memorable swansong A WEEK IN WINTER by Maeve Binchy (Orion, £18.99)
Rosamunde Pilcher wrote a wonderful, romantic novel set in the months leading up to Christmas, which culminated in the protagonists finding a festival refuge in a house in a small town in Scotland. It had everything that is most beguiling about Christmas: present buying, snow, parties and burgeoning romances. It was called Winter Solstice.
A Week In Winter, Maeve Binchy’s last novel, explores the same theme – this time in a country-house hotel set amid a wintry seaside landscape in the west of Ireland, populated by a group of incongruous guests – and although Christmas doesn’t figure (something of a relief at this time of year), the idea of refuge and a safe haven does.
This is a book designed to be read in a dark January chill; it begs for a fireside and the sound of wind and rain howling outside. Essentially, it’s a collection of short stories, each dealing with one of the assembled guests, held together by a single uniting theme – the hotel. Stone House was once the home of the Sheedy sisters. Now it belongs to Chicky Starr, a woman with her own secrets, who returns to her Irish roots after a stint in America. She transforms the falling-down pile into a bohemian boutique hotel, with roaring fi res and a farmhouse kitchen, and welcomes in a collection of people brought here by chance.
There’s a runaway film star, gone AWOL en route to a vital meeting; a mild Swedish accountant who falls under the spell of Irish music, and a truly nasty potential mother-in-law whose attempts to prise her son away from his good-natured fiancée are intriguing to watch.
The last story, involving Freda, the librarian who falls for a complete bounder, perhaps works the best. Here, Binchy’s eye for female friendship, eccentric old ladies and handsome cads is given full rein. Add in a childhood gift for seeing into the future and you’ve got a winner.
Binchy died last year after a prolific career that began in 1982 and during which she wrote more than 20 books, all of them bestsellers.
If you haven’t come across her before, you’ve got a real treat in store.
MUST READ
Soho haunt of the starsTHE COLONY ROOM CLUB 1948-2008: A HISTORY OF BOHEMIAN SOHO by Sophie Parkin (Palmtree, £35)
The Colony Room Club was a sleazy, boozy smoke-hole in Soho’s Dean Street – meeting place for the stars of British Bohemia. It opened in 1948 and closed in 2008, but during its brief tenure ‘hosted the longest-running, and some would say, the best, party in British history’.
Inhabitants of this dangerous world ranged from Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, EM Forster and Jeffrey Bernard, to Lucian Freud, Noël Coward, George Melly, Joe Strummer and Damien Hirst, all orchestrated by its founder, Muriel Belcher – a kind-hearted, bitter-tongued bisexual from Birmingham. You can imagine the feuds and fights, highs and
lows of this kind of gathering – and it's all brilliantly described in Sophie Parkin's loving, wellresearched account.
Great pictures, too, and great stories.
TW
PAPERBACKS
HIGH RISING by Angela Thirkell (Virago, £8.99) Thirkell’s first novel, published in 1933, has been reissued by Virago in a smart new edition. It’s a terrifi c holiday story – charming, chatty novelist Laura Morland and her train-obsessed son spend Christmas in the country with best friend George Knox and his scheming secretary Miss Grey. Laura’s determination to prevent a takeover bid on the part of Miss Grey is aided and abetted by a collection of stalwart visitors. Virago has also reissued Wild Strawberries, another Thirkell comedy of errors. PM
CARRY THE ONE by Carol Anshaw (Penguin, £7.99)
A tragic car accident when they were teenagers changes the characters’ lives forever. Told in effortlessly graceful prose and skilfully plotted, this is a compassionate and moving exploration of the guilt and sadness that binds several talented friends together over a period of 25 years. SB
FISH CHANGE DIRECTION IN COLD WEATHER by Pierre Szalowski (Canongate, £8.99)
Already a French language bestseller, this is an enchanting, romantic and whimsical-magicalrealist tale set in an ice-bound neighbourhood in Montreal, during the great freeze of 1998. There is a cast of eccentric, memorable characters, and a little boy trying to save his parents’ marriage and pet fish. SB
ALSO PUBLISHED…
A YEAR OF VICTORIAN PUDDINGS by Georgiana Hill (Macmillan, £9.99) These recipes first appeared in Everybody’s Pudding Book, published in 1862. Reproduced here, they provide a pudding for each day of the year. In January, these include Snowballs (cored apples enveloped in rice and boiled for 20 mins), Flour Hasty Pudding and Medlar Tart. LS
THE GURKHA’S DAUGHTER: STORIES by Prajwal Parajuly (Quercus, £12.99)
A collection of finely crafted, vibrant stories that focus on the minutiae of the life of the Nepalese community in their homeland and abroad. Stylistically reminiscent of Raymond Carver, while at the same time opening a door on to an unfamiliar world. SB
In search of a good read?
Lola Sinclair finds some helpful advice in a new fiction directory
WHO ELSE WRITES LIKE…? edited by Ian Baillie (LISU Loughborough University, £26.99) This is the seventh edition of the inspired guide to fiction authors. Its main purpose, according to the introduction, is to ‘act as a guide for readers who find an author they really like, read all of that person’s output, and then want to find someone similar whose work they might also enjoy’.
Such a helpful, inclusive idea, made doubly useful by the fact that libraries and librarians – one of the few members of the workforce who might know which author you might like to read next – are being forced almost out of existence.
There are 2,000 authors listed, arranged alphabetically with notes of prizes, genre and so on. A flick through the Ps reveals that Ann Patchett, who won the Orange Prize in 2002, writes like Victoria Hislop, Margaret Drabble and Valerie Martin; while Adele Parks, who writes mature chick lit, is a dead ringer for India Knight, Jane Moore and Tess Stimson.
You’ll find a different branch of oldie lit covered by Debby Holt, who writes like Katie Fforde. Turn to Fforde, and it’s apparent that loads more write like her than Debby Hunt – it pays to do some patient cross-referencing and you’ll be rewarded with a lifetime’s supply of congenial authors.
Baillie has also added lists of pseudonyms, characters (if you know a character’s name, but can’t recall the author you’ll fi nd out here) and geographical settings (if you like a story about Liverpool, for instance, Baillie suggests books by Katie Flynn and Anne Baker. For some reason he doesn’t mention Beryl Bainbridge, one of Liverpool’s greatest writers, for whom the city is a frequent backdrop, even though she appears in the main fiction list).
So, with minor quibbles, this is a fascinating book that will keep you browsing through it long after interest in some of the works of the listed authors has evaporated.