Book Reviews: 22 February
OUT NOW
THE MISINTERPRETATION OF TARA JUPP by Eva Rice (Heron Books, £16.99) Tara Jupp, an eccentric vicar’s daughter from Cornwall, is a horse-mad teenager soaking up life with a capital ‘L’, rather like motherless Cassandra Mortmain, heroine of the classic rite-ofpassage novel, I Capture The Castle. The self-perceived plainer version of enthralling older sister Lucy, ‘an architectural historian in the body of a French actress’, Tara’s unconventional childhood in the rackety rectory makes her the perfect conduit through which to view the birth of swinging London in the early 1960s. Her gorgeous singing voice at 17 gets introductions to those who can catapult her to the fame she believes she craves. Tara’s ‘misinterpretation’ begins at bohemian Clover’s Victorian time-capsule house in Chelsea, romance provided by both a hot, working-class photographer and her childhood crush Inigo, now a one-man, pop hit factory.
Her fixation with Lucy’s disintegrating marriage becomes tiresome, as does Matilda, Lucy’s posh ex-best friend. On the plus side, cultural references and real people are cleverly inserted, including a puckish Brian Jones, and it’s often very funny. Love conquers, of course; birth reconciles. Job done.
Sarah Crowden
LONDON BRIDGE IN AMERICA by Travis Elborough (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) The old story of the American who bought London Bridge under the misapprehension that it was in fact Tower Bridge, forms the basis of this entertaining book about the history and purchase of a Thames crossing that has existed in one form or another for over 2,000 years. Despite a brief moment when the Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred The Unready attacked the bridge when it was under the control of the Danes – perhaps inspiring the nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down – there has been a crossing between the City and Southwark since Roman times; the medieval London Bridge lasted for 600 years, although its Victorian successor remained in situ for less than a third of that time before it was sold to Robert McCulloch in 1968. Sad to say, it’s a myth that McCulloch thought he was getting Tower Bridge – he wanted an authentic slice of Olde England, rather than a piece of Victoriana, as a centrepiece for Lake Havasu, the city he was building in the Arizona desert. Astonishingly, London Bridge is still there – for anyone who, entranced by Elborough’s intelligent mix of social and architectural history, feels like paying a visit.
Theo Walden
THE BREAKFAST BIBLE by Seb Emina and Malcolm Eggs (Bloomsbury, £16.99)Sadly, Malcolm Eggs is just a nom de plume, the alter ego of Seb Emina and the name under which he writes his (cheeky, given the long-standing, not to say august presence of the similarly titled London Review Of Books) London Review Of Breakfasts blog. As you might expect from the title of his book, Emina’s interest in breakfast resides not just in recipes, but in the history of this wonderful meal, and its various international incarnations. ‘Wherever you are, whatever you are doing’ notes Emina, ‘there is a person in the world right now at this moment… breakfasting… In the Middle East, she may enjoy piping-hot mashed fava beans. In Hong Kong he may sip Yuanyang, a tea-coffee combination for which the name refers to the conjugal love of Mandarin ducks…’
Conditioned as we are these days to the idea that breakfast, if taken at all, should be taken on the run, it’s salutary to read about historical giants and their preferred breakfast style. If Abraham Lincoln (one boiled egg and a cup of coffee), Queen Elizabeth I (beer with mutton stew) and Napoleon (tea or orange water and chicken with onions) had time for breakfast, then we do too.
Emina has sections, including recipes, on the full English breakfast, classic breakfast dishes and a series of essays on related subjects: Breakfast proverbs (‘if you eat it up at supper, you cannot have it at breakfast’ Spanish), a Breakfast playlist (Cole Porter’s Sunday Morning Breakfast Time, Supertramp, Breakfast In America, and so on) and the magnifi cent breakfast enjoyed by Hunter S Thompson: ‘four bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half pound of either sausage, bacon or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict… a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine… all of which’ he adds, ‘should be dealt with outside, and preferably stone naked…’
Lola Sinclair
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Country house styleFreya Langley on the delightful memoirs of poet and novelist Mary Sheepshanks
WILD WRITING GRANNY: A MEMOIR by Mary Sheepshanks (Stone Trough Books, £15) The poet and novelist Mary Sheepshanks began her writing career in her 60s, proof if any were needed that life for women needn’t stop the minute they pass their half century.
Her novels are engagingly sparky accounts of uppermiddle- class life – the kind once dealt with in books by Angela Thirkell, but transplanted into the late 20th century. It’s a world of large country houses, country life, barmy relations, good friends and, occasionally, recalcitrant children. Love affairs figure, but all usually ends happily.
It’s plain from this memoir that Sheepshanks used much of her own life in her books, so fans will be delighted to have the background filled in – but this is also something of a 20thcentury social history, spanning the years from the 1930s to the beginning of this century.
Sheepshanks, born in 1933, grew up in a school where her father was a housemaster. She eventually married another headmaster, 20 years her senior, who inherited a large, fallingdown house in the north of England. Life as a child in a boys’ boarding school is intriguing in its own right, but since this school is Eton, it also shines an unexpected light on the school days of our current leaders. Fascinating.
Sheepshanks was also the lateral benefi ciary of a wartime decision to relocate the Buckingham Palace Brownie pack to Windsor. Her account of pack life with the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret reveals an unexpectedly poignant picture of Royal childhood. ‘We always curtseyed when the princesses first arrived,’ she remembers. ‘We treated them with a certain deference and this does not make for normal relationships between children.’
Sheepshanks’s memoir is studded with her poems – indeed some of her work has been published in The Lady – which provide a lyrical commentary alongside the prose life. This is a beguiling book, beautifully written.
PAPERBACKS
OSCAR WILDE AND THE MURDERS AT READING GAOL by Gyles Brandreth (John Murray, £7.99) They could be sisters: Gyles Brandreth and Oscar Wilde, joined at the hip ever since Brandreth, ex-MP, writer and performer, embarked on his Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries. This is the sixth in the series, set in 1897 in Dieppe where Wilde has gone post-imprisonment in Reading Gaol. This time he tackles the brutal murder of a warder and a prison chaplain.
CALMER, EASIER, HAPPIER HOMEWORK by Noël Janis-Norton (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99)
As any parent or, indeed, grandparent knows, getting a reluctant child to do its homework is a thankless task, carried out at that point in the day when everyone is worn out, fractious and in need of food. But it has to be done, and Janis-Norton has tips and strategies to ensure that it is: in the smoothest possible way. Aimed at children aged fi ve to 16 – and parents of any age.
JUST LIKE PROPER GROWNUPS by Christina Hopkinson (Hodder Paperbacks, £7.99)
Nearly 40, beautiful and carefree Tess is pregnant. She recruits four of her closest (shocked) friends to be godparents – but they all have lives that are on the brink of implosion. Will they survive this additional responsibility?
ALSO PUBLISHED…
THE RETURN OF A KING by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, £25) Or lessons from history, perhaps. Dalrymple’s excellent account of the first Anglo-Afghan war in 1839 should be required reading for those spending the defence budget today.
FANNY & STELLA by Neil McKenna (Faber and Faber, £16.99)
The slightly mindboggling account of two middle-class Victorian crossdressers, whose sartorial preferences led to them being put on trial.
CRIME ROUND-UP
Supposing Hitler won...Victoria Clark FInds one thriller arresting, but is unconvinced by the other
DOMINION by CJ Sansom (Picador, £12.99)
In the winter of 1952, England has surrendered to Germany after Dunkirk. Everything is in decay: the infrastructure, the zeitgeist and the moral compass of the nation. Only a small resistance movement led by an ailing Churchill clings to the idea of liberation. Civil servant David Fitzgerald is entrusted with the mission to rescue his friend Frank, who is incarcerated in an asylum. Frank’s awful brother Edgar now works on the Manhattan Project in America. In a moment of drunken sibling competitiveness he reveals the research to Frank who suffers a nervous collapse under the weight of the atomic secret. The Resistance and the Germans want to get their hands on him and David is the only man Frank trusts.
Sansom creates an alternative narrative to the Second World War: the population has been conquered by apathy and the national characteristic of ‘mind your own business’ allows the Germans to rule, trusting in the British desire not to make a fuss.
DEAD WATER by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan, £16.99)
Jerry Markham, a London-based journalist who has returned to his Shetland home, is murdered. Inspector Jimmy Perez is out of action after the murder of his fi ancée, so DI Willow Reeves is drafted in to run the investigation. However, Jimmy is enticed into the investigation. Well written, well plotted, but there is a fl aw: the characters are dull, dull, dull, and it is hard to care about their fates or who is the murderer.