Book Reviews: 5 July
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CLEVER GIRL by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape, £16.99; offer price £13.99)
Tessa Hadley is a writer of witty, sensual and psychologically penetrating stories and novels that chart the entangled byways of everyday existence. This, Hadley’s fifth novel, is no exception, and may be her finest and most satisfying work to date.
The clever girl of the title is narrator Stella, born into a time (1956) when ‘so many things that seem quaint now were current and powerful then: shame, and secrecy’. There’s no shortage of either in Stella’s childhood, but adolescence brings two epiphanies: one that she is extraordinarily clever; the second that grammar-school pretty boy Valentine is the love of her life.
Unfortunately, despite having read Beckett and Burroughs, Valentine hasn’t read the romantic script: he disappears to America, leaving heartbroken 18-year-old Stella pregnant. Motherhood effectively scuppers Stella’s brilliant academic career but this is no grim and gritty hard-luck tale. The next three decades are, for Stella, a journey of self-discovery, an education in life that brings joy as well as pain. A novel of subtle sparkle and great wisdom, Clever Girl is as entertaining as it is deeply aff ecting.
Stephanie Cross
APPLE TREE YARD by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber, £12.99; offer price, £11.69)We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live is the title of a collection of journalism by the legendary Joan Didion, but it would have served well for Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, too.
Part erotically charged psychological thriller, part stomachknottingly tense courtroom drama, Doughty’s theme is the tales that we tell ourselves in order to make sense of our lives and our loved ones’ behaviour – and the way that those tales can lead us astray.
Yvonne Carmichael is a 52-year-old geneticist and a regular at the Houses of Parliament, where she gives evidence on her work. And it’s here she meets the charismatic stranger who is to throw her life devastatingly off course. Yvonne is soon obsessed with her enigmatic new lover and, like the good scientist she is, quickly constructs a hypothesis that explains his strangely shifty conduct. However, an appalling act of violence exposes the flaws in her reasoning and sees her arrested for murder.
Doughty brilliantly evokes the backdrop to Yvonne’s illicit liaisons: London’s corridors of power, seedy alleyways and anonymous coff ee shops. She also powerfully exposes the injustices of the justice system in this psychologically acute and immensely absorbing page-turner.
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MR DARCY’S GUIDE TO COURTSHIP by Fitzwilliam Darcy (Old House Books, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)Learn to court your own Mr Darcy as the gentleman himself, via Emily Brand, gives a step-by-step guide to Georgian courtship.
This essential volume for single ladies in want of marital and financial bliss – as well as the meeting of true minds – includes advice on romance in the Regency era, making oneself agreeable, selecting a wife, winning her aff ection, the proposal and an agony-aunt style ‘Ask Darcy’ section.
Written by the proud, indomitable Mr Darcy before he was tamed by the headstrong Miss Bennet, I found this book disappointing, despite the potentially hilarious concept, and yearned for Austen’s original tale.
Poppy Whale
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Across the Pond TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury Publishing, £18.99; offer price, £14.99)
A shamelessly daring, ambitious epic of a novel – the focus is transatlantic crossings between Ireland and North America – this is a fitting companion piece to McCann’s much lauded earlier novel, Let The Great World Spin. it strides con dently through history and across continents, offering multiple voices and viewpoints through a skein of thematically connected stories and some engaging characters. Some are real people: the first transatlantic British aviators, Alcock and Brown, who in 1919 flew from Newfoundland to Ireland to try to forget the war; former slave Frederick Douglass, who appears during his time spent speaking to the Abolitionist cause in Ireland as the famine loomed in 1845. Others, especially the four generations of brave, indefatigable women of Irish and partly Irish descent – Lily Duggan, Emily and Lottie Erlich, Hannah Carson – are arresting inventions.
The novel’s emotional life lies with its women and is rooted in a preference for the quietness of peace over the cacophony of con ict. Events will lead Irish maid Lily’s granddaughter Lottie back to Northern Ireland, where she and her only daughter Hannah will share a family tragedy in the Troubles.
MCann’s impulse is towards a Joycean magnanimity, affirmativeness and bravery, as in Hannah’s nal remark: ‘We have to admire the world for not ending on us’.
Steve Barfield
COFFEE TABLE BOOK
TOUR DE FRANCE: 100th Race Anniversary Edition by Françoise and Serge Laget, Philippe Cazaban, Gilles Montgermont (Quercus, £30; offer price, £26)There is much to enjoy – even for noncyclists – in this detailed, witty and authoritative history of the world’s most passionate and gruelling endurance cycling race.
The style is chronological and traces Le Tour – it began in 1903 in unassuming and chaotic fashion to promote the sports newspaper L’Auto. In the early days, partisan supporters booby-trapped roads with nails, while fist- fights between fans and rule bending by cycle manufacturers were commonplace and the authors haven’t shied away from some of the Tour’s more recent difficult moments.
Handsomely illustrated with many archival photographs, route maps and reproductions of ephemera, the book is an eccentric social history of modern France via its quintessential sporting spectacle.
SB
PAPERBACKS
IDENTICALLY DIFFERENT: Why You Can Change Your Genes by Tim Spector (Phoenix, £8.99; offer price, £8.54) This science book guides us, via artful storytelling and groundbreaking research using identical twins, to reconsider the flexibility and power of our genes. Its chapters focus on gene categories, such as the ‘happiness’ and ‘fidelity’ gene, suggesting that they are more pliable than fixed.
Ijeoma Onweluzo
BEHIND THE FACADE: A Psychiatrist’s View by Dennis Friedman (Peter Owen, £14.99; offer price, £13.49)
In a series of thoughtprovoking, case-history vignettes, in which he draws on a lifetime’s experience as a psychiatrist, Friedman explores such topics as maternal deprivation and early bereavement, in order to consider how therapy can ameliorate human suffering.
SB
ALSO ON THE SHELF
Archipelago by Monique Roffey (Simon & Schuster, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)
A tropical storm has claimed the life of Gavin Weald’s baby son, destroyed his house and stolen his marriage, owing to his wife’s subsequent depression. With his young daughter Ocean and his dog Suzy, he sets out on a voyage in his small boat from Trinidad to the Galapagos Islands – part despairing flight from reality, part desperate search for redemption. This frequently tense tale pulsates with life and incident; as intoxicating as the sea itself.
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AUDIO BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE BLACK TOWER by PD James, read by Michael Jayston (BBC Audiobooks, £18.99)Jayston brings suitable chill to PD James’s bestseller about a series of deaths in a Dorset care home. Commander Dalgliesh arrives at the request of a friend to find him dead, and a subtle, threatening killer.
KEEP CALM AND READ THESE…
Victoria Clark reviews two novels about wartime Britain THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Simon Mawer (Abacus, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)
A powerful, realistic account of a young woman’s journey as she joins SOE and becomes a secret agent in wartime, occupied France. Marian Sutro is a diplomat’s daughter, brought up on the continent. Her family connections to Clément Pelletier, a nuclear physicist who remained in Paris after the French defeat, render her important to the British war eff ort.
Marian has never felt important in her life before, but SOE and its training allow her to reinvent herself as the woman she knows she is. The novel traces her journey from hesitant and indecisive girl to competent agent completing her mission with self-assurance and matter-of-fact bravery.
The observational stance makes it such a powerful exploration of patriotism and betrayal.
THE GIRL IN BERLIN by Elizabeth Wilson (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)
Set in 1951 in an exhausted London where Elizabeth Wilson has just captured the culinary imagination, vinaigrette is made with olive oil from the chemist and Burgess and Maclean have quietly disappeared; it follows Jack McGovern of Special Branch as he is seconded to help the Secret Service search for a mole in the ranks.
McGovern is a sturdy Scotsman, not prone to fl ights of imagination and his steady progress through both London and Berlin unearths tangential betrayals and deceits in his pursuit of the traitor.
Wilson catches the idiom of the time and this is a thoughtful and careful look at the period and the Cold War’s rampant paranoia.