Literary Review

March 2007 Crime Round-up

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Richard Godwin Enjoys Four First Novels

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

There is something uniquely unsettling about Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which caused a small sensation at last year’s London Book Fair. Occasionally it is the psycho-linguistic plot, in which the amnesiac protagonist, The Second Eric Sanderson, is pursued by a conceptual shark which feeds on human memory and frequently jumps out of the […]

Great Tales From English History

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Best-selling author Robert Lacey begins his fascinating history with Cheddar Man, who lived 9,000 years ago when England was still joined to Europe. He ends with the discovery of DNA and thus creates a frame for some entertaining historical tales. We are told how Julius Caesar first glimpsed England, with armed men standing along the […]

Caught in the Middle

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary fiction, from Jay McInerney’s The Good Life to Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. The Reluctant Fundamentalist tackles the subject from a different perspective: that of the well-educated Pakistani who is caught between two worlds. The novel takes the form of a conversation between Changez, a bearded […]

Ostend and Back

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

In the first two volumes of the confessedly semi-autobiographical trilogy that A Curious Earth now brings to a close, Gerard Woodward told the story of a family whose dysfunction – a mixture of passion, self-destructiveness and absurdity – could not fail to hold the reader in thrall. What almost all the family members have in […]

Clan Warfare

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Iain Banks has an unusually large fan-base. He is almost a household name, but his fans – unlike those of, say, Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie – are passionately devoted to his work in a manner associated more with pop stars or film directors. There are several reasons for this: in contrast to many literary […]

Boccaccio in Hollywood

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Max is an Oscar-winning film director whose career is on the slide. His girlfriend Elena writes self-improvement guides with such bracing titles as Here’s How: to do EVERYTHING Correctly! It is 24 March 2003, the morning after the Academy Awards ceremony and also the fifth day of the invasion of Iraq. Still groggy from their […]

Into the Wasteland

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

n Jim Crace’s post-apocalyptic vision of the future, America has become an ‘old world’ country – a once mighty nation, its cities reduced to rubble and its people returned to a pre-industrial way of life, or driven into economic migration. Where their pioneering ancestors crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of the American Dream, the descendants […]

Five Fall Victim to Gangmasters

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Nobody who, like me, enjoyed Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian will, I think, fail to take pleasure in this book. A surprising number of people I came across couldn’t abide Short History, however, and I suspect that they will hate Two Caravans for all the same reasons. One of Lewycka’s strong […]

Crossroads in Cairo

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

In Cairo’s Suleiman Basha Street, opposite the Excelsior Restaurant where Zaki Bey el Dessouki proposes to Busayna, young enough to be his daughter but who reciprocates his love, stands the Yacoubian Building. Even among the other old-fashioned European-style buildings on Suleiman Basha Street it stands out, despite its dilapidation, a monument to the Armenian millionaire […]

John Dugdale on James Salter

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

The octogenarian American writer James Salter is being fêted this month as an overlooked fiction giant. Two publishers have joined forces to advance his claims to admission to the literary pantheon, with four reissues accompanying the paperback appearance of Last Night (Picador 132pp £7.99), a new collection of short stories. 

‘I Make the Art!’

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Soon after the 11 September attacks, Henry Hemming and Al Braithwaite, both artists fresh from university, went on a year-long journey through the Middle East. This, Hemming’s debut travel book – which takes us through Turkey, Iran and various Arab countries – is the result, taking us through Turkey, Iran and various Arab countries. The […]

Poetry and Poker

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

I once walked into a branch of Waterstone’s in search of a copy of The Savage God, Al Alvarez’s book on suicide. I was directed to the self-help section. Maybe the sales assistant genuinely thought I would find it there, maybe she thought I needed the sort of help that only a copy of The […]

Those Irritating Lefties

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

I must be careful what I say about James Delingpole. When he was introduced at a party to the last person who gave him a bad review, he snapped, ‘I don’t talk to c***s,’ and cut him dead. This is the Delingpole trademark – I say what I bloody think, no messing around. It’s the […]

Noah’s Ark

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

This book is long overdue. At a time when poetic form is at a premium Michael Longley is, among other things, a master of it. Pasternak, like Tolstoy, thought of history as an organic growth, seeing it ‘in the form of images taken from the vegetable kingdom, moving as invisibly in its incessant transformations as […]

Woggles and Wolfcubs

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

‘Another naughty scout-master’, remarks Lord Sebastian Flyte to Charles Ryder as they sit with the Sunday papers in the colonnade at Brideshead. The lamented Bobby Corbett, Christ Church chum of Auberon Waugh (himself a Wolf Cub troop leader in his day), used to echo this line over breakfast at Rowallan in Ayrshire, when he would […]

Unravelling String Theory

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

In the early 1970s physicists formulated the ‘standard model’ of particle physics, which unified three of the four known forces of nature – the strong force which holds the nucleus together, the weak force responsible for radioactivity, and the electromagnetic force. But including the fourth, gravitational force proved intractable, because the mathematical formalism for how […]

Gospel Without God

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

In Western societies there is an astonishing ignorance about the nature of Christianity – even among those increasingly few who resort to the Church. Such interpretation as there is exhibits a preference for ethicism, and is virtually indistinguishable from the prevalent secular humanism. What does exist, however, is a widespread fascination with ‘spirituality’ (generally understood […]

Interview: Alexander Masters

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

Stuart: A Life Backwards was Alexander Masters’s first book. The biography of Stuart Shorter, a ‘thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur’ whom Master befriended while working for a homeless charity, it was funny, moving and pleasingly unworthy. It won the Guardian First Book Award in 2005 and the Hawthornden Prize in 2006. He […]

Imperial Impersonation

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Jonathan Beckman

A deep-rooted desire to believe that public figures who have died in mysterious circumstances somehow managed to escape their fate and survive for years thereafter seems to be as old as history. In 1113 a party of canons of Laon visiting Bodmin in Cornwall narrowly escaped being lynched by local inhabitants when they expressed mild […]