Book reviews for The Times by Chloe Barker
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Byline: Contributors: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
RULES OF THE WILD. By Francesca Marciano. Vintage, Pounds 5.99
(Fiction). ISBN 0 099 27469 8
ESM LEAVES
WHY THE TREE LOVES THE AXE
By Jim Lewis
Flamingo, Pounds 7.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 0 006 55103 3
SOLIPSISM FLIRTS with solecism. The most frequent word in this novel is "I". The writer is a man and his first-person protagonist is a woman - and faux-naive or a nutcase. So, like a grand ceremonial staircase leading to a bedsit, there is a high threshold between the reader and the story, which is of a much lower order altogether. The language lurches between telling it like it is and Sixties sleeve-note escapism. One for critics rather than pleasure readers. -
CLOUDSPLITTER
By Russell Banks
Vintage, Pounds 6.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 0 099 27497 3
BANKS'S CONTRIBUTION to the hero-or-madman debate on the white abolitionist John Brown focuses on his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, arguably the event that triggered the American Civil War. The events are recorded in a manuscript sent by Brown's son Owen to a biographer of the Brown family 50 years later. But what starts as a bequest to posterity becomes a confession and ultimately a suicide note that questions the possibility of objective history.
SHOWBUSINESS
Sceptre, Pounds 6.99 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 0 340 71567 7
ANYONE WHO has had a band and dared to dream will relate to DJ Radcliffe. This is typical rites-of-passage, middle-class grammar schoolboy stuff, enlivened by Radcliffe's eye for engagingly banal detail and dry, self-deprecating humour. However, this is not quite a tale of rags to more rags. Radcliffe's band briefly hit the big time.
Learn from the story of an addicted man who, after a 25-year apprenticeship, lived out his fantasies and knew when to quit -
Nearly.
By Dennis Bock
ISBN 0 747 54284 8
BOCK'S NOVEL opens with an out-take
from Leni Riefenstahl's
film of the Munich Olympics. His plot leads us to several subsequent Games,
but this is not a sports story. Bock creates a richly layered tale of one
family's post Holocaust struggle to come to terms with the past and to build
a future in their adopted nation,
JACKAL
By John Follian
Orion, Pounds 6.99 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 0 752 82669 7
FOR 25 years Carlos the Jackal was one of the world's most
wanted terrorists. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties his private army
carried out assassinations, kidnappings and explosions across much of
EMINENCE
By Morris West
Harvill, Pounds 5.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 1 860 46614 1
IN THE hothouse that is the
THE MAN WHO LOVED ONLY NUMBERS
By Paul Hoffman
Fourth Estate, Pounds 7.99 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 1 857 02829 5
NO ONE has embodied the stereotype of the eccentric genius more fully than the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos. He slept only three hours a night, worked 19 hours a day and announced his readiness for maths by saying "my brain is open". Hoffman is not a mathematician, so (thankfully) his book is short on numbers and long on anecdote.
The result is a funny and curiously moving portrait of brilliant man.
COD
By Mark Kurlansky
Vintage, Pounds 7.99 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 0 099 26870 1
AT THE hub of politics, power and passion, it was a cause of the
American Revolution, and made many millionaires. It was the seal of the Court of Terminer, which hanged women for witchcraft. Improbable perhaps, but the Atlantic cod has had a huge impact on our lives. This book charts 1,000 years of man's exploitation of a once-fecund fish. This is both elegant eulogy and elegy: hunted almost to extinction, the cod may not survive. Man's greed will endure.
THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS
By Magnus Mills
Flamingo, Pounds 6.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 0 006 55114 9
RITCHIE AND Tam are Scots fence-layers, and this drily entertaining
first novel is an account of their
adventures in
like oxen, drink like elephants, live like pigs and are generally
beastly. Ultimately all the fences they build are enclosures for
themselves. Mills was shortlisted for the Booker while working as a
bus driver. A red herring. He is a very disciplined and hilariously
straight-faced writer. This is deadpan, with corpses. - AC
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
Chilled-out in
and Senna
ROUND
(Non-fiction) ISBN 0 091 86777 0
A DRUNKEN Pounds 100 bet, of the sort that nobody attempts
to win once they sober up, led Tony Hawks to hitch round the circumference
of
AS GOOD AS IT GETS By Simon Nolan Quartet, Pounds 7 (Fiction) ISBN 0
704 38108 7
FOUR UNIVERSITY dropouts in
of five kilos of cocaine. Nolan laces the text with a mixture of black and light humour and attempts to moralise as inconspicuously as possible. What becomes clear, however, as the experience fractures into neurosis, is that the author remains too detached from his characters to make the story matter. As a result, the book diverts rather than grabs, its shallow veneer concealing no hidden depths. -
THE DEATH OF AYRTON SENNA By Richard
Williams
(Non-fiction) ISBN 0 747 54495 6
PROST WAS "the Professor"; Mansell was a bulldog; but Senna was an
artist. "Senna's car was dancing like raindrops on a pavement," said
John Watson after being overtaken by the Brazilian in 1985. Senna's
death at Imola in 1994 brought to a close a golden age. Privately,
Senna was a quiet man, so Williams's biography struggles to cast new
light on his character. But as a tribute and an examination of the
aftershock on the sport, this is essential reading. - JE
HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD By Kiran Desai Faber, Pounds 6.99
(Fiction) ISBN 0 571 19571 7
DESAI'S NOVEL is about Sampath,
whose life is a shambles until the day he climbs into a guava tree and becomes
a guru. A gentle satire on life in provincial
A debut of irresistible, pell-mell charm.
THE CALENDAR By David
(Non-fiction) ISBN 0 857 02979 8
WE CAN measure femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) and "star clusters 11 billion light-years away", but man's attempts to quantify and understand time will never stop. Five thousand years of lunar, solar, lunisolar, stellar, astronomic and now, atomic time, are all here in this populist, but polished, account. To millennium madness, it brings the peace of perspective. After all, 2000 will really be 2544 - if you're a Buddhist.
THE FLOATING EGG By Roger Osborne Pimlico, Pounds 10 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 0 712 66686 9
HERE, IN 25 "episodes" in the history of geology, are poetic - and
plausible - parallels between Captain Cook and Homer's Odysseus; the
"floating egg" that saved
alum, the cloth trade and
of payments; fossils and fetishes; much to do with geology, but more
to do with life. A splendid book that proves that science need not
"always be concerned with the
dissolution of myth; it can live alongside some other kinds of understanding".
BESTIE:The Authorised Biography
of George Best By Joe Lovejoy Pan, Pounds 6.99
(Non-fiction) ISBN 0 330 36750 1
WITH ACUTE objectivity, Joe Lovejoy has written one of the neatest
books about a footballer and a 20th-century icon. By cementing Best
into context - from his childhood
in
Manchester United, and through to the suicide of his alcoholic mother
and the death threats that finally tipped him into alcoholism -
Lovejoy ensures that no other explanation for a life at once
wonderful and tragic is necessary.
ALL POINTS NORTH By Simon Armitage Penguin, Pounds 6.99 (Non-fiction)
ISBN 0 140 26238 5
OPENING THIS collection of short pieces about Armitage's
roots is akin to leaving the blandness of the M1 to find oneself amid
a crowd of intensely human, often funny, brutally real characters:
Armitage's father, selling old tyres to buy food; men watching quail
fighting in backrooms; the author himself, official poet to the
Co-op. As they go about their ordinary business, the detail of
Armitage's observation and the poignancy of his prose makes each
piece extraordinary. - LW
DAUGHTER OF THE RIVER By Hong Ying
(Non-fiction) ISBN 0 747 54405 0
HONG YING'S memoirs tell the story of the poor and downtrodden in
melt your soul.
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE By Haruki Murakami Harvill, Pounds 7.99
(Fiction) ISBN 1 860 46581 1
FICTION IS stranger than truth when written by Murakami, the Japanese
master-storyteller. This is the saga of Toru Okada, an ultra-ordinary
hero in the mould of Bilbo Baggins or Arthur Dent, whose life is
thrown into chaos by a series of bizarre events. Whether describing
the minutiae of Okada's life in
a
the utterly fantastical, the narrative is clear and compelling.
Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of an original.
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Byline: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
THE MIGRATION OF GHOSTS. By Pauline Melville.
(Fiction) - ISBN 0 747 54279 1.
LIKE THE 12 months of the year, Melville's collection of short
stories fits together to form a perfect whole. Spirits and dreams
warm the pages with the delights of magical realism and there are
captivating moments of beauty. From the depths of the Guyanan jungle
to the Notting Hill Carnival, this novel sees characters take off at
moments of self-revelation. A bright collection resonant with faith
in human kind. There is a story here for everyone.
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Byline: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
DON'T. By Jenny Diski. Granta, Pounds 7.99 (Non-fiction) - ISBN 1 862
07250 7
IN THIS colourful collection, acclaimed author and journalist Jenny
Diski presents us with 33 short essays on subjects ranging from the
origins of evil to the thin divide between sanity and madness. With
her direct and honest prose style, Diski penetrates to the heart of
the matter and has a fair few surprises up her literary sleeve. But
these essays also reflect who Diski is: she allows her demons to
slowly escape through her pen without drowning in the act of
self-revelation.
Headline: Made for TV;Books
Byline: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
STRANGER THAN FULHAM. By Matthew Baylis. Chatto & Windus, Pounds 10.
(Fiction). - ISBN 0 701 16857 9.
Baylis, otherwise known as a storyliner for EastEnders, brings us
Alastair Strange, a bohemian with soppy feelings for soaps, a wacky
family and a serious soft spot for Martha, in this unique
coming-of-age tale. Trapped in a small-town mentality, Strange flees
the claustrophobia of
Fulham in particular, where he hopes to find some answers. But then
Strange is forever on the run from his problems, usually finding
solace in the hundreds of soaps he watches religiously on television.
His quest for the truth pushes him onwards like a melancholy Don
Quixote, out to find the meaning of life and of himself. Strange
repeatedly becomes propelled along by fate. His job at the vanity
publisher Pendennis Press was the first one for which he judged
himself eligible when scanning the Guardian media pages; both his
flatmate and his girlfriend Martha practically land in his lap. He is
the noble victim par excellence but with such endearing traits he
proves hard to resist.
As for Martha, she is his muse. Even though a little "dotty" and
usually stoned, she succeeds in luring him outside his hemisphere of
television with her eccentricity: his heart is captured and he swears
to keep his promises to her. Just as we are won over by his nobility,
his world starts to crumble; dark secrets surface, secrets involving
Gus, Strange's older and fiercer brother.
Disaster turns his life into a tragi-comedy.
The volcanic blow to Strange's heart gives him a tender courage. His
valour is necessary if he is to win back what he lost - Martha.
Thrilling pages, filled with raw sentiment and graphic imagery, glow
with emotion and touch us.
Funny, fast and funky, clever in its depiction of young urban culture
and too honest to be ignored, it deserves its own television series.
Baylis has triumphed.
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Byline: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
CIRCUMNAVIGATION. By Steve Lattimore.
- ISBN 0 753 80549 9.
NINE SHORT stories set on the American West Coast coldly describe the
horrors of frazzled family life. In the title story, a recluse
becomes a hero when a child is mysteriously dumped on him.
Self-defence lies beneath these tales like a steel plate, protecting
against childhood scars. Dogs cuts to the bone, boldly tackling the
reasons why these scars exist in the first place, and Family Sports
raises the kind of philosophical questions that, overall, make this a
moving collection. - CB
Headline: Paperbacks;Books
Byline: Chloe Barker
Source: The Times
Issue Date:
Page: Metro 20
TAMARIND MEM. By Anita Rau Badami. Penguin, Pounds 6.99 (Fiction)
ISBN 0 140 26376 4.
FROM DISTANT
elderly mother Saroja
travelling alone through
burden to her parents, at 23 Saroja was forced into a cold and
loveless marriage with a man she did not know and a life of
loneliness, insecurity, bitterness and an underlying craving for
love. After his death comes her chance to enjoy freedom. A tremendous
first novel, elegantly written and bursting with emotion and
sensuality. - CB