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Monday 21 August 2017

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Paperbacks

Charles Osborne, Lisa Gee, Christopher Bray, David Isaacson, Toby Clements, Helen Brown, James Urquhart and Lucy Beresford review the latest paperbacks

Porno by Irvine Welsh (Vintage, £6.99)

Porno is Irvine Welsh's sequel to Trainspotting, and is pulled off with terrific verve and humour.

Since ripping off his mates' drugs cache (at the end of Trainspotting), Renton has spent the decade quietly running an Amsterdam nightclub. Begbie passed those years doing time for manslaughter. Now he's out, he is still scarily paranoid, viciously psychotic – and after Renton. Spud has remained the sorry junkie, damaging all with his pathetically good intentions, while Sick Boy, returning to Leith after a wilderness decade in London, has slickly reinvented himself as an honest publican-cum-pornographer.

Renton nervously agrees to help bankroll Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, the porn flick that Sick Boy directs while hoovering lines of coke all the way from Leith's grottiest pubs to the glitz of the Adult Film Festival in Cannes. Routine violence, drug abuse, misogyny and the relentless obscenities occasionally drag on in Porno, but the audacious scamming of Welsh's main players (and Sick Boy's gloriously acid put-downs) keep the cheeky plot snapping briskly along. JU

Madcap: the Half-Life of Syd Barrett by Tim Willis (Short Books, £7.99)

Right at the start of their long career Pink Floyd made music worth listening to. Their 1967 hit singles See Emily Play and Arnold Layne mixed surrealism with whimsy - Ealing comedies for the psychedelic set. But after their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, they degenerated into witless pomp rock.

Why the change? Because Syd Barrett, the founder member and chief writer, had been booted out after going nuts on acid. Admittedly, Barrett had taken to plucking randomly at his guitar on stage, but without him the band's light touch was gone.

Was there method in Barrett's madness? Tim Willis thinks so. Like James Dean's early death, Barrett's dramatic departure made him a cult. Even today, pilgrims knock on his Cambridge door in the hope of meeting their mescaline messiah. When Willis knocked Barrett actually answered. For its account of that brief meeting alone, this marvellous little book is worth reading. CB

This is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston (Review, £6.99)

Imogen is a fragile, introspective teenager growing up in Dublin and County Cork. Denied love by her cold mother and weak father, she becomes infatuated with Bruno, a friend of her brother, Johnny, and finds warmth in the arms of Mathilde, the home help.

One day Imogen stops speaking, whereupon she is committed to a nursing home. When Johnny mysteriously drowns, he joins a series of skeletons that emerge from the family closet in this haunting tale of mental illness, illicit love and emotional betrayal.

Characters damaged by their upbringing are Jennifer Johnston's metier, and echoes are a favourite motif. In what is, despite its title, a very fine novel, the tragedies of her family's past recur as Imogen's words resound off the coastal bay.

A taut narrative, pared prose and lyrical imagery add up to a sad affirmation of Philip Larkin's adage on the effect of parents on their children. DI

The Last Diaries by Alan Clark; ed by Ion Trewin (Phoenix, £8.99)

Look after your diary, someone said, and your diary will look after you. Thank God Alan Clark followed this advice. This is the third and final tranche of his diaries. They start in February 1992 with Al (you soon come to call him that yourself) in the midst of a torrid affair with X. They end, for Al at least, on September 5, 1999, with his death from a brain tumour in bed at home in Saltwood castle. From August 2, though, his wife, Jane - a woman for whom the term long-suffering might have been invented - carries the diary on with growing assurance until the day of his funeral on September 7.

Much of the diary is taken up with Al's decision to leave the Commons in 1992, the publication of his earlier diaries and then his return to politics in 1997. But Ion Trewin, the editor, has done a terrific job balancing this - it occasionally seems like ancient history - with Al's other concerns, domestic, motoring, romantic and, ultimately, medical as he faces his death with peevish courage. TC

White Lightning by Justin Cartwright (Sceptre, £6.99)

James Kronk was once the fastest white boy in the world. Then he was a highly promising film director. Now 47, with a timeline of London-based career disasters, failed relationships and personal problems stretching behind him, all that electric promise has fizzled out and he's returned to his native South Africa to be with his dying mother.

While she fades, his energy and prospects seem to pick up. He decides to stay, buys a dilapidated farmhouse complete with staff, tearoom and a caged baboon. He starts his renovations, befriends the baboon and adopts an impoverished Xhosa family.

But James's excellent intentions are undermined by his fatal flaw (not fatal to him, though): an inability to hear anything he doesn't want to hear. This failing precipitates tragic events -and also proves deeply irritating to the women in his life.

Clever, funny, sad, deep with luminous surfaces, elegantly contoured and so well wrought there's no sign of the author fiddling with his protagonist's thought processes, this is a superb novel that's built to last. LG

Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison (Vintage, £6.99)

This book documents the side to his mother Blake Morrison never knew, a side only revealed after her death, when Morrison uncovered letters recording every minute shift of his parents' courtship.

Through these candid missives (charting the couple's vulnerabilities, their longings, even her menstrual cycle) and Morrison's meticulous analysis of them, we discover Agnes, an Irish Roman Catholic talented at medicine and self-effacement, torn between love and her faith.

Morrison's jaunty prose is filled with lovely incidental details, such as the post-war law forbidding a Dublin hotel from serving butter at luncheons and dinners.

Though the book is clearly an affectionate tribute (the "sequel", if you like, to Morrison's earlier homage to his father), one's full enjoyment may depend on one's level of discomfort at Morrison's renewed plundering of family history to thrust centre stage a woman who spent her life preferring to recede into the background. LB

Shroud by John Banville (Picador, £7.99)

Axel Vander is an academic with a shady past. During the Second World War, Axel - a Belgian Jew - assumed the identity of an anti-Semitic friend, before fleeing Europe for the United States. There he has made a name for himself as a literary theorist dedicated to the belief that "there is no self" and that life is an aesthetic act. Back to Nietzsche.

Back to the very Nietzschean city of Turin, too, because when Cass Cleaver, a research student obsessed with his work, threatens to expose Axel's past, he quickly falls in with her demands for a meeting. Even more quickly, the ageing deconstructionist and his young apprentice fall into bed together. But the affair threatens to play havoc with his cosy post-structuralist view of identity: in falling in love he begins to realise that the self and other people do exist after all.

While as preened and plush as Nabokov's, Banville's prose lacks the master's sly wit - and its coiling rhythms finally prove too constrictive for this challenging novel. CB

I'll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate, £7.99)

Annelia, the narrator of Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel, suffers the curse of ceaseless yearning. Her mother died not long after Annelia was born, for which her brothers blame her, and her father runs off, leaving Annelia in the care of her cold farmer grandparents.

She wins a scholarship to Syracuse University, where a sorority accepts her on the understanding that she help the girls with their essays. But Annelia is an awkward loner and the intolerant sisterhood dashes her quest for friendship as cruelly as a black postgraduate betrays her hopes of love.

Over and again the void beckons. Ultimately, guided by the wisdom of Spinoza and Nietzsche, she realises that truth alone is the object of her yearning.

This intense character study leaves the social upheavals of early 1960s America firmly in the background as it becomes a testament to spiritual resilience. It is an excellent addition to Oates's formidable canon. DI

Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus, £6.99)

Cheerful books set in Sub-Saharan Africa are rare but, despite the unnervingly lachrymose title, this is one of them. Set in Botswana, it is the second outing (of five now published) for Mma Precious Ramotswe, the "traditionally built" (fat) private detective in charge of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

Her client this time is an American lady whose son disappeared from a farm on the edge of the Kalahari Desert 10 years previously. Despite a police investigation at the time, no body has ever been found. Precious goes to the farm, finds an old photo pinned to the wall, notices that one of the men looks evil and... well. There we are.

Or almost. The moral dilemmas Mma Ramotswe faces on the way are among the many things that make up for the uncomplicated plot, and make this novel (and the whole series) shine. Soothing, full of hope and understanding, this is a dangerously addictive read. Take more than one in the series if you are going away this summer. TC

Virgins of Venice by Mary Laven (Penguin, £7.99)

All that remains of Le Vergini, one of 16th-century Venice's grandest convents, is the tracery of a neo-gothic arch. Beneath it a plaque, dated 1557, vows: "Love and hope keep us in this pleasant prison."

As Mary Laven's crisply compassionate book reveals, the nunneries of that guiltily decadent city were certainly regarded as "prisons" by many of the unmarriageable noblewomen who dwelt, without calling, behind their stern walls.

Dumped there by families who wanted to save a few dowry ducats, the nuns were both relied on by the general population as a precious spiritual resource and condemned as "public whores" when the odd errant bride of Christ crept from her cloisters in search of less divine love.

But, as Laven tells us, most sought smaller satisfactions: keeping chickens, sewing surplices and, in the well-documented case of one Suor Deodata, "doing her laundry separately from everybody else's". HB

Stories I Stole by Wendell Steavenson (Atlantic Books, £7.99)

Stories I Stole is billed as travel writing, but it is really an astringent memoir of Wendell Steavenson's years, beginning in 1998, as a lackadaisical journalist based in the "village goldfish bowl" atmosphere of Tbilisi, with its occasional electricity, hot baths and beggars, refugees and scratched-together generosities.

Georgia had not been independent since the 12th century. In the short decade following the Soviet collapse, the country had reverted to "its comfortable medieval self" of feudal patronage and bribery, divided by five languages and gruesome ethnic conflicts that were prosecuted mostly by boy-soldiers clinging to their red-cheeked adolescence. Soviet architecture "had become that of Ozymandias", and Steavenson's stolen stories are often glimpses into an antique land contorted by modernity.

Gorbachev's deserted dacha contrasts starkly with the fierce hospitality of remote peasant hamlets, aggressively toasting strangers with phenomenal amounts of vodka. Steavenson captures the romantic gestures of border wildness, but her stories remain gritty. JU

Dirt Music by Tim Winton (Picador, £7.99)

Many novels claim to tell of the redemptive power of love. Tim Winton's novel (shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize) shows you this quality effortlessly in a narrative of great poetic lucidity.

It follows two unlikely lovers who must explore their inner landscapes to discover who they are. Restless in her relationship with Jim (the hero of the small, redneck fishing community of White Point, Australia), Georgie embarks on an affair with the poacher Lu Fox, the sole surviving member of a musical family locked historically in a feud with Jim's clan.

When Fox's dog is shot and his truck attacked, he escapes, hitch-hiking across the arid interior, to an island off the north-west coast, where he pursues a Crusoe-like existence.

With Georgie ambivalently in tow, Jim attempts to track Fox down, hoping to earn forgiveness for his past.

Winton's prose is both exquisite and robust. He is one of the few writers who can illuminate the recesses of the human heart, and Dirt Music is pitch-perfect. LB

The Angry Young Men by Humphrey Carpenter (Penguin, £8.99)

A wildly diverse collection of writers, among them John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Colin Wilson and John Braine, the "Angry Young Men" were the playwrights and novelists who outraged the establishment in the 1950s. Osborne's play Look Back in Anger lent its name to the group, who attacked the class-bound English social system.

Humphrey Carpenter tells how they boozed and brawled their way to notoriety, and also explores the extent to which the media invented the whole movement, and how the writers themselves exploited this. CO

Walt Disney by Marc Eliot (Andre Deutsch, £7.99)

Previous biographies of Disney were exercises in whitewashing, approved by Walt Disney Productions and presenting him as a gentle creature, one of Hollywood's model citizens, revered as a loving husband and doting father of two adorable children.

But the creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had a dark side. For 25 years he was an informant for the FBI, targetting communists, "subversives" and Jews, and his emotional problems included obsessive hand-washing, heavy drinking, sexual inadequacies and severe depression.

Eliot presents a rounded portrait of Hollywood's dark prince. CO

Arthur Lowe, Dad's Memory by Stephen Lowe (Virgin, £6.99)

Arthur Lowe's acting career encompassed everything from Shakespeare to American musicals and farce, but he is most famous for his depiction of the pompous, bumbling Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army. He endured a difficult personal life, struggling to balance the increasingly erratic demands of his wife with his own health and career, and died 20 years ago in his mid-sixties.

His son gives a moving account of Arthur Lowe's life and work, and writes candidly about how it felt to fight the public for his father's affections. CO

A Time to Die by Robert Moore (Bantam Books, £6.99)

One day in August 2000, the Kursk, Russia's best and most advanced nuclear submarine, mysteriously sank in the Barents Sea with a crew of 118 on board. For 48 hours, the outside world knew nothing of this as the Russians tried to find out what had happened. When British and Norwegian rescuers were finally summoned, they were fed misinformation.

Having conducted more than 100 interviews in six countries, and spoken to the families of the men who died, Robert Moore has produced a nail-biting account of the tragedy, which answers most of the reader's questions. CO

The Romanovs and Mr Gibbes by Frances Welch (Short Books, £6.99)

This is the story of the Englishman who was appointed tutor to the children of Tsar Nicholas II in 1908, and over the next 10 years lived as one of the family in the royal palace.

He grew to love the Romanovs deeply, particularly the Tsar's heir, the frail, young Tsarevich. Sydney Gibbes was a vital eye-witness to events at the time of the Revolution, and spent the rest of his life trying to vindicate the Tsar's memory.

Frances Welch throws new light on the tragic Romanov story, telling it from the English teacher's point of view. CO

The Railway King by Robert Beaumont (Review, £7.99)

When George Hudson inherited a fortune in 1827 he invested in the burgeoning railway industry. By 1848 he was a millionaire, controlling a third of Britain's railway network. However, his suspect accounting practices were exposed and he was imprisoned and later reduced to living in penurious exile in France.

Here is the story of Hudson's extraordinary life, from the day he was expelled from his village at the age of 15 for siring an illegitimate child to his burial in a lonely Yorkshire churchyard. CO

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