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Tuesday 27 June 2017

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Paperbacks

Anita Sethi, Rebecca Sparkes, Jonathan Gibbs, Toby Clements and Nicholas Bagnall review the latest paperbacks.

Dirk Bogarde by John Coldstream (Phoenix, £9.99)

From his appearances in 1950s comedies to Visconti's Death in Venice in 1971, Dirk Bogarde was Britain's most successful matinée idol. Yet, although a giant onscreen, he built a carapace over his private self, of which little was known and much conjectured, particularly about his sexuality.

Impressive, then, that John Coldstream has accessed Bogarde's personal archives, friends and family to produce such an engrossing, well-researched and splendidly written biography.

Son of a Belgian father and Glaswegian mother, Bogarde was born Derek Niven Van den Bogaerde in London, in 1921. From there, Coldstream traces his happy Sussex childhood, his transformation into Dirk Bogarde after war service, his film career and his departure from England in the 1960s to forge a second career as a writer.

While revealing much of the imaginative and shy man, Coldstream also details the fascinating intricacies of the mask itself. AS

Self's Punishment by Bernhard Schlink and Walter Popp (Phoenix, £6.99)

The hero of this atmospheric 1987 novel is Gerhard Self, a balding, eccentric 68-year-old private detective with a penchant for Aviateur cocktails, pretty ladies and pretty awful chat-up lines.

Self usually works on insurance cases and so he is out of his depth when the manager of the Rhineland chemical plant asks him to investigate incidents of computer hacking. A man is murdered, triggering Self's trawl through some gruesome political and personal history: he once served as a Nazi prosecutor, and he is now forced to unravel unsolved moral mysteries.

The novel evokes Self's anxieties, from balding to women, to history, questioning how to grow old gracefully, how to love and how to live in a present moment that is under the shadow of an immoral past. A bestseller in Germany and the first of a three-novel series, Schlink and Popp sift through chaos with compelling precision. AS

How the Light Gets In by MJ Hyland (Canongate, £7.99)

Lou Connor is a prodigiously intelligent 16-year-old raised in a cramped Sydney apartment by chain-smoking, TV-watching parents and two sexually precocious sisters.

How the Light Gets In introduces Connor as she arrives in Chicago, an exchange student on a scholarship for disadvantaged pupils. Placed with the Harding family in their book-filled, all-American "white suburban mansion", the troubled teenager has a mixed reaction to her fantasy family, while the high-achieving Hardings are given more than a "short-term experience of a quaint foreign visitor".

The book captures all the spikiness, guile and vulnerability of a displaced adolescent girl. Lou is a candid and clear-sighted narrator, bewildered by her need for the alcohol and cigarettes she knows will jeopardise her hard-won stay. Hyland provides no neat conclusions, nor a saccharine tale of redemption. She does, however, deliver an astonishingly well-written slice of reality. RS

The Rare and the Beautiful by Cressida Connolly (HarperPerennial, £7.99)

The Garmans, nine strikingly beautiful, "gifted" siblings, have long fascinated writer Cressida Connolly. The Rare and the Beautiful is her account of an extraordinary family that lived at the centre of European literary and political life between the wars. Their lives ran parallel with some of the great names of 20th-century art: Jacob Epstein and Laurie Lee were just two of those captivated by Kathleen Garman and her siblings.

Kathleen was the first to achieve notoriety when she was shot in the shoulder by Epstein's jealous wife. Mary married the poet Roy Campbell, but abandoned their children for an affair with Vita Sackville-West. The youngest and most beautiful sister, Lorna, broke Laurie Lee's heart by becoming both muse and lover of a young painter named Lucian Freud.

"This book does not pretend to be a full biography," writes Connolly. However, she has produced a sensitive but unsparing portrait of a thoroughly unconventional family. RS

The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (HarperPerennial, £7.99)

Eliza Lynch, the Irish courtesan who became the powerful mistress of Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez, has had a number of fictional and non-fictional outings in recent years. In casting her extraordinary story as a historical romance, Lily Tuck is lighter on Eliza than others. That said, it's not hard to read the most bitter of ironies in her letters back to the beau monde of Paris, as the disastrous Paraguayan war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay rages around her.

Tuck won the US National Book Award for her novel, and the writing gallops along through a whirl of new-world impressions, with its catalogue of exotic fauna and folk monsters: "tigers, tapirs, wild boar and poisonous snakes", the mboya jagwa and the ow ow. But to experience the tragedy of an entire nation through this voluptuous woman's senses leaves one feeling slightly light-headed. JG

The Secrets of Rue St Roch by Janet Morgan (Penguin, £8.99)

A good spy story should include plenty of individual heroism and terrible betrayal, but the reality is more likely to feature large amounts of careful, nervous bureaucracy. This account of British spy operations in occupied Luxembourg during the final stages of the First World War offers extensive proof of this.

The brainchild of one Captain Bruce, the Luxembourg project was a train-watching ring, increasingly important in 1918, as Germany shifted more divisions from the Eastern to the Western front. Bruce's principal agents were Lisle Rischard, a Luxembourg housewife trained to send coded reports through a newspaper column, and Baschwitz Meau, who was sent over enemy lines in a balloon to help her.

Gripping as all this subterfuge is, there is also quite a lot about the bickering between divisions of British intelligence, the meticulous preparations for the balloon ride and updates on the progress of the war at large. JG

Fascination by William Boyd (Penguin, £7.99)

This is William Boyd's third collection of short stories after On the Yankee Station and The Destination of Nathalie X, and it perfectly demonstrates the author's peripatetic interests. The first story is set in Oxford, the second in rural France and the third, fittingly, begins on a transatlantic jet. But although one cannot speak of "Boyd country", the stories have a particular atmosphere unique to the author. To describe it as black comedy is to undersell the pigment.

Boyd's characters - mostly men - never realise how happy they are until what they have is taken away from them. They are usually frustrated by something (lust or the desire to write poetry) and are then undone by some bomb ticking from within.

Boyd has written numerous film scripts and has developed a complete confidence of form, so that each of these stories is polished, perfectly observed but suffused with a sophisticated and unusual ambience. TC

The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made by Simon Ball (Harper Perennial, £9.99)

All four were at Eton together, all fought in the Brigade of Guards in the First World War and all were to achieve power in the Conservative Party; the "three friends" of the title being Oliver Lyttelton, Harry Crookshank and Bobbety Cranborne, later Lord Salisbury. All shared a common outlook, a sense of duty and a competitive urge. Today we tend to look askance at the influence their money brought, but in this excellent slice of political history Simon Ball reminds us that wealth did provide "a bulwark against personal corruption". NB

Breaking Ground by Daniel Libeskind (John Murray, £8.99)

The architect Daniel Libeskind's rise has been rapid since his design for Berlin's Jewish Museum only seven years ago. Libeskind had rejected modernist austerities and shown how advanced technology allowed us to translate any inspired scribble into glass and steel. There are plenty of scribbles in this memoir, and plenty of pretentious aphorisms ("Architecture is the eternal witness" etc etc). But all architects are show-offs, and whatever you think of his work, when it comes to his encounters with conceited rivals over the World Trade Centre you'll be on his side. NB

The Life and Death of Smallpox by Ian and Jenifer Glynn (Profile, £8.99)

Here's a gripping account of the terrible disease that could alter the course of history - it was an outbreak among the Aztecs that ensured victory for the invading Spaniards, and another among the Crusaders that stopped them taking Mecca. The hero is obviously Edward Jenner, who in the late 18th century discovered that inoculation with cowpox was just as effective as with the smallpox virus but without its dangers. Perhaps most interesting, though, is the sometimes hysterical opposition to vaccination that followed, whether from misguided religious bigots or from cynical old Malthus who saw the pox as a useful population regulator. NB

Somewhere Else by Charles Rangeley-Wilson (Yellow Jersey Press, £7.99)

The prose is high-style lyrical one minute and comically laddish the next, which can be very irritating, and the subject is fly-fishing, which is not exactly everyone's subject, so it's to Mr Rangeley-Wilson's credit that for more than a moment I found myself hooked. His secret is the expert precision with which he can describe not only the parabola of a salmon but also the tilt of a landscape, or the quirks of the many people he meets on those fishing trips of his. NB

Alexander the Corrector by Julia Keay (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

Generations of Bible readers have blessed Cruden's Concordance, that index to every word (apart from auxiliary parts of speech) in both Testaments, first published in 1737. But Cruden's own life was a miserable one: he was more than once put in a lunatic asylum by enemies, one of them a vicious rival in his timid suit of a widow. Compiling a concordance might seem a nerdish thing to do, but it plainly needed the same obstinate persistence that got him out of the madhouse. A wonderful story. NB

The Best of McSweeney's ed by Dave Eggers (Penguin, £8.99)

David Eggers's "experimental" (his word) American quarterly has acquired cult status; this selection from its first 10 issues carries the familiar mixture of fiction, whimsy and reportage, the sort of "great work", as he has explained, that was being "rejected for all the wrong reasons" (though some names, Zadie Smith's among them, were already familiar). Perhaps the best of these 18 pieces is one by Eggers himself about a climb up Kilimanjaro, a fictionalised account that owes less to experiment than to straight old-fashioned craftsmanship. NB

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