Category: Book Reviews

Agrippa by Robert Harris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Historical fiction is the paint-by-numbers of fiction writing. It lets you do the fun part – adding the colours of description and the shades of narration to the dry outline of recorded history – but without having to do the hard work of skillfully sketching the contour lines that define plot and character. And because the story already has brand recognition, you are guaranteed some degree of buy-in from your readers, simply by choosing a piece of history everyone knows.
The downside is the limits to how much artistry you can achieve within the confines of a story once told by God, and then badly retold by a slew of stuffy academics. Your art is constrained by the fine lines you are forced to walk as you paint: Slip too much into history, and you bore your audience. Slip too much into fiction, and you risk the trust of readers who expect you to stay true to what actually happened.
In Agrippa, Robert Harris manages to walk this fine line, but only barely. On the one hand, the very choice of canvas is to the author’s credit. He has selected a truly interesting central character, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the right-hand-man of Augustus Caesar; combined with an equally interesting period in history, the turbulent years after Julius Caesar’s assassination leading into a civil war that brought down the Republic and gave birth to the Empire. For lovers of ‘Rome Porn’ like me, there isn’t much for an artist to do in terms of colour choice to guarantee an enjoyable read: a stab of red as bloodlusted legions clash on the battlefield, a few hard strokes of flesh-colour as adulterous togas fall to the tiled floor of a sumptuous villa overlooking the Tiber. The palette is tried and true.
The problem is Harris doesn’t try very hard to make Agrippa feel true. The narrative device, a first-person retrospective from the protagonist’s deathbed, means our eponymous hero comes into the story weary and disillusioned, and this tone is carried across the entire novel, leaving no place for a character arc. We should feel the bright colours of youth slowly turn muddy and dun, as Agrippa’s noble friend and patron Octavius rises to power as Augustus, and becomes mired in the hypocrisy and filth of Roman politics. Instead we are treated to moments where the narrator tells us that he is too tired and fed up to recount the details of this or that battle or journey across the Adriatic Sea. What the reader hears instead is that Robert Harris himself is too tired to finish painting in all the numbers on his canvas. Time is running out, but not the time Agrippa has left before succumbing to his old war wounds, rather the time Harris has left before succumbing to his publisher’s deadline.
For all this, Harris remains a competent, if pedestrian, writer – good enough to put into words some surprising and entertaining details. I was struck by the descriptions of the hydraulic engineering works credited to Agrippa: canals, aqueducts and sewers. But most of all, I liked the parallels to the modern era. For instance Augustus Caesar’s frequent references to ‘upholding the Republic’ decades after his uncle had crossed the Rubicon resonate in today’s world, where the United States still calls itself a ‘Republic’, decades after JFK was assassinated for attempting to stand against what was already an American Empire by 1963.
Enjoy Agrippa for the competent, interesting story that it is. But don’t expect great art out of a tired novelist who can barely write colours between the lines.




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The Magician by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As a longtime fan of Thomas Mann’s work, I was reluctant to pick up this quasi-biography, especially knowing it was written in the contemporary era; a time when the woke agenda’s revisionist impulses are injected into every historical account with the feckless zeal of an mRNA vaccine campaign – turning 18th England into a racial melting pot, and imbuing female protagonists with the physical strength and courage of ten doses of toxic masculinity. The risk of this one getting the tone badly wrong was magnified by Mann’s complex relationship with sexuality. I feared the biography of one of my favourite writers would be reduced to a prop for virtue signalling some banal cliche of the 2020s LGBTQ3.1415PI+ agenda.
I should have trusted in the craftsmanship of Colm Tóibín. From the early pages on, the author shows us that he has a deep love and respect for Mann’s oeuvre. Not only are we plunged straight into the small, mercantilist world of late Hanseatic Lübeck, but the very pacing and tone of the narration mirror the style of Buddenbrooks, Mann’s own autobiographical account of his early life in Lübeck. Tóibín outdoes himself in matching Mann’s own delicate descriptions that bring to life the austere subtlety of the Lutheran city-state, as it gets swallowed by Prussia just as the Buddenbrooks / Mann family’s fortunes become swallowed by those of outside Germany.
And so the biography continues apace, weaving Mann’s great works into the very source of those novels: the tale of Mann’s own life as it unfolds. We are taken to Italy to discover the true story behind one of the most beautifully written novellas in the German language, A Death in Venice. We join Mann and his wife Katia in the sanatorium in Davos to understand whence The Mountain got its Magic. We live with Mann the patriotic zeal that preceded World War 1, then the implosion of Germany and the rise of fascism, culminating in a break in biographical inspiration caused by Mann’s exile to the United States.
That Mann’s works were so uninspired by his newly built house in the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles highlights how destructive was 20th Century fascism for European intellectualism: By the time the war ended, Thomas Mann was already a figment of a destroyed past – he had nothing really to give to Post-War Germany. For me, this reflects a deeper truth: Those of Europe’s intelligentsia whose creativity was not starved to death in Nazi concentration camps, found their creativity saturated and bloated out of them by American hamburgers, hot dogs and ice cream.
But perhaps the best thing about The Magician is how deftly and delicately it tackles the question of Mann’s sexuality. It would be every bit as easy for a modern writer to overegg this pudding by making the entire book be about Mann’s repressed gayness, as it would have been for biographers of more prudish times to underegg it by evading the topic altogether. Tóibín avoids either trap, and instead allows Mann’s own work to dictate the place sex occupied in his life. The result is an account that is by times graphical, but more often nuanced and metaphorical.
The ending of The Magician was touching, but for personal reasons it also caused me to smile wryly. The final passages include a memory Thomas Mann indulges at the end of his life, while on his final trip to Lübeck: it is a story his mother told him as a child about the trip Bach took to Lübeck to meet the then more famous composer Dietrich Buxtehude. I was struck by the contrast with another book I recently read on that very subject, called Something of his Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S.Bach, by British author Horatio Clare. Tóibín’s beautifully written account of Bach’s journey – though only a few paragraphs; though only a story inside a memory inside a biography – is a thousand times more impactful that Clare’s entire book.
And that underscores the main point here. To attempt the biography of a writer as good as Thomas Mann, it takes a writer as good as Colm Tóibín.



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Blood Ties by Jo Nesbø

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the ‘uncanny valley’ – where visual effects are neither purely cartoonish, figurative representations of reality; nor are they close enough to pass as photorealistic. Instead, they are in between, and create an uncanny sense of something that is ‘almost’ real.
Jo Nesbo’s Blood Ties occupies the uncanny valley of the written word, in between the genre of Scandi crime fiction, and actual literature. What makes the effect so unpleasant is that the book has some features of real writing to it. Nesbo wants to be a serious writer, and achieves that in places. At the same time, he is cursed with muscle memory from years of cranking out many, many scandi murder stories; he cannot quite escape the ridiculous and cartoonish tropes that made him a wealthy writer of comfortably bad genre fiction.
What results is simply awful. A truly unlikable protagonist named Roy who plods through the uni-dimensional, clumsy plot at a slow and pedestrian pace, yet still finds time to embroil himself in action scenes that are as unrealistic as they are unnecessary.
Worst of all is the warped moral lens through which the reader is forced to view Roy and his uninspiring mission to build a roller coaster in rural Norway. Nesbo tries hard to make the reader sympathise with this guy by backsplaining his childhood abuse into the narrative with a blunt instrument, yet even the heavy spice of child abuse feels so uncannily fake as to leave us emotionally cold. Meanwhile, in the present time, Roy’s brute-boy morality and sordid affair with a young woman are the side plot to his attempts to escape justice for the many murders we know he and his brother Carl committed in the past. Is Roy remorseful? It’s actually hard to say, because the character is so poorly written. Perhaps sensing that the child abuse doesn’t quite make Roy the likeable underdog the author was hoping to craft, Nesbo resorts to making the minor characters even less charismatic than the protagonist, so that Roy can shine by comparison.
It doesn’t work. Nesbo’s warped moral lens does little more than give the reader a headache and make him want to leave that depressing Norwegian town forever. Whatever Roy’s childhood, however corrupt and petty the cops and bankers that inhabit the town of Os, most of me wanted him to get caught and go to jail. But I didn’t want it badly enough to keep reading. I made it about halfway through, before committing my own sort of crime:

Leaving my paperback copy of Blood Ties at an Airbnb, for some other unsuspecting reader to suffer the same fate as me.



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Hamlet by William Shakespeare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


To read or to watch on stage? That is the question when it comes to Shakespearean plays. And there is a clear consensus among middle class parents of teenagers condemned by the school curriculum to the former: it is better to take seats amidst a sea of theatregoers, than to suffer pages full of the slings and arrows of outrageous Elizabethan word salad.
I will make so bold as to disagree. I think you need to do both. First read and study, then go and watch a great performance. And while reading the first few of the Bard’s plays might feel toilsome, it is the only way to truly steep yourself in a language that – let’s face it – has grown archaic even to the most literate among us.
So as I picked up Hamlet to read it for the very first time, I thanked my English teachers who, 35 years ago, I once cursed for forcing me to chore through Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear…And I’m glad I saved the best for last.
For one thing, it is replete with quotable quotes I knew but did not know came from Hamlet; phrases woven deep into our cultural fabric – everything from the Rotten State of Denmark, to ‘Never a Borrower nor a Lender be’, to ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’, to the latest Taylor Swift song, and many more I’ll leave for the reader to discover himself.
Beyond that, Hamlet is a cracking good story. It is the mother of all whodunnits – for though Hamlet’s father the king is dead, was he murdered? And if so, by whom? It is also the progenitor of the ‘unreliable narrator’ device. Can we believe that Hamlet’s interaction with the ghost is something more than a manifestation of his crescent madness?
And it is the prototype for the psychological thriller: the internal struggle the young prince endures when faced with the decision of whether to avenge his father’s death or to accept it not only gives rise to the most memorable quotable in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, but it is also a delicate and meaningful treatise on the nature of courage and cowardice. The poignancy with which Hamlet’s prevarications contrast with the bold decisiveness of the similarly wronged Laertes is so sharp it almost causes the reader to wince.
Most of all, though, we readers of this great play must never forget that Hamlet is what the middle class parents of high school scholars proclaim it to be: a set of instructions to actors, so that they can put on a show. Now that I have suffered my slings and arrows, I can’t wait to book a ticket and see this masterpiece come to life.





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Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach by Horatio Clare

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


There is a style of book that populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. It is a gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the insides of your university-educated ego as you delight in a particularly well-crafted metaphor, or the deployment of a somewhat archaic adjective you imagine other classes of reader would be forced to look up on their phones.
Such is the book Horatio Clare sat down to produce when writing Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J.S.Bach (Field Notes). A sheaf of said field notes – most likely handwritten – lay next to a computer, perhaps held in place by a mug of good coffee, as Horatio set about recounting his ‘adventures’ while recording a BBC documentary that follows the historic walk of Johann Sebastian Bach across the Germany of 1705.
The problem is, Clare largely fails. To be fair, there are exceptionally well-written passages lost in the long and wearisome trek that is this short tract. But its central purpose – to give the reader a sense of the young J.S. Bach and his walk from Central Germany to the coastal city of Lubeck, to meet the then-famous composer Buxtehude – is lost.
We do not get Something of Bach’s Art. Instead we get a rather dry, tired account of three middle-aged men on a work assignment for the British state broadcaster. We learn much about Horatio Clare: he likes birds and wishes Europe had more of them, in that vague way of the comfortable urban naturalist shielded from the realities of the nature he adores. He dislikes right-wing populism, yet he very much likes virtue-signalling that fact. Most of all, he is rather indifferent to Bach’s music and its German cultural context, instead treating it like the work subject we know it was. He does not even bother to hide the fact that the ‘walk’ he takes in Bach’s footsteps is mostly a series of train and taxi short-cuts to the next hotel.
Perhaps not much is known of Bach or his walk to Lubeck, and so Clare had not much to tell without drifting fully into fiction-writing? Perhaps the very idea of walking in Bach’s long-erased footsteps was a silly one? Or perhaps the BBC documentary (that I did not watch) is well-edited in a way these field notes are not, and therefore tells that story much better?
In any event, we do learn something of Horatio Clare’s Art – specifically that he is prepared to put his name to a book that never ought been published; great tits, wood pigeons and all.



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The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is not the first Daphne du Maurier novel you are likely to read. After all, she is much better known for her pacy, plot-driven psychological stories like Rebecca, The Scapegoat or Jamaica Inn.

The Glass-Blowers has little of that. In fact, at the beginning, I found it a little off-putting, because it didn’t quite rise to my expectations. The narrative device, of an opening third person narration, followed by a long first-person letter narration, and a closing third person narration, makes it hard to climb into the action in a way you might expect from a du Maurier.

But here is an excellent example of why readers should apply the 50 page rule before giving up on any book (save perhaps the most obvious trash): This book begins as an unformed lump, at first it’s hard to imagine it could be anything of value. But as du Maurier slowly and methodically breathes life into it, the story takes shape over the course of the French Revolution. It is masterfully crafted, with the contours of each character etched in crystal clarity upon an impeccably told history of the rise of the First Republic, the Reign of Terror and the ascension to power of Emperor Bonaparte.

Like the glass that acts as metaphor throughout, there is both strength and fragility in the Busson family, and especially the narrator and central character Sophie. In fact, The Glass-Blowers is nothing short of an epic; yet it is one that respects the personality of the straightforward and efficient Sophie herself, by managing to fit onto a mere 300 pages. In this, du Maurier shows respect also for the reader; something we know and appreciate from her more celebrated works.

Lovers of A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables take note: Dickens and Hugo do not have a duopoly on the market for great 1789 fiction.





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The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a little gem of a book – easily the best I have read so far this year.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is not easy to review, because the book itself refuses to adhere to conventions. In fact, it is only by having read and reflecting on this book that you are reminded how conventional much of today’s literature has become.

To say that it is a series of anecdotes about a grandmother and a granddaughter on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland is factually accurate, but does the book no justice at all. There is a story thread that runs through the book, hidden in plain sight.

To say that Jansson uses commonplace events as metaphors to illuminate deeper truths, and in so doing makes the commonplace extraordinary, is too simplistic. Jansson seems to skirt the line between metaphor and on-the-nose narration.

Her prose is sparse, and while this may reflect the work of the translator, it is somehow perfectly suited to the story and the characters.

The willful and sensitive granddaughter, Sophie, does not exactly grow up, but in the spaces between the chapter-anecdotes, which read almost nostalgically, we see the structure of the grown woman Sophie will one day become – this vision lends depth to the anecdotes and gives the reader important perspective.

And in the spaces between the grandmother’s many naps and clandestine cigarette breaks, we see that same woman: an unwritten character whose invisible womanhood binds the granddaughter and grandmother to each other, giving this short novella the breadth of a multigenerational epic.

No plot spoilers, but the final chapter made me cry. I’m not even sure if it was the subtle metaphor I imagined she was employing, or simply Jansson’s plain, beautiful writing onto which my mind projected a metaphor. And in the end, is there any difference?

Because either way, if I remain a writer and live as long as the grandmother, I would count myself lucky to ever write something as simple, as perfect and as honest as The Summer Book.



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Berlin Game by Len Deighton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as I crossed from the lights and noise of West Berlin into East Berlin, I realised I was going to have a hard time making a phone call. In the following years, I would work (and even have one notable flirtation) with East Germans as they struggled to adjust to life in a West that had swallowed their country.

So when I picked up Len Deighton’s Berlin Game, I hoped to revisit a little bit of that intangible sense of Cold War Germany – the clash of cultures and the deeper German culture that lay underneath; the fear and hatred of the Stasi; the casual bigotry of the Wessies against the Ossies; the dull tastelessness of Communism braced against the glitzy degeneracy of Capitalism.

To his credit, Deighton tries hard to fill the book with enough details to create that mood. But that is just the problem: he tries too hard. The details are too studied to feel credible. It contrasts well with the movie Goodbye Lenin, a beautiful and compelling sketch of East Germanness that draws from the artists’ resevoir of details with the natural ease of true natives.

The other major problem is with the book’s protagonist – whose name I have (tellingly) already forgotten two weeks after reading. Who is this man? Is he the pensive, understated and soft-spoken antihero the dialogue suggests? Or is he the scary hard man, prone to outbursts of violence, whom the narrator goes to great pains to describe? After reading the book, I still cannot really say and I’m sure Deighton had no real idea.

This points to a wider weakness in Deighton’s writing. His highly stylistic descriptions are used as a sticking plaster to cover over the shallowness of his characters. I paraphrase a sample here: “She flashed him the kind of smile that said she wanted to know more about his past, but was slightly afraid to ask the question.” There are dozens of these kinds of ‘smiles’ peppered throughout the text, and I’m sure if Deighton sat down with a police sketch artist he would be unable to create a drawing of a single one of them.

Of course, the book is ultimately a spy novel, and therefore should be judged by its compelling, racy plot. But here I have to give it only middling marks. In fact, very little happens, and although the ending is somewhat surprising, it achieves this ‘twist effect’ only by sacrificing the gritty realism that kept the action credible but slow the rest of the way through.

Ultimately the most interesting thing about Berlin Game has nothing to do with spies and little to do with the Cold War. It is what the story tells us about the very English author and his own country. Deighton, son of a working class man, struggled to find a place in a Britain that had faded from power. He wrote the book at the dawn of Thatcherism, at a time when his country had been humiliated by an IMF economic programme, shocked by race relations and bruised by the paramilitary consequences of Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland.

The result is a well-wrought tale of bureaucratic London, pervaded by wry cynicism and divisions of social class, all washed down by copious glasses of neat gin. The details are sparse, but authentic. In this, we see that Deighton is truly writing what he knew.



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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There are some rules to good writing that, if followed, tend to improve the reader’s experience and make the text seem more professional. Here are four examples that are often given to would-be writers in creative writing courses: (1) avoid adverbs, (2) avoid arbitrary changes to character point-of-view, (3) show-don’t-tell, (4) keep the ‘voice’ consistent.
Of course, rules are made to be broken. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn’t just good writing, it’s great writing. And yet, it breaks all of these rules, liberally and willfully. Twain’s literary dance is freestyle, the joyous rhythm of pure storytelling, which casts his narrator’s gaze across an expanse of adverbs, ‘author-splaining’ and character points-of-view as wide as the Mississippi River; all in a literary voice that changes – practically mid-sentence – from the Southern soprano of a Missouri boy to the often ironic tenor of a Yankee intellectual.
Never do you get the sense that Twain takes these literary liberties out of amateurish necessity, as cover for having been a bad student in dance class. He shows you just enough flashes of clever convention to assure you he could, if he wanted, write the whole thing in the elegant ballroom waltz of his (very English and much admired) literary predecessors: Dickens and Thackery.
But Twain’s ambition is not just to tell great stories; it is to tell great American stories. This Americanness, fresh and unburdened by convention, makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer such an interesting read. The style is raw, because it must be raw, if it is to tell of a country still in its adolescence.
So too the eponymous central character. Tom is a flawed hero, a shabby scholar, and an undisciplined and ofttimes ungrateful nephew to his long-suffering Aunt Polly. His boyish play at piracy or robbery makes no moral distinction between good and evil, and in that, he displays not badness, but the amorality of those who have not yet tasted forbidden fruit. Equally, though, he is bursting with vital energy, courage and shows us throughout the book’s pages glimpses of the American Smooth of goodness, which his manly future self will one day master.
Most of all, Sawyer is free. Free to fight with or befriend other boys, to smoke, to break out of his house at midnight and explore distant river islands, unconventional ideas or “h’anted houses”. He is the Lord of the Dance.
In all of these ways, Tom Sawyer is not a character at all. He is the personification of this juvenile America. His Adventures, set purposefully at the dawn of the civil war, are an allegory for the rise of the United States as it shuffles forward in an awkward, uncharted yet somehow inevitable dance towards greatness.
No wonder this book has entranced generations of American readers. When they read Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, they are not just being told a story, they are being told their own nation’s biography.
Tom’s flaws are their flaws; Tom’s accomplishments are theirs too. And while this ‘Nation-State Tom’ has long since grown up, and the Republic of his manhood long since turned into an Empire frail with decay, still there remains something of that unconquerable American spirit that makes this book important.
As the rock band Rush sang of Tom Sawyer, a 105 years later:
“What you say about his company, is what you say about society.”



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