Category: Books

Clisson and Eugénie (1795): Napoleon Bonaparte

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★★

During a hard-fought game of Trivial Pursuit the other day, I discovered that Napoleon Bonaparte had written a romantic novel. Obviously, I decided that I had to get my hands on this as soon as possible. I had visions of balls and the language of fans, of brooding heroes, comic misunderstandings and smart-tongued heroines. This was foolish, I admit. In fact, this isn’t a novel so much as a short story, barely more than twenty pages long. It’s also very clearly Romantic rather than romantic. And Napoleon may have been a great general, but he wasn’t all that good as a novelist. Personally, I don’t believe this would have received any critical attention whatsoever were it not for the identity of its author; but that is interesting enough to warrant a bit of discussion.

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How Not To Be A Boy (2017): Robert Webb

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★★★½

I thought I knew what I was getting with this. The title and cover design channel Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman, which left me squirming in scandalised delight several years ago. And, to some extent, I was right; but Webb’s book takes the celebrity-does-gender-studies memoir to new and much darker regions. Written with fearsome honesty, it’s a ruthless exposé of what British society does to its young men, but also a tale of what it’s like to grow up in a world where you simply don’t fit in. It’s a humorous, frank and thought-provoking counterpart to Moran’s book, a welcome view from the other side of the gender barricade, and yet at the same time a completely different beast. Reading this, I feel (to some degree) as my male friends may have felt on reading Moran. Ahead lies terra incognita. And there may be dragons.

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Under the Skin (2000): Michel Faber

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Photo: David Rose

★★★½

Every day, Isserley spends hours driving along the A9, the arterial road which runs like a backbone through Scotland. She’s always on the lookout for hitchhikers, but she has a few ground rules. She only stops for the tall, well-muscled ones. And she loses interest pretty quickly if it turns out that they’re married, or have a girlfriend. You see, Isserley’s very careful. She’s only really interested in the ones no one would miss. The twisted offspring of a sci-fi novel, a murder mystery and an urban legend, Michel Faber’s story plays with expectations in a way that’s fascinating – but deeply disturbing.

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The Final Solution (2004): Michael Chabon

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★★★½

Close on the heels of Gentleman of the Road, J has supplied me with another of Michael Chabon’s books, in a not-so-discreet but much appreciated effort to nudge me through the rest of his oeuvre. At little more than 120 pages, this is more novella than full-length and, despite a haunting underlying subject, it has the feel of an amuse-bouche: a casual skirmish with one of the great characters of English literature. It’s the tale of an elderly man who was once famous for his extraordinary deductive powers across the length and breadth of the British Empire. But times have changed: the pea-soupers of London have given way to a peaceful retirement in the Sussex countryside, and the chaos of the human city to the quietly organised hives of honeybees. Little can tempt the old man from his self-imposed isolation; until, in the summer of 1944, he encounters a curious duo: a young boy with a splendid African grey parrot on his shoulder.

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Rules of Civility (2011): Amor Towles

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★★★★½

I’ve just returned from a business trip to New York, during which I had the perfect reading material: Amor Towles’s chic but shrewd Rules of Civility. While it shares the ineffable style of A Gentleman in Moscow, it has a different spirit: harder, wiser and more cynical. It conjures up Manhattan in the late 1930s: a city of walk-ups and steel fire-escapes; jazz quartets in smoky underground bars; and glittering parties in riverside mansions. And, at the book’s heart, are two young, scrappy and hungry heroines: Katey Kontent and Eve Ross. Both, in their own way, are self-fashioned and, as they wait on the brink of 1938, they can almost taste the potential in the air. Right now they might be eking out their last dollars in a downtown bar but, one day, New York is going to spill its gorgeous bounty right into their silken laps. It’s just a matter of finding the lever to get things moving. And, by happy chance, the catalyst is about to walk into both their lives…

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The Crow Garden (2017): Alison Littlewood

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★★★

In 1856, the young doctor Nathaniel Kerner makes his way north to Crakethorne Manor in Yorkshire: his first placement as an alienist or mad-doctor. He hopes to find an asylum full of progressive ideas and enlightened leadership, but it soon transpires that the enlightened spa treatments and extensive gardens described in the brochures are fictions. Instead Crakethorne is governed by the unstable Dr Chettle, who eschews modern notions of treatment in favour of the questionable science of phrenology. His new home isn’t all that Nathaniel would have wished. And yet there is one aspect which captures his imagination: Victoria Adelina Harleston, his beguiling patient.

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The Alchemist of Souls (2012): Anne Lyle

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★★★½

Night’s Masque: Book I

Larry Rostant’s Renaissance cover art has once again persuaded me to take a punt on a novel: a compelling blend of fantasy and gritty historical fiction, populated by players, spies, noblemen, and swordsmen who are down on their luck. This is London, in the fading days of Elizabeth I’s reign, but not as you know it. The queen tarries at Nonsuch, mourning her late husband Robert Dudley, while the reins of power are in the hands of her elder son Prince Robert. The capital seethes not only with religious strife, but also racial tension, for the discovery of the New World has brought Europe into contact with the skraylings: human-like and yet not human; great craftsmen, traders and warriors. And the imminent arrival of the first skrayling ambassador to the Court of St James may well be the spark that ignites the blaze. Imagine Shakespeare in Love seasoned with grit, intrigue and more than a hint of otherworldly magic.

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The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018): Stuart Turton

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★★★★

A man wakes up in the middle of a wood, with a single name on his lips: “Anna”. That’s all he has. His mind and memories are blank. Who is Anna? What is she to him? Who is he? He has no idea. When he sees a screaming woman running through the wood, followed by a man in a dark coat, and hears a shot shortly afterwards, he knows he has just witnessed a murder. But when, terrified, he stumbles out of the woods and into the grounds of a crumbling country house, he discovers that nothing is quite as it seems. For this novel is in a genre all of its own: a ferociously creative, time-travelling, body-hopping murder mystery, which reads like a cross between Memento, Inception and Groundhog Day, written by Agatha Christie.

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The Sky Over Lima (2014): Juan Gómez Bárcena

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★★★★

It’s 1904 and José and Carlos, two wealthy young men, are playing at being poets. They loiter in a tumbledown garret, savouring the romance of pretended poverty, and share their love for their favourite writer: the visionary Spanish wordsmith Juan Ramón Jiménez. His newest book hasn’t yet made its way across the seas to Peru, but the boys are desperate to read it. Maybe they could write to him and ask for a copy? And yet… and yet… They know that the great man won’t be moved by the plight of two impressionable students, so they formulate a cunning plan. Might he feel obliged to answer if they adopt another persona – if, for example, they pretend to be a beautiful young woman?

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Caligula (2018): Simon Turney

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★★★

The Damned Emperors: Book I

Simon Turney (usually billed as S.J.A. Turney) has built up quite a following with his e-books set in the Roman army, especially the Marius’ Mules series. They’ve been at the edge of my consciousness for a while, so I welcomed the chance to have a taster of Turney’s writing via this new novel. It’s the first in a series which will focus on the deliciously colourful emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In tackling Caligula, however, Turney takes the same approach that Margaret George did with Nero, attempting to cut through the accretions of centuries of propaganda and legend, to reveal the man beneath. It’s a noble attempt, but not without its problems, as the Julio-Claudians are always at their most interesting when they’re barking mad.

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