Book Reviews: 10 May
OUT NOW
EATING FOR VICTORY (£9.99, Michael O’Mara Books; offer price, £9.49)The food writer Jill Norman contributes an insightful foreword to this collection of Second World War information leaflets, documents and recipes pressed upon the nation during rationing. It was a tricky business to survive on a week’s allowance of 100g bacon, 6p worth of meat, 50g cheese, 50g tea and one egg but, as Norman points out, the nation has never been healthier as a result. That’s partly because petrol rationing meant biking and walking wherever possible, and, if you wanted fruit and veg, you grew it yourself – thus using up calories that, in our remotecontrolled life, hang around like unwanted guests.
So, what can we learn from this book? Loads. Try the chapter on soup, for instance. It provides 16 recipes that use cheap, easily accessible ingredients and offer great nutritional value. They’ll take half an hour to make at the most, will fill you up, keep you warm and save you money, and you won’t put on an ounce. Not only that, you can adapt them to use up all the leftovers we currently chuck in the bin.
And in an era in which the dangers of sugar have been recognised, there’s also a chapter devoted to using less or taking acceptable substitutes.
Peony Makepiece
WEDDING NIGHT by Sophie Kinsella (£18.99, Bantam Press; offer price, £14.99)Doyenne of chick lit, Kinsella invites her readers on a labyrinthine odyssey of love in her latest romantic caper.
This amorous romp begins with Lottie, the lovestruck and impetuous protagonist, delusively believing that her longterm beau, Richard, is about to propose. But when she realises that the ‘special lunch’ and ‘big question’ were merely alluding to a couple’s vacation, their relationship precipitously unravels.
However, her marital dreams are promptly resurrected when her silvertongued ex, Ben, contacts her in the hope of honouring their pact to get married if they were both still unattached at 30. Lottie accepts Ben’s proposal with an alarming alacrity, selfprescribing what she believes to be the perfect salve to her broken heart.
An assault course of impediments ensues as friends and relatives attempt to prevent the wilful Lottie from realising her nuptial fantasy into what they conceive to be a nightmarish reality. The question is, will Lottie surmount the obstructions of these wellmeaning interlopers and consummate this illfated union?
If you have a penchant for chick lit, this witty tale of misunderstandings and misplaced feelings will tickle your fancy. Kinsella traces Lottie’s circuitous pursuit of her elusive fairytale ending with her signature charm and humour.
Cara Purvis
PERILOUS QUESTION by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20; offer price, £16) The brief but pivotal period in history, between Waterloo and the start of Victoria’s reign, that resulted in the Great Reform Bill of 1832, is tackled by Antonia Fraser with her now familiar combination of meticulous research and racy descriptions of the characters involved. You could almost be reading a novel as the reforming Whigs take on the Conservative opposition aided by a cast of revolutionaries like William Cobbett.
The problem arose with the expansion of industrialised towns such as Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds, which had almost everything modern life could afford other than parliamentary seats – the reverse of places like Old Sarum – ‘a lump of stone and a green field’ – which was scandalously represented by two MPs.
Riots, ferment in political circles and a general state of perturbation throughout the country led many to believe that England was on the verge of revolution. Eventually, assent was given by William IV, and the Great Reform Bill was passed, leading to a complete change in the way Britain was governed.
Theo Walden
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Love on every levelJulian Barnes’s new book uses ballooning as a metaphor for love and loss, finds Cecily Gayford
LEVELS OF LIFE by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £10.99; offer price, £9.89)‘Every love story is a potential grief story,’ Barnes writes in Levels Of Life. In this measured and moving investigation of loss, the metaphor he chooses is ballooning: a glorious, godlike ascent into the heavens, which can turn – and still sometimes does – into a boneshattering plummet to earth.
The first section, ‘The Sin Of Height’, deals with the early, hit and miss days of ballooning, and in particular with the enthusiast and pioneer of aerial photography, Felix Tournachon, whose uxoriousness in the face of disaster subtly anticipates Barnes’s own devotion to his late wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The second, ‘On The Level’, brings together two of the ‘balloonatics’ he describes in the first section, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and a bohemian English army officer, Captain Fred Burnaby. A love affair is embarked upon in the reckless spirit of a ballooning trip; the resulting emotional crashlanding is so abrupt and traumatic that Burnaby’s death – a spear thrust to the neck at the Siege of Khartoum – is simply the coup de grace.
For Barnes, to embark on a love story – or a balloon trip – is an act that simultaneously rewards bravery and tempts fate: ‘Together, in that first exultation, that first roaring sense of uplift, [lovers] are greater than their two separate selves.’ But as in nature there is always an equal and opposite reaction, the greater the ‘uplift’, the harder the crash to the ground at the end of it when, ‘sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away... and what is taken away is greater than what was there’.
Because of this emotional logic, falling in love and plunging into grief are experiences that transform individuals, extending feelings and perceptions to proportions far greater than the sum of their parts. In the final section, ‘The Loss Of Depth’, Barnes writes painfully of entering a ‘new reality’ after his wife’s death – everything is cast in the shape of grief. He notices ‘all the widows and widowers coming towards you’, who had previously been ‘invisible’.
Levels Of Life is not a guide to surviving grief: Barnes recounts the story of a friend, who ‘assembled the classic texts of bereavement’ while her husband was dying of cancer, only to find in the event that there was nothing in literature that adequately expressed her own feelings: to make the point that each grief is unique.
Instead, it is a raw and powerful testimony; Barnes hides nothing of his own pain, while exposing little of his wife’s private life, which remains her own – and his.
Her significance is measured in his grief: ‘It hurts exactly as much as it is worth.’
MUST READ
Up, up and awayFALLING UPWARDS: HOW WE TOOK TO THE AIR by Richard Holmes (William Collins, £25; offer price, £20)
Ballooning has been much in the news – for tragic reasons, but tragedy and ballooning have been intimately related ever since Napoleon formed a Corp d’Aérostiers in 1794 – very early in balloon history – and took it to Egypt where it was destroyed by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.
Accounts of this, and other airy incidents, can be found in this brilliant book by the biographer Richard Holmes.
Plenty of illustrations accompany firsthand accounts of ballooning in the dark (like being surrounded by ‘a black, plunging chasm’, said a passenger on an 1836 London to Frankfurt flight), the balloon postal service of 1870 when the Prussians besieged Paris (60,000 letters were delivered) and scientists who used balloons to discover massive seasonal airflows of migrating insects, 9,000ft up.
PAPERBACKS
WHO IS OZYMANDIAS? by John Fuller (Vintage, £9.99; offer price, £9.49)Fuller’s intriguing and witty book aims to get to grips with the essential puzzlement of verse by dissecting some of our greatest poems. Browning, Bishop, Coleridge and Yeats are all discussed, as is TS Eliot and Tennyson’s dejected Mariana, who has retreated to a ‘lonely farmhouse, a setting that suits Tennyson’s own mood of “dank melancholy”,’ notes Fuller. TW
SWEET TOOTH by Ian McEwan (Vintage, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)
McEwan’s bestselling spy story, set in 1972, focuses on Serena Frome, groomed for the Intelligence services during her fi nal year at Cambridge, who falls for a happening young novelist. How can she keep her undercover life secret while revelling in the throes of love? A satisfying and intelligent read.
PM
THE TRUNDLERS by Harry Pearson (Little, Brown, £13.99; offer price, £12.59)
If you like the sound of leather on willow, you’ll have been straight out of the slips to pre-order this history of medium-pace bowling. Or seam-bowling, to the uninitiated – bowlers who try to deliver the ball at speeds of between 55mph and 75mph. Pearson, a witty writer, is the ideal guide to cricket.
TW
ALSO PUBLISHED…
MARGARET THATCHER by Charles Moore (Allen Lane, £30; offer price, £24)The first volume of Moore’s authorised biography of the late Mrs Thatcher, taking in her Grantham upbringing, the early years in Parliament and eventual power in 1979.
BIG BROTHER by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins, £16.99; offer price, £13.99)
In this compelling, tough and witty book about food, or too much of it, Shriver explores diets, sibling relationships and whether we can ever save those we love from themselves.
LITERARY AWARDS
Winning wordsShortlists of the three literary prizes to be presented this summer
The Orwell Prize (15 May), is awarded for outstanding political writing that goes ‘way beyond the malodorous environs of Westminster’; the Women’s Prize (5 June), formerly the Orange Prize, is a celebration of women’s fiction both here and abroad; and the Independent Booksellers Book Award (29 June) is chosen by the booksellers.
◆ A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa; AT Williams
◆ Burying The Typewriter; Carmen Bugan
◆ From The Ruins Of Empire; Pankaj Mishra
◆ Injustice; Clive Stafford Smith
◆ Leaving Alexandria; Richard Holloway
◆ Occupation Diaries; Raja Shehadeh
◆ On The Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin; Marie Colvin
The Women’s Prize
◆ Where’d You Go, Bernadette; Maria Semple
◆Bring Up the Bodies; Hilary Mantel
◆ Flight Behaviour; Barbara Kingsolver
◆ May We Be Forgiven; AM Homes
◆ Life After Life; Kate Atkinson
◆ Zadie Smith NW; Zadie Smith
The Booksellers Award
◆ The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry; Rachel Joyce
◆ HHhH; Laurent Binet
◆ Bring Up The Bodies; Hilary Mantel
◆ Capital; John Lanchester
◆ The Etymologicon; Mark Forsyth
◆ Flight Behaviour; Barbara Kingsolver
◆ The Song Of Achilles; Madeline Miller
◆ Walking Home; Simon Armitage
◆ A Tale For The Time Being; Ruth Ozeki
◆ Behind The Beautiful Forevers; Katherine Boo