Books in brief
Robert Maxwell was always a gambler. The press baron who raided the pension fund of the Daily Mirror and regularly bet huge amounts in casinos—one time winning £750,000, another losing £400,000—was born poor in a shtetl in Czechoslovakia, in 1923. After the Nazis invaded, he journeyed to Hungary to fight for the resistance; later, inspired by Churchill’s speeches, he joined the British Army. In March 1945, he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery by Bernard Montgomery, the day after he was told his mother and sisters had been murdered at Auschwitz.
John Preston’s life, which has won the Costa Prize for biography, keeps you gripped with its lurid highs and lows. Even as Maxwell clawed his way into the British establishment with his genius for deal-making and bullish charm, he suffered private agonies, including the deaths of two of his children. His frightening energy led him to accumulate publishing businesses at the same time as being a Labour MP and hosting lavish three-day parties at his Oxford mansion. Insecure and domineering, he used to stand on the roof ’s edge and urinate onto passers-by below before climbing into his helicopter. Yet he also gave huge amounts to charity—and made sure everyone knew about it. (“Starving children were saved yesterday thanks to the intervention of Mirror publisher, Robert Maxwell,” was the type of line that Alastair Campbell, then at the
Mirror, admits to writing.)
His seven surviving children both adored and hated him. He was equally capricious, replacing the picture on his desk of his favourite daughter Ghislaine with that of his dog. Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine’s boyfriend for whom she trafficked young women, were similar characters—controlling, charismatic and narcissistic—but Preston doesn’t push the parallels. Similarly, he analyses all the theories about Maxwell’s death at sea—suicide, attempted suicide gone wrong, accident while urinating, killed by Mossad— with proper scepticism. Most likely Maxwell, haunted by his family’s destruction during the war and about to be exposed as a fraud, decided to end it all the only way he knew how: on his own terms.
Sameer Rahim
A founding claim of China’s government is that the nation is an eternal entity. From the outside, China can look like a nation state. But the country encompasses a huge population who eat different foods, practise different religions and hold different regional loyalties. They also, as Yale academic Jing Tsu describes in this highly readable history of two millennia of Chinese language reform, speak multiple languages and dialects. Under an empire, this mattered less—loyalty to an emperor transcends other differences. But creating a uniform nation state required the creation of a single Chinese language at its heart.
For the tyrant Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the 3rd-century Qin Dynasty, standardising the script was a way to impose cultural unity. Over the centuries, it had the advantage of allowing people speaking different dialects to make themselves understood in writing, but the non-alphabetic script made it hard to master, difficult to catalogue and unsuited to the needs of technological progress. There were centuries-long debates over rival methods of categorising written characters in a dictionary. Great minds wrestled for decades with building a typewriter that could cope with the 4,000 most basic Chinese characters, let alone the 40,000 in the 1716 Kang Hsi dictionary.
Language reform became a cause both for centralising tyrants and 19th- and 20thcentury political reformers, who saw the writing system as a barrier first to literacy, then to China’s participation in telegraphy and later digitisation. This is the story of the gifted individuals for whom this subject became a lifelong obsession.
Isabel Hilton
Like a 66m-year-old home movie, the first hours after the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid are recorded in precise detail at Hell Creek, North Dakota: the torn fish, broken tree trunks, and assorted teeth and bones smashed together by a seismic wave that rocked the planet.
Otherlands transforms that
He would stand on the roof ’s edge and urinate onto passers-by below
snapshot into a book-length narrative. Thomas Halliday offers a 550m-year tour of the incredible diversity of life that has existed on our planet. Giant penguins waddle across the shingle bay of subtropical Antarctica; a turkey-sized dinosaur, Caudipteryx, performs a courtship dance around a nest of cyan eggs.
Halliday’s trick is to tell his story in reverse. The first hominids exit early; the continents merge and drift and merge again; the sounds of the cretaceous forest fall silent as we pass beyond the evolution of birdsong. Life retreats from land to ocean, and the first eyes give way to the sightless world of the Ediacaran, an alien realm of crawling beings.
This reverse-telling mimics our present climate woes. Atmospheric carbon is at a three-million-year high and rising, and humans are now the world’s driving evolutionary force. Since 1978 the total vertebrate population has halved. But the technique also expands our empathy. I was reading Otherlands when I learned of the death of EO Wilson, who coined the term “biophilia” to describe our innate need to connect with other living things. Halliday shows how the most distant creatures have played a part in making our world. The epilogue winds forwards to today with a stark warning of the biodiversity crisis, tempered by the lesson of history: that “everywhere, always, life is built upon life.” David Farrier
“Her performance as a contented wife was consummately good,” observes Nicky, a young writer in 1960s London, of Phyllis, the middle-aged suburban housewife at the heart of Tessa Hadley’s new novel. Phyllis’s conjugal harmony collapses when she abandons her husband Roger and two children, Colette and Hugh, to live with Nicky, and embarks on a sexual transformation.
Free Love is signature Hadley, as she charts the battle that rages within Phyllis between the expectations of her class and gender and the “space that had been unfulfilled in her passionate nature.” Told in delightful prose—trees are “upright inky pen strokes”; a staircase is a “coiled spring”—Phyllis’s story is one of awakening to the politics of the decade, as Nicky questions her views on the Vietnam War. Through a new friendship with a Grenadian nurse, Phyllis also witnesses the racism of the era.
Still, Free Love remains a deeply domestic novel—the nervous excitement of teenage Collette’s first trip to the pub is rendered as carefully as a conversation about the evils of western capitalism; the quietly heartbreaking transformation of Hugh into a brittly confident public schoolboy shapes Phyllis’s psyche more than her time at marches.
Though a prize-winning author, Hadley’s career has never quite taken off. Perhaps she is a victim of her own consistency, each of her novels so beautifully written that she is perpetually judged against her own very high standards. Though maybe not the best of Hadley’s eight novels, by any other measure, Free Love is a triumph.
Sarah Collins
A decade after her last novel, Monica Ali is back. Love Marriage marks a return to the domestic milieu and themes of her Booker-shortlisted debut Brick Lane: British Muslim identity, discrimination, privilege, sexual repression and awakening. Over 500 compulsive, tightly plotted pages, it explores the conflict between duty and desire, family and freedom.
Ali subverts the traditional marriage plot to illustrate the pitfalls of taking people, including oneself, at face value. She knows from experience that “life is not simple”—controversy over Brick Lane’s
depiction of the Bangladeshi community crystallised questions over representation and creative freedom that infuse Love Marriage.
It centres on the impending wedding between Yasmin Ghorami, a junior doctor living with her “chaste” Bengali family in southeast London, and Joe Sangster, a registrar living with his feminist provocateur mother in Primrose Hill. Ali has fun parachuting the Ghoramis into NW3, to be studied, in Yasmin’s mind, like “some anthropological specimen.” Although Yasmin mocks her mother’s ensuing “journey of self-discovery,” the novel’s dramatic irony hinges on the fact that she is on a parallel journey herself.
Her parents emerge with almost painful vividness, as do the tragi-comic hospital scenes. Ali prizes entertainment over realism, and her penchant for debating issues through her characters means some verge on caricature. Nevertheless, Love Marriage
reveals a master storyteller playing to her strengths: a satirical eye that deftly navigates the fine line between humour and pathos; a wicked ear for dialogue; and a flair for conjuring illicit passion. It highlights how ineluctably we are shaped by our families and the secrets they keep. Madeleine Feeny