PAPERBACKS
John le Carré’s latest novel, Agent Running in the Field (Viking, 384pp, £8.99), is set in 2018 and is, according to his editor, ‘incredibly prescient, and a very emotional book in terms of how connected le Carré feels to the history of Britain and Europe. There’s no looking away, he addresses the very current political crisis.’ Robert Mccrum in the Guardian agreed: ‘Ever since he was propelled into spy fiction by the cold war division of Europe… le Carré’s de facto muse has been the zeitgeist. Publishing such a thriller at the age of 88, a feat of imaginative stamina that surpasses the tenacity of his idol Graham Greene, le Carré confirms his place at the head of his profession. Not many writers half his age could so successfully put Goethe and Sting into the same sentence.’
The book ‘is as ingeniously structured as any of le Carré’s fiction, skilfully misdirecting the reader for much of the time,’ enthused David Sexton in the Evening Standard. ‘The novel has been trailed as an anti-brexit, anti-trump book, and it is indeed that… But it goes beyond that,’ wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman. ‘ Le Carré’s subject has always been corruption – corruption of the intellect and the spirit, the corrupting influence of power and money. “Radix malorum est cupiditas,” and the irresponsibly selfish and unscrupulous rich occupy one of the lower circles in le Carré’s Inferno,’, but Massie believed this was a ‘warmer’ novel than many of his others.
The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Penguin, 544pp, £9.99) is Bill Bryson’s latest book. As Richard Morrison in the Times explained, the author ‘isn’t a medic, biologist or psychiatrist, but that’s what makes his exploration of the human body, all seven billion billion billion atoms of it… so readable and useful…. He asks all the questions a layperson doesn’t dare to ask for fear of exposing humiliating ignorance, then answers them in witty, jargon-free prose.’
Most reviewers plucked some startling facts from the book: in the Washington Post, for example, Alexander C Kafka noted that ‘You grow 25 feet of hair in a lifetime. You host 40,000 species of microbes, and when you kiss you transfer some 1 billion bacteria to your beloved.’ Ceri Radford in the Independent discovered that we ‘shed half a kilo of skin flakes every year’. Gavin Francis concluded his review in the Guardian: ‘For all Bryson’s encyclopedic reading, his brainpicking sessions with medicine’s finest minds, the ultimate conclusions of his book could stand as an ultimate prescription for life: eat a little bit less, move a little bit more.’
Molly Case is a ‘spoken word artist’, writer and nurse born and brought up in south London. She currently works at St George’s Hospital in London as a cardiac nurse specialist. In How to Treat People: A Nurse at Work (Penguin, 288pp, £9.99), Case has structured her memoir ‘around the ABCDE assessment used by nurses – airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure,’ explained Alice O’keeffe in the Guardian. ‘This allows Case to roam widely across different aspects of her experience as a nurse, writer and daughter (her father was treated on the cardiac ward where she worked)… Her patients inspire her most compelling material. While doctors tend to describe the people they treat as a collection of symptoms, as a nurse Case has the advantage of working intimately with them and their families, sometimes over long periods of time... She shows us that the unique role of a nurse is to understand and care for people both physically and emotionally. Nursing may not have the cachet of brain surgery but it’s an essential profession and, in Case, it has an eloquent advocate,’ O’keeffe concluded. ‘It’s a youthful, vibrant, cynicism-free book, which gives it great charm,’ Melanie Reid wrote in the Times. ‘May she inspire her contemporaries to join her in a vital job.’
Clarissa Farr was high mistress of St Paul’s Girls School for some 11 years, during which time her pupils achieved extraordinarily good exam results. The Making of Her: Why School Matters (Wm Collins, 320pp, £9.99) ‘shares the wisdom she deployed there and the lessons she learnt. It is about the importance of good teachers and the influence a school community can have on the lives of children,’ wrote Sian Griffiths in the Times. In an interview in the Standard, Farr explained that ‘The world is full of people desperate to reinvent education. My abiding feeling is there are a limited number of ways you can improve on a fantastic teacher.’ In the TES, Gwen Byrom, herself a headteacher, thought it ‘a warm and witty book, which raised a number of wry smiles of recognition, and is full of hard-earned wisdom and affection for our schools and all that goes on in them’.
In her Times review of Jo Baker’s thriller The Body Lies (Black Swan, 288pp, £8.99), Siobhan Murphy set the scene: ‘Baker’s protagonist is recruited to the creative writing department of a northern university. Fear has driven her here – she was attacked on the street in London.’ In the Guardian, Sarah Moss thought there was ‘some good campus satire: since one of the writing professors is on research leave and the other off sick with stress, our heroine finds that she is the creative writing department.’ ‘The book’s clout,’ believed Murphy, ‘is in the sexual politics behind its contrast of the fictional depiction of violence against women – as written in the postgrads’ work – and the stark, isolating reality.’