Books REVIEWS
BLACK COMEDY HOWARD JACOBSON Zoo Time (Bloomsbury) ●●●●● There isn’t a single character in Howard Jacobson’s new novel that you would want to spend time with. None of them, from protagonist to bit-part player, has enough good qualities to render friendship an appealing prospect. Yet Zoo Time hooks you from the start, largely due to Jacobson’s ability to
shape a sentence and build a paragraph with almost archi- tectural finesse. In an age where beach reads or Nordic crime dominate the fiction charts, Jacobson takes the time to craft lines that are so perfectly executed, they deserve to be read twice. Possibly even aloud, to fully appreciate the comedic value of his prose.
Despite a sustained focus on the slow death of publishing, humour still drips off every page, perhaps because, rather than in spite of, this fact. Zoo Time feels like a last hurrah, as literature and novel-writing heads over the top into a bat- tle it can’t win. That’s what the book’s ‘hero’, Guy Ableman, thinks anyway. With his previous outpouring about to go out of print, and new material difficult to mine, novelist Ableman spends an inordinate amount of time imagining inappropri- ate scenarios with his mother-in-law. The desire to use these fantasies in his writing also features heavily, as do the constant rounds of book festivals, talks and meetings with agents/publishers that dominate a writer’s life.
But it is Ableman’s relationship with the two women in his life – his wife Vanessa, and her mother, Poppy – that Jacobson centres on. A fascinating, often hilarious but also deeply sad triumvirate, which holds our gaze but keeps us ever so slightly at arm’s length. (Kelly Apter)
POETRY COLLECTION CHRISTOPHER REID Nonsense (Faber) ●●●●●
Since winning the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering, Christopher Reid hasn’t stopped to smell the roses. He’s brought out a Selected Poems and this whole new collection, Nonsense. A Scattering was steeped in mourning and writ-
ten as a tribute for Reid’s late wife, and Nonsense doesn’t stray far from the same theme. The book’s opening section is the story of a recently bereaved academic attending a conference on nonsense. There’s a riff on Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly, and shorter lyrics with more focused targets. Perhaps this collection is too much too soon,
WAR DRAMA KEVIN POWERS The Yellow Birds (Sceptre) ●●●●●
Kevin Powers’ debut novel has an intensely poetic rhythm. The heavy introspections of its protago- nist, Private Bartle, flow hypnotically, like the desert landscape in which much of the book is set. Bartle is a soldier in the US Army, the chapters flitting between his recollections of serving in Iraq in 2004 and his return home to Virginia in 2005, where he’s haunted by the memory of a dead friend. Poet and writer Powers is ex-US military himself. And while this isn’t a memoir, there’s clearly inspi- ration drawn from his real experiences. Despite being little over 200 pages, The Yellow Birds is
dense with detail; ten minutes of reading can feel like an hour. That’s not to say the book is slow: instead, it treads carefully to its deeply unsettling finale, leaving us sick at the damage war inflicts on the mind and body. And yet somehow it is uplifting that a writer as honest and compelling as Powers can emerge from such an inhuman mess. (Yasmin Sulaiman)
as the poetry occasionally feels a little burnt-out, slumping into weary phrasing (‘howls like hell’; ‘funny money’). But Nonsense is alive with voices and sto- ries in its extended plays on nursery rhyme structures, and often clear-eyed in moments of private revelation. The shorter lyrics at the close are the sharpest points, suddenly lucid and jubilant, well worth the wait. (Charlotte Runcie)
HISTORICAL TEXT BODLEIAN LIBRARY How to Be a Good Lover (Bodleian Library) ●●●●● In the wake of the Bodleian Library’s How to Be a Good Wife/Husband self-help guides, along comes this repeated dip into the 1930s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ for middle-class wannabe socialites. Some advice is quite pertinent, such as ‘love in a cottage is better than riches in a palace’ and ‘don’t seek your wife among your own relatives if you can possibly help it’.
But others (‘many a beautiful soul is to be found behind a somewhat plain face’ and ‘don’t attempt to kiss your lover with your hat still on your head, young man’) make you wonder whether this might not be a text uncovered by librarians at Oxford’s oldest research facility, but an almighty spoof perpetrated by some pitiful sketch show troupe of the future. In the end it feels like the literary equivalent of lining up the most senior of the
Chelsea Pensioners and laughing at their efforts to use Twitter: funny for ten seconds but ultimately a bit of a pointless venture. (Brian Donaldson)
46 THE LIST 20 Sep–18 Oct 2012
HISTORICAL DRAMA LAWRENCE NORFOLK John Saturnall’s Feast (Bloomsbury) ●●●●●
The writing of John Saturnall’s Feast has report- edly taken Lawrence Norfolk all of 12 years to complete. And given the lush depth and intricate detail on almost every single line of these 400 pages, it’s understandable. This is a book for lovers of ‘proper literature’ where description of character, place and time are far more crucial than anything approaching plot. As such, this is quite probably a masterpiece, but may leave those who yearn for a thrusting storyline a little parched. It’s a tale of love across the 17th century English
divide where the partition runs from the hell-like kitchen our eponymous hero works in, up through the stately manor he feeds and which houses Lady Lucretia Fremantle. But it’s also a savage attack on church and state where war and injustice (John’s mother is accused of witch- craft) are enforced to brutal effect, and a chance to celebrate the everyday heroes who don’t have a chapter in the history books. (Brian Donaldson)