Below you can browse reviews and essays I’ve written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the TLS, and other publications. A sample:

Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson (Picador)

After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard. Continued →

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation. Continued →

The Immortals: A Novel
by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)

A fifth of the way through this novel, one of its characters, a serious-minded teenage boy called Nirmalya, has a presentiment that he is about to figure in a narrative with a particular theme:

It was as if [...] he was now to be caught up, if not as a player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose — perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself?

Indeed, it could be. The city in question is Bombay, whose ambition is visualized, over the book’s chronological span of several years in the 1980s, in passages that observe new building on land reclaimed from the sea, or luxury apartment blocks sprouting incongruously in the middle of treeless wastelands. Continued →

The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind
by Jonah Lehrer (Canongate)
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (Allen Lane)

A great self-help current of philosophy, from the Stoics to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conveys one simple message: you cannot change the world, but if you understand the bad habits of your thinking you can change how you react to the world, and that way lies wisdom. Modern popular neuroscience often holds out the same promise: armed with the knowledge of what scientists have learned from magnetic imaging of the brain, the reader will end up master of his own mind. If you know how that muscle inside your head works, you can exploit it better. Continued →

Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea that’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
by James Harkin (Little, Brown)

When you’re just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkins’s dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied “system”, which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.

But at least we feel that we are “in the loop”. We feel important, too, if asked to provide “feedback”. Harkin’s book is at its best in its enjoyable excavation of such metaphors. He traces them back to the birth of “cybernetics”, when a mathematician named Norbert Wiener tried to improve the performance of anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war. Wiener took the engineering concept of “feedback” — in which information at the output of a system is plugged back into the input — and applied it to living organisms. So an anti-aircraft gun, the gunner, and the enemy plane constituted a single system whose performance was to be optimized. Now, Harkin argues, the inhabitants of “Cyburbia” happily volunteer to become mere cogs in a smoothly functioning global machine. Continued →

The Last Bachelor
by Jay McInerney (Bloomsbury)

Fresh from his cameo gig on the TV series Gossip Girl, where he played a famous writer who worked in dusty bars with a glass of whisky to hand, temporary mentor to an aspiring teenage littérateur, Jay McInerney is back in print with a collection of short stories. Just as the one-time enfant terrible’s appearance on the show represented an explicit passing of the cultural baton labelled “cutting-edge, hip, young Manhattan”, so his new book confirms McInerney’s contemporary market niche as that of a kindlier, more palatable alternative to Bret Easton Ellis, who remains too dangerous for the mainstream. Continued →

The Triumph of Music: Composers, musicians and their audiences, 1700 to the present
by Tim Blanning (Allen Lane)

What is the difference between Mozart and Sir Elton John? Of the many possible answers that might suggest themselves, the one that interests historian Tim Blanning is the gulf in their social status during their respective lifetimes. Mozart, a hired hand of the archbishop of Salzburg, was seated with the valets and cooks at dinner. Sir Elton, on the other hand, is massively rich and hobnobs with the royal family. The process by which musicians climbed the respectability ladder — from servants to superstars — is the subject of this fascinating book. Continued →

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
by Manjit Kumar (Icon)

Quantum physics is the branch of science most irresistible to raiders from other disciplines who don’t quite understand it. The catalogue of literary-metaphorical abuses of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for example, must run to thousands of entries. This ought not to be surprising — for, as this new book shows, the discipline has from its inception been intimately bound up not just with empirical investigation, but with passionate philosophical arguments about the nature of existence itself. One might not have the mathematics to follow every step of the science, but everyone has a potential stake in what it seems to imply about reality and our relationship to it.

Manjit Kumar’s book is an exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars. In what also has to operate as a kind of group biography of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac et al, the quasi-novelistic character sketches occasionally have a comic quality (”The son of a tax collector, Ludwig Boltzmann was short and stout with an impressive late nineteenth-century beard”), but the real meat of the book is the explanations of science and philosophical interpretation, which are pitched with an ideal clarity for the general reader. Perhaps most interestingly, although the author is admirably even-handed, it is difficult not to think of Quantum, by the end, as a resounding rehabilitation of Albert Einstein. Continued →

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story
by James Buchan (Maclehose Press)

The hero of this singular novel is first seen with an estate agent called Harriet, who is showing him round country houses. He is introduced with the curious phrase “Jim Smith, as he called himself”. If he has another, real name, the reader never learns it. He is a Londoner, who used to do something in the software industry, and is repeatedly described as “cold”. He seems almost to be an experiment in how far the writer can burn off conventional signals for personality and likeability in his leading character, leaving only a fiercely observational intelligence to guide the story. And yet, as we ought to expect from the writer of complexly magnificent novels such as Heart’s Journey In Winter and A Good Place to Die, Buchan has his reasons. There turns out to be a good excuse for that apparently bland surname, which reaches back into Roman mythology. And what starts as a surgically obsidian comedy of town versus country manners becomes something far stranger, as layers are peeled off the palimpsest of the English landscape, and of literature itself. Continued →

The Gone-Away World
by Nick Harkaway (Heinemann)

The great thing about a post-apocalyptic world is that pretty much anything can happen in it. So it is not excessively implausible when, in the middle of this rambling fantasy-SF-horror-kung-fu novel,¹ a troupe of mime artists turns up in a grimy bar and defuses the ambient threat of violence through the power of melancholic dumb gesture. It’s a very funny scene. The danger, though, is that if anything can happen, the reader might not particularly care what does. Continued →

1. The Guardian here unilaterally inserted the phrase “eagerly awaited”, so that I appeared to be talking, absurdly, about an “eagerly awaited rambling fantasy-SF-horror-kung-fu novel”. The status of the phrase “eagerly awaited” is itself interesting. Who was eagerly awaiting this book? How did the Guardian know about them? It seems more likely that “eagerly awaited” is actually PR code for “much-hyped”, which this book certainly was. But in that case it is not a newspaper’s job to endorse the hype, as it implicitly did here. «