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

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. ↩

The Pirate’s Dilemma
by Matt Mason (Allen Lane)

One couldn’t wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people’s computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.

It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls “the pirate’s dilemma”. Continued →

I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While
by Taichi Yamada, translated by David James Karashima (Faber)

Variations on a supernatural theme: such are the novels of Taichi Yamada’s so far translated into English. A man’s dead parents come back to life; or a woman and a man somehow find themselves telepathically connected across nocturnal Tokyo. The stories are not so much sensational accounts of spirit-world incursions into everyday life as intimations that the ghostly or otherwise inexplicable is already there, if you’re in the right state to notice.

The people in the right state to notice are middle-aged men with troubled or defunct marriages. And so, in this newest translation, we meet a 48-year-old man, Taura, with a distant wife and a son he doesn’t really know, and whose middle-management career is in suspended animation. Recounting his story directly to the reader as though in person, Taura tells of getting laid up in hospital with a broken leg, and sharing a room for one night with a woman. They cannot see each other owing to a screen between their beds, but they get talking. One thing leads to another, and they have aural sex. The next morning, a nurse moves the screen, and Taura sees that the woman is old, wizened and grey. Continued →

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross (4th Estate)

What is a composer? Is it someone who invents music from nothing, or someone who seeks inspiration in mathematical procedures, folk music, or birdsong? Is it someone who imagines a situation in which noise could be interpreted as music, and makes that situation happen? Or someone who takes other musics and mashes them up through loudspeakers? Is a composer a person who stands colossus-like outside the times, tuned in to the eternal spheres, or someone messily implicated in history as it happens? Does public acclaim mean the composer is a successful communicator, or a sellout? Is a composer an artist, a celebrity, a monk or a prankster? Continued →

Death at Intervals
by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill)

In the craft of the sentence, José Saramago is one of the great originals. His prose is a voice that envelops all voices: it is like the universe’s immanent murmur. Those who have not read him before will be startled from the very first page of his new novel, when speech first appears. The anonymous, perhaps only hypothetical speaker begins talking in the middle of a narrative sentence, following a comma, with no quotation marks but only a capital letter to mark the beginning of his speech and nothing to mark its end. A decentring feature of this long-established style is that when people speak in sentences themselves containing commas, you are not at first quite sure when the speech has ended and the narrator’s voice has resumed, Is it here, you think, No, it’s later on, it must be here, I reckon, you see how tricky this can be. Continued →

Matter
by Iain M Banks (Orbit)

The Culture is an anarcho-communist, galaxy-spanning civilisation of post-humans and machines that has been the playground of some of Iain Banks’s best novels, published with or without his middle initial. The Culture is vastly curious and tolerant: just about the only thing it won’t accept is being attacked. Thus its war with the Idirans, the backdrop of Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), was a battle forced upon it by a fundamentalist enemy that refused to negotiate.

If that sounds vaguely similar to some contemporary geopolitical narratives, Banks is now out to extend the analogies further in Matter, his first Culture novel for eight years. In it, representatives of various advanced civilisations debate the ethics of intervention in other people’s affairs, even if it’s for their own good. Luckily for a writer who is so skilled at scenes of violent action, the Culture has a secretive arm called Special Circumstances that specialises exactly in deniable intervention. Its armed officers constitute a kind of interstellar equivalent of CIA Black Ops. Continued →

White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard
by Daniel Johnson (Atlantic)

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, was imprisoned for five days last month after participating in an opposition rally in Moscow. On his release, he wrote an impassioned editorial for the Wall Street Journal denouncing “Mr Putin and his gang” and observing that “KGB officers in plain clothes were clearly in charge even at the police station”. Although Kasparov is no longer a professional chess player but a politician himself, the event makes a chilling postscript to Daniel Johnson’s colourful history of chess as an ideological weapon in the USSR.

Most famously, chess became a proxy version of the cold war during the 1972 match in which Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, after Henry Kissinger had intervened to persuade the holed-up Fischer to play. Johnson efficiently relates the by-now-familiar story of Fischer’s rise, punctuated by drama-queen vanishings, with a wry running simile that compares him to Achilles, “sulking in his tent”. In view of Fischer’s later deterioration into ranting anti-Semitism, Johnson sensibly resists the cliché that chess makes men mad, and instead offers the valuable observation: “It was not chess that made Fischer what he eventually became — it was the abandonment of chess.” Continued →

The Painter of Battles
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Weidenfeld)

A man lives alone, in a crumbling tower by the sea. On its interior wall, he is painting a vast circular mural of war, melding histories and landscapes into a singular nightmare. One day a stranger arrives, and announces that he intends to kill the painter. Instead of punching the man, fleeing or informing the police, the painter takes the news phlegmatically, continuing to work on his mural while receiving the visitor each day for a series of long, philosophical conversations on the nature of art and war.

Such is the curious setup of this novel. There is no point complaining of implausibility, since if the painter had reacted otherwise, this particular story wouldn’t exist, and it is this story we have in front of us. Other fictions are based on similar theatrical conceits: perhaps Sandor Marai’s Embers, in which two men converse in a castle to reveal one’s betrayal, long ago, by the other; or the sly entertainment of another two-hander, Gilbert Adair’s A Closed Book. But here Pérez-Reverte — the author of some delicious novels constructed around enigmas in chess or painting, and the series of elegant swashbucklers starring Captain Alatriste — is composing in a more minor and less ludic key. Continued →