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. ↩

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 →