Books of the month: From Daisy Buchanan’s Insatiable to Nikesh Shukla’s Brown Baby
Martin Chilton reviews six of February's biggest releases for our monthly column
I was curious to check out Hollywood star Ethan Hawke’s novel A Bright Ray of Darkness (William Heinemann), although perhaps the less said about it the better. A heavy-handed opening, featuring an unconvincing row in a taxi cab, is followed by a dismal sex scene between the middle-aged actor protagonist and a young woman begging him to “come on my face now, on my lips and on my neck,” all of which prompted me to make my excuses and leave for pages elsewhere.
Happily, there is lots of satisfying fiction out this month, including Lucy Jago’s historical gem A Net for Small Fishes (Bloomsbury), a novel based on the scandal that shattered the royal court of James I in the early 17th century. I would also recommend Conor O’Callaghan’s We Are Not in the World (Doubleday), a powerful tale of a fractured father-daughter relationship.
Among the best debut fiction this month is Tish Delaney’s love story Before My Actual Heart Breaks (Hutchinson), Nadine Matheson’s gritty London-based thriller The Jigsaw Man (HQ), Ali Benjamin’s The Smash-Up (Riverrun), and Inga Vesper’s tense The Long, Long Afternoon (Manilla Press), about a seemingly happy Californian housewife who vanishes in the 1950s.
The standout thriller of the month is Femi Kayode’s Lightseekers (Raven Books), a stunning murder mystery, set in Nigeria, about psychologist Dr Philip Taiwo, who is asked to investigate the public torture and murder of three university students. We know who murdered them (it’s all caught on social media) but Taiwo has to find out why. The suspense is expertly handled. Linwood Barclay’s Find You First (HQ) – a sinister thriller in which the possible heirs of a dying tech millionaire vanish – is reliably good.
Confessional memoirs dealing with race and identity seem to be the flavour of the month. I enjoyed Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla (reviewed in full below), and was also intrigued by Georgina Lawton’s Raceless (Sphere), which pieces together how she explored her racial identity after the death of her father. Emily Bernard’s Black is the Body (Doubleday) contains 12 highly personal essays about her experiences as a black woman in America, and Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks (Sceptre), deals with the author's nomadic childhood and family secrets. Josie George’s A Still Life (Bloomsbury) is a moving account of living with a chronic illness.
February brings two enlightening books about feminism. Carol Dyhouse’s Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen (Oxford University Press) tells the story of how women’s lives have been shaped since the 1950s. Happily, the era of the magazine Housewife, which carried articles urging women on the best tactics to land a husband – recommending that girls “hung around naval bases” – seem a laughable anachronism. In Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), Sam Mills explores the phenomenon of the sneaky modern males who claim feminist credentials to advance their interests while, in reality, being “abusive men hiding in plain sight”.
I’m sure most of us were glad to see Donald Trump turfed out of the White House last month. A reminder of his erratic behaviour appears in Joby Warrick’s excellent Red Line: The Unravelling of Syria and the Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World (Doubleday). When Ivanka Trump showed her father videos of Khan Shaykhun’s chemical attack on children, the President phoned his defence secretary and started yelling, “Let’s go in! Let’s kill the f***ing lot of them.”
Novels by Patricia Lockwood, Steven Hall and Daisy Buchanan, along with Shukla’s memoir, John Preston’s biography of Robert Maxwell, and Peter Oborne’s polemic about political dishonesty are reviewed in full below.
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston ★★★★☆
To declare a bias factor: my first full-time job at a newspaper conglomerate was at a small outpost of Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group empire, a magazine division run by Martin Heller (who, like Maxwell, changed his original Czech name, having been born Miloš Pokorný). Over one drunken lunch, Heller told me lots of shocking stories about the character known as Captain Bob, with whom he’d worked closely since the early 1960s. I hoped that John Preston’s book Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell would be fascinating and it does not disappoint. Fall is a well-researched, devastating portrait of a weird, dangerous megalomaniac.
Maxwell, born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, had a grim, poverty-ridden childhood and Preston pieces together his murky past, including his brutality during the Second World War, actions that included executing an unarmed civilian. After emigrating to Britain in 1940 and starting Pergamon Press – where he worked with Heller – Maxwell became a Labour MP, a job that gave him the scope to use his talents as a born con man. In 1968 he launched a “Buy British” campaign with promotional T-shirts made in Portugal.
As well as a dissection of financial chicanery – one that covers the story of his battles with the wilier Rupert Murdoch – Fall is also a compelling account of a deeply strange man. Preston provides numerous accounts of Maxwell’s gluttonous nature; he would eat half of a 40-pound turkey in one Christmas Day sitting. His weight gain led to a memorably biting description from Clive James. After seeing the Daily Mirror owner at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, James said he was reminded of “a ton and a half of half-cured ham wrapped in a white tuxedo”.
Maxwell did not hire sardonic journalists like James, of course. He identified people who were willing to be bullied, or freeloaders and sycophants (even though he privately dismissed toadies as “a bunch of arseholes”). The famous and mighty flocked to his parties. Broadcaster David Frost turned up at one with a £500 bottle of wine. “Unaware of how much it had cost, Maxwell’s chef later tipped it into a beef stew,” Preston notes.
Preston, author of A Very English Scandal, knows that the devil with Maxwell is in the detail, not only in his business life – the tale of how he robbed the Mirror pension fund of £763million remains shocking – but also in the minutiae of Maxwell’s personal life. His family life was dysfunctional. The man who’d been regularly assaulted by his own sadistic father “Mehel the Tal” ended up beating his own sons (I met one, in 1989, and thought at the time that, underneath the bluster, I was talking to a deeply damaged person). Maxwell’s favourite child was his spoiled daughter Ghislaine; a friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who is currently awaiting trial in a New York jail, having pleaded not guilty to charges of the enticement of minors and sex trafficking.
Maxwell’s parents were murdered by the Nazis. It seemed inevitable that his own life would not end simply. The double-meaning title of the book refers to the famous fall that killed the Mirror owner: a descent into the sea near the Canary Islands, over the side of his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine. Maxwell was 68 when he died on 5 February 1991 and his death is still shrouded in mystery. Was it accidental? Suicide? Murder? Preston weighs up the evidence around a shady end to a shady life.
Preston, who interviewed scores of Mirror employees, including Maxwell’s butler, portrays a warped, lonely egotist, one whose love life was ultimately self-destructive. I felt no sympathy for him, but I did pity his poor Filipina maids, who had the job of tidying up his disgusting mess. “As well as clearing away the empty takeaway containers, they would have to pick up towels that had been left lying about – towels that Maxwell now sometimes used instead of toilet paper, then tossed on the floor,” Preston writes. Maxwell truly was a s***ty man.
‘Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell’ by John Preston is published by Viking on 4 February, £18.99
The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism by Peter Oborne ★★★★☆
The most intriguing part of Peter Oborne’s new polemic about political dishonesty comes towards the end when he is reflecting on the “sunny, liberal, optimistic” Boris Johnson he knew in better times. “Fifteen years ago Boris Johnson hired me as a political correspondent at The Spectator magazine,” Oborne recalls in The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism. “He was a joy to work for, a fine editor and a loyal colleague with the quickest mind I’ve ever encountered. Nothing needed explaining twice. While writing this book I’ve found myself trying to reconcile the person I knew then with the prime minister of Britain.”
The present-day version of Johnson described by Oborne could hardly cast him in a more damning light. He is, according to Oborne, “deceitful and amoral”, a “compulsive liar”, someone, like Trump, who “lies habitually, with impunity and without conscience”. The cartoon on the book cover by Peter Brookes links Trump and Johnson, as does Oborne, also in the way that both are lazy, and both have “a record of racism”.
In the chapter “The 2019 Election: One Lie After Another”, Oborne, and his researcher Jan-Peter Westad, forensically detail, in the text and in comprehensive footnotes, Johnson’s lies about the NHS (the bogus new 40 hospitals), police numbers, Brexit (the dishonesty over the border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the report on Russian interference in the referendum and the “inflammatory falsehoods” misrepresenting opponent Jeremy Corbyn. Unfortunately, millions of Brits seem to no longer care about being lied to about serious matters.
Part of the problem is that Johnson’s “claims” are simply not held up to inspection by most of the popular press. Oborne, who formerly worked for the Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, says his new book will “make me enemies”, especially for statements such as “a great deal of political journalism has become the putrid face of a corrupt government”.
Oborne makes it crystal clear that Johnson is not the jolly buffoon still popular with swathes of the public: his success is the result of “a deliberate and carefully calculated strategy of deception”. In the interests of balance, Oborne, who declares that he voted for Brexit, believes that the whole process of modern prime ministerial dishonesty began with Labour’s Tony Blair and his “structural preference for deceit”.
The Assault on Truth is an intensely depressing read, even for those who open the first page already lacking a smidgen of respect for Johnson and his “squalid associates”. As I write this review, we have passed the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths in Britain from coronavirus. Oborne details Johnson’s “negligent” failings in handling the pandemic, comparing his corrosive reign to that of the conscientious German leader Angela Merkel, who insists that transparency is vital when lives are at stake. Put all this together and it’s hard to disagree with Oborne’s belief that Britain is facing a moral emergency.
‘The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism’ by Peter Oborne is published by Simon & Schuster on 4 February, £12.99
Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home by Nikesh Shukla ★★★★☆
“How do I raise a brown baby?” Nikesh Shukla asks his dead mother, as he confronts the reality of bringing up two mixed-race girls in modern Britain. Shukla, comedy writer, filmmaker, and editor of The Good Immigrant – a collection of essays by BAME voices across Britain, knows a thing or two about the reality of race relations here. He was called “shit skin” at school and, as an adult, has suffered death threats for his opinions. Shukla is certain that post-Brexit, racism has stepped out from the shadows. “We haven’t sprouted more racists. People have just decided it doesn’t matter as much to hide it anymore. Which is terrifying,” he writes in Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home.
I enjoyed the warmth, tone and dry wit of Shukla’s memoir, which includes lots of random observations on everything from the toxic uselessness of BBC Question Time to the problems of addictive scrolling on a mobile phone.
The central themes of the book are parenthood, racism, death, and food. I liked Shukla’s candidness about his own problems. “I can measure my depression by what goes into my mouth,” he admits. His reflections on the “drudgery of parenthood” are bitingly honest (“trying your best not to live in filth, eat filth, wear filth”) and anyone who has been through the hideous experience of controlled crying in which you resist the urge to pick up your crying child to encourage self-soothing, will wince at his account of this experience. He also has thought-provoking things to say about grief, father-son relationships, and the problems of explaining death to your children without fostering an existential dread.
The book, which slips deftly between humour and seriousness, explores how to find hope in a world full of divisions, subject to systematic patriarchy and “f***ed” due to climate change. In an address to his daughters, he points out the fallacy of a meritocracy in Britain, “a country run by chums giving jobs to their chums who then give their chums peerages for saving their chums money on tax. I hope you live to see a world where you work at an appropriate amount to have the same opportunities. It won’t be in my lifetime though, Ganga.”
On the bright side, this sometimes bleak, constantly engaging book does teach you how to eat a mango properly.
‘Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home’ by Nikesh Shukla is published by Bluebird on 4 February, £16.99
Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall ★★★★☆
“The world comes in through our mothers and fathers like light through a stained-glass window,” says Thomas Quinn, the narrator of Maxwell’s Demon, the first novel from Steven Hall since his cult hit The Raw Shark Texts.
When Quinn starts receiving mysterious messages – including an answerphone recording from his dead father and a letter from a reclusive bestselling author called Andrew Black – he becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about Black’s new novel Cupid’s Engine. Is Quinn, alone in London while his wife Imogen is on the other side of the world, being pursued by the hero of Black’s first novel?
The novel zigzags through meditations on everything from Dan Brown to Maxwell’s Demon, a Victorian thought experiment that arguably undermines the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Hands up, some of this was beyond my understanding, but I did enjoy the Biblical reflections, especially the problem with the Gospel stories about the Bethlehem birth. I doubt you’ll ever be able to look at a Nativity Set again without thinking about the discrepancy of the ox.
Maxwell’s Demon, which has been labelled deliberately postmodern, is an engaging, pacy mystery as well as an exploration of reality, entropy and the language of a modern creative landscape that is “a world of sequels, prequels, remakes, remakquels”. The book is full of conceptual and typographic trickery and it’s soaked in an appreciation of the written word. Hall’s descriptions are often little gems, such as “Newhall Black became a drifting, cellophane wrapper of a man”. In addition, it is drolly witty about the dynamics of the book world, especially offbeat agent-author relationships.
Maxwell’s Demon is undoubtedly a strange novel – your appreciation may depend on the extent to which you can stomach being discombobulated – and is perhaps a book to be best enjoyed with a pint, preferably in the unusual pub Hall describes, one that “does a good line in burgers, taxidermy and Herman Melville memorabilia”.
‘Maxwell’s Demon’ by Steven Hall is published by Canongate on 4 February, £16.99
Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan ★★★★☆
All the steamy, swinger sex in Insatiable, subtitled “a love story for greedy girls”, got me musing: are orgies still carrying on covertly during this time of lockdown and social distancing? Is it a boon time for sales of mask fetish products?
In Daisy Buchanan’s debut novel, protagonist Violet, who has pulled the plug on a turgid fiancé, and who is estranged from her best friend Nadia, is in a vulnerable state when she gets drawn into a group of friends who hold sex parties. The thrill of random sex is initially intoxicating but eventually leaves her feeling dirty and burned out.
Although Insatiable is drenched in sex – there are a lot of graphic descriptions of the licking, sucking and fingering of “slippery” parts – there is a welcome underlying humour amid all these raunchy passages. For example, when Violet is having a threesome with the married couple Lottie and Simon, “a walking aftershave advert”, she is ordered to kneel by the husband. “Calm down, Christian Grey, snarks my brain,” Violet thinks to herself. After one of the Islington orgies, one of the women remarks to her partner, “We should probably be heading back. We’ve got the plumber in the morning.”
Buchanan neatly skewers patronising, controlling, and boorish men (“all aboard the banter bus” is the regular cry of the fiancé Violet ditches), and some of the best moments are in the observational comedic look at middle-class London life, and the social mores of the inner-city farmer’s market crowd. One of the swingers, Richard, has twins called Hugo and Hector “Ah, yes. Names you could shout in the central aisle of Waitrose without shame,” muses Violet. She may be a bit of a disaster, but she is likeable, everything from admitting that she binges on “reduced to clear” birthday cakes to worrying about buying charity shop clothes that remain “haunted by the ghost of the owner’s BO”.
Buchanan also has a few funny pokes at the Millennial generation, including their weddings with the ubiquitous readings from The Owl and the Pussycat. But there is a serious undertone to Insatiable, which uses Violet’s experiences and inner monologues to explore female desire, predatory behaviour (Lottie has a hawk-eye when it comes to spotting younger women who are “naïve, curious, vulnerable”) and the insecurities of feeling like you don’t fit in and are unsure of who you really are. The book will strike a real chord with twenty-something readers, although I’m not sure how many will get the references to “dreamboat” men or the cartoon figure Mr Magoo.
“I had grown up believing that a female body was a problem to be solved,” says Violet, who is trying to make sense of why she enjoys the sex parties and the feeling they give her of being “back in my body”. Insatiable is a frank, funny account of 21st-century lust, but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the Simon-Lottie dynamic. Overall, the novel succeeds because of Violet and her humour. We meet her when she is broke, living in Streatham. When she first envisages attending a sex party at a posh house, she imagines the sort of luxurious place “where you can walk around in bare feet without constantly having to dust away the grit and hair”.
‘Insatiable’ by Daisy Buchanan is published by Sphere on 11 February, £12.99
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood ★★★★★
When a doctor warns the nameless young protagonist of No One is Talking About This that she must not go home and search the web for information about a particular congenital disorder, it is clear he does not understand the younger generation. “She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die,” writes Patricia Lockwood.
Lockwood, the Indiana-born 38-year-old, is the author of the hilarious memoir Priestdaddy. She is also an online ‘”star”, celebrated for her poetry, her humorous tweets, and is perhaps perfectly placed to write about our warped digital landscape. Her debut novel is full of splintered, piercing asides about the online world – referred to throughout the novel as “the portal” – that dominates early 21st-century existence. Will the book date? Perhaps, but it’s certainly a funny, stimulating, and mordant snapshot of modern life.
Through hundreds of short, firecracker entries, the protagonist, a woman who has gained a mass following for her social media posts, depicts an incoherent, threatening landscape, one full of eavesdropping, narcissism, double-edged voyeurism (“this thing in my hand that is an eye”) and the fickleness of being at the whim of “the prison of public opinion”. Lockwood satirises the hollowness of social niceties in one pithy “real-life” entry: “In remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8:45-9:15am!”
The scope of the references in the book is wide – everything from Thom Yorke to Jeremy Wade’s television programme River Monsters – in a work that feels intensely relevant to our fractured time. “She stepped back, alarmed. Had she committed a Brexit? It was so easy, these days, to accidentally commit a Brexit,” writes Lockwood, a master of playful language.
Trump goes unnamed in No One is Talking About This; he’s referred to simply as “the dictator”. I finished reading the book on the day Trump’s mob attempted a coup by storming the halls of Congress, and was struck again by a section in the book describing a moment the main character is looking after her sister in hospital. “On the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that the dictator had finally gone too far. The next day, on the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that no he hadn’t, and in fact that it was no longer possible to go too far.”
No One is Talking About This is a difficult book to pin down. Although the book focuses on the modern addiction for “disappearing into the internet”, the author is exploring bigger questions: what is a human being? What counts as a real contribution to society? Lockwood knows all too well that the all-consuming portal is now also a capricious hunting ground, with a rapid turnover of targets. “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.” She is also self-mocking. When the protagonist is angered by the regressive anti-women laws passed in Ohio, she is reduced to the lame threat that, “I’ll blow the whole thing wide open! I’ll… I’ll post about it!”
Although I enjoyed the biting humour, I was ultimately left downcast by this autopsy on our ailing world, a place where the internet is an illusory refuge for those seeking relief from everything from worrying about climate change to violence, vanity, and loneliness. However, Lockwood’s wonderfully intricate language and original mind more than compensate.
‘No One is Talking About This’ by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury on 16 February, £14.99
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