Books of the month: what to read this February

Martin Chilton shares his February reading highlights

Highlights for February include books about South Korea, elephants, and Charles Dickens (Supplied)

This month, a forgotten gem from 1983, Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding, gets a welcome republish from Penguin. I would also recommend Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons (Hamish Hamilton) and Nicola Rayner’s impressive and vibrant historical novel The Paris Dancer (Aria), set during the Second World War. Fans of grisly history should check out Blessin Adams’s Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (William Collins), an exploration of notorious murders that scared and titillated the British public while also challenging notions of gender.

Picks for the fiction, non-fiction and biography books out this month are reviewed in full below.

Novel of the Month: We Do Not Part by Han Kang

★★★★★

South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past in her new novel (Penguin)

South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past in new novel We Do Not Part (translated into English by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris).

Protagonist Kyungha, who suffers from depression, migraines and abdominal spasms, is sparked into action when she receives an emergency call from her close friend Inseon, who is in hospital in Seoul after a horrific chainsaw injury. Even though a powerful storm is brewing, she pleads with Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island to rescue Amy, her beloved parrot.

Jeju is a place shrouded in death. In 1948, tens of thousands of civilians, including Inseon’s relatives, were slaughtered there by South Korean forces. In her arduous journey to retrieve Amy, Kyungha battles blinding snow and is wracked by anxiety. The desolate setting is captured by Han with skill in what becomes a tale of pain, endurance and a quest for catharsis in an indifferent world.

As the heinous events of the past are slowly revealed – villages incinerated, children brutally murdered, flamethrowers used on unarmed citizens – the barbarity of Korea’s past rulers (who covered it up, with US government complicity) become almost secondary to Han’s desire to rescue the victims’ stories from oblivion. The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section (“Part Three: Flame”) that is simply stunning. Han pulls off a masterful meditation on what it’s like to be assaulted by an “endless spew of blood-soaked memories”.

In that finale, I was stopped short by the grace of one dazzling page, with its cascade of memorable images. These include a description of mental collapse as hundreds of fuses in one’s head blowing one by one, and a woman sleeping all day in a hospice, who reminds Kyungha of “a sea where the high tide lasts forever”. Han ends her magnificent novel on a beautifully beguiling note.

‘We Do Not Part’ by Han Kang (Translated by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) is published by Hamish Hamilton on 6 February, £18.99

Non-fiction Book of the Month: A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts

★★★★☆

The bleak fate of so many magnificent elephants during the age of empire is told through the astute eyes of Sophy Roberts (Penguin/Brady Binstadt)

“It’s important to look human cruelty straight in the eye,” writes Sophy Roberts, author of the superb The Lost Pianos of Siberia, in her new book A Training School for Elephants, which features numerous depressing accounts of animal mistreatment during the age of empire. It’s hard not to wince when learning that elephants had their feet amputated merely for them to be turned into champagne coolers.

Roberts’s book is based around an 1879 expedition, conceived by King Leopold II of Belgium, to ship elephants from India to the east African coast where they were then marched towards Congo. Leopold planned to capture these creatures and set up a training school to exploit elephants for a colonial transport system. To that end, he hired a warped, erratic Victorian Irishman called Frederick Carter (known as “Lord of Tuskers”) to oversee the project. Carter is one of several bizarre men who come into Roberts’s book.

Overall, the story is a complex, shameful testimony to the greed and heartlessness of an era. Leopold was an utterly cynical man – he boasted that he did not want to miss out on his share of “this magnificent African cake” – and the grim photographs and statistics tell their own dismal story about massive colonial plundering. The scale of the ivory trade in Africa (to provide everything from billboard balls to Victorian dildos) is laid bare, accompanied by a perceptive look at Britain and its zoos, “elephant mania” and the abuse of imported animals.

Roberts writes elegantly and empathetically (there is a wonderful description of a giraffe herd on the move) and part of the book’s power is seeing through her astute eyes the bleak and strange fate of so many magnificent elephants.

‘A Training School for Elephants’ by Sophy Roberts is published by Doubleday on 20 February, £22

Autobiography of the Month: Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Extraordinary Imagination of the Greatest Storyteller by Peter Conrad

★★★★☆

Peter Conrad’s insightful new study of Charles Dickens is a reminder of why the author remains such a colossus of literature (Bloomsbury)

One of several things that fired Charles Dickens’s prodigious imagination in childhood was his nurse’s deliberately comic bedtime tales about a serial-killing cannibal named Captain Murderer. In Peter Conrad’s insightful new study of Dickens, the author of so many classics is quoted as calling the Captain “the first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peaceful youth”.

This tidbit arrives in a section titled “Devilkins”, one of 14 chapters that help to build an engrossing biography of the mind behind Great Expectations, David Copperfield (etcetera, etcetera) by delving into a body of work that spans fiction, journalism, diaries, letter writing and public readings.

Of course, it would be hard to top Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of Dickens as a straightforward life story but Conrad, who has previously written so well about Shakespeare, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock among others, says that re-reading Dickens during the pandemic became a compulsion that “re-enlivened a locked-down London and reinvigorated me”. We should be grateful: Dickens the Enchanter is a treat. It offers a fresh understanding of his genius to new readers and is a highly rewarding reminder to devoted fans of Dickens of why he remains such a colossus of literature.

‘Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Extraordinary Imagination of the Greatest Storyteller’ by Peter Conrad is published by Bloomsbury on 27 February, £22