BOOK REVIEWS

By Ed Needham www.strong-words.co.uk

NON-FICTION

By Josh Ireland (John Murray, £12.99)

In 1964, a year before his father’s death and just four ahead of his own at 56, Randolph Churchill was operated on for a benign tumour. Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was typical of modern science to remove the only part of him that wasn’t malignant. Winston Churchill’s wartime personal secretary John Coleville concurred, remembering Randolph as “one of the most objectionable people I had ever met.” By his end, Randolph was chugging through two bottles of scotch and 100 cigarettes daily – not traditionally the sign of a happy man nor the kind of fumes many would envy. Yet this biography of the relationship between Winston and his son goes some way towards restoring a little colour to Randolph’s battered reputation, as well as showing an aspect of Winston that has tended to command little of the torrent of ink devoted to him: that of warm and loving father.

Winston’s own father, another Randolph, had kept the emotional temperature as low as possible, yet Winston always treated his own boy as an intimate, even greeting him as an adult with a kiss. Such a firm footing helped Randolph to become “a young man whose self-confidence was so large it appeared it could swallow galaxies whole” and he was an exceptional public speaker, but his temperament was volatile, possibly because no-one could emerge undamaged from so much exposure to Winston’s colossal personality, and father and son would often clash in a “brutal mix of anger and pain.”

Randolph generated more of that anger and pain by standing unasked in a pre-war election, wrecking the Tory vote for the seat and his own chance at a political career, and although a journalist of considerable output, came to devote much of his energy toward constructing his own toxic reputation. He “staggered around London, littering his path with gratuitous insults” and “ruined parties, gate-crashed private dinners, immolated friendships that had lasted for decades.” His post-war productivity was largely reduced to writing dad’s giant biography, but ultimately that long shadow served a more destructive purpose: as an ideal environment for Randolph’s abundant flaws to flourish.

By Edward Chisholm (Monoray, £16.99)

Two years after completing the extortionate rituals of a British university education, Edward Chisholm has discovered the true value of a degree – he is still jobless. Attempting a spot of out-of-the-box thinking, he moves to Paris with a girlfriend, thinking that perhaps that’s where all the jobs are hiding. If they are, he doesn’t find them, and then she leaves him anyway. Now what? With his need to eat overcoming the embarrassment of his mediocre French, he scams a job as a ‘runner’ at a large Parisian restaurant of some repute, although his language skills are insufficient for him to understand what the job entails. He learns soon enough, the hard way. A runner is a sort of waiter’s lackey, being constantly hissed at to help clear tables or carry vast trays of glasses on the fingertips of a single hand. Payment at the end of a 14-hour day is in the form of tips from the waiters – except they don’t cough up.

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The waiters themselves exist in a sort of twilight zone between the Hades of the kitchens and the gentility of the dining room, and show both faces: polite to the customer, more like a Victorian pickpocket to their colleagues, as they feed themselves on left-overs from the plates, badmouth each other to get the best blocks of tables and steal each other’s dishes and tips. Chisholm, initially greeted with double contempt for being so lowly and English, has to learn on his blistered feet (his shoes soon fall to pieces and are held together by tape).

With time he acquires the guile to force waiters to subsidise him, and he is eventually inducted into the waiterhood. Rule one seems to be that wages are for rent and bills, but tips are to be spent immediately, and disposing of them at speed buys a privileged insight into the lives of this oddly pre-21st century caste. From that brutal life comes a hugely enjoyable book, and should anyone you know begin to manifest an interest in going to university, get it into their hands immediately. They need to know where such folly leads these days.

FICTION

By Sergei Lebedev (Apollo, £8.99)

With every year that passes, people get more excited about the Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev, hence a fresh wave of reissues, flawlessly translated by Antonina W. Bouis. The most recent to appear is The Year of the Comet which first saw light in English in 2017. The son of geologists, Lebedev once said in an interview that he was “doomed to be a geologist”, work that took him to deepest Russia and exposed him to the vast remains of the old gulag system, something he was shocked to discover still existed as a footprint. This is a theme that runs through all his work: while some things seem eternal and immovable (most notably the Soviet Union, but also rocks), a closer look reveals everything undergoing a ceaseless process of ruination. At the same time, deep suspicions and an aversion to too much truth make a sense of stability a rare commodity.

Like Lebedev, the unnamed narrator of The Year of the Comet is raised as a child largely by two war-widowed grandmothers, one of aristocratic ancestry, the other of peasant stock. Were it not for the 1917 revolution, their family lines never would have merged. Although he doesn’t know it at the time, the boy is of the last Soviet generation, and spends half the book trying to make sense of his odd and lonely world, as experienced from the family dacha, while the nailhard grandmothers compete to take possession of him. A key piece in composing his picture is the discovery of a 1930s edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, an unexpected triangulation point that enables him to see how he is among people who have been led to believe themselves members of earth’s most advanced society, while in reality they experience hardship and shortages daily. With age, that hardship comes into sharper focus still, with Chernobyl, illness and a particularly sinister character who may be a serial killer. Eventually the Soviet dream collapses, but as signalled by Halley’s ominous comet, the forces of disintegration, suspicion and a

powerful fear of history radiate on untroubled into whatever lies ahead.

By Ilya Leonard Pfeijffer (Fourth Estate, £18.99)

Since Grand Hotel Europa was published in the author’s native Netherlands in 2018, the Dutch people have spoken of little else, such has been its impact. It deals with a writer who has taken up residence in a melancholic and isolated hotel, whose old-world appeal is lost on all but a tiny handful of mildly eccentric ‘permanent’ residents. The bellboy is a very young and grateful refugee who shares the traumatic story of his flight with the author. The author in turn sits down to write his own story, of a recently failed relationship with an art historian with whom he lived in Venice. One person does have faith in the hotel, however, its new Chinese proprietor, Mr Wang. His ‘upgrades’, such as removing the elaborate chandelier and installing an English pub, soon have the overseas customers interested, convinced they are soaking up an undiscovered piece of authentic European culture. With their arrival, it also becomes clear that this novel intends to enter on a much larger scale analysis of the complexities of the movements of people from A to B, such as tourism’s gormless momentum, devouring all in its wake, and the response to refugees, who have often spent significantly more for the privilege of travelling in vastly inferior conditions to reach the same destinations.

Observed en masse, the tourist and the refugee also generate very different readings to when the same species are examined as individuals. While the tourists transform cities beyond recognition, causing entire streets in Amsterdam to be handed over to the retail of Nutella or causing Venice to face the prospect of having no inhabitants but 18 million visitors by 2030, they raise numerous speculations of just what it is they have come to experience. As they circulate with their authenticity-seeking iPhones, the narrator and his former beloved, themselves being driven out of Venice, embark on their own cultural code-cracking quest: an Umberto Ecotype search for a missing Caravaggio.

By Don Winslow (HarperCollins, £20)

Behind the sofa, everyone – Don Winslow is back in town. That town is Providence, Rhode Island, and Don seems to have just visited his ammunition wholesaler. Like a hard-boiled Dickens, he’s assembled a vast grudgebearing cast to swarm over a sprawling plot of gangster clan conflict, generational transition and internal family meltdown, narrated with gusto

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in a lexicon of 1986 vintage that considerably predates current sensitivities regarding the acceptability of certain insults. For Winslow fans who still haven't come to terms with his epic The Power of the Dog trilogy coming to an end, this is Vol 1 of a fresh threesome, and doesn’t dither in compiling the sort of body count his readers expect as standard.

Set in something of a criminal backwater, two different factions have maintained a mutually beneficial division of graft under their respective patriarchs, a season of cooperation that is about to come to an end. On one side are the Murphy/Ryan people, whose revenues flow from the docks, the trades unions and associated illegal entrepreneurialism. Danny Ryan is connected to the Murphys by marriage and history, although his own father Marty was once the network’s overlord until a weakness for liquor took precedence. That would have made Danny the heir to the throne, but he’s happy for now to rub along without that responsibility. Their natural enemies are the Morettis, whose artisanal speciality is trucking and its off-book opportunities, but the next generation is gnashing away on the leash and trying to add one of the bars under Murphy protection to their own chain of cocaine dealerships. A singularly dim and unstable member of the Murphy family, younger son Liam, manages comprehensively to wreck the détente by going straight for a nuclear option: a blend of sexual line crossing (touching the breast of a made man’s girlfriend) and the commissioning of unauthorised hits. It’s on!

By Hernan Diaz (Picador, £16.99)

Trust has already laid waste to American readers’ minds with its brilliance, and seems particularly suited to this moment of oligarchical, billionarial ultra-greed, focussing as it does on the Achilles heel of the obscenely rich man: the thin ice of his ego. Exquisitely revealed through tales within tales (expect to endure lots of references to Russian dolls in other reviews) Trust revolves around a razzledazzle New York couple from the roaring twenties. He’s a financier, she’s a blue blood, and they manage to keep their fortune intact even when swept over the waterfall of the Wall Street Crash. In 1937, a hit novel is published. Called Bonds, it seems to tell a version of their rise and fabulosity. The magnate is incandescent that this work of fiction has painted his late wife (she has since passed away in a sanatorium) as a lunatic and embarks on his own memoir to set the record straight – as he sees it. Lending a hand is an assistant who has diverted her own writerly ambitions towards the service of rehabilitating the wife and trashing the reputation of the impertinent novelist. She contributes her own version of her wealthy patron too.

Completing the trove of documents is the late wife’s journal, which reveals a more intimate picture of the tycoon and the heads he’s chosen to step on to build his staircase to wealth and glory. As the life of this pillar of business and society is collaged together from these differing sources, the reader has no choice but to decide which to believe: which past, which characteristics, and which the more accurate version of the role played by all that money. Only then may they hazard a guess as to the true depth of a rich man’s self-delusion. n