Review: Vivien Horler

Departure(s), by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)

In contemplating his own death, the novelist and essayist Julian Barnes says there are minor consolations to the idea of being dead, including the fact that when you are on the cliff-edge, so to speak, you know you will miss the worst of what may be to come for the world.

This book is a farewell of sorts; Barnes tells us early on it is his last book. The “Departure(s)” of the title refers to several, including his own. He turned 80 early this year, and writes he is aware that “shortly I shall exist as only a shelf-ful (sic) of books plus a cluster of Biographical Anecdotes”.

He bids farewell to his readers: “… I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has delighted me – indeed, I would be nothing without you”.

But this is not a tragic book – it’s often very funny. There is the delight of Barnes’s discursive comments on what he is writing. And there is a dog. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke (4^th Estate)

A friend read this before I did, and said she thought it was weird. She didn’t finish it.

But I’d heard a podcast review by a Guardian panel, and it sounded intriguing. It is – I was hooked from the start.

Natalie is 32 and lives a traditional lifestyle – is in fact a trad wife. She and her husband Caleb live on their Idaho ranch, Yesteryear, and have five children with a sixth on the way. Handsome Caleb is not much of a farmer, but Natalie makes money as an internet influencer with five million followers.

She has a pretty kitchen where she bakes sourdough bread from scratch and creates impressive family meals. There are chickens in the coop and hand-collected eggs. The five sleepy, tousled children, all home-schooled, sit around the breakfast table eating their cereal with raw milk and drinking their squeezed orange juice. Continue reading →

Days of Miracle and Wonder – Paul Simon and the trials and triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn (White Rabbit/ Jonathan Ball)

The phenomenon of Graceland – controversial, Grammy-winning and money-spinning album, tours, documentary and a couple of books – would never have happened without a bootlegged cassette tape.

In the run-up to his 45^th birthday – incredibly 40 years ago – Paul Simon’s meteoric career appeared to be “losing steam and significance”. His 1983 album, Hearts and Bones, had been well received, reached Top 40 status and sold more than a million copies worldwide, but was generally regarded as a commercial failure. (Eish)

In 1984 Simon met Norwegian instrumentalist and songwriter Heidi Berg who had borrowed a bootlegged cassette tape called Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. She in turn lent him the tape, asking him to return it. He never did. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Jonathan Ball)

Sebag Montefiore (the preferred of his two first names) knows how to write a book.

And also how to sell one: he has been on countless podcasts, a guest on talk shows and in interviews at literary festivals.

All are wonderfully informative and hugely entertaining (you can find them on YouTube). The best is on Ask Haviv Anything, a history and current-affairs podcast hosted by Haviv Rettig Gur, an analyst at The Times of Israel, because Gur asks intelligent questions. The most entertaining, despite its tedious interlocutor who doesn’t give Montefiore a chance to punt his book, is from the Montreal Literary Festival.

That’s also because he’s on stage with Salman Rushie, who steals the show, especially with a marvellous line about President Donald Trump: “It’s difficult to respect a man who has bad grammar.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office, by Amman Brar (Juniper/HarperCollins Publishers)

In 1999 the British Post Office introduced computer terminals into local post offices. Most villages and areas had a post office, but they were different from the post offices South Africans were used to.

They were often in a small local shop which sold basic groceries, with the sub-postmaster in his or her own little cubicle.

The computer system introduced was known as Horizon, and the Japanese company behind it was Fujitsu, a major global technology and IT services company.

From the beginning there were accounting problems, which escalated to alarming levels. According to Wikipedia, between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Life and Death of a Rock ’n Roll Sailor – A true story, by Diane Coetzer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Yachtsman Anthony Murray and his sister-in-law Diane Coetzer planned to write a book together about his ocean voyages. But not this one.

Anthony was an experienced sailor who delivered yachts all around the of world. Diane is a freelance journalist, and the daughter of the late lamented writer Owen Coetzer, with whom I worked on the Cape Argus and Weekend Argus for years.

Diane is also the partner of Jeremy, Anthony’s younger brother, who worked in the music production business.

On February 18, 2015, during a voyage delivering a Cape Town-built Leopard 44 class catamaran to Phuket in Thailand across the Indian Ocean in cyclone season, the catamaran and its crew of three lost all contact with the world. It had been expected in Thailand later in February. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Homemade God, by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)

Vic Kemp is a successful London artist who has made a fortune from the sort of work that gets printed on T-shirts, posters, greeting cards and even coasters.

The pictures are semi-erotic depictions of high-heeled women in red lipstick meeting suited men in pools of lamplight. When the only journalist who ever interviews him asks if his work is really about his own sexual fantasies, Vic laughs. If people can’t face a bit of fun between consenting adults, they are fools, he says.

It might not be high art, but it has earned Vic enough to have a flat in London, a studio not too far away, and a crumbling villa on an island in an Italian lake where his four children have spent their summers growing up, learning to swim and smoke and drink. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Motherland – A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy, by Julia Ioffe (William Collins)

Julia Ioffe is a 40-something American-based, Russian-born writer and journalist of great accomplishment – if Motherland is anything to go by.

In her introduction to this magisterial history, told always from the female point of view, Julia Ioffe talks about her female relatives: her sister the oncologist, her mother the pathologist, her grandmother the cardiologist (to whom the book is dedicated) and her great-grandmother the paediatrician.

Americans, she says, consider this history to be extraordinary, but measured against the history of Soviet women of the 20^th century, Ioffe’s forebears were “perfectly average people” who happened to be the products “of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person”.

By 1917, Soviet women were able to vote, and by 1918 they had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave and free higher education. In 1920 they were granted the right to abortion, provided free by the state – but without anaesthesia. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Command – A soldier’s journey in the African battlespace, by Brigadier-General Peter Sereko, with Antonio Garcia (Tafelberg/Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Peter Sereko has had an extraordinary life as a soldier, and Antonio Garcia has helped guide him through that life – and the minefield of writing a biography.

It has helped that both men were soldiers, Sereko rising to the rank of general and Garcia a former combat engineer who left the base for academia.

Garcia is well established as a military historian and author, with books on South Africa’s peacekeeping roles on the continent, the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914/15 and Union Defence Force’s victory over Germany in the early years of World War 1.

Command is Sereko’s first book, one in which his 38-year military career provides a rich vein of material, especially for a young black man joining an apartheid army. But by 1986, when he signed up, it was an army aware of the failings of National Party policy and already beginning to re-think its role in what would become the new South Africa. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Restless Dolly Maunder, by Kate Grenville (Canongate)

Shortly before she dies, around the mid-1950s, Dolly Maunder looks back on her life.

Her generation was the hinge, she thinks: when she was born in the early 1880s the door of female aspiration had been shut tight. Then it began to creak open. “My generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.”

This is an Australian historical novel by an acclaimed author, and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. Kate Grenville has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award (named after the author of the brilliant book, film and now TV series My Brilliant Career).

She has written more than 10 novels and a handful of non-fiction books. As far as I can recall, this is the first of her novels I have read, and I loved it. Continue reading →