Review: Vivien Horler

Red Tape: The untold story of a visionary South African’s battle against bureaucracy, and the birth of a world-renowned wine region, by Brigid Hamilton Russell (Quickfox)

An international trade treaty with the unlikely name of the Crayfish Agreement was at the heart of legendary wine man Tim Hamilton Russell’s victory over bureaucracy.

The agreement was signed in Paris between the Union of South Africa and the French Republic on February 11, 1935, granting SA the right to export crayfish to France at favourable tariffs, as well as fresh and dried fruit.

In exchange, the Union government agreed SA wine and brandy makers would be barred from using any “appellations of French origin”. So not only could the local industry not call a locally produced wine a Bordeaux or Burgundy, it could not even describe it as made in the Bordeaux or Burgundy style, type or class. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

Central to this brilliant novel is a dinner party and a poem no one but the poet’s wife has read.

This sounds rather genteel, but What We Can Know is a great deal more than that – it’s the tale of a literary quest complete with buried treasure, a love story, a terrible crime, a harrowing description of caring for a partner with dementia, and a meditation on the difficulties presented by historical biography.

It’s also a fascinating exploration of what our world could become, with about two-thirds of the narrative set in 2119, a bit over a century hence. There has been the Inundation, the flooding much of the world, leaving the republic of Britain an archipelago of islands. There have been limited nuclear wars, and the major superpower appears to be Nigeria. GPS no longer exists, as satellites reach obsolescence and crash and burn, and it’s not clear how long the internet will survive. About half the world’s population has died. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

All the Way to the River – Love, loss and liberation, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury Publishing)

All the Way to the River is the third memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert’s I’ve read. The first was Eat Pray Love, a bestseller which made her fortune. It famously starred Julia Roberts in the film version.

The second was Committed – A love story, and was a sequel to the first. At the end of Eat Pray Love Gilbert meets a Brazilian, and the pair agree to a committed relationship, but not to marry, since both have been divorced and don’t want to go through that again. But the US government steps in, saying if they don’t marry, the Brazilian will not be allowed to return to the US. And so they do.

All the Way to the River is another love story, of sorts. It’s also about addiction, and beating it – or not.

This time the object of Gilbert’s devotion is Rayya Elias, a Syrian-born hairdresser, musician, filmmaker and force of nature. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

This Way Up – When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones & Jay Foreman (Mudlark)

Back when I was at school we learnt in History, or it may have been Geography, that Bartholomeu Dias and his flotilla were the first Europeans to round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, opening up the sea route to India and the east.

But there’s an extraordinary tale of skulduggery involving Christopher Columbus, and how a map by his cartographer brother Bartholomew Colmbus probably persuaded the Spanish royal court to fund Christopher’s voyage west across the Atlantic to find India, China and the Spice Islands. (He didn’t of course – but he did find the West Indies.)

It appears, according to this fascinating book by a pair of chaps who call themselves the Map Men (after their YouTube video series), that Italian-born Columbus, with his brother in tow, first approached the Portuguese court with his plan.

But Portugal turned them down, partly on the grounds that the trip was counter to Portugal’s determination to find a route to India by rounding Africa and sailing east.

Columbus went on to see if he could persuade the Spanish to sponsor him, but he left his brother behind in Portugal compiling a new world map for the king, based on the latest Portuguese discoveries.

Dias’s triumphant return to Portugual in 1488 appeared to scupper Columbus’s Spanish plans, and Portugal was keeping the details of Dias’s voyage secret. Columbus was desperate – and broke.

His secret weapon was the useful Portuguese information provided by his brother, via another Italian cartographer called Martellus.  The Map Men tell us Martellus’s map had Columbus’s brother’s fingerprints “all over it”.

The extraordinary thing about this map is that the southern tip of Africa is ridiculously long, so much so that it breaks the map’s frame.

The Map Men write: “Discoverer Dias had marked the Cape of Good Hope at 34 degrees south of the equator, which just happened to be bang on; A+ for his use of the astrolabe. On Martellus’s map, however, it’s an inexplicable 45 degrees south.”

Notes that Bartholomew Columbus left behind after his death said he was present when Dias presented his findings to King John II of Portugal, claiming the Cape was 45 degrees south.

“Columbus’s Brother was present in all of this, and therefore would have known Dias located the Cape at 34 degrees, not 45. What he writes here, therefore, is a blatant lie. At 45 degrees the journey east to Asia was made a whole 40 degrees less appealing… One degree of latitude equates to 69 miles, so by adding a total of 40 degrees of sailing, Columbus’s Brother had made the eastern route to Asia less appealing by about 2 760 miles.”

And the Map Men conclude: “Not only do the inexplicable [map] distortions appear perfectly designed to facilitate Columbus’s ambitions, they contain a body of evidence quite literally pointing to the hand of his brother.”

As a result, the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus the okay to head west in 1492. He returned, wrongly claiming to have been in Japan, when he was in fact in Cuba. The French Caribbean island of St Barts bears Columbus’s brother’s name to this day.

This is just one of the stories told in an extraordinary and fascinating account of the importance of maps.

I’ll mention two other intriguing snippets in This Way Up. Copyright is tricky when you’re a mapmaker, because if your map is correct, what’s to stop other cartographers from publishing their own versions, with slightly different colours or fonts, and without all the hard slog of actually measuring streets and rivers and mountains?

The solution is to introduce deliberate errors, a dead giveaway if you’re copying some else’s map. There’s a tiny alley in London called Book Mews, which appears in the London A-Z as “Brook Mews”. The Map Men say there is a rumour the A-Z has at least one mistake on every page.

And here’s another factoid: in February 2019, the same month the Swedish furniture company Ikea was about to open a branch in New Zealand, they produced a map of the world that left New Zealand off it altogether.

It turns out New Zealand is quite often left off world maps, including the massive United Nations logo on the wall of the UN headquarters in New York.

In Kazakhstan Airport there’s a large wall map of the world in the customs hall with no New Zealand… “which by the way resulted in a New Zealand visitor being detained for 24 hours when unable to point to the country of her passport in 2016”.

I enjoyed This Way Up very much, although occasionally the Map Men’s jokey tone jars, and the maps, reprinted in black and white to fit a trade paperback’s A5 pages, are often too small to be helpful. But I learnt a lot, in a most agreeable way.

Review: Vivien Horler

The Mushroom Tapes – Conversations on a triple murder trial, by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing)

Many books have been published within weeks of the end of a sensational court case, mostly it would seem to cash in on the public’s ghoulish interest in the subject matter.

The Mushroom Tapes is not one of those, although its subject captured headlines all around the world. There is something about  women killers that evoke a kind of fascinated horror: women are supposed to be caring and nurturing, not cold-hearted murderers.

There is still some interest in women like the SA nurse Daisy de Melker, who was accused of poisoning two husbands with strychnine and found guilty of murdering her son with arsenic. She was hanged in Pretoria Central Prison in 1932, aged 46.

Then there was Marlene Lehenberg who, with a co-accused, killed her lover’s wife in Cape Town in 1974, and was sentenced to death. The death sentence was later commuted.

And of course there was Dina Rodrigues, found guilty in 2007 of masterminding the killing of her lover’s baby by a previous girlfriend. She served a lengthy prison sentence.

The Mushroom Tapes is about what is probably Australia’s most notorious murder trial. It involved a wealthy but middle class woman called Erin Patterson who in 2023 murdered her parents-in-law, as well as her mother-in-law’s sister, by feeding them a lunch laced with death cap mushrooms. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Why Q Needs U – A history of our letters and how we use them, by Danny Bate (Blink)

My three-year-old grandson Ned, who’s (obviously) very bright, picked up a book in a shop and read: “Santas’s beard is very …”

Then he turned to his father and said: “Tom, what’s this word?”

The word was “rough”. Maybe if it had been spelt “ruff” he’d have got it.

That’s just one indication of how spoken English has veered away from the acrophonic principle which held, back in the mists of time, that each sound should be represented by a written symbol.

All readers of English occasionally feel a bit sorry for people learning the language, because the spelling of newer written languages like Afrikaans, or Czech, which was revised during a revival movement in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, makes more sense. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Identity Unknown – A Scarpetta novel, by Patricia Cornwell (Sphere)

In the mini-biography inside this Kay Scarpetta thriller, prolific writer Patricia Cornwell’s interests are described.

“Cornwell continues exploring the latest space-age technologies and threats relevant to contemporary life. Her interests range from the morgue to artificial intelligence and include visits to Interpol, the Pentagon, the US Secret Service and NASA.”

Many of these themes turn up in Identity Unknown. Cornwell has  written just shy of 30 Kay Scarpetta novels, and many other books besides, including a non-fiction account of who Jack the Ripper really was.

But somehow I’m not sure I’ve ever read a Scarpetta novel until this one. The forensic anthropology novels I’m more familiar with are those by Kathy Reichs, whose TV series The Bones was enormously popular.

This story has twin but linked threads: the death of a seven-year-old girl, Luna Briley, whose hugely wealthy and powerful parents are suspected of being abusive and killing her. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Wolf Hour, by Jo Nesbo, translated by Robert Ferguson (Harvill Secker)

When you’re on a one-man crusade against gun violence, how do you fight it? By shooting the perpetrators, of course.

Jo Nesbo is an international crime fiction sensation who has sold 60 million books worldwide, and the fact he writes in Norwegian is no barrier to his enthusiastic reception by readers of all languages.

This stand-alone thriller is set entirely in Minneapolis, Minnesota, apparently once settled by Norwegian immigrants, but now as diverse as many parts of the US, despite President Donald Trump’s rejection of the concept.

Minneapolis is the city where George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white police officer in 2020.

But this story begins in September 2022, when Holger Rudi flies into Minnesota from Oslo, researching a novel about a policeman of Norwegian heritage.

It’s also about his cousin, someone he spent holidays with as a teenager, who died in peculiar circumstances. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Killing Stones, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

This detective thriller is subtitled The Return of Jimmy Perez. I didn’t realise he’d been away, but I think I may have missed a novel in the Perez series, since he has now left the Shetlands and is living in the Orkneys.

Not only that – he has a partner, Willow, another cop who is pregnant and on maternity leave, and a four-year-old son, James.

The Orkneys, I discover when I look at a map, are closer to mainland Scotland than the Shetlands, where Jimmy was born, and are more fertile and a little less wild and windswept.

But nasty winter storms can blow up, even there, and it is on such a wild night that Archie Stout, a farmer on Westray, goes missing. Archie is a distant cousin of Jimmy’s – they frequently stayed together as boys and feel as close as brothers. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Letters from Elena, by Anne Hamilton (Legend Press)

Two little girls find great friendship, until they’re untimely ripped apart.

So sudden is the departure that Elena, the 10-year-old Greek Cypriot, isn’t allowed to say goodbye to her friend.

April is a lonely 10-year-old in an English village, an only child with somewhat elderly, very proper parents. Life tends to be a bit black and white until a Greek Cypriot family move in above the chippy, taking over the shop.

There are three daughters, Elena being the middle one, and to April’s great joy she is welcomed by the family, invited to stay over on Friday nights, eating fishcakes and watching television. Continue reading →