Review: Archie Henderson

London Falling: A mysterious death in a gilded city and a family’s search for truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador) 

What made Zac Brettler, a privileged 19-year-old, jump to his death from the fifth floor of a glitzy London block of flats on the north shore of the Thames?

Who knows?  Scotland Yard bungled the investigation and the coroner appeared indifferent to the anguish of a family seeking answers. Not even the notorious London tabloids, who would usually smell out a story like that quickly, got a sniff.

By a set of coincidences, the story instead fell into the lap of reporter Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker, a serious magazine that doesn’t go in for Second Coming-type headlines or lurid, racy, demotic copy. No Rich Kid dies in Upmarket Apartment Plunge for him or his magazine. The tabloids might even have had a strapline: MI6 saw death fall – and did nothing.

The facts of those imagined headlines would not have been wrong. Zac fell to his death, his thigh clipping part of the building close to where he landed. Did the injury on the way down render him unconscious, did he drown in the Thames? Or was he still alive when he landed? None of those questions were answered by those investigating his death. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Test Cricket: A History, by Tim Wigmore (Quercus)

To write the history of Test cricket in one volume is a bit like trying to score a century before lunch, take a hat-trick by tea and win by an innings before close of play. Can’t be done. Now Tim Wigmore might have done it.

It had been done only once before, but at a time when there was a lot less to write about. A History of Cricket by Jim Swanton and Harry Altham was first published in 1926 when Test cricket had not yet reached its 50s. By the time of its 1962 edition it had grown into two substantial volumes.

The scale of Wigmore’s undertaking is enormous. To give an idea how difficult it must have been to contain Test cricket to a single volume, consider this: eminent historian and former first-class cricketer Andre Odendaal wrote three volumes on just South African cricket. And Wisden needs between 1 500 and 1 700 pages to cover one season. When the compact, distinctively yellow-covered almanack, which can also serve as a doorstopper, first appeared in the 19^th century, it was under 200 pages. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, by Clare Stephens (Atlantic Books Australia)

A few weeks ago I read a Guardian article about an Australian woman, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who in 2016 provoked a terrifying media backlash in an Anzac Day post. She had invoked “lest we forget” in referring to people in Australian offshore detention centres and the suffering of Syrians and Palestinians.

Anzac Day on April 25 is taken seriously in Australia. It is a public holiday, and commemorates all the Australian and New Zealand armed forces who have served and died in various conflicts since the disastrous Gallipoli landings in World War 1. It is not putting it too strongly to say the day is regarded as sacred.

So for a 20s-something Muslim woman – who happened to have been named Young Queensland Australian of the Year – to equate on Facebook the suffering of Muslims with that of gallant Australian soldiers was, to many, heresy.

“It was wild to observe,” she told the Guardian. “People kept being like, ‘Oh, it’ll blow over,’ and it never did.”

Months later she moved to London, where she still lives. Continue reading →

Review:  Vivien Horler

Under a Blood Red Sky, by Annemarie van Niekerk, translated by Michiel Heyns (Tafelberg)

SA-born Nobel Laureate and twice Booker Prize winner JM Coetzee says: “We can best explore the deep history of a society through first-hand testimonies of personal experience. [This book] allows us privileged insight into life as it is and has been in the South Africa of our times.”

Dr Annemarie van Niekerk is a feminist, an academic, and a woman who has edited several titles on women’s literature in Africa. Now in her 60s, she grew up in what was then Port Elizabeth in a loving but strict Afrikaans Nationalist family, one of three daughters, and currently lives in the Netherlands with her husband and son.

That’s the thumbnail sketch. The fleshed-out version is much more interesting, challenging and thought-provoking. Under a Blood Red Sky – the title comes from the U2 song New Year’s Day – tells her story against the background of life in South Africa over the past 60 or so years, and reminds us how strange it is to grow up here and witness the tests of history, from apartheid to the new SA, and the contradictions they throw up. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Place of Tides, by James Rebanks (Penguin)

Before we all had duvets, some of us had eiderdowns. These were comforters stuffed with feathers that perched on top of our blankets (and usually slid off in the night).

The term comes from the soft breast down of the eider duck, which was traditionally used to fill the comforters. These ducks are found on remote coastlines and islands in the far north of Europe, Siberia and north America, all close to the Arctic circle.

Today the filling in comforters is more likely to be either synthetic or from domestic poultry breeds, according to Wikipedia, but the collection of down from eider ducks continues. Duvets and pillows filled with eider down are considered luxury items. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Trace – Case studies of a forensic pathologist in Africa, by Ryan Blumenthal (Tafelberg)

Doctors are notorious for closing ranks when a patient believes they have been wronged by their medical practitioner.

But Dr Ryan Blumenthal, the author of Autopsy and now Trace, isn’t that guy. That’s because he is only too familiar with the sort of mistakes doctors can make – he sees the results on his autopsy table.

He believes many procedures performed today are probably unnecessary, and based “on first-hand experiences where I have witnessed the negative outcomes of such cases”. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

People who like Dogs like People who like Dogs – Extraordinary encounters in an ordinary park, by Nick Duerden (John Murray)

Englishman Nick Duerden was a cat person, until he got a dog. He was also, as a result of not being very well, rather reclusive, not helped by the fact he is a freelance writer.

But when you get a dog, you have to walk it, so you’re forced to go out. And then you will meet other dog walkers, and possibly make friends with them, or at least become dog-walking companions.

The dog he got was a Border Terrier which, oddly enough, doesn’t at all resemble the doodle they’ve chosen to put on the cover. I was drawn to the book by the cover, since my own dog, a Border Doodle, looks exactly like that. And when Sofia wants to go for a walk she will sit, looking both accusing and gormless, sometimes with a ball in her mouth.

No matter, in the reading of this memoir I was drawn to Missy, his small terrier, about whom he writes with great affection and occasional exasperation. Missy, who is 13 months old at the start of the memoir, has a stiff wire coat and “the energy of a just-lit firework”. You’ll know what that’s like if you’ve ever had a 13-month-old dog. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Everything is Tuberculosis – A history and persistence of our deadliest infection, by John Green (Ebury Press)

Around 1940 or 1941 my Aunty Thelma contracted tuberculosis. It was in the early days of World War 2, and she worked for a company that had been making compressors for the mining industry before pivoting to munitions as many British manufacturing companies did.

She was not quite 20, and having a lovely war. She was engaged to a man who drove a sports car, she had a flashy diamond ring, and according to her younger sister – my mum – was partying till late and then going straight on to work in the shell shop.

They made explosive shells in the shell shop, which was housed in an old, damp building, and she got sick.

This was more than a decade before streptomycin became available as a cure for TB, and so she was treated, as people in the UK were in those days, in a sanatorium in a place called Tehidy in Cornwall.

The ward she was in had a roof and three walls, with the fourth side open to the elements all year round. In winter they would watch snowflakes drifting on to their beds, she told me (although in truth it doesn’t snow much in Cornwall). Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Remain – A supernatural love story, by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan (Sphere)

A supernatural love story? Not my usual fare.

There’s a telling exchange between the main guy, the architect Tate, and his friend Oscar.

Tate tells Oscar he’s not in a good space, and Oscar responds: “I’m guessing you and Gigi had a fight?”

Mystified, Tate responds: “Gigi?”

Oscar: “GG? Ghost Girlfriend?”

In fact the ghost girlfriend is called Wren, but other than that, Oscar is on the button. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph)

You wouldn’t think a novel about a rather formal, acerbic 70-something woman from Annapolis, told solely in the form of letters and emails – mainly letters – would become a bestseller.

But you’d be wrong – The Correspondent topped the New York Times bestseller list in December. Of various reviews I’ve read, I think The Times said it best: “A warm, funny gem of a novel.”

Sybil Van Antwerp lives alone in a house with the view of a river through the trees. She is particular, precise, likes to write her letters with a fountain pen on good paper she gets from the UK. Continue reading →