26 Books

Charles Rosen is a world-famous pianist who, like his great colleague Alfred Brendel, is also well-known for his writing. Here, Rosen covers what is still a highly controversial subject, that of feeling in music. This is a reasonably technical book, and readers without a musical education may struggle to follow some of the discussion.

Music and Sentiment

Charles Rosen
Yale University Press 2010, Hardcover, 160 pages, £16.99

But first, a digression. There’s an interesting TED talk by Itay Talgam about how conductors communicate with their orchestras, interesting because it’s just so wrong-headed about conducting in particular and music generally. He starts by showing the audience a video of the great Carlos Kleiber conducting the Radetzky March at the Vienna Philharmonic’s kitsch-laden New Year’s Day Concert. Kleiber is literally dancing around the podium, barely bothering to even issue a beat. This, in Talgam’s opinion, is the exemplar.

Black Hearts – full title: Black Hearts: One platoon’s descent into madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death – is the harrowing story of one company’s experience of war in Iraq. This company – Bravo Company of the Black Heart Brigade – is notable because four of its soldiers committed one of the highest-profile war crimes in recent US history: the rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Abeer al-Janabi, and the murder of her family.

Black Hearts

Jim Frederick
Macmillan 2010, Paperback, 500 pages, £12.99

Black Hearts examines not what happened on 12 March, 2005 – the four men pled guilty and the events themselves were never contested – but how it could have happened. How four young soldiers could sneak off, unsupervised, in a locked-down conflict zone. How manpower could be so scarce that there literally weren’t enough boots on the ground to maintain order and safety. How so many men could experience the same war, yet these four could deliberately and cruelly take four innocent lives. And even, how this act could possibly come as a surprise, when the institution of warfare demands so many volatile ingredients be put under such pressure, and for so long.

I used to be a football fan, and then Shane recommended this book to me.

For most of its length, it’s well-argued and informative, although its UK title gives the wrong impression about its contents, which range over a number of issues, many having nothing whatever to do with the English national team. Its US title – Soccernomics – gives you a better idea of both its contents and its inspiration.

Why England Lose

Simon Kuper
HarperSport 2010, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

I’m not going to write about the book in much detail, except to note that it was the very last straw in my disaffection with a game that has simply become a business, a business in which people who go to the ground and watch their team play have become the least important stakeholders, when the game is ostensibly played for their enjoyment. The fact that I’d allowed myself the delusion that it was anything else says a great deal about the emotional hold the game used to have on me. Like leaving a cult, it takes effort to de-programme your brain, and this book is a useful aid in that process.

Subtitled “Beethoven and the World in 1824″, the “World” referred to being the rather narrow one that bound Beethoven to fellow artists at the dawn of the Romantic era, this is an exploration of the genesis and impact of Beethoven’s last completed symphony. As with Beethoven’s other great late works, the Ninth Symphony was revolutionary in length, complexity, form and content, and its legacy was felt well into the early years of the 20th century, and perhaps beyond that (listen to Shostakovich’s own 9th symphony, for example).

It’s a great symphony, of that there’s obviously no possible doubt, perhaps the greatest symphony written. My own view is that the Ninth was finally surpassed only by Mahler, and the fact that many people would regard that as a sacrilege should tell you a lot about how revered the Ninth is.

The Ninth

Harvey Sachs
Faber and Faber 2010, Hardcover, 208 pages, £12.99

I’ve always thought that Mahler’s own Ninth Symphony owes a great deal to Beethoven’s, especially the first movement. Those two first movements, composed almost 90 years apart, are perhaps the two most perfect expressions of the symphonic form. Even today, nearly two centuries after its premiere, the first movement of Beethoven’s symphony is challenging, dense, unforgiving, pitiless and full of rage. The fugato section in particular is one of the fiercest, labyrinthine, most thrillingly dark pieces of music I know, and perhaps most of all I love the opening. Beethoven starts with what any beginner would be told was an embarrassing faux pas, but one of the most fascinating chords in music: open fifths. (Another of my favourite pieces, Berg’s Violin Concerto also starts this way, surely in homage to Beethoven.)

The media’s coverage of Tom McCarthy’s new novel has been remarkable. Our esteemed cultural gatekeepers have, by and large, followed the guidance given them by the publisher and described C as a “modernist” or “experimental” or “difficult” novel. McCarthy himself is slightly more circumspect, telling The Observer that “I’m not trying to be modernist, but to navigate the wreckage of that project”. His jacket blurb, though, explicitly describes his work as being in the tradition of Beckett.

What he has actually written is a fairly conventional British historical novel, with the the customary bloat and boast of copious research, but lacking the formal invention and play that one would expect in anything described as modernist.

This dichotomy is tremendously interesting to me, and I want to spend a little bit of time thinking about why McCarthy has allowed his publishers to create this association.

C

Tom McCarthy
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £16.99

When I think of modernist novelists, I think first of all of formal innovation of the type that readers of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil will be familiar with. And certainly one thinks later of Beckett in this same mould.

Just taking the writers I listed above, we find innovations like interior monologue, intertextuality, novelistic essay, digression and shifting narrator without having to think about for very long at all. The nearest McCarthy gets to a formal innovation is the interpolation of the odd letter and the pervasive use of the present tense.

I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.

Take a Chance on Me

Jill Mansell
Headline Review 2010, Paperback, 416 pages, £7.99

Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about three chapters and then dips down into autopilot. Mansell makes an engaging male character (saddled with the hideous lothario name of Johnny LaVenture), makes him warm and witty and generally nice, and then makes him hop around until our heroine deigns to fall into his arms. I know this is always going to happen and it’s not rocket science, but it helps if the story along the way makes its fantasy vaguely realistic, and this may as well be actual Mamma Mia! instead, in which case God help us all.

It’s probably a good thing that David Nicholls’ acting career didn’t take him stellar, because people adore his writing.(And how lucky is that, to have two talents to pick from?)

One Day

David Nicholls
Hodder Paperbacks 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £7.99

And people will, and do, love One Day. Partly because that cheery orange and white cover is gracing every 3 for 2 stand in the United Kingdom and a 3 for 2 offer is basically a Decree From God, and partly because, in Emma, Nicholls has written one of the best characters of the last few years.

Nicholls’s lovely gimmick is that each chapter rejoins two old friends on the anniversary of their meeting at university and gives us snapshots of what they’re doing. Dexter, a good-looking bloke blessed with charm and luck, is an absolute pillock, and is to be tolerated only because his zingy, wry friend Emma is just the most wonderfully-written girl. I started reading it before bed and found it so easy to read and fun that I was pushing myself to read faster so that I could cheat sleep until I’d finished it.

The latest instalment of Charlaine Harris’s chatty, witty and hugely enjoyable Sookie Sackhouse novels comes with a clonking great fib on its front cover.

Dead in the Family

Charlaine Harris
Gollancz 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £14.99

Having spawned the just as enjoyable hit TV series, True Blood, the TV cast adorn the book’s cover despite, in this universe, one of them being dead and another not existing.

But no matter. What will matter is fans of the series launching into this one which would be a colossal mistake given this is number 10: Sookie’s story is miles ahead from the TV series, featuring fairies, werepanthers and others supernatural beasties that haven’t so much as shown up on the box yet.
So while fans of the show should head for the earlier novels (not to worry, they’re so crack-like you’ll rocket through them in a week), Dead in The Family is absolute bliss for established Sookie nuts.

This is a relief more than anything. Harris is a brilliant writer, but ten books is ten books and I was gnawing my nails with worry that, by now, she might have been hit by burnout and expectation (Janet Evanovich’s wonderful Stephanie Plum novels stopped being wonderful around book 10 and yet – grimace – they keep coming).

I admire Don DeLillo’s work greatly, and Underworld remains one of my favourite novels in the English language. But since that masterpiece was published, DeLillo has been in uncertain form, the four novels he’s produced since then being slight, both physically and in substance. But a slight book from DeLillo is worth a great deal and, even though Point Omega is another mild disappointment, it still contains things to like.

Point Omega

Don DeLillo
Picador 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £14.99

Those looking for a fundamental change in DeLillo’s basic style of what can seem to be the occasional portentous and meaning-free sentence surrounded with gnomic, stilted dialogue will find nothing to like. But, if you’re looking for realism, DeLillo isn’t the place to start. His style can be monotonous (nowhere more so than in The Body Artist), but it can also be profoundly beautiful, often hauntingly so. Somewhere at the centre of his writing is a deep-seated angst, a fear about the business of being human, a fear about our future, and a profound sense of loneliness. It’s perhaps not surprising that this doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Eight years passed between Gold’s debut, Carter Beats the Devil, and this, his second novel. Carter Beats the Devil is a fictionalised story about Charles Carter, an American magician who was successful in the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s a very good book.

Sunnyside

Glen David Gold
Sceptre 2010, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

Sunnyside is more ambitious but, because it doesn’t quite reach its target, it’s ultimately less successful. It tells the story of the birth of celebrity, the rise of Hollywood and the earliest stirrings of American empire. At its centre is Charlie Chaplin but numerous other real life figures appear on its pages.