Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson
Ecco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24

Shortly before his death Teddy lost his virginity to Eliza, who was visiting for the night from New York, where her mother is dating Jude’s father. Eliza also gave Teddy cocaine, which may have been the key ingredient in the mixture of substances that killed him. All of this happens in the opening of Henderson’s novel, which deals with the fall-out from Teddy’s death.

Jude travels to New York to tell Teddy’s brother, Johnny, the news. He moves in with his estranged father and gradually becomes involved in the ’straight edge’ punk scene, which rejects stimulants of any kind. Meanwhile Johnny, who is exploring Buddhism, decides that the right thing to do would be to marry Eliza and raise his brother’s child.

It is this chaotic situation that Henderson gradually brings to order. The punks form a kind of family, their own families having disintegrated at the hands of their hippy parents. Jude’s father deals drugs and his mother makes a living blowing glass bongs. Johnny’s mother skipped town shortly before Teddy’s death, fearing that her lies about Teddy’s father’s identity were about to be exposed. Nobody in the book seems grown up but at least the children have an excuse.

Without parental guidance, all kinds of values take their place. Buddhism, straight edge punk ideals and the camaraderie of life in a touring band are all explored as potential codes for living. In the end, the kids will grow into their identities, regardless of what they choose.

Henderson has an eye for detail and creates an authentic mid-1980s New York that is grubby and crime ridden but also filled with an unusual sense of community. A key scene in the novel takes place at the Tompkins Square Park riot in August 1988, in which heavy-handed policing turned a rally into a battle.

She’s equally able to draw the contrast between New York and sleepy Lintonberg, Vermont. The characters shuttle between the two – usually from one of Jude’s parents to the other – seeking to escape one and find refuge in the other. The city represents hope for excitement but also danger; the small town means boredom but sometimes safety. Conversely, the city means anonymity, while the small town can be a place where mistakes are hard to live down.

These aren’t pleasant characters – at least I didn’t find them that way – and that can make this book a difficult read. Like real people, the cast of this book are rough-edged and can be inconsistent, selfish, confused and irrational. Spending a lot of time inside their heads can be an uncomfortable experience.

That’s not a criticism. If anything, it’s to Henderson’s credit that she has resisted sentiment and stuck to the story. Ten Thousand Saints is a very good novel but not necessarily an enjoyable one.

No related posts.

The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

Pantani was tiny – he weighed just 57kg (9 stones) and was 5′8″ – but had an enormous power to weight ratio that made his a near ideal climber’s physique. He was known as ‘Il Pirata’ (The pirate) because of his penchant for bandanas and earrings, and a propensity to attack and attack again. These things made him an enormously popular rider.

Away from cycling, Pantani led a very troubled life, which increasingly revolved around prostitutes and drugs. In 1999, he was expelled from the Giro d’Italia following the conclusion of the penultimate stage while in an almost unassailable lead for the General Classification, and his career and life never recovered. In 2004, aged 34, he died in a tatty hotel room in Rimini of a massive overdose of cocaine.

Matt Rendell’s book is a very detailed account of Pantani’s life and career and contains a forensic account of his death. There is a very convincingly argued look at the evidence for Pantani’s use of doping products, extracted from databases used to track athletes’ performance and medical records of blood tests conducted prior to surgery. Every piece of evidence shows that Pantani’s hematocrit level followed a yearly pattern in which it peaked at levels rarely if ever seen in healthy individuals around the time of the Tour and dropped off afterwards, a pattern that would not be observed in even the most esoteric pathologies.

The weight of evidence is too great to dismiss, especially given that most of it does not relate specifically to doping controls and therefore would not have been subject to masking techniques that athletes use to fool testing regimes.

Many of Pantani’s contemporaries, Bjarne Riis and Richard Virenque for example, have subsequently admitted to their use of EPO, although Lance Armstrong continues to deny using it. Riis was stripped of his one Tour de France victory, and Pantani should be too. But, really, EPO use was so widespread at that time that it’s difficult to believe that there were any clean riders in the peloton.

Pantani denied using performance enhancing drugs and hinted repeatedly at some vast conspiracy to frame him. Needless to say, the only conspiracy was his own to cheat the authorities and, ultimately, the fans into believing that his performances were legitimate.

Rendell’s book forms an useful companion to David Millar’s excellent Racing Through the Dark for those seeking to understand the science and practice of blood doping. It is, however, a rather dense and repetitive book, not to mention a bleak one. Despite that, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in road cycling. It’s a desperately sad story, but one that needed to be told.

Related posts:

1. Racing Through the Dark by David Millar
2. We Were Young and Carefree by Laurent Fignon
3. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

We Were Young and Carefree

Laurent Fignon
Yellow Jersey 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99

Fignon, who died in 2010, takes the unusual step of recounting the most famous incident of his career at the start of his book with the following anguished words:

Come on, let’s burst the abscess before we really get started. The would has to be left open. Let it bleed away in silence. It will bleed a good while yet.

(There’s more than a hint of Amfortas about that paragraph!) While this decision makes for a more exciting opening than a load of guff about his childhood, it does somewhat hurt the architecture of the story.

Fignon was a genuine character, a rider who loved to attack and to go on what are charmingly known in the cycling world as ‘exploits’, feats of power, endurance and suffering that inspire all who watch them. He was also not afraid of expressing an opinion about his teammates or opponents, which perhaps explains why journalists liked to shove a microphone in his face at the finish of a stage.

In some ways he was lucky to win the Tour in 1983, only his second season as a pro, as he was only selected for the Renault team because of team leader Bernard Hinault’s withdrawal through injury. In pro cycling, team members may gain individual moments of glory, such a stage win, but they are required to subjugate themselves to the needs of their leader in the overall race classification, so Fignon would never have had the chance to win had Hinault been fit, even if he’d been selected.

Hinault must have been furious! Indeed, he left the Renault team to form a new team, and so Fignon was left as the Renault team leader the next year, when he won again.

After that, he was hit with a series of injuries and admits here that he never rode as well again. Despite wins in other races, he never won the tour again, even though he looked certain to do so in 1989 when starting the last stage – a time trial that year rather than the formality that the last stage is today – 50 seconds ahead of LeMond. Fignon’s saddle sores and controversial equipment used by LeMond proved to be the difference.

His book is beautifully written or at least that’s the impression left by by William Fotheringham’s translation. It’s full of anecdotes and insights into the psyche of a professional cyclist at the height of his sport. Sports autobiographies can be pretty uninspiring books, but Fignon’s is definitely an exception.

This is a book that will appeal to anyone who is interested in road cycling and, to those who are, I’d strongly recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Racing Through the Dark by David Millar
2. It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn
3. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

Racing Through the Dark

David Millar
Orion 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £18.99

This is the kind of complicated story that the media doesn’t really like very much, hence the stupid coverage of the possibility of Millar’s lifetime Olympic ban being lifted, something that he has not sought, but which has come about because of a separate legal challenge to the legality of the BOA’s policy of lifetime bans.

Millar is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful guy, and his story is fascinating. It’s a surprise to find that his early experiences of being a pro cyclist were rather less organised than one might assume. He was largely left to construct his own training programme and travel arrangements and found it difficult to get the right equipment from his then team, Cofidis.

Today, teams like Team Sky have every single element of a cyclist’s training and preparation under microscopic control, so it’s interesting to see how slapdash methods were even as recently as the 1990s.

There’s also a darker side to this laissez-faire approach, which allows the rider to do things behind the team’s back, or for the team to have plausible deniability if a rider gets caught doping. The testing regime for cyclists is now far stricter, so the idea that a cyclist could simply disappear for a few weeks before the season for secret training is now impossible. But at the start of Millar’s career, this was the standard way to avoid testing; just turn off the mobile and keep a low profile and you were good so long as you weren’t caught red-handed.

Millar’s explanation of the subtle pressure that a team can exert on a young rider is fascinating. At no stage was there ever a conversation along the lines of “hey David, we’d like you to start using EPO”. Rather, they questioned his commitment to correct “preparation”, a loaded word that is used as a code for doping. “Have you done everything possible to prepare? Are you properly prepared?” Doping is simply seem as part of being a professional. Everyone else is doing it, so isn’t it wrong that your results should suffer? Aren’t you letting your teammates down?

Eventually, Millar succumbed not only to the vitamin injections he had previously resisted but also to the lure of outright cheating. This involved him visiting a doctor in Italy and following a regimen of EPO injections and hard training. When returning from his purdah, his performances were markedly improved.

Unlike other riders, though, his cheating did not last very long. He was arrested in Biarritz while having dinner with David Brailsford, now Performance Director of British Cycling and General Manager of Team Sky. Although this was embarrassing for Brailsford, who has a hardline anti-doping stance, he stood by Millar.

Since being caught, Millar has, unlike other exposed cheats, admitted fully what he did and become a forceful and eloquent advocate of clean cycling. Because of his doping ban, he’s not eligible to race with Team Sky or, as I mentioned above, the UK Olympic team, even though he’s now known to be clean. He accepts this, and is quick to emphasise the fortunate position he’s in as a professional cyclist. At no stage does he try to shirk responsibility, and he’s excellent on how the culture of silence about doping is so harmful to the sport in general.

Millar’s book is very well-written, insightful and paints a fascinating picture of what life is like inside a pro cycling team, and is one of the only honest accounts of doping in professional sport available. If you’re interested at all in road racing, or doping in sport more generally, I’d recommend this book unreservedly.

Related posts:

1. It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn
2. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting
3. Take Your Eye Off The Ball by Pat Kirwan (Shane’s book four, 2011)

How I Won the Yellow Jumper

Ned Boulting
Yellow Jersey 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £12.99

I find Boulting’s writing almost unbearable, mainly because it’s exactly like hearing him speak, only it’s directly inside your brain. He’s one of those commentators who loves to point out what to the intellectually lazy seem like portentous parallels between two happenings despite there being no causal relationship at all. You know the kind: “the last time Barcelona played Man United on a Tuesday night, a short man with a bad hair cut scored the winner. Can Nani emulate Messi tonight?” or some shite like that.

Given that sports presentation is an almost exclusively male preserve (why?), it’s perhaps not surprising that banter seems to constitute 90% of a commentator’s verbal armoury. It’s wearing enough when you have to listen to it, but when every single page sounds like this, it’s almost impossible to take.

Boutling has always seemed like someone who does very little preparation, and that turns out to be spot on. Amazingly, this is consistently held up as hilarious rather than evidence of rank unprofessionalism; the title of the book is a reference to him saying ‘yellow jumper’ on air rather than ‘yellow jersey’ because of how little he knew when first asked to join the ITV cycling team. Muddling through is seen as worthy, in stark contrast to the preparedness of the athletes participating in the race.

This is a generalised problem with sports presentation in Britain. Ignorance that would be completely unacceptable in an American Baseball or NFL commentator is all too common here, to the extent that it’s difficult to think of any decent commentators at all. Insightful coverage of sport can be found if you look hard enough (especially online), but next to none of it makes it onto the TV, where platitudes, cliché and received wisdom rule.

Sport writing is also stuffed full of terrible prose, and Boulting’s is no exception:

What could possibly be gained from dragging both of us into discussions about the white chocolate chips in the muffin that sat glowering on a saucer in the middle of the table?

How on earth is it possible for a muffin to glower? This kind of thing is what Boulting mistakes for sophisticated writing, but it just grates every time. Only very rarely does he find an apposite metaphor. Almost every sentence could do with editing:

The wine, a bottle of Château du Val de Mercy (one of the rare occasions on which I actually committed to memory a memorable bottle of wine) was as beautiful to drink as French wine often is.

That sentence is replete with errors. By definition, memorable bottles of wine are committed to memory; he means he committed the name, which is different. Then it sounds like he’s saying that the bottle of wine was an occasion, whereas if he’d said “this was one of the rare occasions” he could have cleared up that ambiguity. Finally, his description of the quality of the wine is circular: a bottle of French wine is as beautiful to drink as French wine can be, which while unarguable is also not useful information or even a compliment (it would be true if French wine was routinely hideous).

Further on he refers to French policemen possessing “purposeful briefcases”, which is either a strange formulation or an under-reported technical breakthrough in the field of attaché case design. I wouldn’t nitpick like this if the entire book wasn’t infested with this type of mind-numbing stuff.

Sadly, whatever value there is in Boulting’s story is thoroughly occluded by his terrible prose. If you want to learn about the Tour, there are plenty of better books than this.

No related posts.

It’s All About the Bike

Robert Penn
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 208 pages, £8.99

Before long I was going on reasonably long rides and within six months had completed my first 100 mile sportive. Now, I ride at every opportunity, doing at least 40 miles at the weekend whenever I can get the time. What is it about cycling that’s so addictive? I set out to read as much as I could about this remarkable machine and its aficionados.

Robert Penn’s book is about building a bike out of the best possible components from around the world. This doesn’t mean that the result is something that you’d find being raced in the Tour de France; rather it’s something that is precisely tailored to the rider’s taste, shape and riding style.

Get a group of cyclists together and you can start a debate about just about any component of a bike, from gears to brakes, to saddles, to handlebars to the material used to make the frame. It’s a remarkable fact that although there are dozens of options for each of these components and more, the bike remains pretty similar to its earliest ancestor machines in many respects.

Penn devotes a chapter to each major decision that needs to be made when custom making a bike. For his frame, he chooses steel, which while simultaneously classic and trendy is not the lightest or most up to date material. It does look and feel great though.

One of the joys of the book is the time Penn gives to the master craftsmen who sweat the details of what makes a perfect seat post, bottom bracket, saddle or wheel. Their dedication to a niche of a niche is truly inspiring. Most bikes today are made out of cheap commodity parts, but if you’re prepared to pay, you can have beautifully made components made by people who know exactly what they’re doing. By and large his custom build is in impeccable taste, but the paint job of blue and orange sounds genuinely awful.

There’s more to this than simply a bike geek’s tour of the world though. Penn also shows how the bike has developed over the years in each of the major component groups, never assuming too much knowledge of the reader. And for those in the know, there’s greater depth and the odd amusing aside (like his remark that Johan Bruyneel, Lance Armstrong’s coach, ‘knows that success in road cycling is all about scientific precision’).

I doubt you’ll get much out of this book if you’re not already interested in cycling, and road cycling in particular, but if you are, I should warn you that should not be surprised to find yourself firing up every custom bike configurator you can find in your browser, which can become a very expensive habit if you click the ‘buy’ button too often…

No related posts.

Memoirs of a Master Forger

William Heaney
Gollancz 2009, Paperback, 320 pages, £7.99

Some time ago I stumbled across a blog post by Joyce in which he explained that the success of the novel had been somewhat galling. It had better reviews than Joyce’s previous work and went into reprint in its second week – a feat that none of his other books had managed. Joyce wrote: “It confirms some rather worrying trends in publishing.”

Would this book have been just as successful if it had been released under Joyce’s name? He thinks it is unlikely. Without any preconceptions about the author, critics and booksellers had to take William Heaney’s ‘debut’ at face value. A new Graham Joyce novel has critics digging through the old reviews and booksellers reaching for the previous sales data.

It is a fascinating experiment but I found the book itself to be unremarkable. William Heaney, the central character and supposed author, is a borderline alcoholic who works for a youth organisation and, in his spare time, sells forged books and donates the proceeds to charity. He also either sees demons or has a mental illness that leads him to believe that he does.

The demons have been around since a distressing incident at college, which is recounted in flashback. The donations to charity are, in some ways, an act of penance for what happened when he was younger. They are also partly driven by the fact that Heaney is, despite the criminal activity, a kind and decent person.

William’s wife has left him and the separation has caused tension between him and his children. He falls into a relationship with a younger woman, Yasmin, though he feels uncomfortable at the age gap and her pursuit of him. For things to work out, William will have to confront his demons.

Do you see what Joyce has done there? He’ll have to confront his demons. His demons. Yes, the metaphor is a little heavy-handed.

Joyce says that the book contains a critique of the publishing industry. There is a satire of British Council-supported poetry and, obviously, the novel is filled with fake books as well as – apparently – a demon that lives in a manuscript. It doesn’t really amount to a critique, though.

The problem is that this is part thriller, part romance and part satire but doesn’t fully convince as any of those things. The threads about demons and forgeries seem to be building towards a tense conclusion that never arrives. Instead, everything is tied up with very little trouble. So much for the thriller.

The romance, too, is pretty simple. Two likeable people want to get together and there are no significant obstacles to that. Jolly good. And the satire just isn’t sharp enough.

Nevertheless, Joyce writes very well and Heaney is an amusing, interesting character whose observations are often enjoyable.

Related posts:

1. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Shane’s book 7, 2011)
2. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (Shane’e book 5, 2011)
3. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape 2011, Hardcover, 160 pages, £12.99

Sadly that is very much the case here. In many ways The Sense of an Ending reminds me of Graham Swift’s horrendously smug and pointless Tomorrow. While it’s not as bad as that, I certainly didn’t enjoy it very much.

Like Tomorrow, The Sense of an Ending revolves around a secret that is supposed to be so terrible that we are meant to be outraged and shocked when it is revealed, whereas in both cases my reaction was “is that it?”. (At least, it seems that way. If not, why be so coy about the secret as to leave it to the final pages before it is revealed?)

The book is written in the first person, and the narrator’s voice is very pooterish. The idea, I think, is that we’re supposed to think of him as someone who’s a bit naive, which I did, but also someone for whom we have a degree of sympathy. On the contrary, I found him boring, unremarkable and rather prim, and those feelings got in the way of having much sympathy for him.

While I’m certain it’s possible to write a brilliant novel about someone so boring, this one isn’t it. I’d recommend giving it a miss.

A brief note on the physical form of this book. I bought the first edition, which is, as is customary with Julian Barnes’ books, beautifully made. The cut edges are black and, although contributing to the expectation that something more remarkable is going to be found in its pages, this and the all-too-rare sown binding make this a lovely object.

Why aren’t all first editions made with this kind of attention to detail? Now that e-books are gaining such ground, is it too much to hope that physical books will be produced with more care?

No related posts.

There isn’t much of a story here. Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’, is disconnected from life. Having spent time as a poet, a soldier and, more recently, a mathematician, he has come adrift. His father suggests that he take a job as secretary to a count, which leads to his involvement in a committee charged with organising a celebration to mark the Austrian emperor’s 70th anniversary.

The book is considered a 20th century classic, a modernist landmark to rank alongside Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses. If you read James’s 26 Books review, you’ll find that this is his favourite novel. I’m afraid I cannot find the appeal at all.

This is a novel of ideas, a book about nationalism, morality, crime, justice, family, art, intellectualism, commerce, philosophy, militarism, sexual deviance, pacifism, mental health, society, the media and love. Had Musil lived, he would probably have gone on to cover umbrellas, chagrin and sausages too, for all I know. It’s a book about everything and that’s pretty much my problem with it.

The Man Without Qualities is like a map of the world in 1:1 scale or a gigantic photograph in which everything is in focus. It feels like there is no discernment. A work of art is more about what you leave out than what you put in and Musil seems unable to leave anything out. By attempting to say everything, he ends up not saying anything.

For 700 pages or so the book meanders. The long deliberations of the committee, which is led by Ulrich’s cousin, are satirised mercilessly. Having established that the committee is foolish and peopled by fools, Musil then goes on to repeat the point in various ways for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I found it hard to care. There is no emotion to connect to, just a series of abstract intellectual ideas that are ultimately meaningless.

After about 800 pages the book becomes more compelling. Ulrich’s father dies and he travels back home to settle affairs. There he meets his sister, Agathe, from whom he has been estranged for some time. They find a deep connection that draws them together and, since they are siblings, also makes them uncomfortable. Suddenly Ulrich seems to have found the meaning that he was looking for but it is forbidden to him. He and his sister are two halves that can never be properly whole.

The pair alter their father’s will so that Agathe’s husband is disinherited. Her marriage had been an unhappy one and she planned to leave him anyway. Ulrich becomes consumed with the question of whether their action was justifiable.

It’s here that Musil’s obsessive attention to the tiniest detail of intellectual process finally finds a worthy target. There is emotional weight to this dilemma. What Ulrich and Agathe have done is illegal but is it also immoral? That question finds a parallel in their relationship.

This is compelling in a way that a satire about a committee can never be, at least for me. About three hundred of the final four hundred pages in this book could be edited into a wonderful novel.

And what of the rest? I’ve tried to understand what people see in this book but I remain puzzled. The blurb on the back of my copy says: “There is scarcely a page that does not provide new thoughts or offer new insights.”

It’s certainly true that there are plenty of insightful passages and thought-provoking sections here but they are diluted amid the pages of detailed examination of nothing of consequence. Worse, Musil devotes equal time and energy to expounding ideas that are just nonsense.

Here’s Arnheim, a wealthy German industrialist who worms his way onto the committee, considering money:

“And the same is true of morality: if our acts were unrepeatable then there would be nothing to be expected of us, and a morality that could not tell people what was expected of them would be no fun at all. This quality of repetitiveness that inheres in the workings of the mind and morality inheres also, and to the highest degree, in money. Money positively consists of this quality. As long as it keeps its value, it carves up all the world’s pleasures into those little blocks of purchasing power that can then be combined into whatever one pleases. Money is accordingly both moral and rational; and since we all know that the converse is not the case, i.e., not every moral and reasonable person has money, we may conclude that money is the original source of these qualities, or at least that money is the crowning reward of a moral and rational life.”

That “no fun at all” is wonderfully placed and is indicative of the frequent brilliance of Musil’s writing. However, the argument itself is obviously nonsense. Of course money isn’t a moral and rational force, any more than trousers or bassoons are. We can see the flaw in Arnheim’s argument immediately. He’s a fool – and given that he’s supposedly a respected author, Musil is implying that Arnheim’s readers are fools too. But why spend so long unfolding a worthless argument?

Every single character has these obsessive, laborious thought processes. In Ulrich’s case, the ideas are most often interesting and illuminating, though by no means always. Other characters are almost always talking – or thinking – nonsense. At great length. It becomes tiresome very quickly.

There is no shortage of critics far more learned and well-read than me who will tell you that this book is a masterpiece. If you are curious then you should probably make up your own mind. I can’t recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (James’s book 4, 2011)
2. The Canal by Lee Rourke (Shane’s book 2, 2011)
3. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies (Shane’s books 29-31, 2011)

Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.

In common with a lot of other 19th century cookbooks (this is, in fact, a sort of greatest hits anthology. Pellegrino Artusi, the author, is best known for Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, published in 1891) there is a lot of knowledge assumed and your hand isn’t as tightly held as it might be by modern writers, keen to pick up where Delia Smith left off. In some recipes the technique is barely touched upon, although he does at least give comprehensive lists of ingredients, complete with quantities.

In describing the pleasure of eating, though, he’s completely at home and prone to long, deliriously happy passages about how much he loves to tuck in. The cuisine is Italian and some well-known dishes such as minestrone (complete with an anecdote about cholera) and cacciucco are here, but there’s very little of the pasta and risotto varieties that modern italian cooks go for. Little birds abound, as do almonds and spices but you won’t be reading this in the kitchen anyway so the actual ingredients don’t matter so much. This is a book for reading. For example:

‘All you drinkers out there can put your forks down; this herring is not for your jaded palates.’ (from ‘Civilised herring’)

‘Dear Mr Meat Loaf, please come forward, do not be shy. I wish to introduce you to my readers. I know that you are modest and humble because, given your background, you feel inferior to many others. But take heart and do not doubt that with a few words in your favour you shall find someone who wants to taste you and who might even reward you with a smile.’

‘Cheer up, for if you eat these cookies you will never die, or you will live as long as Methuselah.’ (From ‘Health cookies’)

All of the above recipes are just about possible to cook from the information given, but only if you fill in the gaps yourself. Cooking, as Artusi says, is a troublesome sprite, especially if you try to cook from this book. Reading, however, is a delight.

Nose to Tail Eating is playful and spirited in its own way but rejects Artusi’s frilly style in favour of beautifully executed brevity and simplicity. Each page has a list of ingredients on the left, a paragraph or two of explanation in bold on the right followed by some idiosyncratic but exact instructions below.

Nose to Tail Eating

Anthony Bourdain (Introduction)
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2004, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

The cuisine here is British, and the comparison in style between the two books illustrates the differences in the food perfectly. Where Exciting Food For Southern Types is rambling and drawn-out like a long lunch in the sun, Nose to Tail Eating gets straight down to the business of cramming as much deliciousness as possible onto one plate. It’s hungry and eager where Artusi is verbose and anecdotal.

Which isn’t to say it’s unsophisticated, but it’s a modern, British sophistication that contrasts sharply with Victorian-era Italy. The style of writing reflects the restaurant, St John, that the recipes come from. It’s funny and readable (the recipe for haggis, in particular, is wonderful) but you could cook from it every day and be very well fed indeed.

The authors of Canteen: Great British Food clearly love St John and have taken its message that simple British food has nothing to be ashamed of to heart. Their restaurants offer good food and they can show you how to make some really excellent piccalilli but I can’t work out if their hearts are really in it.

Canteen

Patrick Clayton-Malone
Ebury Press 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £17.99

British food is clearly fashionable, and it’s hard to know how to feel about that. On the one hand it might speak of a nation at ease with its own identity, happy to live in its own house instead of constantly aspiring to recreate the food of its neighbours, or it could just be irony making its way onto our tables.

I strongly hope not. To take your own cuisine and offer it with a knowing wink rather than a genuine belief that a good meat pie can be as delicious as bouillabaisse is a cowardly betrayal. Food, especially restaurants and publishing, can be faddy and capricious and that can lead to centuries of tradition and quiet good work being consumed in the fire of reviews and development meetings. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I’m absolutely certain it’s not at St John. Fingers crossed, and bon appetit.

Related posts:

1. Edwardian Entertaining by Christine Smeeth (Ian’s book 2, 2011)
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and All About Steve by Fortune Magazine (Shane’s books 36 and 38, 2011)
3. The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri (Ian’s book 4, 2011)