The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his Friend Marilyn MonroeAndrew O'Hagan, Faber and Faber, £7.99: Imagine you're a dog. Now imagine you're Marilyn Monroe's dog. What would you have to say to posterity? Plenty, is the suggestion in Andrew O'Hagan's wickedly funny recreation of the movie star's final two years. She really did spend it in the company of a classy little canine, given to her by Frank Sinatra.
She called him Mafia Honey and he went everywhere with her, from glitzy parties to art galleries and nightclubs. Maf is the ultimate unreliable narrator. He can’t talk, yet he has hilarious conversations with pigeons, spiders and poetry-spouting cats. He discusses Aristotle with his doggy friends and he prefers Montaigne to Descartes, largely because of their philosophical positions on the nature of animal consciousness. He is, in short, a hoot. And he offers a strangely, well, human perspective on his troubled, anxious mistress. Ah, if only dogs ruled the world: it would be a simpler, more joyful place.
Arminta Wallace
Sunset ParkPaul Auster, Faber and Faber, £7. 99
Paul Auster’s 16th novel opens with an engrossing account of Miles Heller, a 28-year-old college dropout who has severed contact with his family. Fearing that the authorities may be informed of his relationship with an under-age girl, Heller leaves his job clearing out abandoned houses and relocates to a squat in Brooklyn, where the story encompasses a cast of characters each warranting separate chapters. Their intersecting lives, however, do not overlap seamlessly. In the absence of dialogue, the narrator’s splintering second-hand impressions cram the pages with details and coincidences that do little to bring the characters to life, draining momentum and diluting the novel’s substance. The emotional and physical debris littered throughout Sunset Park feed into Auster’s signature motif: an intense self-doubt that prompts identity crises and even disappearance. But recycling that theme without the metafictional feats of his earlier work means Sunset Park ultimately relies on Auster’s storytelling, which, in this case, peters out and leaves few surprises.
Cian Traynor
Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court, Lucy Worsley, Faber and Faber, £9.99
After enjoying Courtiers, Worsley’s rich, amusing gaze at the courts of George I and II, you will rate William Kent’s king’s staircase and the drawing room at Kensington Palace as must-sees when next in London. Because it engages immediately with its small and large plots and its wonderful characterisation, the work, though strictly history, reads as a novel. Household staff and courtiers are selected for their position in the drama, but the particularly vivid portraits of three sexy, funny, clever and bookish women, Molly Lepell, Mary Bellenden and Henrietta Howard, who knew their men, are a triumph. The writers Pope, Swift, Hervey and the Walpoles were in and out of their lives and provide source material for Courtiers. But this is no giddy read. At the end you’re left with a sympathetic and informed sense of the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian public life.
Kate Bateman
EM Forster: A New Life, Wendy Moffat, Bloomsbury, £10.99
This does as most literary biographies should and looks at its subject’s life both in itself and as part of his times. For Moffat, a delicate dissection of Forster’s homosexuality (of which he was deeply protective, yet endlessly fascinated by) serves to enrich her work. Moffat enlivens the various locales of the writer’s life, from his Cambridge days to imperial India and Egypt, before taking in the intellectual and cultural energy of the post-war US. She writes with humour and an eye for the absurdities of Britishness during Forster’s life, when sex was referred to as a “parting with respectability”, and to be gay was to be “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. Her subject, rendered achingly human and familiar by her writing, is caught between political progressiveness and trenchant colonialist orientalism. She navigates both subjects and more, using Forster’s sexuality as a guiding star in an admirable work which shies away from simplistic narratives to produce a nuanced portrait of both the man and his time.
Jack Horgan-Jones
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession, David Grann, Simon and Schuster, £7.99
Once again David Grann manages to appeal to our inner hardboiled detective by relaying 12 real-life mysteries. He invites the reader into worlds of crime, mystery and insanity, keeping our curiosity every step of the way. One story delves into the death of a Sherlock Holmes expert and tries to decipher whether the cause was suicide or murder. Another shows conflicting evidence in a case of a man accused of burning to death his three children, with the accused racing against the clock to prove his innocence while on death row. Grann also documents a case where a postmodern novel is a mitigating factor in a murder inquiry because it may lead to clues about the psychological instability of the author, who happens to be the defendant. And he follows an obsessive oceanographer in his futile quest to find the giant squid. This is investigative journalism at its most entertaining and engaging.
Ciara Peters
