A look at the latest paperbacks on the shop shelves
The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry
Faber £7.99
"People persist with ordinary life, because there is no other sort of life." Yet ordinary lives meander and circle and overflow and sometimes turn upside down; none of which can even begin to give a flavour of the breathtaking sinuosity of Sebastian Barry's fourth novel. It is narrated by Roseanne McNulty, who has been in a mental hospital for much of her life, and by her psychiatrist Dr Grene. Roseanne is ancient – maybe 100, nobody knows – and her doctor is distracted, both by grief at the death of his wife and alarm at the imminent closure of his asylum. They are, as the saying has it, a right pair; and they carry our interest and empathy as the storyline shifts and twists along the byways of a century of Irish history and the ancient, secretive paths of the human mind. The bookies' favourite for last year's Man Booker Prize, The Secret Scripturehas just won the overall 2008 Costa Book of thge Year award. "Exquisite . . . mesmerising . . . memorable . . . unique". Take your pick of the adjectives; just don't be put off by the hype. This is a great book by, arguably, our greatest living novelist.
Arminta Wallace
Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
Picador, £8.99
In his disturbing, gripping book, New Yorker writer and Paris Review editor Gourevitch uses the interviews carried out by award-winning film-maker Morris for his documentary to piece together the events surrounding the taking of the notorious photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused and humiliated by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. Rather than merely blaming those who took and were in the photographs, Gourevitch establishes that “the complicity, the blind eye and the cover-up, the indiscipline and incompetence . . . infected every link in the chain of command that ran from the MI block to the Pentagon and the White House . . .”. He outlines how the Bush government side-stepped the Geneva Conventions, renaming prisoners as “security detainees” to whom the conventions did not apply. (He also points out that a full three-quarters of the people detained were later proved to have been innocent of any crime.) Ultimately those depraved photos, with their grainy, amateur quality, reflected the reckless ineptitude of the whole war as well as its murky, illicit nature. It’s a sorry tale but a brilliant piece of journalism.
Cathy Dillon
Negro with a Hat.The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey
Colin Grant
Vintage, £8.99
As black America’s struggle for civil rights began Jamaican Marcus Garvey played the role of fire-breathing provocateur. At his height, he roused crowds in Harlem and had a utopian vision of mass migration of African Americans to Africa and nation-building, generating impressive funding for his many projects. Styling himself “President of Africa”, Garvey drifted into an extremism that led to many failures of judgement, including a bout of dialogue with the KKK. Surprisingly, he identified his own cause with Irish republicanism, and sought to emulate de Valera. According to this compelling biography, it was a divided, colonial consciousness that led him to adopt the military garb of the Empire into which he had been born as a third-class citizen. Grant’s exhaustive research is given life by his deep engagement with a difficult subject. This is an example of the best kind of popular history.
Luke Sheehan
Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington
Norma Clarke
Faber, £10.99
Laetitia Pilkington was notorious in her own time but is forgotten in ours. This biography seeks to restore the 18th-century “Lady of Adventure” to what author Norma Clarke sees as her rightful place in history. A Dublin curate’s wife and friend of Jonathan Swift, she was forced to live off her wits after her husband caught her in a compromising position with a trainee doctor. She became a writer, specialising in “satires with a special appeal to ladies who had been ill-treated by men”, and achieved fame and fortune with a memoir telling “the story of her life and libidinous times”. For all its lively detail, this is literary biography rather than scandalous romp, and contains much to interest Swiftian scholars and historians of Georgian Dublin. In many of her concerns Pilkington was ahead of her time, and hers remains a tale that deserves to be told.
Freya McClements
The Bolter
Frances Osborne
Virago, £8.99
Glamorous, brave, wilful, extravagant, sometimes selfish, yet fiercely loyal, Idina Sackville’s remarkable life spanned two world wars five divorces ,one murdered ex-husband, two abandoned sons and one estranged daughter.
In 1913 Idina married Euan Wallace, one of the best-looking, youngest and richest bachelors in Britain. Her lifestyle was almost too shocking to be believed; sexually voracious, expecting no faithfulness and earning her a notorious title in the press after she “bolted” from Wallace and their sons. Whether living in England or Kenya, her love for Euan could not be extinguished, no matter how far Idina pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. This book conveys a genuine regard for a woman who lived life on her own terms, accepting the consequences of her actions, ultimately dying alone.
Claire Looby