Books of the month: From Salman Rushdie to Blake Morrison

Torture, espionage and mind experiments are just three of the edgy subjects featuring in some of the engrossing non-fiction out this month.

Given that it is still taboo for Chinese officials to admit fully the brutality of Chairman Mao’s reign, Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber) offers an important reminder of the grisly nature of what took place there during the 1960s and 70s. In one disturbing quote, a teacher, who was later to be killed in a frenzied attack by Mao fanatics, foretells her own murder with the words: “Beating someone like me to death is just like killing a dog.” Branigan’s book demonstrates that some stains of history will never be wiped away.

In Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage (Icon), Nathalia Holt pays tribute to the female secret agents of the Cold War era. “Women were much better at detecting surveillants on foot,” admits one officer from the time, putting this skill down to the necessity in general life for women to be vigilant about their own physical protection. The pioneering spies were smart and strong, but things did not always end well in their personal lives. When Elizabeth Sudmeier retired, after ground-breaking work as a spy in Iraq in the 1950s, she found it hard to cope without the excitement of her clandestine work. “The isolation pressed in on her and her drinking worsened,” notes Holt.

Although it takes a lot of mental energy for a woolly mind like mine to understand tricky science, Sally Adee’s We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body’s Electrome (Canongate Books) is worth the challenge. The book opens in dramatic style, with the former long-standing technology features editor at New Scientist reporting on her own experience with a mind-boggling military brain-stimulation experiment. In the book, Adee offers an intriguing guide to how the future of healthcare might involve manipulating the body’s natural electricity. In one possible scenario, rice-sized electrical implants could replace drugs.

Among the recommended fiction this month are This Other Eden by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann), a moving story about a community of outcasts, inspired by historical events, and Georgina Moore’s The Garnett Girls (HQ), an absorbing family drama with resonating settings on the Isle of Wight.

Novels by Salman Rushdie, Kevin Jared Hosein and Rebecca Makkai, along with memoirs by Blake Morrison and Averil Mansfield and a biography of James Ellroy, are reviewed in full below.

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Victory City by Salman Rushdie ★★★★☆

Some of the violence in Victory City, the epic new novel by Salman Rushdie, may induce a wince or two, especially graphic descriptions such as that of “the last shreds of roasted flesh” falling away from someone’s head during a vicious battle. These scenes were written before the horrific attack on Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in August 2022, when the 75-year-old author, who received death threats from Iran in the 1980s after his novel The Satanic Verses was published, was stabbed 15 times, causing him to lose the sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

Rushdie’s courage and steadfast belief in free speech remain a source of inspiration, and his writing remains a source of pleasure. Victory City, an ersatz translation of an ancient Indian epic, deals with the aftermath of a battle between two kingdoms in 14th-century southern India. The story follows nine-year-old Pampa Kampana and how, after witnessing the death of her mother, she becomes a vessel for her namesake, the goddess Pampa, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Pampa Kampana, who “carries the scent of her mother’s burning flesh in her nostrils for the rest of her life”, plays a vital part in the rise of Bisnaga – “victory city” – a new wonder of the world.

Rushdie’s imagination seems fired by returning to an Indian novel after a decade of books based in the West, and although the fantasy of Victory City might not be to everyone’s taste, it is a sweeping tale with a valuable message: that stories last for ever and words can be the true victory.

‘Victory City’ by Salman Rushdie is published by Jonathan Cape on 9 February, £18.99

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Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell ★★★☆☆

“I am obsessed with violence. I am obsessed with twisted sexuality,” admitted James Ellroy, author of more than 20 books including The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid. When you read Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, an account of his harrowing, dysfunctional childhood, it is hard not to see it as an example of “show me the damaged child and I will show you the disturbed man”.

Ellroy’s mother Jean, a volatile, hard-drinking woman, was raped and murdered when Ellroy, born in 1948, was just 10. At nine, he had been sexually abused by a teenage au pair, something his waster father Armand thought was “funny”. Armand, who poisoned his son’s mind against his mother, was an inveterate liar and his boasts about having “f***ed” the “nympho” Rita Hayworth seem open to question.

Love Me Fierce in Danger, its title taken from a line of poetry Ellroy wrote, is certainly a warts-and-all biography (down to the descriptions of the acne on his back) and it’s often rather gruesome fare. Author Steven Powell, who has known Ellroy since 2009, catalogues the writer’s adolescent behaviour, including making obscene phone calls, voyeurism, burglary, and fetishistic acts with girls’ underwear. It is little surprise that Ellroy ended up with a police record for trespassing, indecent exposure, and lewd conduct in public.

Powell has interesting stories about Ellroy’s path to success as an author and his dealings with Hollywood after his writing success. He details the way Ellroy has tried to “discredit” the film version of LA Confidential, and his dislike of Kevin Spacey, who Ellroy claims is “a venomous individual”.

In later years, after gaining acclaim and exploiting his own self-styled persona as “Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction”, Ellroy suffered from alcoholic blackouts, drug addiction, paranoia, hallucinations, insomnia, hypochondria, delusional episodes and anxiety attacks.

Ellroy’s behaviour towards women was often creepy and offensive, and his racism and antisemitism are laid bare in this candid book. However, the comments that “humour is present in everything he does”, and the way his racism is described as a “classroom Nazi act” or “his Nazi schtick”, seem charitable to this reviewer, especially when you consider that Ellroy visited the offices in Glendale of the American Nazi Party, bought swastika armbands, and purchased the record “Ship Those N*****s Back”. One of Ellroy’s early characters, Fat Dog, was an “unapologetic racist”.

Ellroy named a bull terrier Margaret in honour of his “idol” Margaret Thatcher, and dogs feature heavily in Ellroy’s life, including the one called Minna that he and his father let urinate and defecate all over the carpet in their Los Angeles apartment. This strange father-son pair had to leave windows open all night “to alleviate the stench”, and lived like this for five years until their home was fumigated by the landlord.

Ellroy called one of his books My Dark Places, which sums up this stark, revealing account of his life.

‘Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy’ by Steven Powell is published by Bloomsbury Academic on 9 February, £14.99

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Two Sisters by Blake Morrison ★★★★★

Friends of Blake Morrison’s nephew Liam who did shifts at the local Co-op in Yorkshire would ring Liam to let him know that his mum had passed out again on the pavement outside. It’s one of many painful vignettes in Two Sisters, Blake Morrison’s memoir about his sister Gillian and half-sister Josie, both of whom died, self-destructively, before their time.

“In my grief since Gill’s death I’ve been re-examining childhood memories,” writes Morrison, who spares nobody in this painful account of family flaws and unhappiness. His own father seems to have been an odd, controlling man. As well as keeping love-child Josie secret, he was capable of strange, cruel behaviour towards his children (he accused Blake Morrison of being “infantile” and “still wearing nappies” at 18), and seemingly locked adult Gill in the cellar for 36 hours after she was accused of stealing. The length of incarceration may have been exaggerated. The elusiveness of truth and pitfalls of memory are a theme of the memoir.

Gill was open about drinking herself to oblivion, and Morrison is wise not to attempt to give definitive answers to the mysteries of alcohol addiction. In Gill’s case, we are given some understanding of why someone would drink so heavily and end up doing the sort of miserable and humiliating things that happen when dipsomania gets out of control. Morrison is even-handed, though, and honest about his own selfish, melodramatic behaviour at times.

The book is so much more than a misery memoir, however, offering rich insights into sibling rivalry and love, especially in the wider literary landscape. There are dozens of interesting footnotes, drawing on the wisdom of writers as diverse as George Eliot and John Cheever. And you can’t help but marvel at the bizarre nature of some sibling relationships. What weirdness was really going on with Dorothy and William Wordsworth?

Alcoholism, suicide, blindness, depression and grief are clearly not cheery subjects, but Two Sisters is an acute, wonderfully adroit book, overflowing with sharp yet compassionate observations about human nature.

‘Two Sisters’ by Blake Morrison is published by The Borough Press on 16 February, £16.99

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Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein ★★★★☆

Luxury and poverty exist cheek by jowl in Kevin Jared Hosein’s debut novel Hungry Ghosts, set in colonial central Trinidad in the 1940s. It is a tale that throbs with the threat of danger, both emotional and physical.

The gangly, greasy Dalton Changoor and his skittish wife Marlee own a rural farm on a hill, an estate earned from mysterious money “flecked with blood”. Below, by the river, live the Saroop family – Hans, Shweta and their son Krishna – in the filthy, ramshackle building called the Barrack. When Dalton goes missing and his wife seems in peril, the fates bring both families together and the consequences prove disastrous.

Although white colonialism seems a distant force in the drama, it is there in the background (Dalton meets his wife in a brothel, where American naval officers pull the hair of sex workers, spit on them and bite their breasts), and the deadly dynamics of class and wealth are at play in a compelling story. Crossing between the worlds of rich and poor can leave someone “like a bird garbed in another’s plumes”.

The language is lyrical and unusual – words such as “flabellate”, “sedulous” and “noctilucae” pop up – and Hosein’s fine similes conjure a vivid picture of Caribbean life, even if they are simple ones: he talks of cooking with vegetables that “look like a wild overgrown garden in the charred pan”. There are also potent descriptions of the landscape that capture the sights and sounds of everything from the clothes to the animals, including the “echoes of affronted dogs”.

The supporting characters all add something to the story, and none is better drawn than the long-suffering Shweta, so ill-treated by Hans. Hosein, who also writes poetry, captures her plight and core character in small, telling details, such as the way that, when she was a child, seeing her supposedly kind brother’s cruelty to animals forced a shift in her opinion of people as a whole.

Hungry Ghosts explores grim themes – how humans can sometimes have the impulse to deteriorate, how there is no turning back after some decisions, how ordinary cruelty can mash another human “into little pieces” – while musing on the footprint all of us leave during our time on Earth.

Hungry Ghosts is a dazzling debut and a deeply engaging meditation on violence, religion, family, guilt and grief.

‘Hungry Ghosts’ by Kevin Jared Hosein is published by Bloomsbury on 16 February, £16.99

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Life in Her Hands: The Pioneering Career of One Female Surgeon by Averil Mansfield ★★★☆☆

Averil Mansfield, who was born to a working-class family in Blackpool in 1937 and went on to become the UK’s first ever female professor of surgery, grew up in a bygone era. As a schoolgirl, interested in biology, she asked her cherished father Ralph Dring to buy her a publication on the human body. He bought her a book, “but the pages about the reproduction systems were solidly glued together by my protective father”, she recalls in her memoir Life in Her Hands:The Pioneering Career of One Female Surgeon. No wonder looking at male genitalia in a dissection room at medical school was “overwhelming”.

The accounts of her early training and her time working in America are some of the best parts of the autobiography. Initially she did not know what “GSW” stood for (gunshot wound), finding out the meaning from colleagues in Philadelphia who were sadly used to such incidents. She was with those colleagues on the day JFK was assassinated in 1963.

Mansfield is keen to stress how important it was for her to “pass on the baton”: to train the next generation and follow the mantra of “lift as you climb”. She plays down the sexism in the UK medical profession in the 1970s, even though women made up only about 2 per cent of the consultant surgeon workforce in that decade. “We were always treated as equals,” she insists, adding: “I never felt at any time that I was treated differently because I was a woman,” and “I never had to deal with inappropriate behaviour.” Perhaps she was just lucky, although she does give examples of patients who complained about being operated on by “a bit of a girl”, or the man who simply exclaimed, “Bloody hell, a woman!”

Although at times the book is something of a rather dry résumé of her career, it offers insights into the culture and perils of the operating theatre (she calls dangerous surgery “Tiger Country”). I would also have liked to have read more from such an eminent medical voice about why she now has “concerns for the welfare of the NHS”.  

In any case, Mansfield was undoubtedly a pioneer, and her memoir is a significant guide to life as a surgeon in 20th-century Britain. Although perhaps it is best for anyone about to go under the knife not to know that, during operations, some surgeons sometimes chat about how they grow vegetables.

‘Life in Her Hands: The Pioneering Career of One Female Surgeon’ by Averil Mansfield is published by Ebury Spotlight on 23 February, £20

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I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai ★★★★☆

The new novel from Rebecca Makkai – author of The Great Believers, winner of the Carnegie Medal and a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Award finalist – is the absorbing thriller I Have Some Questions for You.

The plot, influenced by the real-life conviction case of Adnan Syed, subject of the 2014 podcast Serial, is about the violent 1995 death of 17-year-old Thalia Keith at the “fancy” boarding school Granby, and whether the Black athletics coach Omar Evans has spent nearly a quarter of a century in jail for a crime he did not commit.

Successful film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane, a woman with her own tragic past, returns to Granby to teach and begins a personal quest to uncover what really happened to her troubled roommate Thalia, in part to deal with the “molten core of guilt” in her own soul over the original investigation.

As well as being a well-plotted crime tale, the novel has pertinent things to say about the fetishising of murder, about easy online outrage, and about people who insert themselves into someone else’s story. Thalia’s horrible fate is shown in the context of societal violence towards women – actor Rita Hayworth’s abuse and Clark Gable’s alleged “date rape” past feature – and the boarding-school setting allows Makkai to explore themes of friendship, teenage desire and insecurity, racism, the callousness of people in authority, the negligence of the state in crime investigations, and how respectability is a false cloak. I Have Some Questions for You also offers a thought-provoking re-evaluation of what was problematic about male behaviour in the 1990s in the light of the #MeToo scandals of the 21st century.

Although a couple of chapters sag a little, the novel successfully sustains attention over more than 400 pages, up to the stark ending around a trial in Covid-hit 2022. I Have Some Questions for You is engrossing, but it has some bleak truths to tell. As Bodie says, “How could any woman truly be shocked by predation?”

‘I Have Some Questions for You’ by Rebecca Makkai is published by Fleet on 23 February, £16.99