Book reviews roundup: Fanny and Stella, The Engagement and The Return of a King
"M
cKenna has done a tremendous job of recreating Victorian London's gay subculture, weaving newspaper reports, police documents and contemporary diaries into a jolly and rollicking narrative... open a page at random, and you find yourself in a world of prostitutes, crossdressers and hermaphrodites." The Sunday Times's Dominic Sandbrook fell for Neil McKenna's "rich and absorbing" Fanny and Stella, his account of the trials for sodomy in Victorian times of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park: "I was rather distracted, meanwhile, by McKenna's habit of inserting long Mills-and-Boon passages ('He did not want Mary-Anns that night. He wanted real men, strong men ... Men who smelt like men') that presumably owe more to his imagination than to the documentary sources. All the same, Fanny and Stella is a cracking read. I never thought I would say that about a book that … devotes quite so much attention to anal warts." According to John Preston in the Evening Standard, "Dressing up in drag in the 19th century could be hazardous. Male transvestite prostitutes often wore false breasts made from boiled sheep's lungs. One, who took out his breasts when he went to bed, was surprised to find the next morning that they'd been eaten by his cat … You would need to be a very dull - or prim – dog indeed not to find this a terrifically entertaining story. Neil McKenna has thrown himself into it with unfettered glee."
Catherine Taylor in the Daily Telegraph described Chloe Hooper's new novel, The Engagement, about Liese, a British architect who gets involved in a disturbing sexual relationship with Alexander, a rich Australian, as "wholly disturbing": "It's a book of coercion and sexual games, fantasy and, yes, feminism, for those who prefer their erotic literature less Fifty Shades of Grey, more Jane Eyre". David Grylls in the Sunday Times argued that "it may be too subtle for its own success. Deliberately, it offers neither full-blown horror nor reader-I-married-him romance … this is a book about erotic games that is wholly unerotic in impact … Although it probably won't sell in large numbers, it should wow the classier reading groups." The Independent on Sunday's Doug Johnstone wasn't impressed with a "patchy, frustrating psychological thriller … let down by a narrator whose ongoing blindness to the danger in which she places herself becomes increasingly annoying, to the point where I felt it should more accurately have been titled The Enragement."
William Dalrymple's new book, The Return of a King, about the first Anglo-Afghan War, on the other hand, has been acclaimed everywhere and is selling well. Saul David in the Daily Telegraph called it "sparkling": "Dalrymple has written some marvellous books on the British in Asia but this, I think, is his best. Extensively researched (with much new material) and beautifully written, it covers the story from the perspective of both invaders and invaded." According to the Sunday Times's Max Hastings, the "sorry saga has been recounted many times, but never that I can recall as well as by Dalrymple. He is a master storyteller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers … Almost every page of Dalrymple's splendid narrative echoes with latter-day reverberations." Justin Marozzi in the Evening Standard agreed that "the parallels with Britain's ongoing intervention are irresistible and engrossing, frequently uncomfortable ... My only regret reading this wonderful history is that it was not published a decade earlier."