Critical eye: book reviews roundup
After bestselling accounts of D-Day and the battles for Stalingrad and Berlin, could Antony Beevor rise to the challenge of chronicling the entire war of which they were a part? And how would he measure up when compared with rival historians of the conflict, such as Max Hastings and Andrew Roberts? The most positive early verdict on Beevor's 860-page The Second World War came from the Spectator's Ian Thomson, who hailed an "exceptionally powerful book" that "has something of the ambitious sweep and narrative verve of Hastings and more besides". In the Financial Times, Tony Barber applauded "an example of intelligent, lively historical writing at its best" for carrying out the difficult task of "capturing the interplay between the momentous events unfolding on different continents and the high seas"; but he found the author's touch "less sure" on the combatants' war economies, and suggested "some may find Beevor harsh on the leadership qualities of Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill". The Independent on Sunday's Roger Moorhouse praised "a splendid book, erudite, with an admirable clarity of expression": but noted regretfully that it "appears to lack some of the pizzazz of his earlier offerings". Least emollient was the Sunday Times's Dominic Sandbrook, who said "the book does not have the impact of its predecessors", partly because Beevor's method is "better suited to individual episodes than a vast, globe-spanning conflict", and also because "the military history of the second world war has become so crushingly, exhaustingly overfamiliar".
"Paul Theroux's latest bulletin on the state of Africa is, to put it mildly, not an encouraging one," wrote James Walton in his Daily Mail review of The Lower River, in which Ellis Hook, a sexagenarian American divorcee, returns to the village in Malawi where he taught in the 60s. Walton judged it "a proper novel, rather than a disguised travelogue", but one leaving an "overwhelming impression … of a disillusionment with Africa that borders on despair". While conceding there was some "terrific writing", the London Evening Standard's John Preston complained that The Lower River "never hardens into dramatic focus … There isn't really enough material here to sustain a novel. Instead, it reads like a distended short story – and a pretty predictable one at that". In contrast to Walton's lukewarm approval and Preston's ennui, the Sunday Telegraph's Mark Sanderson invoked Conrad and Waugh in asserting that "Theroux has never written a better novel", mentioning its "hilarious" comic scenes and the "trademark precision" of the landscape descriptions.
Reviewers of John Irving's In One Person were similarly divided, with those with thumbs down represented by the New York Times's Janet Maslin, for whom it was a windy, shapeless "book about what it means to be bisexual, famous, writerly and afflicted with whatever tics and whimsies plague the characters in all 12 of Mr Irving's previous novels". Irving's "blunt politicking for full understanding of gay and transgendered identity sits uncomfortably with his zany side", she argued. "It's hard to fathom how these extremes exist in one person at all." Typifying the thumbs-up faction were the Times's Tim Teeman, who acclaimed a "wonderful novel … an epic, moving survey of 70 years of sexual revolution", and the FT's David Evans, who discerned order where others found incoherence in enthusing that Irving "has rarely written with the gorgeous poise and control he musters here".