Flying high

The Last Kestrel

By Jill McGivering

It would be easy to dismiss McGivering’s debut novel as ‘me-too lit’. She and her publishers spotted the success of The Kite Runner and, driven by McGivering’s personal experiences as a frontline war correspondent, hatched a plan to produce another book about Afghanistan for Western readers. This approach may indeed be what happened. But the product nevertheless surpasses any cynical design the audience may wish to infer.

A beautiful journey

My Beautiful Genome

By Lone Frank

Although scientists have been studying genes for decades, the consumer genomics industry is only just finding its feet. A rash of companies have rushed into the market over recent years. They offer all sorts of genome services, from tracing your ancestors through to your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s and even genetic-match dating.

So real you can smell the blood

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is an extraordinary book. Friends of literature know its claim to fame – journalism with a novelist’s approach – but the experience of reading it is much more profound than a simple tagline. In bringing together the two worlds of reportage and fiction, Capote is clearly a talented interviewer, researcher and writer. Most of us are blessed if we can succeed in just one of those roles.

The book tells the story of how two young men robbed and murdered a family in a small American town in 1959. In my opinion, Capote’s account is so compelling for focusing on two areas: the shockwaves sent through the community by this awful event, and the psychological profiles of the two killers. Let’s take the first focus. The voices of the community are one of the most memorable aspects of this book, whether it’s the hard line taken by the postmistress or the devastation of the victims’ friends. You can hear these characters as real people. Indeed they are so well drawn that you hit a paradox: they are as well characterised as a novel’s protagonists, which the writer has invented and spent time bending to his will – and yet these are flesh-and-blood people who did indeed live through the nightmare that struck this small community. Capote, then, has a talent for conducting a great interview and then capturing it within his text.

Now let’s turn to his portrayal of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote’s masterstroke is his decision not to reveal their motive early on. By doing so, he creates tension and chills. The killers are characterised so perfectly that you feel what they feel, even to the extent of being able to understand how they could come to commit such an awful crime. Capote delves into their respective histories and uses them to craft a chilling portrayal of the pair of them. Their statements – reproduced at length towards the end of the book – are compelling. It’s like reading a detective’s files. In fact, it’s better: it’s like interviewing murder suspects yourself and hearing their ghastly admissions.

One criticism of the book is that Capote fails to convey the killers’ long wait to execution. His attempt includes telling the stories of a few other death-row inmates, but this detracts from the tight story he has told until that point. I can understand why he might want to stretch out the close, as it happened in real life, but he doesn’t quite achieve what I suspect he wanted to. But that is a minor blot on an exquisite canvas. I suspect that In Cold Blood will remain an important book for some time.

Sexism is alive and well

Living Dolls: the return of sexism

By Natasha Walter

For as long as I can remember, I have been alive to the fact that, in Western society’s eyes, people are not created equal. I wasn’t around during even the second-wave of feminism, but I knew that people were still discriminated against due to their sex or gender. So I came to Walter not for affirmation, but examples, analysis and explanation.

At first I felt that she was providing only examples. A great deal of this book – especially in the first half – is exposition. For instance, Walter describing a typical night in an Essex nightclub in which the girls are invited on stage to pose for Nuts magazine; Walter interviewing former strippers; Walter describing the girls’ pink and glittery section of the toy shop. Walter described all these encounters – many of which shocked me – in neat and concise prose. Her writing is cast by Walter’s scepticism: naturally, she cannot describe a girl’s wanting to be a pink princess without a dose of cynicism in her language. While some of these accounts were gripping, they were not what I came for. I wanted insight. I craved objective analysis – especially after Walter had opened my eyes further.

Eventually it came, and it was worth the wait. I still can’t help but imagine what this polemic would have been like if Walter analysed every encounter she had while describing it to us or, in any case, if her analysis came closer to a description of something problematic. But her decision to keep the exposition and analysis mostly separate is nevertheless an intriguing one. I suppose in the very least it left me really hungry for the analysis when it did come.

And I have to say that I found her arguments compelling, persuasive and well made. I had found the ‘pink princess’ approach to girls’ toys rather tasteless, but I always thought that that had been down to the fact that I’m a boy or a grown-up or a bigger fan of other colours – or a republican. But now I feel I have some substantive reasons for not liking it. Walter puts the ‘pink princess’ phenomenon in context, plots its development relative to other narrow representations of women and shows what it does for the developing psychology of a young girl. The realisation that, in the extreme, a modern girl is essentially building her identity through medieval values (entitlement, privilege, dependence, and the wait for a prince to take over the role of provision from her father) is shocking. My second surprise is Walter’s explanation of how the media’s sexualisation of women affects us all. She breaks down the notion that now women who choose to strip or pose in a lads’ mag are empowered.

I think she could have developed this argument more, but nevertheless her examples speak for themselves. The women she meets, who chose to strip, describe how it is not empowering at all. And the girls she interviews, perhaps most crushing of all, explain how they want to be glamour models. Walter craftily weaves example and analysis together here when she positions these girls against her argument that sexualised representations of women in the media present very narrow choices for young girls. Girls who see glamour models all the time think that the models’ bodies are the ‘ideal’ body types: they work towards achieving this or become depressed that they don’t have it. And Walter drives home her point with statements from her interviewees (one very compelling 17-year-old included) who feel that that is exactly what these representations do: present very persuasive but narrow choices.

The great thing about Walter and this book, by the way, is that she doesn’t suggest for one moment that internet porn turns all men into dangerous sex obsessives or all women into subservient performers; her arguments are much more nuanced. To that extent, I could have done with a broader analysis. That is, the affect of sexism’s return on men. Walter mentions men superficially, but more insight would have been welcome. Perhaps that is another book, though; Living Dolls remains concise, tight and expertly argued.

A soaring science book

Dragonfly – the terrifying story of Mir, Earth’s first outpost in space

By Bryan Burrough

As a boy, I had always been under the impression that NASA astronaut Michael Foale was from the same part of the world as me. I knew him to be from Louth, a village not far from my own hometown of Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire. I am sure that the Grimsby Telegraph described him as a local lad. Foale’s humble beginnings filled me with admiration and gave me a connection to outer space when he served aboard the space shuttles and Mir. However, it turns out that Foale grew up the son of an RAF man and an American woman. The family moved around a lot – Foale’s childhood included only a stint at an air force base in Lincolnshire.

This is one of the many difficult truths Burrough reveals in his compelling book about the joint American-Russian missions aboard the space station Mir in the mid-nineties. I am sure that Burrough didn’t perceive Foale’s background to be a major factor for his reader, but it resurrected in me the passion I had for space as a boy. Burrough has filled his book with the wonder, joy and admiration I haven’t felt for years: towards astronauts, engineers, scientists, pilots and the programmes that pull them all together. Burrough’s book trips along through the intricacies of the bumbling shuttle-Mir programme, an unlikely alliance between the strangest of bedfellows – the Americans and Russians. As a skilled journalist, Burrough gained access to every single important voice, from the ground crews to the political administrators and even the astronauts themselves. I can tell that Burrough put in weeks and weeks of research time in interviewing them and crawling through files and Mir-to-Earth communications records.

From all of this he has crafted a gripping account, centred around the fire, the so-called Near Miss and the almost-fatal collision when the space shuttle Progress struck Mir and tore a whole in its frail shell. The courage and smarts of the people who patched up Mir is astounding, but not half as intriguing as Burrough’s representation of the bickering and political point-scoring behind the scenes. Here lies Burrough’s real story. Here his talent shines. What an immense achievement.