A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal
Diana and Michael Preston
Najla Al Owais wrote to tell us how this history of the Taj Mahal captured her imagination. She gives it a perfect score: five out of five.
‘There is something remarkable about reading a well-written history book. Oh, you must know the feeling. You find it hard to come back to reality. You walk around for days wishing desperately for a time machine in your basement. You look at things and say, “Gosh, that would have been different in so-and-so’s time.” I’ve spent the past week reading the story of the Taj Mahal and have been so mesmerised by it that it’s all I can talk about.
‘The book follows the Moguls’ rule in India, from when Babur first ruled until Aurangzeb, while giving special emphasis on the Taj Mahal, that majestic architecture of eternal love. Let’s see: did you know there have been accounts that Shah Jahan (the ruler who built the Taj for his wife) intended to build a similar mausoleum for himself across the river from the Taj, only he wanted it to be black? Also, during the British rule of India, a lot of the garden plans were changed, and a lot of the precious stones used to decorate the Taj were looted.
‘While I cannot judge its historical accuracy, since this is the first book I have read about India and the Moguls, I have certainly enjoyed it. The book is so reader-friendly and captivating that it really is impossible to put down. I highly recommend it to those interested in either history or India.’
Published by Corgi. Dhs68, available at Magrudy’s.
Chalcot Crescent
Fay Weldon
3/5
‘Two years after I was born,’ writes Fay Weldon in a preface to this witty but frequently frustrating novel, ‘my mother had a miscarriage.’ So Weldon imagines the life of the younger sister she never had, and the result is Chalcot Crescent.
It is 2013. As 80-year-old Frances Prideaux hides from the bailiffs in her house in Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, she reminisces about her roles as wife, lover, mother and once-successful novelist. A lot has happened in an alarmingly short time: following the Shock, the Crunch and the Crisis, the UK has endured the Recovery, the Squeeze and the Bite; witnessed the fall of capitalism and the rebirth of nationalism; and is now governed by the sinister National Unity Government.
Weldon is no Orwell, but neither is she any slouch when it comes to evoking a tangible sense of claustrophobia and foreboding. Frances’ paranoia swells to epic proportions: is her grandson really a terrorist staging a political coup? Is her daughter at risk of assassination? Is there a more gruesome story behind the National Meat Loaf?
As Frances’ suspicions deepen, the distinction between fact and fiction blurs – at one point she even fears she has fallen victim to her own ‘overheated imagination’. It’s ironic that her creator does not always share this appetite for invention: Frances’ story frequently reads as a Weldon autobiography with the names changed. And while Frances cuts a convincing, complex figure, at turns acerbic and endearing, nobody else gets this five-star treatment. The other characters are plentiful and diverse, but they suffer from the author’s neglect and frequently descend into cliché.
Still, Weldon’s trademark humour ensures that despite the flaws and the apocalyptic visions, the feel is more playful than prophetic. At least let’s hope so… otherwise we’re all doomed.
Alexandra Masters.
Corvus Dhs85 Available to order from Magrudy’s.
Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
Brian Dillon
4/5
Dillon’s expedition into the borderland between the personal and the cultural begins with the writer’s own experience of hypochondria but quickly moves on, as Dillon chooses nine classic cases from history and extrapolates fascinating insights into illness, emotion and the tricky business of bodily existence.
He proceeds chronologically, starting with the depressive James Boswell before picking off a batch of neurotic/dyspeptic/melancholic Victorians: Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin, Henry James’s daughter Alice and a German called Daniel Paul Schreber who suffered from such colourful delusions (among others, that ‘little men’ were pumping out his spinal fluid and expelling it in clouds through his mouth) that he became the posthumous subject of a famous study by Sigmund Freud. Finally Dillon moves into the angst-ridden 20th century and the cases of Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.
Dillon is not too squeamish to recount the full pathological detail of his subjects’ physical and mental illnesses, but neither is he in the freak-show business; on the contrary, as well as communicating great sympathy for their anxieties and delusions, he’s interested in how these lives convey what exactly hypochondria is. In many of his case studies, illness is a way of exerting various kinds of control; in others, notably the extraordinary Shreber, there is a philosophical aspect to their mind/body disjunction. Above all, Dillon carefully unpicks the knots that bind the physical suffering of these brainy, high-achieving writers, artists and thinkers to their intellectual output. For many of them, indeed, the straitjacket of illness created exactly the environment they needed to let their creativity fly free.
Lisa Mullen.
Penguin Dhs124 Available to order from Magrudy’s.
A Week in December
Sebastian Faulks
3/5
December 2008 and the world is going to hell: a hedge-fund manager sets out to destroy a vulnerable bank while his son succumbs to drug-induced psychosis; a young suicide bomber plots to blow up a hospital while his father prepares to meet the Queen; an innocent tube driver is accused of negligence while a sour book reviewer gets a taste of literary immortality. Apparently unconnected lives collide in this big, brash satire, which is amped up to match the shouty urban din it satirises. It’s a novel that smashes snake-oil capitalism into the guts of suicide jihadism; blows genetically modified herbal smoke into the gurning face of reality TV; and throws a semi-literate self-made chutney millionaire into the jaws of an intellectual pitbull.
It’s fair to say that Faulks goes on a bit at times, ventriloquising great chunks of research through the mouths of his ciphers. But some of his insights are right on the money, particularly when he climbs down from the soapbox and peers into the little details of city life: the crazed cyclists playing chicken with traffic; the torturous competitive thinness of a certain kind of status-obsessed middle-aged woman; the way the super-rich have so colonised parts of cities that they are closed off, never thinking about, let alone meeting, anyone outside their microcosm.
The book barely touches on all those things that make London beautiful: its variety of people, cultures, pleasures, the irrepressible rhythm of its ever-beating heart. These qualities are implied, though, in what is missing from his characters’ sterile lives. And they’ll still be there, Faulks suggests, when – or should that be if? – the madness passes.
Lisa Mullen.
Hutchinson Dhs72 Available from Magrudy’s.
