BOOK OF THE WEEK
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton
THE skeleton of this novel is loss. Every moment, every scene, flutters around the sensation, and drives the next, so you are drawn inexorably onwards as the characters – a motley bunch of broken-hearted renegades and misfits – go about reclaiming land, feelings, rights, power and family, little by little; and it's astonishing. Twenty years have passed since Roy's debut novel, the Man Booker Prize-winning The God Of Small Things, and in the intervening decades she has been writing contentious essays on India's troubled, and troubling, political system. The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness mines her research, and delicately braids together strands of the brutal, toxic Kashmir conflict, with the difficulties faced by a community of hijra (transgender people, who are now recognised as the 'third gender' in Indian law) and the fate of a baby abandoned on a rubbish-strewn street. Roy's use of language is beautiful and inventive, and often so stunningly evocative that you forgive her when the politics become knotty and tangled. It's no fluffy beach read; it's rich, powerful and deeply upsetting at times. Roy demands your mind and time, and the rewards are huge.
Ella Walker
Phone by Will Self, published in hardback by Viking
AFTER Shark and Umbrella, Phone completes Will Self's high modernist trilogy. Among other things, Phone is a tale of the limitations of technology, the insights of schizophrenia, the abuses of modern warfare, and of a clandestine love affair between M15 spook Jonathan De'ath and Gawain Thomas, a tank commander serving in Tony Blair's Iraq. We also meet again Zack Busner, the ageing psychiatrist and recurring Self character, along with his extended family. For a long time it's hard to see how all of these characters interrelate, but they do all get pulled together in the end, sort of. The centre of the novel focuses on a series of tautly written, grittily credible scenes in which Thomas's weakness as a military manager allows a group of Iraqi detainees to be abused by their British squaddie guards. De'ath the spook arrives to mop up the mess. The book's endless puns and allusions, its recherche lexicon and swamping cleverness give it a sort of brittle, parodic style. Some of the plot points lack credibility, and there are techno-mystical riffs aplenty. But then again, this is a Will Self novel; what else would you expect?
Dan Brotzel
NON-FICTION
Al-Brittania, My Country: A Journey Through Muslim Britain by James Fergusson, published in hardback by Bantam Press
IF ISLAMIST terrorism drove James Fergusson to start writing this book, it was moderate Islam he uncovered on his year-long journey around Britain researching it. Britain's rapid increase in its Muslim population since 2001 has created consternation among policy makers and newspaper proprietors through each successive year. And yet Fergusson, a long-time foreign correspondent and contributor for papers including The Independent and The Daily Mail, uncovers a diverse and proudly British Muslim community – not without its problems, but largely downtrodden by successively inept government attempts to make it assimilate. Flagship counter-terrorism measures such as Prevent get scathing feedback from interviewees, as are similarly poor educational wrangles in densely-populated Muslim areas like Birmingham. The relationship between British Islamism and terrorism is more complicated: as Fergusson notes, many of the Muslim-majority areas he explores are ridden with extreme poverty, and a governmental shift in attitude towards multiculturalism in the wake of the 2015 Tunisian attacks has only served to further isolate those at risk of extremist ideologies. Fergusson's travelogue is a triumph of detail, and doesn't fail in its mission to ask hard questions of all concerned parties.
Peter Cary
CHILDREN'S
Knighthood For Beginners by Elys Dolan, published in paperback by Oxford University Press
AUTHOR and illustrator Elys Dolan (Steven Seagull Action Hero) has penned her first young fiction book – an epic David vs Goliath tale, that's sure to treat imaginations and tickle funny bones. Dave is a dragon who's rubbish at being a dragon. In fact, he's the first dragon ever to fail his Dragon Certificate, which involves hoarding gold, digesting villages and... knitting. He stumbles on a book called Knighthood For Beginners and decides he'd rather be a knight than a dragon. As the book instructs, he finds a trusty steed in the form of adventurous goat Albrecht, who manages to win a suit of armour from a small knight to make Dave look the part. The duo are soon imprisoned by towering knight Sir Gnasty, who is plotting to overthrow the King, and manage to escape up a drain into the King's toilet. Dolan has packed 200 pages full of comic-strip illustrations, that fit seamlessly in with the words of her short chapters, making it a fun and speedy read. At it's heart, it's a story of friendship, finding your strengths and the love of books.
Kate Whiting
