Reader reviews roundup

This week readers have travelled to Ireland, gone Romantic and raked over the ruins of empire

Julian6 has been to Ireland this week, with John McGahern's "quietly impressive" Memoir of life before the second world war ? a universe which "seems as remote from our lives as if it were two hundred years before".

This is a land held in the iron grip of the church, a theocracy where hierachy is all, and this permeates the lives of families like McGahern's: the father as the head - the mother as the heart.

McGahern shows us the "terrible rages" of his father Frank, a former IRA man "for whom violence towards his whole family is almost second nature". But according to julian6, McGahern's account is alive to the contradictions implicit in a society where the church can be at once "repressive", encouraging "abuses in the home and at school" and at the same time a "luminous beacon of hope".

While the depiction of childhood is "richly imagined in all its physicality and sensuous beauty", the second half of the book "seems more sketchy" before McGahern comes to a close that is "calm and softly elegiac". For julian6, "McGahern is a writer to admire but also to love."

LynnRobertsPoet has been examining Lynn Shepherd's A Treacherous Likeness, which sees detective Charles Maddox tangling with Romantics when he is engaged by Percy Bysshe Shelley's family to safeguard the reputation of the late poet.

It rapidly becomes evident, however, that beneath the burnish the metal is vilely dark and pitted by corrosive emotions.

The story moves between Charles and the bed-ridden Mary Shelley in the 1850s, LynnRobertsPoet continues, and Charles's great-uncle Maddox, who was employed by the Shelleys in 1816.

Maddox is plunged, despite himself, into the involved loves and hates of the Shelleys, Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Harriet Shelley, and the variously engendered offspring. He discovers a pit of interrelationships so dark, murderous, incestuously interwoven and infectious that he is hideously compromised and buries the whole matter ? until his great-nephew comes digging.

Bodies and dysfunction aplenty are uncovered in a fractured, multi-layered narrative which is "extraordinarily clever and satisfying", culminating in a resolution "which marries historical fact to themes in Shelley's own writing".

There may be a little too much in the way of coincidence for some, adds LynnRobertsPoet, but "only the most carping of critics would object to some extra smoke and mirrors in this imaginative castle".

And finally a brief hat-tip to Harry Dadswell, who heads over from the Cambridge Humanities Review to offer reviews of Mark Binelli's The Last Days of Detroit, Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India and Pankaj Mishra's "timely and welcome" From the Ruins of Empire.

According to Dadswell, Mishra turns swiftly from familiar figures such as "Gandhi, the future Atat�rk, Nehru, Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zedong" because he argues "many of Asia's more long-lasting political and intellectual tendencies originate in the theories of lesser-known Asian intellectuals".

The two main protagonists of this book, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), are figures largely unknown in the West outside specialist historical circles. Al-Afghani was a peripatetic intellectual and polemical journalist whose intellectual heritage has been claimed by everyone from pan-Islamists to left-wing secularists. Liang Qichao on the other hand was one of China's foremost intellectuals at the turn of the century, involved in the attempts to reform the late Qing dynasty and witnessing its subsequent collapse into the chaos of early Republican China.

Dadswell salutes Mishra's account of their lives, but laments his "two-dimensional" treatment of their ideas, arguing that the author is too concerned with "the question of how these intellectuals evaluated the west as a model"

Having proven his capabilities as a polemicist we can perhaps expect more from him as an intellectual historian.

Dadswell regrets Mishra's focus on the "the imperial age" and his leap to the present day, "leaving much of the intervening history of the post-imperial age evoked rather than explored". "Let us hope that this path-breaking work inspires others to follow in its wake," he says.

If you're inspired to follow in Dadswell's footsteps and add your own review to our ever-expanding database, then find the book of your choice and click on the button helpfully marked "Post your review". Or if we've mentioned your review here, get in touch with me at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk, and we'll send you a surprise from the cupboard.

Richard Lea

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/08/reader-book-reviews-roundup

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