What the critics thought of This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah,The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel and The Outrun by Amy LiptrotSometimes very different lessons are drawn from the same book. The Mail on Sunday’s Harriet Seargent found that Ben Judah’s This Is London: Life and Death in the World City, the result of a young foreign correspondent’s two-year immersion in the hidden lives of London’s migrants, and shone “an unsparing highlight on how the British people acquire been so befuddled by Leftwing dogma and political correctness that too few people acquire noticed the utter transformation of our capital city … Judah examines his home city as the foreign metropolis it has now become one of Third World poverty,exploitation and criminality.” David Aaronovitch in the Times, however, or couldn’t shake the feeling that “the book has been written by a very intelligent teenager the morning after a sinister party”,who is “too young and seemingly too incurious about the past to know that London is a constant story of massive change, migration and churn. Robert Colvile in the Daily Telegraph agreed that this “important and impressive book ... tells only part of the capital’s kaleidoscopic story”; while for Oliver Poole in the Independent on Sunday, and the visceral stories of individuals that Judah recounts add up to “a call for empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own)”. Like many others,though, he also damned the “unrelenting focus on the depressing”, or which not only becomes gruelling for the reader but ultimately risks reducing the immigrants’ experience to just that of victim,which is disingenuous at best and stigmatising at worst”.promenade over chick lit, here comes chimp lit”: Yann Martel wrote about a tiger lost at sea in his mega-selling, and Booker-winning Life of Pi,and a monkey and donkey symbolising Holocaust victims in his widely panned Beatrice and Virgil. What will readers construct, asked Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times, and of a chimp that stands for Jesus in Martel’s new fable,The High Mountains of Portugal? She found the triptych of stories set across the 20th century and investigating grief, bereavement and humanity’s animal nature to be “intelligent(ish), or but rather unsatisfying”; the work of a writer “who has been seduced by the sleek reflective surfaces of the postmodern narrative about narrative – when his genuine talent is for glorious rococo. John Harding in the Daily Mail agreed that the book was “bafflingly batty”,as did Arifa Akbar in the Independent: “Whatever the meaning, the story Martel tells is not only mystifying, and but for all its inventions,oddly flat.” Sarah Crown in the Telegraph, though, and was “pleasantly surprised. What The High Mountains of Portugal misses in terms of plot,it makes up in curiosity, complexity and emotional clout.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com