Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Arts, Books, Literature

Book Review: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule

Cartography has never been a neutral discipline. Maps offer a partial view of a landscape, informed by what the mapmaker wishes the reader to see. A colonising army will mark the features of the terrain that serves its purposes and exclude inconvenient signs of prior habitation. And they will do this in their own language.

“Land”, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, is set in Ireland in the 1860s. It has been more than a decade since the Great Hunger killed over a million people and forced an even higher number into exile, and the landscape is dotted with empty villages and over-full graves. Tomás – an Irish cartographer working for the British “redcoats” – and his young son, Liam, are charting a remote peninsula on the country’s west coast when Tomás has a sudden, revelatory experience at a pre-Christian holy spring.

What he encounters there inspires him to abandon his office job and counter the efforts of his erstwhile employers by drawing his own, dissident map of the area. It will reconstitute the terrain as its inhabitants understand it, in their language, honouring the communities that have been annihilated, the woods and waterways that rightly belong to them, and the old cultural landmarks the British have no use for.

The task, for Tomás, is personal: both he and his wife, Phina, were orphans of the Hunger, forced from their rural lives into urban workhouses. He moves his family from Dublin to the countryside as an act of reclamation and renewal. Phina, however, is more ambivalent. She worries about money now that her husband has foregone his regular salary, and about her daughters’ future prospects given that in their new village Catholic schooling is reserved for boys.

Like much of the author’s previous work, including her most famous, the 2020 book “Hamnet” – adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao – “Land” is a historical novel with O’Farrell’s signature interest in absorbing family relationships. The first half of the narrative sows the seeds of a defiant, multigenerational reckoning with the British Empire, and to an extent the Catholic Church. We encounter a windswept landscape; a menacing, nameless viscount; a kindly widow who represents all the grieving folk of the land; and a condescending priest. O’Farrell takes us on a lively deep dive into the land’s prehistory – a place of hill forts, druids, wanderers and wolfhounds, where virgins are ritually sacrificed to stave off bad weather.

Great period novels balance larger historical context with personal details and textures, and at first “Land” feels poised to do just that, deftly situating a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s centuries-long struggle against British rule.

But as the novel proceeds, this promise largely dissolves. Tomás’s cartographic ambitions, initially presented as the story’s engine, fall from focus as the story shifts to his children’s comings of age and their own varied relationships to the Irish diaspora across the British Empire.

Unfortunately, O’Farrell leaves these relationships and their wider ramifications mostly unexplored. Liam joins the Jesuits and travels as a missionary to South India, where he briefly considers the connection between his role and that of the British in Ireland, but ultimately loses his faith because of homesickness rather than any true engagement with the locals’ plight.

– A sweeping historical family saga set primarily in post-Famine Ireland. The novel blends themes of cartography, colonialism, family bonds, and the deep connection between people and the land

His sister Enda journeys to Quebec on an emigration permit she’s stolen from Liam, and struggles to make a living there as a domestic labourer and street musician. She meets her love interest in the immigration line: an Eastern European teacher turned cook who picks up work as a logger in the summers to make enough money to bring the rest of his family to Canada. But the novel pulls its punches when it comes to the parallels between deforestation in the Americas and that in Ireland.

Nonetheless, O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout, and there are some emotive and moving passages told from the perspective of Phina’s nonverbal youngest child, Eugene. But the problems with “Land” stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its core characters. They are all unimpeachably good. Tomás loses his grip on reality, and their other daughter, Rose, resents her siblings for leaving her behind on the peninsula; but the real darkness in the novel lies outside the family unit – with the redcoats, the viscount, and the church. The evils of imperialism do not require its victims, real or imagined, to be pure and incorruptible, especially when their own migrations make them the dominant presence in other colonies.

At its best, “Land” evokes weighty, time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s “Red Shift”, drawing associative lines across eras and grappling with the long afterlives of colonial violence. But there is no doubt it is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.

– Land by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Knopf (an imprint of Penguin), 384pp

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Arts, Books, China, History

Book Review: Mao

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The central argument of Brown’s thesis is that Mao was a ‘moderniser through destruction’. He believed that for a new China to be born, the old one had to be violently uprooted. The book suggests that while Mao’s methods were often catastrophic, the unified, assertive China we see today is an inescapable result of his reign

Kerry Brown writes that “Mao’s provocations… would have suited the world of social media and Twitter/X”. That’s a fertile observation. One could well imagine an @Mao account, or a podcast – The Chairman Mao Experience – attracting a huge and hungry following.

Mao Zedong was, after all, a famed dispenser of earthy aphorisms. He told an astonished hall in 1959: “Comrades… if you have to s—, s—! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.” He was obsessed not so much with state-building as with the more intimate endeavour of moulding minds. “Simple slogans, cartoons, and speeches”, he wrote, “have produced… a widespread and speedy effect among the peasants.” Social media would have been a central platform for his rhetoric.

Even in death, Mao trips us up. In the half a century since his passing in 1976, biographers and historians of China have failed to reach consensus on what drove him, what degree of responsibility he bears for the tragedies of the early People’s Republic, and what his contributions were to the wealthy and successful China of 2026. He ran the country for 27 years, yet remained an enigma – associated, at various times in his life, with violence and mercy, Confucianism, and techno-utopianism. In his new biography Mao, Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College, London, all but emits a sigh, surveying the task ahead: “Getting a clear sight of who Mao was… presents a massive challenge.”

Some early signs provide pointers. Young Mao, born in imperial China in 1893, was fiercely opposed to the ruling “Simple slogans, cartoons, and speeches”; yet, he was schooled in the Confucian classics, and was impressed by the importance of self-cultivation. It was a short hop from self-cultivation to the cultivation of others’ selves – in particular those of the vast mass of China’s peasantry, whose loyalty and labour were required for revolution.

Mao came to believe that Marxism offered the best blueprint for achieving this. Russia’s Bolsheviks had shown that what Brown calls “an enlightened vanguard of activists” armed with a simple critique of present injustices could rally the masses to their cause. The people of Hunan province, where Mao built his early political base, possessed, in his estimation, “no brains, no ideals, and no basic plan”. Changing that required, in Brown’s words, “the framing of social relations in elemental terms as a struggle between… two great forces”. One only had to exchange Marxism’s “capitalists” with “landlords” for China’s peasants to raise their gaze beyond their own fields and throw themselves into collective action. Mao deployed night-schools and propaganda to this end, providing just enough education to create a biddable mass that would “rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power… [would] be able to hold it back”.

Compromise was not in Mao’s DNA. In 1921, while still a marginal figure in the party, he attended the fabled first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. The location, then in the city’s French concession, is today regarded in China as sacred ground, festooned (the author tells us) with TV screens and interactive guides. And yet: so disillusioned was Mao by the CCP’s pragmatic decision to forge a temporary alliance with the Chinese Nationalists that he boycotted its second congress in 1922. (In later years, he would pretend he’d done no such thing, and only failed to locate the address where the meeting was being held.)

Mao once declared that revolution is “not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery . . . a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence where one class overthrows another”. Brown takes the reader on the wild ride that was Mao’s life in the 1930s and 1940s: his quick return to the fold, the rise of the CCP, its fight against Japanese invaders, then all-out civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists – whom Mao had driven out of China and into Taiwan by the end of 1949, thus establishing Communist rule.

Then comes the perplexing mix of success and tragic failure that were the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Greatest of all disasters was the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, during which a staggering 50 million people may have died (reliable statistics are impossible to come by). How to explain the gargantuan folly of setting up backyard steel furnaces in villages across the country, producing shoddy tools and utensils, while people were left eating tree bark and raw wheat?

Prof. Brown points us towards “Mao Zedong Thought”, the “philosophy” that seems to have turned on a terrifying sense of China’s population as an expendable means towards utopian ends. Those village furnaces might have claimed untold lives – consuming farmers’ tools and time when they should have been tending their fields – but for Mao they were a symbol of Chinese modernity. A nuclear exchange would be regrettable, but China had so many people that no enemy could possibly kill them all. Food aid was offered to China’s neighbours during the height of the famine, because you can’t put a price on projecting an air of progress. Brown wonders whether Mao understood economics at all – whether “capitalism” was, to him, little more than “a term of abuse or criticism for those he regarded as… enemies, rather than something [of which] he had a clear understanding”.

Brown is like a trustworthy tour guide, knowledgeable and clear, but not always sure which sights we most need to see. Digressions into the lives and thinking of other figures occasionally takes up space that might have been better used in rounding out our sense of the chairman himself. Writing about a figure like Mao isn’t easy; but readers may still find themselves hankering after a more vivid personal portrait, alongside answers to some of the questions thrown up by Mao and Maoism.

For instance, important aspects of Mao’s private life are passed over rather quickly. He was often consumed by what might now be described as anxiety and low mood, over fears of his rivals plotting and scheming against him. He withdrew from public life for long periods at a time before returning with fresh and deadly energy – most famously at the time of The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. And while we must be wary of sensationalism, it seems clear that Mao had a fondness for young women, especially during his later life. All these things might be mined for insights about one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century.

Similarly, we read about the extraordinary violence of the Cultural Revolution without being helped to understand what could make people do such things. So-called “sent-down-youth” from urban China were forced out into the countryside “to seek lived experiences of the revolution”. The results extended to forced marriage, rape, and even murder at the hands of rural Chinese who were fearful that their food and resources were under threat. Mao was the prime instigator and orchestrator of this infamous episode in Chinese history, alluding at the outset to the utopian potential of “disorder” under heaven.

Were Mao’s pathologies poisoning a nation, or coaxing to the surface its darkest inclinations? Brown is surely correct when he says that “it is hard to work out the psychology of a man who was almost constantly calculating and balancing different forces around him”. Still, a tighter curating of key moments and insights plus some judicious speculation might have helped the analysis in this book be more cohesive and compelling. As it is – and in fairness, perhaps this is true to the nature of the chairman – Mao Zedong risks once again slipping through our fingers.

– Mao by Kerry Brown is published by Reaktion, 272pp

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Arts, Books, Philosophy, Politics

Book Review: For the People

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Democracy is in crisis – no thanks to arrogant liberals like AC Grayling. From Brexit to religion, this pompous and insulting philosopher has made a career out of telling the public why they’re wrong. His latest polemic’s a case in point

AC Grayling, a former professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, is a warhorse of progressive liberalism. He has campaigned for many years in favour of human rights, drug legislation, voting reform, euthanasia, and against war crimes. He is staunchly anti-Brexit and a militant atheist.

Like many people, Grayling is unhappy with the state of the world. Everywhere he looks, there are perils: war, inequality, democratic backsliding, Donald Trump. Things just aren’t going as he would like with authoritarians on the march and liberals in retreat. “Humanity is still at an infantile stage,” he laments. No one respects university professors anymore.

His latest book, For the People, sees Grayling writing in defence of liberal democracy, and in defiance of Vladimir Putin, Chinese communism, and even the populace of Clacton-on-Sea.

His basic contention is that democracy is under threat around the world. It’s losing ground at home to a cocktail of indifference and hostility, and overseas to actual authoritarianism. There are four basic issues: democracy is bleeding moral authority among its own citizens (by repeatedly disappointing voters); it’s too hospitable to big business and oligarchy (allowing “big companies and wealthy individuals… to have a vote equal to millions of other people’s votes”); it’s confronted by the rise of authoritarians in China and Russia (who make it seem like a loser’s doctrine); and it’s assailed from within by a wilfully anti-democratic new kind of politics (“populism”, which floods the minds of voters with fear and propaganda). The reader is left to contemplate the possibility of “the end of the democratic moment in history”.

There’s nothing immediately objectionable here. Grayling is correct that global democracy is in retreat and decline, and correct that this should concern all of us – and deeply. His own remedies, however, have serious flaws. The most immediate is that the publication is incredibly boring. The vision of liberal democracy that Grayling proffers is colourless and tedious. His ideal seems both to involve interminably hard work – “The price of liberty is eternal engagement,” he pens in his best schoolmasterly voice – and narrow in what it offers us. If one describable vision of a democratic commons is that of a boisterous public square full of dissent and babble, For the People proposes something more like a seminar of legal academics to which the voting public have been grudgingly invited in a non-speaking capacity.

Not coincidentally, the same is true of Grayling’s style: figureless, monochrome, and almost baroque in its repetition. One of the book’s two (rather odd) appendices comprises a report from the human rights group Council of Europe on the threat posed by the far-Right that runs to nearly 40 pages. Readers who enjoy this kind of ponderous document will find themselves very much at home among Grayling’s prose.

This brings us to the second major problem with Grayling’s book. The thrust of his title promises to save democracy, but it is with liberalism that he is truly concerned. For Grayling, the two are all but congruent; liberal democracy, we are told, is “a pleonasm: the two words in the phrase are practically synonyms”. This view is by no means the self-evident one Grayling pretends it is. There have been liberal states which were not really democracies – Britain before the Great Reform Act, for instance – and contemporary scholars often describe the rise of figures such as Trump as marking an abandonment of liberal norms via democratic mechanisms.

– Grayling argues that the current political systems in many Western nations have been hallowed out, leaving them vulnerable to populism, elite capture, and the ‘tyranny of the majority’

Where this book goes really off the rails, however, is in its insistence that rule of law, and thus liberalism, essentially exists on a higher plane than that of mere politics. The rule of law, for Grayling, is the “ethical” aspect of the state: it gives character to politics (voting, lawmaking), rather than politics giving character to law. What this means is not just that political actors shouldn’t break the law, but that the basic shape of that law is sacrosanct (and is not to be changed even by majority will). To make such a change, Grayling thinks, would be to fall for the “majoritarian fallacy”. It would injure both the minority who disagree and the majority who want the change; the law is what’s best for everyone, whether they like it or not.

There are shades here of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the “general will”, described in The Social Contract of 1762. Rousseau’s general will is not the majority view of a state’s citizens; it is “not so much the number of voices, as it is the common interest which unites them”. If an individual has “a particular will contrary to or different from the general will”, Rousseau writes, the latter will overrule the former: “He will be forced to be free.”

Grayling makes much of this “common” or “best” interest, in contrast to majority opinion, by which he means the interests of those he considers stupid. “Too many,” he writes, “have a vote that can be manipulated by orchestrated misinformation and misdirection to make choices that are not in their best interests.” The public, alas, are still in that “infantile stage”. Grayling is no doubt thinking here of the Brexit referendum, the outcome of which he bitterly opposed and continues to insist should have been ignored. Yet, he campaigned enthusiastically for a “People’s Vote”, and presumably would have accepted any majority opting to rejoin the EU. The intellectual arrogance of this is ludicrous.

And it is here we have the third and greatest problem with Grayling’s position. Only a very strange form of democracy would insist that it can tell you your business, or that your own sense of your interests is wrong. When we read, then, that “the purpose of democratic government is to serve the best interests of all”, it sounds pleasant enough, until you ask the author: who will decide what my interests are? Grayling’s answer to this question is simple: AC Grayling. “The interests of the people are not hard to identify,” he declaims. But here’s the thing: they are. This is why politics exists.

At the same time, Grayling is suspiciously vague as to how your “best interests” and mine become known. There’s an appeal to JS Mill’s “harm principle” hidden away in an endnote, and a suggestion that Britain, just like Bhutan, should replace GDP with GNH (Gross National Happiness) when assessing social wellbeing; both actions suggest some utilitarian arithmetic. Suffice to say that this is not a new debate. Moral philosophers have for centuries sustained an endless back-and-forth argument about utilitarianism, the “hedonic calculus” – Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century formula for working out how much happiness an action creates – and the plausibility of gauging happiness at the collective level and whether that is possible at all.

Grayling has an utterly blasé indifference to the fact that, for most people, most of the time, their “best interests” are not their only ones. They might not even be that important. Interests in love, in adventure, in faith, in simple curiosity: these may not reliably make us happy, but they’re central to the creatures we are. For the People dissolves this vitality into a tepid brew of committee-approved “best interests”, a safetyism of the soul. Grayling’s democracy is relentlessly boring. It lacks imagination.

Of course, liberal democracy needs defenders; but it needs better defenders than this. Grayling’s world would be a drab, antiseptic thing, where everyone gets just what the doctor ordered and your freedom would be so perfectly calibrated that you couldn’t really do anything with it. There’s no place here for despair or desire, for rebellion, ambivalence, or intrigue. Those things aren’t good for you, and Grayling has told you so. But what if the people want something else? Maybe some people just don’t want to be happy.

– For the People is published by Oneworld, 288pp

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