From Dan Jones to William Boyd: new books reviewed in short (original) (raw)

Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China by Jack Weatherford

By the end of the 13th century, the Mongols ruled the largest empire in history, stretching from China to eastern Europe. The man largely responsible was Genghis Khan but it was his grandson, Kublai Khan, who matched these land gains by ones at sea. He turned a polity that originated in nomadic tribes from landlocked central Asia into an unparalleled maritime superpower.

Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist and specialist in Mongol history, is an informed and lively guide to this extraordinary transformation. Kublai understood that control of the sea was vital and used his navy not just to finish off the Song dynasty at the Battle of Yamen in 1279 but subsequently to build and safeguard what Weatherford calls a “Silk Road of the Sea” by which men, arms and goods could be transported as far as the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. The size of Kublai’s fleets was staggering: for the invasion of Japan in 1281 he mustered 4,400 ships carrying some 140,000 men (the Spanish Armada of 1588 numbered 150 vessels). Under Kublai, ships brought not just trade, but shock and awe.
By Michael Prodger
Bloomsbury, 368pp, £25. Buy the book

Warsaw Tales translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the unsuccessful Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, which was followed by 44 years of Soviet rule after the fall of the Third Reich. The translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s collection of 12 short stories and non-fiction texts, Warsaw Tales, includes Polish household names such as Bolesław Prus and the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s first ever English-language publication of “Che Guevara”. Focusing on distinct neighbourhoods, each story paints a vivid picture of Warsaw’s tumultuous interwar period as a republic, through rebuilding under communism to the country’s independence in 1989.

A sense of a unified front against adversity is central to every story. It is the dramatic history that shapes the Varsovians, fictitious or not, and the capital’s permanence amid revised street names and varied political regimes. Warsaw Tales is a guide to the capital, past and present. Although each story escorts the reader through the districts, there is one street that comes up regularly, Nowy Świat Street – New World Street – the main, historic thoroughfare of Warsaw. Though the city was made anew time and again, the authors show that it is its recurrent rebirths that make it what it is today.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Oxford University Press, 256pp, £12.99. Buy the book

Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones

Shakespeare’s Henry V was a boy before he was a man. Across the “Henriad” plays, we observe a full heroic arc. First, we have Prince Hal the wastrel, friend of taprooms and roués like Falstaff. Then, upon elevation to the crown, he puts aside youthful follies (“I know thee not, old man”) and through violence and verse becomes the closest thing England’s had to an Anglo-Alexander.

In his cinematic new biography, Dan Jones concurs with Shakespeare on structure, but not on theme. Giving equal space to Henry’s young life and later triumphs, Jones shows him to have been a dedicated apprentice-prince. He was schooled in statecraft by memory of the plots and depositions of that roiled late-14th-century England (including the one that brought his father, Henry IV, to the throne). And he came of martial age by putting down a Welsh rebellion led by Owain Glyndŵr. This prepared the way for his campaign in France, and all the way to the triumph of Agincourt, thrillingly retold by Jones through his sources: “The air thunders with dreadful clashes, clouds rain missiles, the earth absorbs blood.”
By Nick Harris
Apollo, 464pp, £25. Buy the book

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd

The title of William Boyd’s 18th novel, Gabriel’s Moon, refers to a childhood trauma whose psychological effects complicate the main plot, but the book’s main pleasures are simple. This is a classic spy novel, mapped and realised by a veteran author. The journalist Gabriel Dax tapes his interview with a Congolese prime minister. That prime minister is killed by a foreign intelligence agency, and Dax is now in possession of kompromat. Out come the powerful, mysterious figures and one powerful, mysterious, sexy lady, and we’re off. Planes land in Madrid and Warsaw, cocktails are ordered, pistols are fired, and cigarettes are smoked.

No scene is flat, no sentence is flabby – it’s an entirely winceless read. The tempting quibble – that it also seems an entirely winceless write – is not really legitimate. Like John Banville and Julian Barnes writing crime novels as Benjamin Black and Dan Kavanagh, Boyd makes his forays into the spy genre without reservation, and they are all the more fun for it. Readers who want an ambiguous, profound Boyd novel know where to find one – read Any Human Heart. If you want to enjoy a gripping ride – and who doesn’t? – you could do much worse than Gabriel’s Moon.
By George Monaghan
Viking, 272pp, £20. Buy the book

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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?