Book Reviews

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Anthology #56

Unfiltered, by Guenther Steiner

This author’s name will, no doubt, be unfamiliar to many who don’t follow motor racing; I freely admit that I didn’t recognise it; but when I started reading the book, for reasons I will clarify next, it all fell into place. Motor racing inspires strong feelings, both for & against, and Formula One is probably the pinnacle of those feelings both ways. As it is, I fall comfortably into the middle camp, which is where I am with the few sports I actively follow: I will watch races, and mostly enjoy them, but I don’t support any team or individual driver, whatever their country of origin; I just enjoy the spectacle. I had been aware of the Haas F1 team since its inception, plus its underdog status, which can be a redeeming feature for me. As far as the author of this book [his second] is concerned, with a name like his, one could make an educated guess that he might hail from Germany, or Austria, like another F1 heavyweight, Toto Wolff; but no: he is Italian, from the Alto Adige region of North Tyrol, albeit with German as his first language; plus, as the book’s title suggests, he rarely minces his words, the F-word being his expletive of choice, albeit subtly altered to sound Dutch, for some odd reason. I don’t think plot spoilers are relevant with non-fiction like this; at the time of writing [or completion, anyway], Spring 2024, he is unemployed but enjoying his freedom with prospects and, for the first time in twelve years, looking forward to the future. In a nutshell, after 2 years working with Niki Lauda in the Jaguar racing team [now Red Bull], in 2014 he set up the first fully US F1 team since 1986 [ignoring the doomed USF1 débâcle] in the name of a mega-rich US machine tool manufacturer, Gene Haas. The odds were very much stacked against the team from the beginning, but with skilled management, it did surprisingly well for a few years. Eventually though, Haas lost interest in throwing money at the enterprise, and declined to renew Steiner’s contract at the end of 2023; however, as far as I can see from Wikipedia, Haas still owns the team. If you like F1, you’ll find this book enthralling! The paperback I read was published in 2025 [2024, Bantam, an imprint of Transworld Publishers], by Penguin Random House UK, London, ISBN 978-1-8049-9485-6.

Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

Despite being a Conservative* and, thereby, espousing opinions & beliefs which I mostly am not able to endorse, nevertheless I do feel a modicum of sympathy for him, after reading this account of his parliamentary career between 2010 & 2019. At 429 pages, this is actually a truncated version of the original draft, which weighed in at 220,000 words [which is impossible for me to visualise: a page count would have been better], so he can also only allude in the briefest terms to his previous career: his Wikipedia page gives a fuller account, and it also mentions his tutorship of both sons of Diana, ‘Princess of Wales’ [which caused some hilarity on Have I Got News for You] and the rumours of his involvement in the British Intelligence Service, neither of which is in this book. He is clearly a bookish but fastidious person, and it is not difficult to see how & why he became disillusioned with the British parliamentary system; although being a Conservative in these years of supercharged self-interest & backstabbing can’t have been easy [*he was a Labour Party member in his teens] as a man of some integrity [the Eton alumnus reportedly attended a single Bullingdon Club meeting before resigning, after witnessing the behaviour of other members], if this seemingly honest account is to be believed. He was regularly and continually surprised & disappointed that his wide and demonstrable experience as a diplomat or traveller in Indonesia, Montenegro, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, including learning some of the languages, was not put to better use in government. At the end of his career, his aspirations towards a common goal for MPs, the premiership, came up against the brutish & unstoppable combination of Boris Johnson’s disingenuous upward trajectory and the [to me] inexplicable & misguided support of a large proportion of the British public and an inexcusable number of Conservatives. He has now returned to academia, and podcasting, with a previous colleague from the ‘other side’, Alastair Campbell. Notwithstanding the title, politics aside, this is an absorbing read. The paperback I read was published in 2024 by Vintage, part of the Penguin Random House group of companies, [2023, Jonathan Cape], ISBN 978-1-5299-2286-8.

Parade, by Rachel Cusk

I was hoping, from the brief synopsis on the back cover, that this book might make interesting reading: unfortunately, I couldn’t fight my way any further than the end of the first chapter [and it’s not a long book — 198 pages, of quite large type, for four chapters], because I found the emotive psychobabble very tiresome. Another irritating feature is that each chapter has several overlapping narratives which include a character called simply G, but it is a different character in each narrative. A lot of the pseudo-philosophical musings of the inner landscape are from women, with which I have no problem whatsoever, but although they might start by sounding quite reasonable & justified, they are extended tediously, becoming aphorisms and non-sequiturs; I could put my finger down almost anywhere in the book and find a piece of pretentious twaddle: “G began to draw her daughter, childlike drawings that the girl herself could easily have bettered. She didn’t look at her daughter while she drew: the drawings came from her hand. The hand was full of clumsiness and simplicity but it seemed to awaken her to the sense of its task. Because G didn’t look at her, the girl didn’t know she was being observed. It was an interior act of pure attention. The observation was not an enquiry, but a confirmation, like the chiming of a bell.” [page 87] One of the 3 reviews on the back cover, from the Washington Post, reads thus: “Cusk’s work … has this power, to disturb and unsettle, to subtly rearrange the space of one’s mind.” I might have relished the latter when I was an adolescent, but in my dotage, I think I’d rather avoid rearranging the space of my mind, thank you very much. For what it’s worth, this author is [a? the?] winner of the Goldsmiths Prize. The paperback I read was published in 2025 [2024], by Faber & Faber Limited, London, ISBN 978-0-5713-7796-1.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens, by A.N. Wilson

The title of this comprehensive & erudite biography of the great 19th century novelist is based on the title of Dickens’s final, unfinished novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and each chapter’s title begins “The Mystery of …”. There are many quotes from Dickens’s fiction canon, as well as opinions & quotes from other Dickens biographers, upon whose work Wilson has drawn here. In many ways, Dickens was a man of his time, but in addition to listing his many foibles & peccadilloes, Wilson describes how Dickens was, despite his relish for public performance, a secretive man, who had very good reason to be; and yet, Wilson shows how it is possible to construct Dickens’s own background from the fiction he wrote: so he was hiding in his novels his earlier life in plain sight [although one very significant aspect of his later life was always secret: the private cruelty to his wife, while enjoying an affair with a mistress many years his junior]. He was also a surprising [but inevitably human] combination of contradictory attributes: he was a philanthropist who urged for societal change, and yet his prescription for the treatment of even petty criminals was quite harsh. Towards the end of the book, Wilson opens up with a [to me] quite astonishing honesty about his own background: “Certainly when I look at my own childhood, which had moments of abject terror and hopelessness, I realize [sic] that Dickens not only helped me through those moments — walled up, aged seven to thirteen, in an establishment that made the existence of the pupils at Dotheboys seem actually enviable — but also helped me in my horror-stricken recollection of those times. He performed, as Gwen Watkins says, the function of the tragedian, if that is to provide katharsis through fear and pity.” I could give many more quotes from this fascinating book, but I will end this review with a quote which only begins to encapsulate Dickens’s legacy to the post-19th century world: “If Dickens remains immortal, it is, among other reasons, for his profound understanding of the inner child who remains with all of us until we die. Clearly, however, he had a special status in his own times, different in kind from that enjoyed by any other writer, however popular. Even at the time, those who considered themselves grown-up were inclined to patronize [sic] his achievement.” The paperback I read was published in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd, London, ISBN 978-1-7864-9793-2.