Book reviews: Damned | Nelson: A Dream of Glory | Care of Wooden Floors

By WILLIAM LEITH
Published on 20/10/2012 00:00

William Leith reviews the latest paperback releases.

DAMNED by Chuck Palahniuk

(Vintage, £7.99) * * *

CHUCK Palahniuk, who excels at making us feel worried or sick, has come up with another way of doing so. This time it’s Madison: She’s a teenager – or at least she was before she died. She tells us what it’s like to be dead – apparently it’s not unlike the life of a super-rich woman who has houses all over the world, and spends her time surveying them on a CCTV system. This woman is somehow everywhere and nowhere. Madison imagines what her mother would say to her, if the living could speak to the dead: “What she’d say is, ‘You’re DEAD, now just CALM DOWN’.” Madison is, she tells us, in Hell. Very funny.

NELSON: A Dream of Glory by John Sugden

(Pimlico, £16.99) * * * * *

HORATIO Nelson was a much more extraordinary man than you might think. He was probably a genius. He was hugely ambitious and had true courage – the ability to calculate risk and move towards danger in a way that was utterly practical. This, the story of Nelson’s life until the age of 39, published in hardback eight years ago, is an absolutely excellent book. Every bit is beautifully judged. In one of its most telling scenes, while boarding an enemy craft in battle, sword in hand, Nelson is shot in the arm. His arm is shredded. He immediately realises it needs to be amputated. Climbing unaided up the side of another ship, arm dangling, he tells the surgeon to get his tools ready.

CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS by Will Wiles

(4th Estate, £7.99) * * *

A WOULD-BE writer travels to Eastern Europe to stay in a friend’s flat. On the way he introduces himself. He seems a little OCD. He tells us that, as a writer, he has been “helplessly, prowlingly blocked”. When he gets to the flat, which belongs to a composer called Oskar, we realise Oskar has a monumental case of OCD. His flat is punitively neat. He’s left notes all over the place. He worries about putting cups on surfaces, because of the likely residue. Above all, he’s obsessed with the state of his wooden floors. And our hero has a glass of red wine and stains the floor. A minimalistic gem.