Book reviews: The Ocean of Life | Modern Chinese Ink Paintings | Living, Thinking, Looking

By MICHAEL KERRIGAN
Published on 30/06/2012 00:00

MICHAEL KERRIGAN gives his verdict on the pick of this week’s literary releases

The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

Allen Lane, £25

Rating: *****

Time was the seas seemed limitlessly vast and almost unpollutable; back then. That complacency, though unfounded, was not so absurd: the worst of our outrages against the marine environment have come extremely recently. Radiation and rising temperatures; over-fishing and fertilizer run-off; noise from sonar; drifts of plastic waste: we’ve come close to destroying the oceans in just a few decades – and, in so doing, threatened life ashore. Roberts makes an eloquent and scarily compelling case, but he also points up the positives, the chance for a “New Deal for the Oceans”. If the scale of the damage is awesome, so is the ocean’s capacity for recovery; we have everything to gain by acting.

Modern Chinese Ink Paintings

by Clarissa von Spee

(British Museum, £16.99)

Rating: ****

Forgery, perhaps, is the sincerest form of artistic flattery: Zhang Daqian’s now-classic fakes are wonderfully fulsome in that regard. Yet this giant of 20th-century Chinese art created works of immense originality too – and these are every bit as faithful to tradition in their way. Contact with the West; revolutionary tumult; war … modern history has had its influence, yet so too do older cycles – the seasons; passing generations; life and death. So, Fu Baoshi’s figures give a 20th-century spin to those of the 1st millennium; Liu Dan depicts a regenerative self-reduplicating natural world in which rocks represent the “stem cells” of a living landscape. Eternal questions are forever asked; familiar answers given fresh interpretations with audacity and flair.

Living, Thinking, Looking

by Siri Hustvedt

(Sceptre, £17.99)

Rating: ****

The essays here encompass everything from Mickey Mouse to migraine, from George W. Bush to Goya, yet the same preoccupations keep coming through. Hustvedt is haunted by her consciousness of the spaces between word and thought, idea and reality, experience and memory. Not surprisingly, as a creative writer, she sees the artistic sphere as central. Are we formed by what we read and see? And, conversely, do we in some sense shape the novels, poems and artworks we enjoy? What does it mean to be moved by a book or painting? How can a work of fiction be said to embody truth? The touch is light, but the thoughts profound.