Book reviews roundup: List of the Lost, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, The Heart Goes Last

What the critics thought of: Morrissey’s List of the Lost, James Shapiro’s 1606 and Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

Now and again there is a critical drubbing so comprehensive that it almost literally makes your eyes water. Such was the fate of List of the Lost, the debut novel by Morrissey. “Could this be the most toe-curlingly terrible book ever?” ran the headline of a piece by Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail, who didn’t hold back on his own colourful prose: “Morrissey’s writing is Adrian Mole on magic mushrooms, verbal diarrhoea being squirted at you through an industrial hose.” The paper then gleefully reproduced a selection of the book’s sex scenes, which have been widely tipped for the Literary Review’s bad sex award (“Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation”). “Terrible … monstrously overwritten,” wrote Charlotte Runcie in the Daily Telegraph, and for the NME’s Jordan Bassett, “it feels like you’re swallowing concrete as you slog through the book’s huge paragraphs.” Only Melissa Katsoulis in the Times sounded a more forgiving note. “What did the reviewers expect? An elegant disquisition on the pitfalls of modern marriage? A tragicomic look at what can go wrong when you move to the country? … unreadable at times, but inimitable and irreplaceable. Long may he joyously jiggle his art in our faces, whether we like it or not.”

At the other end of the spectrum 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro proved to be critical catnip, with its themes of the playwright, the plague and the Gunpowder Plot. A “dark, enthralling, and brilliant narrative”, wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer, and the Spectator’s Sam Leith found it a “terrifically interesting book”. In the Independent, Lucasta Miller praised the “exhaustive yet exhilarating depth” of the narrative. “Shapiro does not have quite the cool intellectual elegance found in fellow New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory. What he has instead is a vigorous, burning appetite for historical information and an equally burning desire to impart it.” But Kate Maltby of the Times pointed out one rather inconvenient fact: King Lear wasn’t, in fact, written in 1606 at all. “As Shapiro acknowledges … Shakespeare had completed Lear before the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, and 1606 was instead dominated by Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Perish the thought, that ‘Year of Lear’ simply rhymes better than ‘Year of Macbeth’.” Fortunately, this did little to diminish her enjoyment of the book: “1606 remains a work of rich detail.”

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