Books you need to read this December

It’s been ten years since I Am Pilgrim, the 912-page action-crammed tome, hit the shelves, and fans still haven’t got over it. Some claim it redefined the spy-thriller genre, and The Guardian said it “makes moussaka of its rivals”.

Terry Hayes could easily have retired on the glory, never to write another word. There’s even a film coming out, with rumours that Leonardo DiCaprio will play the lead.

But Hayes clearly wasn’t satisfied, and once again he’s delivered a whiplashing, wild-ride adventure—this time at a modest 672 pages that take us not just around the world, but into a terrifying future.

He packs a crazy amount in, probably enough material for three novels. I know it’s bad form to give spoilers but I don’t think you’ll be any the wiser if I tell you we start at a hanging in Iran and end up 24 years in the future in sewage tunnels fighting orcs.

For the most part, this is a classic CIA spy thriller with all the heart-thumping trimmings. Ridley Kane is a Denied Access Area spy, sent on one mission after the next in places basically impossible to enter, to try and prevent a global terrorist spectacular.

It’s something like Homeland on speed, an immaculately (or at least convincingly) researched, classic US-centric tale of goodies and baddies.

But it doesn’t stop there. While the main thrust of the plot doesn’t change—high-stakes, high tension drama—three quarters of the way through, Hayes strays confidently into the speculative, dabbling with time travel and a dystopian evolution of the human race.

So now it’s Homeland meets The Last of Us and then some.

Some might say Hayes should stick to what he does best, or at least pick a lane, but I’d say he’s a master at getting your blood racing, and if that means reaching outside his usual crayon box for an orc or two, then more power to him. 

The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes is published by Bantam Press at £22

Where other biographers seek to make the personal public, Roger Lewis seeks to find the personal in the public, or rather in the performative.

Moving diligently through each of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s films, he tracks their extravagant and debauched lives, their multitudinous marriages, and their endless vices as they coincided with the actors’ on-screen personas.

Arguably the first modern celebrities, Taylor and Burton’s lives are ripe with salacious stories and titillating details, from trashing hotel rooms and drinking three vodka bottles a day, to demanding gifts of expensive jewellery from production studios and regularly buying all the first-class tickets on a flight to avoid the hoi polloi.

While their inimitable talents are indisputable, they clearly weren’t very nice people. But then it wouldn’t be as interesting if they were.

Lewis inserts himself a fair amount, expressing opinions, sometimes controversial, and passing judgement, sometimes severe. It’s perhaps more honest for the author to be present, where a conventional biographer would hide behind supposedly objective facts.

Occasionally, he lacks a much-needed modern perspective: Taylor’s concerningly young on-screen sexualisation, for example, is explained by her own “innate sexuality”, rather than considering the adults surrounding her who encouraged this.

This is an ongoing theme: Sybil, Burton’s first wife, is charged with having no self-respect because she put up with Burton’s philandering, and Burton’s affair with a 14-year-old girl (“Burton liked her to keep her school uniform on”) is only mildly rebuked, and almost instantly followed by a list of Burton’s other affairs at the time.

One could argue, I suppose, that there’s no use in holding long-past offences to modern standards, and the book, already 656 pages, would certainly be much lengthier if every morally concerning act were thoroughly examined.

And perhaps Lewis’ point is that they were treated (and considered themselves) as though beyond judgement.

Ultimately this is not a happy tale, but it’s certainly fascinating, if only to consider how much shocking behaviour these two “vagrants” got away with. 

"'****!' bawled the baritonal Richard Burton, in the vestibule of the Hotel Capo Caccia, Sardinia, when on August 11, 1967 he found himself with 'thousands of bags all over the place, nine children, six adults…I screamed **** out of drunkenness…To scream **** in the lobby was the only possible way to meet the justice of the day.'

Possibly so. There were many similar days to do justice to. 

At the Grand Hotel Timeo, for example, in Via Teatro Greco, Taormina, Taylor broke a guitar over Burton’s head. Rex Harrison, seeing 14 pieces of luggage piled up at Reception in the Hotel Lancaster, Paris, plus the cages of cats and dogs and turtles, wondered out loud, 'Why do the Burtons have to be so filthily ostentatious?'

John Gielgud, directing Hamlet in Toronto and Boston, early in 1964, said that, 'Even when I went out to lunch with [Burton] between rehearsals, there’d be four or five of the entourage sitting at adjoining tables, preventing people coming up and talking to him.'

In Toronto, Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took the Presidential Suite at the Sheraton King Edward Hotel. In Boston they put up at the Copley-Plaza. 

When they arrived at Logan Airport, there were 5,000 screeching fans, grabbing at their clothes, snatching at their hair, behaving as if Taylor and Burton were the Beatles. The police lost control. Is any sympathy deserved?

Marlene Dietrich, staying at the same hotel as Burton and Taylor, overheard them complaining about the sheer volume of fans besieging the place. 'My dear Richard, my dear Elizabeth,' she said, with her Germanic lisp, 'if you want to escape the crowds, don’t stay in the same hotel as me.'

There is stardom, superstardom, and mega-stardom. 'That sort of celebrity is so very hard to cope with,' said Gielgud. 'They had to exercise the dogs on the roof. There was a man with a machine gun in the corridor standing outside their room.'

The ructions were similar the following year in Dublin, while the filming of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold went on at Ardmore Studios.

John le Carré couldn’t believe it. Taylor was disrupting shooting by turning up in a Rolls-Royce, accompanied by the likes of Yul Brynner and crates of champagne.

'The reputedly 17-strong Burton household…occupied the whole of one floor of Dublin’s grandest hotel,' The Gresham, in O’Connell Street, where the retinue was augmented by 'various children by different marriages,' plus nannies and tutors and, said Le Carré, 'the fellow who clipped the parrot’s claws.'

There is now The Elizabeth Taylor Suite at The Gresham, 130 metres square, containing a four-poster bed seven foot three inches wide."

Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis is published in hardback by riverrun at £30