Book reviews roundup: Paul McCartney; This Must Be the Place; The Gene

For Helen Brown in the Daily Telegraph, the most interesting thing about Philip Norman’s biography, Paul McCartney, is that the Beatle apparently “sweet-talked the mother of one of his girlfriends into combing his leg hair, assuring her that it helped him to relax after gigs”. Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday found little new in the early part of the biography, and agreed that giving so much space to McCartney’s later life was a mistake. However, “Norman has at last redressed the balance of his earlier antagonism to produce a very fair and multi-layered account of how a normal man has, against all the odds, managed to deal with an abnormal talent.” In the Sunday Times, Lynn Barber admitted that she, like the author, is at heart a Lennonist, but she was nonetheless disappointed to find “little new material” about the much biographised McCartney. “What is amazing in retrospect is how prolific Paul and John were – they reckoned they could write a new song in 20 minutes, and often had to because their contract demanded a new single every three months and a new album every six.”

The Irish Times’s reviewer was one of many who enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place, set partly in rural Donegal. Anna Carey admired O’Farrell’s gift for “creating whole characters in just a few pages”, in “lyrical writing [that is] full of grace but never feels forced or affected”. In the i, Arifa Akbar was also impressed by an “epic endeavour to build a portrait of a relationship in its whole, contrary and complex plurality”. Though the overall effect is “cubist”, Akbar noted, with “innovations in narration”, ultimately the novel is “a grownup love story” that will keep the reader rapt. The Express’s Charlotte Heathcoate was “on tenterhooks” as O’Farrell explored love “in all its shapes and forms: romantic love, parental love and the lack of love whether during loneliness, infertility or grief”, and found that she “captures this spectrum of emotions with sensitivity and precision”. The Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard were rare dissenters. John Harding in the Mail called O’Farrell “one of the best line-by-line writers we have, but even the sheer pleasure of her prose can’t compensate for a narrative that simply gets lost as it rambles across continents and back and forth in time”, while Melanie McDonagh in the Standard damned with the faint praise: “If you’re a woman who likes reading about relationships, and don’t set too much store by plot or story, this may be just your bag.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee also divided critics with The Gene: An Intimate History. Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times hailed it as a “thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and … intimate science of our time”, and was unnerved by the questions it raised about eugenics. “Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next.” Prospect’s Philip Ball was surprised by just how “subtle and complex” the genome is, calling the book “not just first-class science writing but an important intellectual contribution in its own right”. The Spectator, however, was not impressed, wincing at Mukherjee’s “lofty language”, “jarring puns”, and prose that is “impossibly grand, bordering on the grandiose”. “We need a readable, authoritative popular guide to the latest developments in genetics”, wrote Stuart Ritchie. “This, sadly, isn’t it.”