From Rachel Kushner to Mark Rowlands: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Stone Circles by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings and The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge.

By Michael Prodger, Pippa Bailey and Megan Gibson

Stone Circles: A Field Guide by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings

Stone circles are not quite the rarities they might seem. While only a few are widely known – Stonehenge, Avebury, Callanish, Castlerigg – there are hundreds more standing sentinel in the British and Irish countryside. Despite some dating back 5,000 years, their haunting presence has never been fully explained.

In their guide, the archaeologists Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings give a brisk summary and visiting notes to 344 of them. They range along the western swathe of these islands, from the clusters on the Orkneys and Lewis, to those in Devon and Cornwall and the many examples across County Cork (there are none in eastern and south-eastern England). Along the way they include a welter of information about dating, purposes – whether ceremonial or burial – geology and the incorporation of rogue stones dragged huge distances by glaciers or by human hands, and the quarries the megaliths came from. They look too at the importance of the land – and skyscapes of each location. The authors are, at heart, enthusiasts (“this site is a real gem”) and their handsome book will encourage the same in anyone they persuade to go stone-circle bagging.
By Michael Prodger
Yale University Press, 494pp, £30

The Happiness of Dogs by Mark Rowlands

What is the difference between a philosopher and a dog? The answer, says Mark Rowlands, himself a professor of philosophy, is that when dealing with such issues as what is important in life and how best to live it, penseurs struggle while dogs answer such questions “effortlessly” – by living them. Canines, he says, are natural philosophers and while they may lack nuance, they have a way of taking pleasure in the smallest things in life. We simians should take lessons from them.

Watching his German Shepherd, Shadow, spin with delight at the prospect of going out to do the same walk he has done a thousand times before is an example of joy in the moment. When he chases the animals and birds on the canal bank behind the house and yet again fails to catch them, he is showing what commitment looks like. When, loosed from his leash, he charges off at speed to survey and explore, he is giving a definition of freedom. And observing his older dogs patiently putting up with his infant son crawling over them instructs Rowlands in parenthood. The message from this gentle and compelling book is that in times of moral quandary we could do worse than ask: what would a dog do?
By Michael Prodger
Granta, 256pp, £16.99

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge

In 2012 Sara Lodge, a lecturer in Victorian literature, read two novels published in 1864, some 20 years before Sherlock Holmes, centred around female detectives. Common consensus was that there were no real-life female detectives in Victorian Britain, but an “impudent thought” came to Lodge: “I don’t believe you.” Her book is a lively, painstaking study of women solving crime in this period – both the real-life and the fictional accounts that sprang up alongside them.

Women were employed by police forces from the 1840s onwards, often to search female suspects or carry out sting operations: women were less visible than men and could go where men could not, capturing thieves and fraudsters, illegal abortionists and mystics. Those who worked in private detective agencies were often hired to catch adulterers in the act, and even to dig up dirt on candidates ahead of elections. Lodge’s survey of fictional female detectives is just as colourful, and I finished The Mysterious Case… with a long list of further reading, not least Catherine Crowe’s The Adventures of Susan Hopley (1840), “the most influential detective story you’ve probably never read”.
By Pippa Bailey
Yale University Press, 346pp, £20

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel – longlisted for the Booker Prize – is an ambitious story about nihilism, Trojan-horsed into a fun spy thriller. The American protagonist is Sadie Smith, a sexy agent who infiltrates a commune in rural France, a group suspected of eco-terrorism. A private contractor, she doesn’t know who she’s working for and disdains the radical leftists she’s working over. Yet she finds herself increasingly seduced by the ideas and backstory of the group’s ageing, enigmatic mentor, Bruno Lacombe, who corresponds with the commune via extended treatises on archaeology, civilisation and humanity’s future, sent by email. But while Sadie sneers at the comrades, Kushner makes clear that they’re right to worry that Bruno is mad.

As a narrator, Sadie can’t always be trusted; despite her cool confidence, it’s clear she’s a lousy spy, a heavy drinker who often relies on luck rather than skill to get her out of a bind. Yet the convergence of Bruno’s philosophy and the deadly turn her assignment takes, work to convince her of something that the commune never could: that forging a new way of life is possible, at least when it comes to that of a hard-bitten agent.
By Megan Gibson
Jonathan Cape, 416pp, £18.99