The Invisible Woman – review | Mark Kermode

Felicity Jones as Nelly Ternan in the 'chilly but engaging' The Invisible Woman. Photograph: David Appleby

Ralph Fiennes may be the director and star of this handsomely mounted tale of the private life of Charles Dickens, but it's Felicity Jones who makes it fly. She plays Nelly Ternan, a young actress of indeterminate talent who captures the author's eye and heart, but wrestles (philosophically, morally, practically) with the idea of becoming his mistress.

The Invisible WomanProduction year: 2013Countries: UK, USA Runtime: 111 minsDirectors: Ralph FiennesCast: Felicity Jones, Kristin Scott Thomas, Michelle Fairley, Ralph Fiennes, Tom HollanderMore on this film

Seen in flashback from the perspective of the now married Nelly, tormented by the memories of her affair, the story unfolds in chilly but engaging fashion, with Abi Morgan's typically insightful script taking its lead from Claire Tomalin's book.

At the heart of Nelly's dilemma is a gender inequality that Morgan's screenplay lays bare; the progressive "freedom" from marriage that Dickens and cohort Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) merrily espouse is a liberty for men only.

Expressing much while often saying little, Jones proves once again to be a mesmerising screen presence, a performer behind whose face you can see the most complex and subtle thought processes at work. Accordingly, Fiennes keeps his direction restrained, concentrating on small moments rather than grand gestures to powerful effect.

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Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen – review

A Russian revolution: Pussy Riot perform in Red Square in January 2012. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov /Reuters

My frustrations with Masha Gessen's Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot crystallise when I reach the beginning of chapter nine and discover that I have entered the story: "Two days before the trial began, the British newspaper the Guardian came out with a huge story," Gessen writes. "Pussy Riot aren't just the coolest revolutionaries you're ever likely to meet. They're also the nicest," gushed the writer, Carole Cadwalladr." Gessen quotes the piece, published here in the Observer New Review in July 2012, at length, noting that "her [ie my] editor had dispatched her in a fit of sudden inspiration". And recounts how thrilled Petya Verzilov, the husband of Nadya Tolokonnikova, is with it. "He sensed, correctly, that this was a first taste of true fame."

On the one hand, "gushing" aside, it's more than a bit flattering. This is a hotly anticipated book by one of Russia's most influential opposition journalists. On the other… well, I can't help thinking I've been taken slightly out of context. It's never explained that the women I met aren't the same as the ones she's spent the past eight chapters writing about – the three facing trial, Tolokonnikova and her cellmates Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, for committing "hooliganism" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. But then Gessen barely acknowledges the other members of Pussy Riot at all. Maybe she has decided that they were just YouTube cannon fodder drafted in to bulk up the numbers, but it would be nice to have that explained. And backed up with the odd quote.

Am I nit-picking? Possibly. But how does Gessen know how I came to be in Moscow? It's a minor point but the unfortunate thing is that it consolidates my frustrations with the first eight chapters of the book: it's unclear where her information has come from. Whole swaths of the story are cited as facts when there's little attribution and almost no sourcing.

It's frustrating because there's no doubt that Gessen – a Russian-American journalist, who was sacked from the editorship of Russia's oldest magazine for refusing to cover an event featuring Putin – was the right person to write this book. She wrote a scathing and widely acclaimed biography of Putin, The Man Without a Face, and was a key member of opposition circles during the 2012 protests.

There's a mutual, deserved respect between Pussy Riot and her. Tolokonnikova agrees to write to her from jail, and at one point meets her during one of the few visiting sessions she's allowed. Samutsevich, who avoids jail, talks to her at length, as does Petya Verzilov. (Though it doesn't stop Gessen from accusing him of colluding with the lawyers to try and financially exploit Pussy Riot by trademarking the name. The accusation isn't sourced. And Verzilov isn't given a right to reply… so who knows?)

Despite the lack of access to two of her main characters, Gessen works with what she's got, and for the most part it's a pacy telling of what is an extraordinary story: how a bunch of young women took on the Kremlin by dancing around in coloured tights and dresses. And she's good on how these young activists, whose art showed a sophisticated understanding of social media, explicitly draw connections between themselves and the dissidents of the Soviet past. But then Russia's past weighs heavily all around. The trial at the heart of the book is a "Soviet political trial replayed as farce".

There are some wonderful details. She has access to the letters Alekhina writes to her friend Olya, and they're some of the best and most humane moments in the book. She immerses herself in the Russian penal code and wages war against the prison authorities. But she also tells Olya, after hours of repetitive sewing in the prison workshop: "It is a wondrous thing, to look out the window. Just to look out the window and nothing else. It is like all the noise in the world recedes and there is so much silence that it fills up my entire head."

Tolokonnikova's letters from prison are more "stilted". She doesn't want to wage a legal battle. She wants her sentence simply to pass. Gessen barely quotes from her letters. Tolokonnikova grew up in Norilsk, a former gulag in the Arctic Circle and now one of the most polluted places on earth. Her determination and autodidacticism won her a place in the philosophy department of Moscow State University at the age of 16, and she has a passion for expounding philosophical theory rather than focusing on personal details. Until last September when something snapped.

She went on hunger strike, and smuggled out an open letter to the world that told of her 16-17-hour days and brutal work regime, the "common hygiene room" shared by 800 prisoners where, when the pipes block, "urine gushes out or faeces go flying", and the absolute lack of humanity. She is now thankfully free, her sentence commuted by Putin ahead of the Winter Olympics. A fact that caused Granta to rush the book out early.

Words Will Break Cement is far from the last word on Pussy Riot. Not least because while being feted by Madonna and co last week will no doubt have been fun, it's what Pussy Riot choose to do next that will be interesting.

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The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton – digested read

'Newspapers always ignore the really important celebrities – like Saint Gengulphus of Burgundy' … The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton. Illustration: Matt Blease

A newspaper doesn't come with instructions. At school, we are more likely to be taught the significance of Monet's use of colour than how to decode the Daily Mail website. Well, some of us are. And yet we consume news more avidly than ever. Why so? In the immediate vicinity of our north London cottage garden, all may be tranquil, yet the lure of background chaos is irresistible. Perhaps the answer is to be found in schadenfreude. We see a photograph of Sally Bercow kissing someone and rejoice in the knowledge that the mystery man isn't us.

It is early morning. Outside, commuters are struggling to get to work when the tube is on strike. I languidly put on a silk dressing gown and eat a breakfast of yogurt and granola. The newsfeed on my iPad tells me rent arrears are on the increase. Why should I care? Would we read Tolstoy if he had made Anna Karenina working class? The maid makes me another pot of coffee.

News organisations are coy about admitting that what they present us with are selective fragmented narratives. They claim to be objective, when none are. The problem isn't bias, it's the nature of bias. The politics of right wing and left wing are a meaningless cul-de-sac. We need a bias towards the beautiful and the majestic. More stories of the sublime, written by cultural commentators. How do we mostly interpret the world? Through the Hegelian dialectic of architecture. Where are most news organisations located? In buildings of staggering ugliness. Were News International to be relocated to the Rococo Basilica at Ottobeuren in Bavaria, then their news agenda would be infinitely improved. Here is a photo of the Rococo Basilica.

The two emotions on which the news plays are fear and anger. In so doing, it toys with our weak hold on perspective. Here we need to be mindful of Euclidean geometry. The recent news bulletins have been dominated by stories of flooding. And yet the damage is limited to a few villages in Somerset and Cornwall. The majority of us in London have been completely unaffected and are free to keep our lunch appointments, so what's the big deal? (Unless you are one of my friends with a second home in the west country, in which case your distress is perfectly understandable.) Here's a photograph of a hideous 1950s bungalow under water. Isn't it better if it falls down?

One of the main claims all newspapers make is that they enable people to make up their own minds. Yet Gustave Flaubert hated newspapers because he believed they prevented people from thinking for themselves. I feel the same way. From this, we can easily deduce that I might have written Madame Bovary had I been living in 19th-century France. Yet how often does this important fact make headlines?

Foreign news is so often reported as a series of wars, famines and earthquakes. I drop in for an hour to visit the Uganda desk at the BBC. The reporters are busying themselves with stories of petty corruption, while ignoring a new exhibition of a minor artist opening in Kampala. Thus the value of wide-ranging Ugandan discussions is lost.

What are we to make of economics? Not much. So let's move on to celebrity. It's become fashionable among my dinner companions to dismiss celebrity culture, but in so doing they let the illiterate determine the celebrity agenda. The broadsheet newspapers should be doing more to promote celebrities from whom we can learn and improve ourselves. Men such as St Gengulphus of Burgundy, the patron saint of difficult marriages.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the news. The ancient Greeks set aside a week each year to watch the tragedies of Euripides. We should adopt a similar policy. We should save all the year's bad-news stories for bumper editions spread over seven days. That way, we might be instructed by them rather than defeated. For the other 51 weeks, there should be more stories about the wars that aren't taking place and the earthquakes that didn't happen. Therein lies happiness.

Digested read, digested: Bad news.

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The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel – review

Irving Finkel with a 4,000-year-old clay tablet documenting the story of the flood. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

The fact that a member of Ukip blamed the introduction of gay marriage for the recent floods in England reminds us that there is an enduring human tendency to read acts of nature theologically rather than meteorologically. It happened after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, when local clerics blamed that tragic inundation on the excesses of the tourist trade. The mother of all moralising flood stories is the tale of Noah's ark and the animals that went into it two by two to save themselves from God's decision to drown the whole human race and start again. As a myth it has charm as well as moral clout, so why meddle with it? Well, fear not: Irving Finkel's beguiling book will only increase your interest in the story – unless, of course, you belong to the Ukip school of biblical interpretation.

With great wit and warmth, Finkel, who is endearingly described as "assistant keeper" of the Middle East at the British Museum, shows how the Hebrew exiles led into captivity in Babylon in the 6th century BC came across a tradition of Mesopotamian flood stories based on real events and adapted them to their own transcendental purposes.

Although the lovely Greek word Mesopotamia was lost in the first world war and replaced with Iraq, its meaning, "between the rivers" (Tigris and Euphrates), is the clue here. This is flood country, so it's hardly surprising that instructions for making boats abounded, and most of them seem to have ended up in the British Museum. Finkel is a master at deciphering these ancient cuneiform clay tablets, but this book is far more than a fine piece of detective work: it is a humane work of scholarship that enlarges the soul.

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The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq: Berlin 2014 – first look review

Mystery solved? ... The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. Photograph: Rafa Alcaide/EPA

Michel Houellebecq, the award-winning French novelist who has left a trail of outrage in his wake over his views on sex, Islam, and western civilisation, here steps confidently in front of the camera for what can only be described as a hybrid fictionalised self-portrait. Written and directed by Guillaume Nicloux, and perhaps taking its cue from Houellebecq's recent novel The Map and the Territory, in which the writer ends up getting murdered, the film entertainingly elaborates on Houellebecq's brief vanishing act in 2011 while on a promotional tour for that very book.

Nicloux's "revelation" is that Houellebecq failed to show up for his readings because he had been abducted by three brothers - on the orders of a mysterious third party - and held for ransom in a small house in the country. Well, it's a theory, and with Houellebecq himself fronting it, who's to argue? In truth, prank though this may be, Houellebecq comes across as a surprisingly engaging figure, with a nice line in self-parody, as well as awareness of his more ridiculous gestures.

Things get off to admittedly slow start: Nicloux follows Houellebecq around as he discusses redecorating his flat, expresses his poor opinion of a friend's piano playing, and wanders the streets smoking; all the while Houellebecq's mien, lower lip thrust out, remains characteristically lugubrious. He is then unceremoniously bundled into a large metal box with a few airholes in the lid; his kidnappers are the heavyset Luc, who sports stubble and the world's worst mullet, and his two beefy, shaven-headed siblings, bodybuilder Maxime and sensitive Mathieu. Houellebecq emerges from his box in what is clearly their family home, and is chained to the bed in a bedroom that rather obviously once belonged to a small girl.

What proceeds from here on in is the exact opposite of the sweaty kidnap drama of tradition. Houellebecq proves a querulous, difficult hostage, constantly needling his captors and negotiating concessions and favours. (One running gag involves Houellebecq attempting to retrieve his cigarette lighter from Luc, who won't give it back.) Their relationship turns into a reverse Stockholm syndrome: Houellebecq's hijackers end up sympathising with his aims. Even to the extent, in a characteristically sleazy Houellebecq move, of agreeing to his request to supply a young prostitute. Houellebecq gets particularly pally with the brothers' aged parents, Dédé and Ginette, who are on site and very helpful.

All this is presented in a straight-faced, low key manner; the humour is as dry as a sauvignon blanc and the actors around Houellebecq - almost all unknowns - complement him perfectly, with no attempt at upstaging. As for Houellebecq himself: given that he's playing himself, it's hardly a stretch, but he has the relaxed air of a natural screen performer. But, as they say, perhaps best not to give up the day job.

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1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson – review

Kaiser Willhelm II with Winston Churchill at Lowther Castle, north-west England, 1906: were the signs of the conflict to come self-evident? Photograph: Corbis

Did you read the writing on the wall in 2012? Could you tell that a third world war would start in 2013 when Russia and Iran responded to the American attack on Syria? If a lack of restraint had pitched us into global conflict last year, historians would have woven narratives to show the signs we missed (I was preparing my own version).

The inevitability of the first world war is usually traced in a similar way, back through events of 1913 and before, and several excellent books have looked at how the world went to war, notably Christopher Clark's excellent The Sleepwalkers. Emmerson's 1913 tries hard to ignore what follows and mostly it succeeds.

This is not an attempt to explain how the war started but more to show what was lost, what it felt like to be alive in that unlucky-number year. If you were European, particularly British, it felt very good indeed. The British empire was not what it was, damaged as much close to home by suffragettes and Irish nationalists as it was threatened by the growing challenges from the US, China and restless colonies. Emmerson presents this world through portraits of its great cities, which seems appropriate as many of them were linked up in a way we would recognise as global: the modernity of some aspects of city life a century ago is striking, with the startup of global brands such as Gucci and Ford, although there were still sheep cropping Hyde Park.

Many of the choices of cities are obvious, divided into groups such as Europe's imperial capitals, some key American cities, a scattering of others – Algiers, Bombay, Tehran – and a handful of cities belonging to "twilight powers", although in the absence of a compelling argument, some choices can seem random. To capture a year of the world in a single snapshot is, of course, impossible, but Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now.

Yet he clings to the view that the world in 1913 was one of innocence, security and mutual understanding, epitomised, perhaps, by the ball in Berlin in May 1913, attended by the British king-emperor, the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Not unlike the after party of the G20 summit in St Petersburg last year, and therefore hardly a reliable measure of international relations.

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Jumbo: the Unauthorised Biography of a Victorian Sensation by John Sutherland – review

Heavy drinker: Jumbo at London Zoo, circa 1890. Photograph: Getty Images

The first joke in this delightful book is the title. Unauthorised? Sutherland does not mean that there is a Jumbo literary estate that might wish to sanitise his revelations. Rather, he acknowledges that others, including Paul Chambers in recent years, have written Jumbo's story. His book is "a kind of fantasia" (Disney's Fantasia featured pink elephants) – "Call it elephantasia". It may be a fruit of Sutherland's early years in Colchester, where, the tourist brochures claim, the conquering Roman emperor Claudius rode in triumph on an elephant, and where Jumbo gave his name to the town's water tower.

Many will have heard the word "Jumbo" without any knowledge of Sutherland's subject, and might consider it to be an unoriginal moniker, like Fido for a dog. But of course Jumbo (c1861-1885) was the first animal or thing to be so called, and gave his name to such items as jumbo burgers and jumbo jets, just as the 12th Lord Derby is immortalised in horse races, matches between local football teams and demolition derbies. Why Jumbo was so called is not clear. Sutherland is inclined to discount the Wikipedia assertion that a zookeeper coined the name from merging the Swahili words "jambo" ("hello") and "jumbe" (chief), going instead with the OED citation of "Slang, Jumbo, a clumsy or unwieldy fellow." Another, less pleasing theory – though not advanced by Sutherland – might be that Jumbo's keepers were thinking of Sambo, already in use as a generic name for someone of African origin.

Jumbo was born in what is now Eritrea. He was captured by a group of Hamran Arabs, and probably witnessed their murder of his mother – one of many cruelties he was to endure. Exported, he ended up at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, before being bought, in a job lot with a pair of anteaters, by London Zoo. He delighted zoo-goers by doing tricks with a bowler hat and accepting buns and pennies from outstretched hands; adults and children, including royal princes and princesses, rode him. After 17 years there was national consternation when Jumbo emigrated to the US to join the travelling circus of PT Barnum.

Elephants are not naturally amiable. Sutherland details the torments that Jumbo underwent each night and that ensured his daytime placidity, and he describes the grisly ends that so many elephant entertainers suffered. Jumbo's predecessor Chunee – about whose behaviour Byron was so impressed that he wrote, "I wish he was my butler" – was sentenced to death for killing his handler, survived an initial blast of 152 musket balls, and was eventually quelled by sabres mounted on long poles. A female elephant named "Murderous Mary", in Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, endured the cruel and unusual punishment of death by hanging. At least Jumbo died relatively quickly, after being run over by a locomotive. Barnum continued to make money from him, exhibiting the skeleton and stuffed frame.

This is the first book this spring from the prolific Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London; the second, How to be Well Read may be less surprising. But Jumbo is clearly a work of personal significance, and written with zest. Author and subject even have drinking in common: Sutherland is a (dry) alcoholic, and Jumbo was reliant on booze to stay calm. You will learn lots of amusing facts – elephants can hold two gallons of water in their trunks, which contain half a million taste receptors. And, like Sutherland, you will be dismayed by how we first abused elephants, and then threatened their survival.

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