On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells
Jonathan Coe’s gloomy new novel will surprise fans of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve-Up!, but it need not disappoint them. In taking on the voice of Rosamond, an elderly, suicidal lesbian, Coe shows an admirable refusal to be pigeonholed. Like many contemporary novelists (Penelope Lively, Thomas Keneally, Alan Judd), Coe is concerned with
At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and
On the 9 August 378 AD near Adrianople in Thrace the Roman army of the East was massacred and the Emperor Valens left dead on the battlefield by an army of barbarian Goths. It was, as Alessandro Barbero’s title claims, ‘The Day of the Barbarians’. He gives a highly readable account of the campaign and
Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it
Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died
Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling
Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant
War Words I heard the other day of soldiers back from serving in the fighting in Iraq, not wounded bodily but suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ — ‘bomb- happy’s’ what they called it in the war on Hitler; ‘shell-shock’ in the one before. And then I thought, Ah yes, I can recall D-Day, June the
Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should
This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran, E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a
I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is
Caryl Phillips has found his niche, as a master of historical ‘re-imaginings’. To blend real sources and fictional interpretations into a continuous narrative requires expert control, and he has it. Foreigners tells the heartbreaking stories of three black men struggling, and ultimately failing, to find their footing in England. It follows Dancing in the Dark
Sung Dynasty My lover tells me that when autumn comes He will fashion me a boat of cherry blossom: There’s no way I’m getting in that. Sean O’Brien
Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from
Whitewater Rafting: a poem Whitewater Rafting Bone-domed, wet-suited, that New Zealand day, six of us in a dinghy diced with death. Twenty-five rapids made us hold our breath. The snowmelt river took our breath away. Eleven miles of turbulent, freezing foam, floodwaters from the glacial Southern Alps with granite canyon walls threatening thin scalps —
‘I find that the earth is not as round as it is described, but it is shaped like a pear,’ Christopher Columbus wrote after his return from America, ‘with a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and nearest heaven.’ Determining the shape of the surface on which we live is,
It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything
David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on
The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a