Comedy

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. There’s great comedy — and also artistry — in this because almost every story actually describes some degree of false consciousness, wrong-headedness or pathetic illusion.

Marcus Berkmann on the few genuinely funny books aimed at this year’s Christmas market It’s a worrying sign, but I suspect that Christmas may not be as amusing as it used to be. For most of my life, vast numbers of so-called ‘funny’ books have been published at around this time of year, aimed squarely at desperate shoppers lurching drunkenly into bookshops on 24 December, still looking for the perfect present for someone they don’t much like. But this year there aren’t anywhere near as many. Perhaps they stopped selling. Maybe the QI Annual and Schott’s Almanac saw them off.

So just how good is it? Because of course those splendid people, the Man Booker judges, have rather prejudiced this review by going and giving their prize to Jacobson’s latest. If only they’d had the patience to wait for the launch of this blog. Because although not on the panel this year (September is such a busy time), I am always more than happy to drop the odd word of wisdom, share my insights, and generally do my bit to see that contemporary novelists are held to account for their various crimes against culture. And all in all, perhaps this year’s prize hasn’t been too badly awarded, because Jacobson has less to answer for than most. That is praise, by the way.

After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. In practice, quirky books aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for the whole year round. But try telling a publisher that. Thousands of them have been pouring out this autumn, and in the pre-Christmas jungle good books will surely be lost, consumed by larger and nastier predators in a single contemptuous gulp. In Ghoul Britannia (Short Books, £12.99), Andrew Martin muses on ‘a nation primed for ghostliness’.

Michael Palin is the meekest, mildest and nicest of the Pythons. The latest chunk of his diaries traces his attempt during the 1980s to break away from his wacky colleagues and forge a film-making career in his own right. The title, Halfway to Hollywood, reflects his modest, circumspect nature. We first meet the millionaire filmstar living a monkish existence in Camden in 1980. He occupies an ordinary townhouse. His three children attend state schools. And he drives a Mini, albeit with a sun-roof. To concentrate on screen-writing he turns down $180,000 to appear in a Hollywood movie (you should multiply by about six to get today’s values) and a week later he goes to Hamleys, where he startles himself with his extravagance by spending £59.

The habit of dividing the past into centuries or decades might be historiographically suspect, but by now it seems unavoidable. And it is possible that, because we now expect decades to have flavours of their own, they end up actually having them. We change our behaviour when the year ends in 0. Can there be anyone who has never used ‘The Twenties,’ ‘The Thirties,’ ‘The Fifties’ or ‘The Sixties’ as historical shorthand, expecting his interlocutor to know exactly what he means by it? By comparison with the Sixties, the flavour of the Seventies is indistinct and muted.

Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Even the title of A Gate at the Stairs tugs in different directions. It is a baby-gate; since this novel starts as a comedy — of sorts — about adoption. (But, as the adopting mother says, while mashing flower bulbs into a poisonous puree, the French ‘have jokes that end “And then the baby fell down the stairs.” ’).

Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley As Alan Bennett says in his introduction, ‘Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say “Joking apart . . .” Jok- ing never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.’ And so, of course, this book is full of jokes: the Chatsworth gamekeeper who used to refer to the Duke of Portland as ‘His Other Grace’; the agent at Bolton Abbey who every year used to put a final item on their bill for the unconscionably expensive August grouse shooting: ‘Mousetraps — 9d’; the ladies gathered at pre-war balls: ‘Some of the young women were fairylike in their beauty. The old and fat were not.