Fiction

After the record-breaking success of the Fifty Shades trilogy, publishers are desperately trying to answer the multi-million dollar question, what comes next? What will all those millions of readers who have raced through Fifty Shades want to read now? With a depressing lack of imagination, many publishers seem to have landed on the answer of more erotica. Each week, more and more shiny paperbacks with suggestive covers, claiming they are ‘the next Fifty Shades’, arrive in the bookshop where I work. If this is the future of reading, then it is bleak indeed.

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is being republished as well as adapted for the screen by the BBC.  I first discovered the tetralogy when, in an attempt to improve my chances, I asked my future mother-in-law for a list of must-read novels.  Parade’s End and The Good Soldier featured near the top of the list. The Good Soldier is Ford’s most remembered work and at one time he considered it his first and last novel.  In his memoirs, Return to Yesterday, he recalls that on the 28th of June 1914, ‘there was to be no more writing for me—not even any dabbling in literary affairs.’  But then there was the war and he found himself in the Welsh Regiment, at forty-one years of age, living through what he termed ‘Armageddon.

Author of classic children’s novel Carrie’s War and the Booker shortlisted Circles of Deceit, Nina Bawden has died today aged 87. Apart from writing over forty novels for adults and children, she campaigned for justice in one of her last books after the 2002 Potter’s Bar railway crash took the life of her second husband Austen Kark. Interspersed with love letters, Dear Austen tells of ‘the lamentable failure of all governments since 1945 to take proper responsibility for the country’s rail infrastructure’ and it was her attempt to do what she could ‘to put that negligence right’. Read an extract here. Bawden also read The Spectator on occasion. In January 1986 she wrote into the letters page.

The fanfaronade for Ian McEwan's latest book Sweet Tooth, a seventies spy novel tantalisingly based on his own life and featuring a cameo from Martin Amis, has begun ahead of its publication date tomorrow. Two puff interviews (one in the Guardian and a slightly sexier one in the Daily Mail) with McEwan managed to include everything we already know about him. The first review in the Financial Times promises a 'rich and enjoyable' read. Wonderful. Given we'll be hearing quite enough about the book (which wasn't–gasp–nominated for the Booker Prize) we'll look at another big beast captured in the literary pages this week: Jeanette Winterson. The Daylight Gate is the second novel in the Hammer literary imprint series after Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat.

He'd probably agree with Edward Gibbon's assessment of history as 'little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind' but Ned Beauman's instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We're motivated by sex: whether we're having it or - as is more often the case in Beauman's world - not having it. And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as "a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual... I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type." A committed Freudian might call that motive enough.

Few could accuse literary fiction of not doing its best to perk up the US export sector recently. It has been a truly remarkable year. A quick glance at my shelves reveals some wonderful new finds: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead and recently Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. Joining them this summer – although a second novel rather than a debut like the above – is Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds. Exactly like the others, however, The Newlyweds comes already wreathed with praise from across the pond. And well deserved too.

This review will not be kind. But let’s not start that way. Ground lies between. Rewind. Am I the only person to find being addressed like this intensely irritating? China Mieville’s new book Railsea is full of it. Some books are so wrought with references, intertext, allusion that can only manifest itself through repeated syntactical anomalies, that they earn themselves glowing reviews for being incomparable, perhaps perverse. Many will read Railsea and wax lyrical about it; to do otherwise could suggest that the cleverness of it all has simply washed right over. This is a risk I am willing to take. Railsea, I am informed, is a work of Weird Fiction. The story peters out in all directions; not a lot actually happens.

Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated duvets, the camera snuck under one of the duvets to show a little girl, reading a book by torchlight. Reading under the covers was a wonderful part of my childhood, as I'm sure it was for many other book-lovers and the quotation from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, read aloud by J.K. Rowling, was an apt choice for this moment.

Book lovers are always pleased when water-cooler conversation turns to the latest phenomenon in which a novel or author has had the kind of popular success that extends far beyond the usual book reading public. The general tenor of such discussions runs along the dyspeptic lines of: ‘Why aren’t people reading better books?’ I have heard the following: 'I find it really depressing when I see an adult reading a JK Rowling novel on the tube’, and ‘Steig Larsson may keep you turning the pages, but what a shame he died before his books could be properly edited.’ And as for Dan Brown and E L James, they have almost become shorthand (certainly among middle-class readers) for bad writing that sells in massive numbers. But do such dismissals tell the whole story?

The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell observed an, ‘ever-widening gap between the popular concept of a peer and the existing reality.’ He found greatest fault with nineteenth century novels and plays, ‘where a lord, silly or sinister, handsome or grotesque, is rarely allowed to strike a balance between extremes of conduct.’  Powell’s nineteenth century examples would certainly have included Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, staged at the Savoy Theatre in 1882.

Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to those of different inclinations. In all the dense weight of recollections and memorials published since Vidal’s death on Tuesday, I have not seen a sharper criticism of his writing and its preoccupations than that made by Spectator reader Walter Taplin in a letter to the magazine in 1982. ‘Sir, On page 13 of the Spectator 23 October there was a cartoon of Mr Gore Vidal holding a cane.

Whatever Mitt might think, if there's one thing that makes us proud to be British, it's the fact we're not American. Alright, it's true we don't have a black president but we still think we're cooler: less brash, more sarcastic and ready to give Tim Berners-Lee a starring role in the Olympic show. The differences are particularly obvious when it comes to the holy trinity of American life: guns, god and portion sizes. And Ben Fountain's debut novel - at the age of 48, he's a honed late developer after the excellent short story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (2006) - rips into all three over-indulgences.

Here is the Booker longlist, announced earlier this afternoon: The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre) Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker) The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books) Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday) Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories) Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate) The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt) Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury) Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber) Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate) As expected, the judges are clearly determined to avoid last year's 'dumbing-down' controversy.

London doesn’t really have a literary hipster scene, but if it did, Ned Beauman would be centre stage. The 27-year-old novelist may look like he’s crawled out of an evolution of man diagram, but he’s very clever and very trendy and, despite having gone to Cambridge, knows a lot about ketamine. His show-offy but energetic first book, Boxer Beetle, came out in 2010 to deafening acclaim and earnt him a six-figure publishing deal, unheard of in these austere times unless you’re a dog who’s won a talent contest. After spending a couple of years hanging out with cool, arty people in Brooklyn and Berlin, Beauman is back in town to promote his new book, The Teleportation Accident.

Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is a mystery 'why people might want to read it [Fifty Shades of Grey] rather than Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Eye or any back issue of Cosmopolitan. And that's to name but a few, and none of the masters like Henry Miller. As the Samizdat above tells you, assuming that you are in the market, go forth and find good smut. Please, anything but 'it'.