Literature

The 2012 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The runners and riders are: Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books) Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber) Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt) Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury) Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber) The Booker longlist was ambitious, a challenge to readers that was high-brow and out of touch as the world went mad for E.L. James's easy mix of spanking and wanking. The judges have continued in this high-minded vein with the shortlist, self-consciously so.

While Howard Jacobson’s prose works are renowned for their wit, energy, and self-deprecating, priapic jokes, his latest book, Zoo Time, is perhaps his most light-hearted to date. The protagonist is a struggling novelist, Guy Ableman: a red-blooded male with a penchant for the filth-merchants of English literature. Ableman has two predicaments: the first is his inability to sell any books. The second is his wish to sleep with Poppy, his alluring and sophisticated mother-in-law. Although the book is meant to be read with the smarmy, tongue and cheek tone that Jacobson has become famous for, the novel also passes judgment on a more serious matter: the crisis that has befallen the world of literary fiction.

How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she asked. ‘They go on and on. They never really add much, though. I usually pass over them.’ My initial reaction was: really? They never add much? I haven’t read NW yet, but my mind went back to The Autograph Man, Smith’s second novel. It only struck me halfway through that I didn’t know much, if anything, about the characters’ appearances, even whether they were black or white.

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.

English Literature GCSE isn’t a compulsory qualification, and the number of pupils taking the qualification has been dropping since 2008. With the current state of the course, you can see why. It’s not that the exam boards set awful texts, or that the subject is dull. It’s that the means of testing are inadequate. The course is examined in two ways; the controlled assessment accounts for 25%, and the external exams, which account for the remaining 75%. Everyone knows that GCSEs aren’t ‘what they used to be’ and yes, we all know how terribly lucky we are to get a copy of the text in our exam; but, at the moment, the major problems are controlled assessments. In 2009, all GCSE coursework was replaced by controlled assessments.

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.

Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its editors cause for consideration as well as celebration. They have commissioned a series of essays on the questions prompted by the unnerving nature of the future.

The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars of modern horror fiction — the vampire myth — was born during that same extraordinary holiday. Shelley and Mary had taken lodgings near Lord Byron, recently escaped from England following the scandal of his divorce, and — many speculate — incestuous affair with his half-sister. Accompanying him was his handsome and neurotic doctor, Polidori. In Shelley's party was Mary's half sister Claire, already pregnant by Byron and desperate to see him again.

Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel 'The Busconductor Hines appeared. Kelman has received several prizes for his fiction including: the Cheltenham Prize for Greyhound for Breakfast and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ‘A Disaffection’. His fourth novel, ‘How Late it Was, How Late’, landed him the Booker Prize in 1994, amid a storm of controversy. To date he has published eight collections of short stories, eight novels, and two books of essays.

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.

Unpredicted Consequences of the eBook Number 371: more people are reading as they walk along. I say ‘more’. Actually I’ve seen two, in as many weeks. So this is a prediction rather than an observation. But it’s one I’m pretty confident about. It struck me as I watched the people in question — both 20-something women, both reading Kindles — that a single-page e-reader isn’t that much bigger than a large smartphone. It’s perfectly common as you walk along to check your emails and texts, or even surf the net — so why not read a book? In fact you can read books on your iPhone, making the transition from one habit to the other even easier.

When Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished book (not quite a novel, not quite a novella) The Original of Laura was posthumously released in 2009, consternation over whether it was right to publish the work at all — Nabokov had instructed that it be destroyed after his death — swiftly gave way to consternation over what the work contained. And what the work contained was yet more evidence that Nabokov’s interest in very young girls was, well, something rather more than an interest.   Here was a figure who was not so much possessed of the ability to send planets spinning (Nabokov’s definition of the real writer) as he was the ability to elicit from the literary world not very much more than a collective shake of the head.

It is almost twelve months ago, following the below-par A Death in Summer, that I wondered aloud on these pages whether Benjamin Black (aka Booker-winner, John Banville) had what it took to write a crime series. A resounding yes comes in the form of the fifth instalment — sixth novel overall, after the 2008 stand-alone The Lemur — of the Quirke series, Vengeance. Black has finally rediscovered the formula that made his debut, Christine Falls, so memorable.   To be sure, crime fiction purists will still bemoan the absence of standard clue-laying.

Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did it. Publishing in the old days, before writers all had ‘web presences’, could be a lonely business, the only real feeling for how your book had been received coming from newspaper reviews and sales figures. Yet when contact is made there can be moments of beauty. There can also be moments of terror, and indeed of bafflement. I’ve been lucky in that my books seem to attract only positive correspondence.

With Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo: State of England — the horrific account of a hard-living career criminal turned celebrity lottery winner — climbing the bestseller charts,  Li and his creator shouldn't be confused. At least, that is according to Amis, who recently told the Spectator that he was never a rebel. Richard Bradford, author of last year’s universally panned Martin Amis: The Biography had planned on shining a light on Amis’ greener youth. At one point the vexed manuscript apparently included a fond Amis recollection of smoking joints in Picasso's on the King's Road, something that would have resulted in arrest in about ten minutes.

The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite watering-hole in the north, south, east or west of the city; it’s as if he left a tangible reminder of his presence — an extra shiny spot or cigarette burn burnished into the leather of an armchair — in each of the now rather shabby-chic establishments.

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn't sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo - Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav -  and his lottery win, it seems written to offend ... even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &"was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks. As a loyal Amis disciple, Nicola Barker in the Observer.