Culture

Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last word is strange. You might imagine that Updike sold novels in bulk, bought by the Main Street masses of whom he wrote. But Updike sold quite modestly in his lifetime — Couples was a major commercial success, earning him a place on the cover of Time in April 1968, but beyond that he struggled to crack the top 50 in America.

As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Britain’s victory is justly recalled. That the war came near to disaster is conveniently forgotten. How well-placed are we to hold the islands today? When the 127 ships of the Task Force — a number that could not be assembled now  — returned in triumph to the home ports in 1982 no one wished to talk about how near the venture had come to grief. Without detracting from the courage and skill of the British forces, victory came because of three unpredictable weaknesses on the Argentine side: they ran out of Exocet missiles, many of their 1000lb bombs failed to explode, and they foolishly attacked the warships instead of the troop transports at San Carlos Bay.

Colm Tóibín began his writing career as a journalist. Although he wrote his first novel, The South, in 1986, it took him a further four years to find a publisher. Since that seminal moment, Tóibín has delivered five other novels; two books of short stories; two plays, as well as several works of non-fiction. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, and won The Costa Novel Award, for Brooklyn. In his latest book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Tóibín explores the odd relationships that various writers, including W.B Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John Cheever and Thomas Mann, had with their families, and asks how it informed their work.

What, if any, are the similarities between the great novels of past wars, such as Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (the Boer War), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (WWI), and Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honor Trilogy (WWII)? And is there a connection between these wartime experiences and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? As a veteran of the recent Iraq War, I found myself haunted by these novels not because of how our response to war has changed, but because the experiences of troops returning from battlefields in the Cape and Verdun when compared to those of Baghdad and Helmand matches with a startling sameness. It would be a mistake to dismiss the novels by Waugh, Ford and Maugham as interchangeable. Each approaches war differently.

A new world flavour to Shelf Life this week, as the novelist Sean Thomas Russell joins us from Vancouver. He has been getting to grips with Shakespeare — an attempt, perhaps, to escape the pervasive influence of Bill O'Reilly. His latest novel, A Ship of War, is published in Britain next week. 1) What are you reading at the moment?   Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber. I've been on a Shakespeare kick recently. I just finished Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt and A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro. I recommend all three. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame.  This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs. It is a traditional bookseller in the sense that well educated, book-loving staff are on hand to offer customers the expertise that is usually unavailable in a travel terminal newsagent like WHSmith. (Smiths seem to be the only such retailer in Britain.) Staff sometimes have a foreign language — a useful bonus in an arena where tourists should be a major source of revenue.

Easter - Rise heart: thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise     Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise     With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part     With all thy art. The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,     Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day.