Culture

Even in translation, Michel Houellebecq’s novels are witty, mad (particularly in translation) and sickeningly funny. I’m reading his latest, The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt last year. As expected, author and characters are superb in their disgust with and contempt for the world in general, and especially France, art, tourism and gastronomy, all of them hideously related. The sex and atrocities have been rationed, though; the writing has new polish and finesse; and a shocking sympathy has crept into the proceedings. Even if it did not win the Man Booker Prize after I backed it at 8-1, I thought Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English was miraculous. I’m not saying that Sam Leith’s You Talkin’ To Me?

This week Ian Rankin tells us which Jilly Cooper heroine he would sleep with and the title he'd give his self-help book. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers?  Enid Blyton books and lots and lots of comics (Victor, Hotspur, plus annuals dedicated to those same comics).   2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?  I had a lump in my throat towards the end of David Nichols' One Day.... 3) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?  Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Lanark by Alasdair Gray. 4) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?

Obviously Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child is a masterpiece. So is Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson. But having already said as much in these pages, I mention them only in passing. You’re less likely to have heard about Grant Morrison’s clever, passionate Supergods, but I urge it on you if you have any interest in myth, magic, comic-book culture or the question of why you’d put nipples on a Batsuit. I was grateful to the Man Booker judges, maligned as they have been, for shortlisting Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which I’d not have read otherwise. It’s wonderfully funny and original. Oh, and there’s The Pale King, too.

The Press Association is reporting that Matthew Crawley (AKA Dan Stevens) will be on the Booker panel next year. Sir Peter Stothard is the chairman of the judges and he will be joined by broadcaster and historian Amanda Foreman and academics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon. That's a heavyweight list. Even Stevens counts as a critic, having just launched an online literary magazine called The Junket. Stothard said, 'We have two of Britain's finest professional critics, with expertise in novels from the 18th to the 21st century, a distinguished actor who is also an accomplished literary critic and an historian who is one of the most successful biographers of our time.

My reading this year has been retrospective, dominated by Stefan Zweig, the most gentlemanly of writers. Beware of Pity, translated by the estimable Anthea Bell, remains powerfully shocking, yet classically restrained, while The Post Office Girl, in a less memorable translation, is queasily convincing. Both are published by Pushkin Press. Zweig seems unfazed by the horrors he implies, and indeed his understated worldliness is a corrective to contemporary fashions. I make exception for two of those contemporaries: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)  and Colin Thubron (A Mountain in Tibet), both of whom do an excellent job of dealing with fears all the more potent for being largely concealed.

Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer is one of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic, with an understanding of the human heart has produced this masterpiece. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read of anyone: it captures the tragedy of Palmer’s life, and brings out the shimmering glory, the iridescent secrets of his Shoreham phase. Matthew Sturgis’s When in Rome: 2,000 Years of Roman Sightseeing is a totally original way of writing about the inexhaustible subject of Rome. Each chapter represents a different era of taste, from ancient to modern times: which artefacts and great sites were most popular in which era.

Jane Shilling’s The Stranger in the Mirror is an essay on what happens to the narrative arc of a woman’s life when she reaches middle age. It is as deeply felt as it is witty and elegant. Henry’s Demons, by father and son Patrick and Henry Cockburn, provides the most compelling insight into schizophrenia that I’ve come across. As Good as God, As Clever as the Devil would have appalled its subject, the intellectually gifted, sexually tormented wife of the Victorian Archbishop Benson, but Rodney Bolt mines a rich archival vein and transcends gossip. First published in 1946, We Are Besieged, Barbara Fitzgerald’s charming novel of an Anglo-Irish family in the Twenties, is a welcome reissue from Somerville Press.