Culture

Fay Maschler has written the Bookend column in this week's magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: In existence for over 250 millions years, lobsters come in two distinct varieties, ‘clawed and clawless’. Human predators tend to the flawed and clueless as they overfish and — since lobsters must be cooked live — kill them heartlessly. Part of ‘the Edible Series’, dedicated to the global history of one type of ingredient, Lobster by Elisabeth Townsend considers the creature that inspired mosaic artists in ancient Pompeii, reclined like a cardinal in still life paintings, gave Salvador Dali a telephone handle, fed the indigent poor and later the spoiled rich and became a partial success in shellfish farming.

Reviewers this week flexed their intellectual muscles as they got to grips with clever clogs Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel.  His roman-a-clef At Last was a double boon: the perfect opportunity not only to indulge in a spot of sordid literary gossip but also to parade their mastery of the Literae Humaniores. And in numbers as mighty as the Achaeans swarming on Trojan plains, they did both. Caroline Moore in the Telegraph tried to trump the account of childhood rape – which  almost became banal when trotted out in every single review – with this biographical anecdote: "He turned up to sit his Oxford finals armed with the shaft of an empty Biro for snorting heroin, but without a conventionally filled pen.

A few intrepid writers from the Right braved the lion’s den of the left-wing Orwell Prize last night, dominated as it was by hordes of hacks from the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman. One of these brave souls even won an award. ConservativeHome’s Graeme Archer, whose quietly angry and deeply considered blog-posts took the prestigious Orwell Blog Prize. Archer’s original subject matter, written in prose as robust as granite, rebuffed strong opposition from the growing cacophony from the left-wing blogosphere. Indeed, his victory defies the popular belief that the day of independent right-wing blogging has passed. Jenni Russell won the journalist of the year award for her work on the Sunday Times and the Guardian.

The Orwell Prize will be awarded this evening and one of the following books will win: Death to the Dictator!, Afsaneh Moqadem Afsaneh Moqadem’s Death to the Dictator! is the fashionable choice for the award. Written by an Iranian dissident using a pseudonym to protect his anonymity, Death to the Dictator! is a fictionalisation of the failed Iranian revolution of 2009. The book opens with faceless security operatives dumping Mohsen Abbaspour’s tortured body at a roundabout on the outskirts of a town. Moqadem weaves an intricate yarn. He examines the character of tyranny, recalling Solzenitsyn and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, particularly the scenes between Captain Merrick and Hari Kumar in The Jewel in the Crown.

As part of the Guardian’s SF weekend, Iain M Banks says that the genre is not for dabblers. ‘The point is that science fiction is a dialogue, a process. All writing is, in a sense; a writer will read something – perhaps something quite famous, even a classic – and think "But what if it had been done this way instead . . . ?" And, standing on the shoulders of that particular giant, write something initially similar but developmentally different, so that the field evolves and further twists and turns are added to how stories are told as well as to the expectations and the knowledge of pre-existing literary patterns readers bring to those stories.

Mark Mason has written the Bookend column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for reader's of this blog. Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that she is under surveillance by the military. She maintains that she can ‘see the reality of the web of synchronicity in my life’. Showing off her special jewellery that ‘helps balance the chakras’, she reveals that ‘because I had a high metabolism and moved around a lot, I had no real [weight] problem until I was about 50’. Past-life experiences figure heavily.

Contemporary poetry (to misquote Blackadder), is a lot like sex. Tons of it about, but I just don’t get it. So I was a little nervous when I gave Apocrypha a go. But I’m happy to say I quite liked it (I seem to remember the same thing about sex, come to think of it). Apocrypha is an entertaining collection of poems about those twilit zones of the modern imagination where the sacred meets the mundane. It’s about the experience of living with religious stories we no longer believe in literally, but which we can’t forget.

I'll never cease to be amazed by the wealth of material freely available on Youtube. I chanced upon the above clip, a nine-minute excerpt from a documentary where a number of Samuel Beckett's friends and colleagues are interviewed. The first, lengthy part of the clip begins with Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the original French production of Waiting for Godot. Martin, who is no longer with us, shares his astonishment and enthusiasm for the role, while giving insight into some elements of his performance. Production designer Jocelyn Herbert is next, discussing nights out with Beckett, friends and colleagues.

As I wrote before the Easter break, Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad is a captivating novel. Reviewers are clamouring at its brilliance, but I agree with Will Blythe of the New York Times that it is 'unclassifiably elaborate'. You should believe the hype, but I can't quite say why. Here is Egan in conversation with Steve Bertrand. (She describes her methods and the life of the book, but she also reveals some of Kindle's shortcomings.

The death of the book has been much exaggerated, it seems. Figures released recently by the Publishers Association show a marked increase in sales of digital books, with total consumer sales rocketing up 318 per cent since 2009. However, there's no need to dismantle the bookshelves just yet. The digital slice of the book market still stands at only 6 per cent. Kindles et al might have the upper hand storage-wise; but, on this evidence, good old print and paper has some more puff in it yet. Beryl Bainbridge, for instance, remains a publishing sensation. Her uncompleted novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, is due for release on May 23. If you can’t wait till then, you can sneak an exclusive preview here courtesy of the Telegraph.