Culture

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookend column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. Sporting literature is a strange old business, often underrated by those who don’t like sport and overrated by those who do. In particular, a warm glow hovers over the reputation of golf writing, which has attained an eminence the unsung litterateurs of snooker and darts can only envy. Golf Stories, edited by the American journalist Charles McGrath, arrives as a small and beautifully appointed hardback, as certain of itself as any book can be.

Historical fiction has been a staple of the reading public for more than a century. Fashions change and there are eras when these novels are more fictitious than historical. The current fashion sees history trump fiction, particularly in the realm of real crime. Colquhoun’s new novel, Mr Briggs’ Hat, is the story of the first murder on Britain’s railways, a whodunit that sent Victorian Britain into paroxysms of fear. You can read her introduction to the book, its themes and its place in the canon of British crime writing here. It is a deft exposition of sensationalism, charting Victorian Britain’s furtive delight in transgression and its concerns about the price of modernity and the loss of innocence.

“It sometimes makes me wretch, just the thought of writing,” said an author whose book launch I attended last night. This was not said in jest as part of a routine of good natured badinage, or as a novel sales pitch. He meant it. “There’s a moment of deep anxiety. A quandary. A kind of self-loathing brought about by sudden self awareness: the realisation that what I’m writing is absurd and that I can’t improve on it. It’s the fear of failure. At that point I get the nausea.” It’s a common complaint: some writers just hate putting pen to paper. And because so few authors have immutable deadlines, many choose to procrastinate rather than scribble.

Essentially, Alan Bennett's new book is about its title: Smut. Here the National Treasure reads extracts from this duet of sly and unseemly stories.

How would you behave if you were at the Royal wedding? I concede that at this stage the contingency is remote, but humour me anyway. It’s a grand sight, the sort of pageant that Britain does best. The royal family, bishops, assembled dignitaries, guardsmen lining the route: all that’s missing is a Spitfire, Vera Lynn and some fleeing Bosche. But Huw Edwards and some bearskins does not a state occasion make. The wedding will look splendid and solemn, but, once the religious ceremony ends, it’s like any other familial knees-up. So was it ever thus. The Gentleman’s Magazine, a staple of polite Georgian England, considered this question of deportment in an edition published around the marriage of the Prince Regent to Princess Caroline in 1795.

It is an old cliché that films of books must be inferior to the books themselves. It is not always true. For instance, read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and see whether you disagree (the writing is pedestrian and the plotting is incoherent, which is why the movie has a different storyline). Then of course there is David Nicholls’ first novel, Starter For Ten, which was fun but nothing like as good as the film adaptation (in no small part thanks to James McAvoy). The adaptation of David Nicholls' One Day, a coming-of-age novel about love and fulfilment, hits our cinema screens this autumn. But clichés are not clichés for nothing. Unlike Starter For Ten, which began life as a screenplay, One Day does not feel as cinematic.

As Roy Greenslade notes, the Orwell Prize aims to reward those who have come closest to achieving Orwell’s ambition of ‘making political writing an art’. The Orwell Prize’s shortlist has been released today. Shortlist is something of a misnomer, as a glance at the exhaustive categories will reveal. Perhaps, in time, there will be a Twitter prize. The major category is the book prize. The shortlist is impressive: Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal, an exploration of Stalin’s Russia after the Second World War. The late Lord Bingham’s The Rule of Law, a masterful examination of the balance of law in Britain and strangely humane and uplifting for such a theoretically considered book; Jonathan Sumption reviewed it for the Spectator.

In recent years the question of why the literary mainstream continues to marginalize and ignore writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy has become a live issue, perhaps most eloquently demonstrated by the furious reaction to the BBC’s shabby and offhand treatment of the genres in its World Book Night program, The Books We Really Read. As someone who reads widely in both fields it’s an irritation I have some sympathy with. Where forty years ago any reader worth their salt would have at least a passing knowledge of SF authors such as J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, many now wear their ignorance of the form proudly, dismissing it with the same shudder they reserve for Twilight.

Usually, I mistrust hype. But if you get the chance over this Bank Holiday Weekend and the next, grab a copy of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which has just won the Pullitzer and would doubtless sweep the Grammies if it was eligible. I have just started it and it was immediately beguiling. It’s a book of contradictions: self-regarding then mysterious; constrained and then epic; foul and at a turn inspiring. I can’t wait to get out into the sun and read it at leisure. It’s much too early to fathom my own response to the book.

The homes of famous writers have a strange allure. A suggestion of genius in the air, perhaps. In the Telegraph, Claudia FitzHerbert has a beguiling piece on newly-reopened Max Gate (pictured), the house in which Thomas Hardy wrote many of his most celebrated works.   Having the name of a famous writer in the town hall records is a boon for any local authority. Take a bow Stratford-upon-Avon. The recently refurbished RSC theatre is just the start. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust looks after a variety of Bard-related real estate including the Henley Street house in which Shakespeare was born, Anne Hathaway's cottage and the farm once occupied by Shakespeare's mother.