Culture

The author Megan McAfferty once said: ‘New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.’ That could have been said of any city. Our literature suggests that urban life is grubby or abject in some way. Blake famously wrote of industry corrupting the earth. The grime and menace of Dickens’ London in Oliver Twist is recalled by photographs of the slums that ooze from Sao Paolo, Mumbai or some nameless Chinese metropolis. The Waste Land tells of comfortable people commanded by the ‘dead sound on the final stroke of nine’, captives of unreal cities.

Pointing you cheerfully in the direction of Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament might be a bit like suggesting you hold your toddler’s birthday party in a funeral parlour, but do please bear with me on this. Yes, Nashe’s verses are basically about the fact that we’re all going to die – and that even when we’re having the most fun we’re still jigging a danse macarbe to the grim reaper’s jolly tune. But how prettily he says it! Flippancy aside, Nashe’s poem is at heart a cry of carpe diem. It’s from a play he wrote in 1593 to entertain the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was living in Croydon to escape the plague. Tough times, as anyone who’s been to Croydon will easily understand.

For John Lithgow, art is a confidence trick. ‘I’m an actor,’ he said. ‘I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well that it isn’t.’ It’s a pithy phrase, but actors are pawns in the hands of playwrights – a troupe of Ted Baldwins jigging at Moriaty’s pleasure. This made me consider literary con artists. Fresh from the success of The King’s Speech, Geoffrey Rush is in New York, playing Poprishchin, the deluded protagonist of Nicolai Gogol’s Diary of Madman. Giles Harvey has reviewed the adaptation for the New York Review of Books and he says that Gogol is ‘literature’s great confidence man’, whose ‘best work is founded on the cornerstone of deceit.

It was, in case you didn’t notice, World Book Night on Saturday. BBC2’s evening of bookish programmes can be found here, together with posts by Matthew Richardson and Emily Rhodes. Besides those, here is a selection of pieces from the weekend’s literary pages. Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English is a highly acclaimed first novel, and Kelman is being tipped for further accolades: both Erica Wagner (£) and John Mullan have expressed their admiration. Lewis Jones reviews Kelman’s idiosyncratic and shocking book for the Telegraph. ‘It is bad form to be rude about first novels, and a pleasure to praise them. Stephen Kelman’s has a powerful story, a pacy plot and engaging characters.

The kraken legend is often said to have been inspired by real sightings of giant squid, and this is why Wendy Williams in her Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid (Abrams, £12.99) has chosen this as a title for her book. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth . . . wrote Tennyson in his sonnet about the gigantic sea monsters of Viking myth. The kraken legend is often said to have been inspired by real sightings of giant squid, and this is why Wendy Williams in her Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid (Abrams, £12.99) has chosen this as a title for her book. But there was no need for such a theatrical title.

John Farndon has written the Bookend column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of the book blog. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth . . . wrote Tennyson in his sonnet about the gigantic sea monsters of Viking myth. The kraken legend is often said to have been inspired by real sightings of giant squid, and this is why Wendy Williams in her Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid has chosen this as a title for her book. But there was no need for such a theatrical title. The truth about real squids turns out to be genuinely fascinating.

Few things are more intriguing than an unfinished novel. With fitting symmetry, two books have been published posthumously in the past two years: Nabokov’s The Original Laura and Jose Saramango’s Cain. This year, Little Brown is to publish The Pale King, an unfinished work by David Foster Wallace – a claimant to the title of Great American Novelist, who took his own life in September 2008. Publication has been delayed twice by what one publisher described as ‘entirely foreseeable circumstances’. Obviously, sensitivity is paramount in this tragic case, but it seems that The Pale King is finally ready to be crowned.

In a recent review of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Robert Macfarlane remarks that the English scrubland between town and countryside is a theme that seems currently to be occupying the national consciousness.  The border country that this book describes is the territory which people pass through on their way to other places; the no man’s land traversed by motorways and criss-crossed by telephone wires.  Macfarlane is completely right: not only have two poets, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, written a book about the edgelands, but the BFI is organising a short film festival on the subject of ‘liminal Britain’ later in the year.

Roger Scruton is a man who has found himself condemned for defending the right things in the wrong way. Love, home, happiness and justice are the overriding concerns of his work, but his arguments about how we can achieve them have been repeatedly damned as mad and dangerous by those kind enough to appoint themselves the moral policeman of public thought. Mark Dooley, it is fair to say, is not one of those moral policeman. He is instead a Scrutonian acolyte whose aim in this book, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, is to outline and celebrate what he takes to be Scruton’s “philosophy of love”. Dooley does not try to hide his admiration for Scruton the man and Scruton the thinker.

John Aubrey was at his most vivacious when describing the cavaliers of his era. 'A gallant in an age of the lewdest bawdy,' he wrote of Lucius Carey with ill-disguised pleasure. These men were rogues like Rochester, Lovelace and Herrick - broke, drunk and invariably syphilitic. They were also royalists, a licentious contrast to their puritanical political opponents. The 'roundheads' regarded the cavalier's person and politics with equal loathing, convinced that both would lead to eternal damnation. Milton's famous evocation of pandemonium in Paradise Lost has a censorious tone that was perhaps a reaction to the abandon of Restoration England.

Jerry Hayes, the former Conservative MP for Harlow and criminal Barrister, returns to The Spectator Arts Blog with his take on Janet Street Porter’s book Don’t Let The B*****ds Get You Down, which has recently been reprinted in paperback. You really won’t want to put this book down. Because the moment the first page of this execrable excuse for a self-help manual is finished, you will feel compelled to hurl it from the nearest window and pray that it won’t land on consecrated ground. This is not just any old turkey. It is a Janet Street Porter primal scream of a self-boasting, oven-ready, 25-pounder. It is a book that quite simply transcends the bounds of awfulness and takes middle class whinging to Turner prize levels. So where do we start?