Culture

Andrew Petrie has written the Bookend column for this week's magazine. Here it is an exclusive for readers of this blog. ‘I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent.

It is strange that, in an age when so few people read books, literary prizes have taken on such significance. This week, with considerable pomp, the Man Booker Foundation announced a new award in honour of the late Beryl Bainbridge, the novelist and Spectator contributor. At last, Beryl the ‘Booker Bridesmaid’ – so-called because she was shortlisted for the award more than any other writer without ever winning it – could become Beryl ‘the Booker bride.' This new 'Best of Beryl' prize, to be chosen by the public, means she can rest in peace. Isn't it silly? Bainbridge deserves a posthumous prize, of course: she was a brilliant writer, arguably the best of her generation, and, I'm told, a wonderful woman.

Writers seldom cause revolutions, especially novelists. Even the greatest and most visionary political authors – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell and Hugo – were bound to the task of reflecting a society in turmoil. But, in doing so, fiction can have a more profound impact than the frenzied efforts of photographers and news editors to explain violent political movement. Disparate sweeps of disaffection can take clear form in the mind of a skilled novelist, and change can be presented beyond the myopia of newsreel. Ben Macintyre has found the novel that charts the character of the Egyptian dissenters. The Yacoubian Building was written by Alaa Al Aswany, a Cairo dentist, in 2002. It is a story of power, pessimism and resentment, and how they build towards violence.

Increasingly, this is an age of revolution. Disaffection has even reached England’s green and apathetic land. Libraries are to close and campaign groups have formed online around books blogs and community forums. Slogans are shouted, ministers harangued and the Culture Select Committee petitioned – all to no immediate avail. The dissenters are not above direct action, albeit confined to the sleepily donnish variety of protest. A wave of sit-ins, or read-ins as they are termed, was coordinated last Saturday and I went to watch the tenor of these demonstrations. First impressions of New Cross Library are thwarted by the pervasive must. The air is coarse: dehydrated by the aggressive central heating, straining with a pained hum.

After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks' emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with 'the hero' in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last. Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush.

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the Spectator. Here it is as an exclusive for the books blog. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and edible’ and ‘a goldmine of pleasures’, which leads you to expect something discursive, entertaining and not particularly substantial, but Hitchings (in real life the Evening Standard’s drama critic) has a serious, even polemical purpose here.

If the Observer was hoping to reignite the debate on the future of cultural criticism they couldn’t have found a soggier squib than American academic Neal Gabler’s unenlightening essay. Professional criticism, thinks Gabler, is dead. According to him, reviewers, or “cultural commissars”, used to be able to control what we “ordinary folk” read, watched and listened to “through a process close to cultural brainwashing”. Now we ignore them, consulting blogs and Twitter instead. Gabler sees this as a revolution against cultural elitism. Several things annoy me about his doomladen, US-centric prognosis: 1.

Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.   Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by 'this turkey' in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.   Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder.

Those who expected a novel loosely based on Barack Obama’s re-election to be a puff piece should look away now. O - A Presidential Novel is a refreshingly cynical look inside the Obama White House by an anonymous someone who claims to have seen the President live and work at close hand. Like Primary Colours with Clinton, the novel never attempts to disguise who “O” might be. And, like the West Wing, it is an irreverent and witty take on an ideal Washington world, following the ups and downs of compelling characters from across the spectrum. From lobbyists, hungry journalists to rich donors, O takes a peek at every level behind the scenes from 2011 to Election Day 2012. But there is more.