The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator: Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences.
'He has no house.' Volislav Jakic's epigraph opens In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut's acclaimed novel. Donne's 'No man is an island' would have served just as well. This is the story of one rootless man, Damon, and his fear of commitment. Ostensibly, travel is Galgut's subject. Hope and desire are thwarted by chance and choice on the road. But, as Galgut is fond of saying, memory is fiction. With the globe at his disposal, Galgut explores how memory is adopted or discarded to mitigate or exaggerate moments of euphoria, grief and regret; and hints at the influence of landscape on memory. Africa - its beauty and squalor, promise and threat - is the book's most visited landscape, inspiring some of the most evocative description of time and place I've ever read.
Christmas publishing stock was in the bookshops for the end of November, so in the absence of material to review, literary editors have roasted the last of their chestnuts with Books of the Year lists. For the most comprehensive list on politics, history, art, and international relations, fiction and poetry, the Economist’s is hard to beat. Jane Shilling’s review of The Memory Chalet in the Telegraph is a tribute to Tony Judt, the historian and philosopher, who died in August. As he struggles to cope with the physical debilitations of motor neurone disease, he creates an intellectual memory bank in a holiday cottage his parents took in the Swiss Alps when he was a boy.
The late twentieth century was blessed with brilliant academic historians whose writing had a common touch; Tony Judt was one of them. Postwar was his crowning achievement. As Europe’s divided halves were conjoined politically and economically after the Cold War, Judt united their conflicted histories. For instance, 1968 was about more than students in Paris and Prague; it was a continental mass of common causes and misunderstandings – a thwarted dash for freedom of expression and thought, from which stronger collective identities must eventually emerge. He was also an essayist, whose work merited the over-used label of ‘polemic’ – a form that seeks truth in confrontation, not ad hominem for its own sake.
C is a Bildungsroman telling the history of Serge Carrefax, an increasingly unlikable amoral antihero. The novel is divided into four sections covering Serge’s childhood, his adventures during the First World War as a member of the Royal Flying Corps, his misadventures in 1920s London with drugs and chorus-girls (all the bits Bertie Wooster left out), and finally a journey into the tombs of Egypt for the Ministry of Communications. Most Bildungsromans follow their protagonists on a journey of development towards self-knowledge. Serge, however, is on a journey to nowhere. Born in 1898 along with the first experimental radio transmissions, he spends his whole life obsessed with transmission and networks of communication.
I doubt that Philip Larkin has ever been out of fashion, but after the 25th anniversary of his death and the publication of his letters to Monica Jones – beautifully reviewed for the Spectator by Philip Hensher – his star is well and truly back in the ascendant. T.S. Eliot, who was hardly renowned for generosity of spirit, wrote that Larkin made ‘words do what he wanted’ - a singular talent that gave Larkin broad appeal, which, for me, is his greatest strength. From the savage irreverence of This Be The Verse to the delicacy of High Windows, Larkin cuts it with both the intelligentsia and the chatterati. To prove the point, Radio 4 broadcast David Walliams and Andrew Motion waxing on all things Larkin. What’s not to like?
The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean ‘everyone’, or just her agent, publisher and ‘many psychiatrists’? The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.
I don’t remember who it was who said ‘memory is genius’, but they were on to something. I’m not sure, either, whether they meant genius in the original sense of ‘animating spirit’ — i.e. memory as constitutive of personality — or in the modern one of ‘brilliance’. But both seem to apply equally well to the peculiar talents of Geoff Dyer. He seems to have a photographic memory; and that’s not a figure of speech. He can remember photographs in an extraordinary way, as witness the opening essays in this collection, in which he spiels on photographers including Alec Soth, Jacob Holdt, Richard Avedon and Martin Parr.
It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk, he ‘begged’ the five writers he considered to be the best in their field to produce a new story for this collection; and ‘happily for me,’ he tells us, ‘they all agreed.’ Jakubowski’s introduction evokes those black-and-white days when Alfred Hitchcock shuffled on to millions of walnut-encased television sets to present us with half an hour of spine-tingling tension — very much as we have with each of the stories here.
For Jasper Conran the country is about ‘the scent of ripe apples or freshly-baked bread’, about grand houses that ‘sleep among ancient trees’, Morris dancers, Morris Travellers, tasteful cottages and ‘daffodils dancing in the breeze’. In his book Country (Conran Octopus, £50) there are some lovely interiors, though the most striking are those of his own former house in Chiswick. Conran’s acknowledgement of Andrew Montgomery, whose outstandingly beautiful photographs of landscapes, people and rooms transcend cliché to make this book such a pleasure, is churlishly scant.
Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Tom Rosenthal has been a life-long admirer of Lowry’s work, spending his formative years in Greater Manchester and even interviewing the old curmudgeon for Radio 3 in the 1960s. One of his aims in this book is to dispel the various myths that have grown up around Lowry and his critically underestimated art. It has become fashionable in the art world to look down on Lowry as a naive painter who could only paint industrial landscapes full of ridiculous scampering matchstick people.
David Cameron was despondent on the evening of 10 May. Although the election result was pretty much as he had predicted privately, he feared that his ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ of coalition with the Liberal Democrats was about to be rejected in favour of a deal with Labour. When we talked that night he feared another spell in opposition, and he ended by suggesting I went into the office the next day since he would have time on his hands. But as we spoke, the Lib Dem negotiating team was reporting back to Nick Clegg on another disastrous set of discussions with Labour, ensuring that long-held hopes of the so-called ‘progressive alliance’ were shrivelling by the hour. Even Vince Cable accepted the reality of the situation.
Juliet Townsend selects the best of this year’s reading for toddlers through to teenagers In these straitened times one can only be grateful for the excellent value offered by picture books for young children, which have remained at the same price for several years. Since the migration of their production to the Far East, some have become ever more elaborate, with pop-up versions accompanied by sound effects, resulting in something which is more a toy than a book. There are, however, many excellent writers and illustrators represented this Christmas. For the youngest children, Christmas Time by Alison Jay (Templar, £10.99) with minimal text and colourful and original pictures, takes us on a seasonal journey, full of reindeer, carol singers, polar bears and snowmen.
Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator: The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean ‘everyone’, or just her agent, publisher and ‘many psychiatrists’?
Last week was Shelley, here’s this week’s Discovering Poetry excerpt: Now I’d be willing to wage at least a fiver that in the last twenty-four hours you passed on the street a nice young couple walking happily hand-in-hand. Nauseating, isn’t it? But also the most natural thing in the world. There seems to me something very touching about such modest affection. Little in itself, but enough to mean the world when done rightly. Between lovers, between a mother and her child, or in the softly squeezed hand of a friend in grief. It’s with this most everyday act of human love that Milton ends Paradise Lost.
Alas, Gordon Brown’s Beyond the Crash was just too late to qualify for this month’s Spectator Book Club book of the month. What a sadness. Instead, I’ve picked a book to inspire goodwill in all men: Lucky Jim. The Spectator originally described Kingsley Amis’ campus classic as ‘that rarest of rare good things, a very funny book’. The general anger that Amis expressed has dissipated into apathy – nowadays it’s the students who feel exercised. But Amis’ craft - the wicked set-pieces, savage wit and his deft prose – remains vivid and modern. Orlando Bird’s piece on Amis’ legacy reminded me of what I’d forgotten of arguably the finest novel ever written by an Amis - let’s have that argument.
Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world's literary pages: Writing in the City Journal, Christopher Hitchens asks why Capitol Hill has been stolen by the pot-boilers: 'The days of the Georgetown hostess are gone; the hostesses themselves are gone, too. Their reign began to close years ago, when senators started canceling dinners to appear on shows like Nightline. (There's a prefiguration of this in Larry McMurtry's neglected 1982 Washington novel Cadillac Jack, in which a character pontificates on world-shaking matters of which he knows little.) The Washington pundit is also a thing of the past: it's been a good while since any insider columnist had the kind of access or influence that Ben Bradlee enjoyed with John F. Kennedy.
A couple of years back, John Carey reviewed a new biography of Kingsley Amis and began with the question that people had been asking for years: why was he so horrible? Amis is regarded as one of a generation of fat philistines, drink-sodden and misanthropic, who made careers of bating Britain’s ‘Trots and leftist shags’. But he was not always so. John Metcalf, reviewing Lucky Jim for the Spectator in 1954, described it as ‘that rarest of rare good things: a very funny book’. ‘Dixon’, he wrote, ‘is completely believable, his predicaments and gaucheries are a part of him, and Mr Amis watches with wide-eyed objectivity’. Lucky Jim, Metcalf concluded, is ‘a very funny, very human novel’.
‘The coalition’s proposal to slash funding for the arts…and humanities risk not just losing a generation of artists, but also a generation of critical and creative thinkers’. So says an indignant Guardian letter buttressed by a shopping list of academics. A familiar clarion call. But surprise, surprise what unites the subjects threatened with impoverishment? Books. It all, in the end, comes back to books. No matter how celebrated the lecturer, no matter how state-of-the-art the facilities, no matter how revolutionary and innovative the course, arts and humanities degrees at least are all about books. Lectures are little more than a splash and a skim through material, a verbal snifter instead of the readerly gulp.
This article was originally published on the Spectator’s Cappuccino Culture blog. It is republished here because it relates to last week’s episode of the gripping if smaltzy adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the story of one writer’s journey through the twentieth century. The second episode begins with the outbreak of the Second World War, the party interrupted. It airs at 9pm tonight on Channel Four. Without need of an occupation, a small band of the well-born lit up the 1920s with mischief and indolence. The last of their number, Teresa Jungman, died aged 102. Many of the dilettante Bright Young Things went on to ‘Great Things’ – William Walton composed, Cecil Beaton photographed and Rex Whistler painted.
Much of Stephen King’s recent work has been relatively lighthearted, but in Full Dark, No Stars (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) he returns with gusto to his dark side and explores the perils of getting what you ask for. Much of Stephen King’s recent work has been relatively lighthearted, but in Full Dark, No Stars (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) he returns with gusto to his dark side and explores the perils of getting what you ask for. The first and longest of these four novellas, ‘1922’, is a murderer’s confession: a farmer describes murdering his wife in Nebraska just after the first world war and the unexpected consequences that gradually destroy his life.
Juliet Townsend finds that children’s arcane playground rituals have survived television, texting and computer games When Iona and Peter Opie published their groundbreaking work The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, they started their preface by pointing out that Queen Anne’s physician, John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope, observed that nowhere was tradition preserved pure and uncorrupt ‘but among School-boys, whose Games and Plays are delivered down invariably from one generation to another.’ Theirs was the first study to establish that this was still largely true in the mid 20th century.
The shores of the eastern Mediterranean, from the eastern Aegean to the delta of the Nile, constitute a region known as the Levant, from the French for the sunrise. The French were first into Smyrna, opposite the island of Chios, which became a boom town in Ottoman times, trading figs and raisins from the hinterland. Far from Constantinople, it was a cheap and relaxed place to do business, encouraged by the Ottoman grants of consular jurisdiction and free trade. European consuls lived like princes in Smyrna, the merchants like lords. Tension between Muslims and Christians, between the many communities of Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Franks who settled there, were generally kept in check, both by the local authorities and by the consuls’ own naval might.
Christmas is coming, which generally leads to a surge in sales of crime fiction. Fortunately for readers, some delectable crime novels have appeared in the past few months. Among them is Val McDermid’s Trick of the Dark (Little, Brown, £18.99). This is not one of her series novels but a standalone thriller whose plot revolves around St Scholastika’s College, Oxford, a women’s college with a certain resemblance to St Hilda’s. One of its alumnae is Charlie Flint, a clinical psychologist whose professional reputation is hanging in the balance. She receives an anonymous bundle of press cuttings relating to a recent murder at the college, now the subject of a high-profile criminal trial.
The glamorous art world of Manhattan is a natural subject for novelists and film-makers, but with the honourable exception of William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, written before the great art boom of recent times got going, few of the novels or movies have quite got it right. The glamorous art world of Manhattan is a natural subject for novelists and film-makers, but with the honourable exception of William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, written before the great art boom of recent times got going, few of the novels or movies have quite got it right. But now comes a novel by Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty, which does seem to have the ring of truth about it.
Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. But the biographer was undeterred. As an English author of books on the arts and the chief arts critic of the Irish Independent, he was a friend of Hill’s for the last 37 years of his life.
In September 1954, Albert Speer decided to walk from Berlin to Heidelberg, a distance of 620 kilometres. As Hitler’s architect still had more than a decade of a prison sentence in Spandau to serve, this might have been seen as problematic. But not so. Speer mapped out a circular course of 270 metres in the prison’s garden, and proceeded to walk it over and over again. He completed the journey in a few months, having done 2,296 laps of the course. Seeking a new destination, he rejected the suggestion of fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess — Asia — on the grounds that it would mean passing through communist countries.
Why do so many aspiring writers think it best to begin with the short story and graduate to the novel? It’s madness. The short story is infinitely harder to write well. Some novelists succeed at both — William Trevor and John McGahern are the names that spring to mind — but Chekhov never wrote a novel and, coming up to date, our leading woman short-story writer, Helen Simpson, has not been tempted to do so either. I can count on a hand the names of contemporary writers whose collections of short stories are worth reading, but Polly Samson has belonged on one of its fingers since her fine first volume, Lying in Bed. That was published ten years ago.
Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’ Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.