Culture

Marcus Berkmann on the few genuinely funny books aimed at this year’s Christmas market It’s a worrying sign, but I suspect that Christmas may not be as amusing as it used to be. For most of my life, vast numbers of so-called ‘funny’ books have been published at around this time of year, aimed squarely at desperate shoppers lurching drunkenly into bookshops on 24 December, still looking for the perfect present for someone they don’t much like. But this year there aren’t anywhere near as many. Perhaps they stopped selling. Maybe the QI Annual and Schott’s Almanac saw them off.

Here is the latest Book End column from this week's issue of the Spectator: Much of Stephen King’s recent work has been relatively lighthearted, but in Full Dark, No Stars 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. It’s stark and compelling, and should be avoided at all costs by readers with a phobia of rats. In ‘Big Driver’, an author of cosy crime novels is raped and left for dead.

The panel of judges for next year’s Booker Prize has been announced. It will be chaired by former chief-Spook Dame Stella Rimington. Rimington’s largely candid biography Open Secret gives a very privileged insight into the momentous events of the later 20th Century; and, apparently, her thrillers are a superior treat for a beach holiday too. Joining her are ex-MP Chris Mullin (of whose diaries more than enough has been said), the Telegraph’s literary editor Gaby Wood, and former Spectator Editor, writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona. And, of course, Susan Hill, who needs no introduction to readers of the Spectator. That panel will, I think, produce a diverse longlist. Congratulations to all, and prepare for the slog.

I never find the time to read poetry these days; and to enjoy and remember it, you have to read a lot. One of the many pleasures of sitting opposite the Spectator's literary editors is being given recommended reading, built on more than 50 years of professional experience between them. Yesterday, Clare Asquith recommended I read Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, of which I'd heard but never read. Written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, it has been described by political thinkers such as Paul Foot and Richard Holmes as the greatest political poem ever written in English. Having now read it, they're not far wrong. It is savage in its contempt and virulent in its disgust.

Hunter S Thompson’s dispatches from Vietnam have entered legend. Murray Sayle is less well known, but he too was in Vietnam as the war degenerated into bloody catastrophe, and he described it with award-winning panache for Harold Evans’ Sunday Times. Sayle, who died recently aged 84, was an inveterate adventurer and mild Quixotic. Born in Australia, he sailed to Britain in 1952 to save a doomed romance. Having failed to keep his woman, he found work as a leg-runner for the crime correspondent at The People. He published a cult autobiographical novel, A Crooked Sixpence, based on the experience in 1960. This was Fleet Street’s happy hour – that brief post-war period of carefree expenditure and extensive foreign reports.

Emma Donoghue’s excellent novel Room was rightly shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the first four (three really) inept words that came to mind after reading it were: ‘really good, really creepy’. It makes me cringe now to think that I didn’t have anything more intelligent to say; but I was emotionally exhausted and, really, no words can quite describe the world Donoghue has created in an eleven square foot shed. Room is 5-year-old Jack’s world, solely inhabited by him, Ma, Plant and the nightly visits from Old Nick. He hasn’t been lied to about his surroundings, just not told the whole truth. It is from this state of awareness, but not of information, that the unnerving story is told.

Here is the latest Book End column from this week's issue of the Spectator: ‘I only see radiators these days’, announces one of the characters in this novel — ‘You know, people who give out heat and warmth.’ A radiator is a pretty good description of India Knight’s Comfort and Joy, too: a book so kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. Miraculously, this is a feel-good story that manages not to be saccharine. Our heroine, Clara, may be nice, but she’s also barbed, tough and clever: a thoroughly modern woman.

In July 1995, entrepreneur Jeff Bezos opened a new kind of bookstore.  Inspired by recent leaps in modern technology, Amazon.com opened its doors to a different kind of consumer, set to the discordant soundtrack of the 56k modem. The concept followed the familiar principle of the mail-order catalogue, an accessible list of titles and cover artwork, enabling ‘browsers’ to shop from the comfort of their own home. But Amazon.com became one of a new generation of retailers, eschewing the expense of the printed catalogue in favour of an interactive online presence. As its consumer base continues to grow, online mail-order companies have become big business.

It is more than 30 years since Mark Amory declared biography dead, when he published his edition of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. Despite the best efforts of Victoria Glendinning (notably on Trollope) and Claire Tomalin (on Pepys and many others) there has been no grand critical resurrection since, until this year and the announcement of the shortlist for the Costa Awards. Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne has received the recognition of which Spectator reviewers Philip Hensher and David Sexton believed it worthy.

The Paris Review has surpassed itself yet again, with a brief memoir by photographer Paul McDonough. His photos and writing depict metropolitan life as it is predominantly lived: in a constant motion of coming and going. For McDonough, there is no such thing as still life. The actors in a city’s exterior space may or may not be aware that they are the centre of attention; but they are never sedentary. This realisation affected his art: "What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare.

When they found Hans Blix dead, his throat was slit and his tongue was pulled through the hole, an arrangement apparently known as a ‘Cuban necktie’. William Gibson did not do the deed – it was the work of an overenthusiastic hit man – and nor is he the person who commissioned the hit; their identity remains unclear. But he can, with confidence, be held directly responsible. After all, it happens in one of his novels. Hans Rutger Blix, ‘naturalised citizen of Costa Rica’, is a character in Virtual Light (1993); his death is punishment for losing the book’s macguffin, a rather special pair of dark glasses.

‘Oh my human brothers let me tell you how it happened,’ begs SS officer Max Aue, the narrator at the beginning of Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust novel The Kindly Ones. It is a book about the nature of evil. Simply memorialising the Holocaust, Littell says, always through the mouth of Aue, has relegated the killers to sub-human status. Littell challenges the reader to empathise with the Nazis, because Europe’s most grotesque trauma was perpetrated by the most civilised of men. Aue is strikingly human. If nothing else he is a study in pretentiousness, with an adolescent impulse to impress.

So just how good is it? Because of course those splendid people, the Man Booker judges, have rather prejudiced this review by going and giving their prize to Jacobson’s latest. If only they’d had the patience to wait for the launch of this blog. Because although not on the panel this year (September is such a busy time), I am always more than happy to drop the odd word of wisdom, share my insights, and generally do my bit to see that contemporary novelists are held to account for their various crimes against culture. And all in all, perhaps this year’s prize hasn’t been too badly awarded, because Jacobson has less to answer for than most. That is praise, by the way.