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Norm wants to know your top ten favourite English-language novelists. I ballsed my ballot up by forgetting to include William McIlvanney. No excuse for you not to do your bit however. Votes for this fellow - interest declared! - always permitted...
When Edgar Allan Poe bumped into a friend in New York in 1845, according to Peter Ackroyd’s brisk new life, the following exchange took place. ‘Wallace,’ said Poe, ‘I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.’ ‘Have you?’ said Wallace. ‘That is a fine achievement.’ ‘Would you like to hear it?’ said Poe. ‘Most certainly,’ said Wallace. Thereupon Poe recited the verses of ‘The Raven’. This lovely little cameo — halfway to being a sketch from The Fast Show — is all the funnier for the fact that the joke is not entirely on Poe. Though maybe not the greatest poem ever written, ‘The Raven’ really was pretty spectacular. Poe knew it.
The bookshelves of any self-respecting library used to be weighed down with the monographs of the titans of 19th-century politics. The three volumes of John Morley’s masterly Life of Gladstone would jostle for space as each new volume of Moneypenny and Buckle’s six-volume Life of Benjamin Disrael was published. Yet one Victorian politician would have been conspicuous by his absence on the bookshelves. Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was hardly a bit-player in mid-Victorian politics. He was involved in the great battles over reform that dominated the period, both as leader of his party for 22 years and leader of his country. Yet the very title of this first ever full biography — The Forgotten Prime Minister — says it all.
Both these books are dominated by the American connection, over half of each being devoted to transatlantic collecting in the 20th century. James Stourton’s theme is post-war art collecting, and his US section is headed ‘America Triumphant’. He describes the 60 years when the USA dominated the international art market through sheer buying power but also because of the vitality and originality of the contemporary American art scene in New York. John Harris, by contrast, paints a hilarious picture of the earlier 20th-century trade in historic interiors and architectural bric-a-brac when ‘period rooms’ were a must-have in American houses and art museums, though most of the latter have now been de-accessioned as fake.
At the centre of James Meek’s new novel — a fine successor to The People’s Act of Love — there is a brilliant scene in which Adam Kellas, a war correspondent, is watching two Taliban lorries driving along a ridge. In the no-man’s-land between is an ancient Soviet tank occupied by Astrid, an American correspondent with whom Kellas has just spent the night, and an Afghan. She is not concerned with the lorries: she has just challenged the man to hit a tree stump in the distance. Kellas asks the Afghan commander beside him, who is infuriated by the tomfoolery, why he doesn’t instruct the tank to fire at the lorries. The commander replies that he doesn’t want to risk his men ‘when the Americans are going to win the war for us anyway’.
A. N. Wilson commemorates the life of the great journalist Hugh Massingberd The following is the address given at his funeral at Kensal Green Crematorium on 2 January We were all so lucky to bask in Hugh’s generous friendship. He included in this friendship his family, his children, Harriet and Luke, Gareth, the father of Hugh’s grandson Jack, whose arrival on this planet caused him such immense joy, Christine and of course Ripples, his wife, friend for life and ministering angel, as well as dozens of happy men and women, boys and girls, all of them cheered up by his mere appearance, or by one of his frequent, semi-legible post-cards written in thick felt-tip pen. In his own phrase — ‘Nothing better!’ There was nothing better than his friendship.
Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jay McInerney, Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith. Two more minutes with the contents table, scrupulously ignoring Zadie Smith who doesn’t contribute a piece but takes part in one of the features, produced a score of six.
Most writers of science fiction have foreseen human communication becoming more sophisticated and realistic. Brave New World has the feelies; 1984 has telescreens; every spaceship seems to have a colossal video wall on which the Emperor Zorquon can appear in Dolby surround sound to threaten the crew with unspeakable things. But more interesting than the media everybody predicted are those nobody did: the text message, twitter.com, the Facebook status update, YouTube. All these are the opposite of the High-Definition experience. They are low-bandwidth, low-effort media — what Malcolm McLaren calls Lo-Fi. And that’s precisely why people like them — for they combine low demands of the message creator with low expectations in the recipient.
After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.
In 1999, Rosalind Bleach, whose mother had just died, opened for the first time her rosewood bureau with a swivel top and four drawers. She discovered 41 letters written between 1907 and 1915 by the Master — Henry James — to Mrs Ford, a now nearly forgotten upper-middle-class woman who lived at Budds, a country house six miles from James’s house at Rye. Everything about these letters breathes another age. James wrote, with a Harrods stylograph pen, or dictated, up to 40,000 letters, which eventually will be published in perhaps 140 volumes. These letters to Mrs Ford have never been seen before.
The century or so before the Civil War, the era of the Tudors and early Stuarts, did not think well of itself. Contemporaries lamented the decline of social responsibility in the nobility and gentry, the erosion of honour and virtue, the spread of enclosures, the parasitism and arrivisme of wealth, and the emptiness and falsity of its display. The picture has often been endorsed in later generations, from both the traditionalist Right and the anti-aristocratic Left, but Adam Nicolson has an altogether happier image of the period. There flourished, he tells us, a ‘communal wisdom’, ‘in which principles of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded’.
Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue which reverts to the same troubled era as its predecessors and occupies a doubtful position on the periphery of the natural order.
These journalistic pieces and two themed short stories have been written by Martin Amis after, and under the direct influence of, the events of 11 September 2001 in America. In a time of increasing specialisation, some supercilious amusement has been expended on the idea of novelists expressing their opinions on current affairs. Terry Eagleton, the academic who, by maintaining a semblance of Marxist thought in the 21st century, revives the dictionary meaning of the word ‘incorrigible’, is among Amis’s noisier critics. He remarked in a recent interview that he didn’t know why anyone should read novelists on these subjects in preference to window cleaners.
M. R. D. Foot on the new, English translation of Simon Kitson's book This short, telling book — it has barely 160 pages of actual text — first came out two years ago in French. It takes a fresh look at Pétain’s French state, which tried to govern defeated France from Vichy from 1940 to 1944; the unfamiliar angle of sight reveals several surprises. Those of us who do not live under authoritarian regimes are always curious about what life in them is like; here is fresh fuel for our curiosity, neatly set out by an expert. The French intelligence services had a visceral dislike both of Great Britain (which they usually called ‘Angleterre’) and of Germany.
The transition from iconoclastic youth to crusty age is common enough. The emergence of Martin Amis as a critic of Islam (at least in some of its manifestations) may be an expression of solidarity with his old friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, or it may be that, as Terry Eagleton suggests, he is turning into his father. Certainly Kingsley may be held to have gone that way, and many of us, as the years pass, do indeed find ourselves resembling Dad. This must be a disturbing thought, often, for our sons. Those whom the gods love die young — before that happens. ‘When Mozart was my age,’ as Tom Lehrer used to say, ‘he’d been dead for years’. ‘Lucky man’ is the unspoken thought.
In last week’s issue the ISBN for A New Waste Land by Michael Horowitz was incorrect. The correct ISBN is 9780902689268.
Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader was one of the masterpieces of Germany’s own Holocaust literature. It combined the pace of a thriller (which Schlink also writes) with the agony of the German second generation, torn between love of their elders and horror at their past. Homecoming returns to this theme. It too displays the skills of a thriller writer — strong plotting, rapid-fire chapters. And it comes closer to home, since its quarry this time is not a lover but a parent. I hoped for another masterpiece, and so will Schlink’s many readers. I am sorry to say that they will be disappointed. It starts well, with an evocation of Peter Debauer’s Swiss grandparents as mysterious and melancholy as anything in W. G. Sebald.
Philip Mansel reviews Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim On 2 May 1953 two 18-year-old cousins were enthroned as kings, in Baghdad and Amman respectively. Faisal II of Iraq, the intelligent ruler of a wealthy country, seemed destined for a great future. Hussein of Jordan, king of a penniless backwater, described by his housemaster as ‘not a success at Harrow’, seemed bound to fail. It was the former, however, who was murdered with his family in 1958. The latter survived countless assassination attempts and died a revered world statesman in 1999. The secret, as Avi Shlaim shows in this complex, readable, important biography, was luck, character, the charm of ‘exceptionally gracious manners’ — and a good army.
It might be thought that a book reviewer needs instruction in the skill specified in the title of Pierre Bayard’s book about as much as a moose needs a hat-rack. But cynics should know that the few people who are guaranteed to read a book are, in fact, the last people to be paid to do so. After the agent, the editor and the copy editor, the book reviewer picks up a book like this and reads it carefully from beginning to end, making notes as he goes. None of those people, however, are reading in any kind of normal way; during the industrial process of book production, the level of intricate attention paid to the text produces an experience which is nothing like real reading.
Eric Ringmar has only been blogging since last year, but has already been sacked from his job as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. What did he do wrong? Nothing, by his account. First I must say parenthetically, for those who take no cognisance of such things, that blogs are no more than diaries that people post up on their own websites, hoping that some desperate wanderer or other in cyberspace might like to read them. For the first few weeks that Ringmar blogged, not many people noticed he was blogging at all.
Many of us are beginning to weary of the pushier sort of ‘expert’. Gone is the sense of proportion, the admission of scientific doubt, the ability to weigh risks against benefits. Taking seriously a year’s worth of their health warnings would give anyone an eating disorder. It hardly builds confidence when so much of the advice directly contradicts whatever was confidently pronounced beneficial only months previously. The natural reaction is to take it all with a pinch of salt (if that is still allowed) and assume that the hasty appearance of a government minister on the one o’ clock news to endorse the latest findings is an early indication that they will transpire to be nonsense.
Ricardo Somocurcio, the narrator of The Bad Girl, is an unambitious man whose sole wish, ever since his childhood in Peru, has been to live in Paris. He studied hard at school and, on arriving in Paris after university, learns languages and soon makes enough money from working as a freelance interpreter to stay in his chosen home. He has a mild concern that he is simply drifting, but in fact his lack of aspirations is nothing worse than the result of being a balanced, civilised individual, happy if he has a reasonable income and enough time to enjoy reading and socialising. However, Ricardo’s existence is never as quiet as it should be, thanks to the ‘bad girl’.
Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who has just reached her 90th birthday, does not try to pretend otherwise; pretending is not, and never has been, her style. Here, she contemplates her own experience of growing older, compares it with some others, and offers a few tips to the rest of us, as we, or people we love, advance towards the minefield. In many ways, she acknowledges, she has been, and still is, lucky. Born into a confident upper-middle-class family, imbued with what she now regards as ‘tribal smugness,’ she went to Oxford before the war and soon found the work she loved.
by , , , ISBN When you buy this book (and buy you should for reasons that follow), try reading the notes to A New Waste Land before the poem itself. This is not because the poem is ‘difficult’ or in any sense obscure. On the contrary, Horowitz is an oral poet, a performer: veteran of his own Poetry Olympics and countless gigs over half a century in coffee bars or at the Albert Hall. A founder of late 1950s poetry-and-jazz occasions, he makes use of repetition, catch-phrases, comic-awful puns, message-hammering riffs. These give way to long lyric passages of seeming improvisation, in the manner of Coltrane or Rollins. The beautiful kite-flying sequence in the present work is one such example; a little lamenting passage for his late wife another.
Decolonisation has not been a happy experience for Africa. But nowhere in the continent has it been as disastrous as in Algeria. The country had once been the most successful of France’s colonies. Before the war, it was rich in resources and heavily subsidised by France. The educational system worked moderately well. It had produced a large class of native Algerians who spoke French, felt at home in France and successfully integrated themselves into the structures of the state. Politically, Algeria was a départment of France. There was a large European settlement, kept on top by a gerrymandered voting system. What would have happened if it had remained French into the age when such arrangements were no longer defensible? A different France perhaps.
Fidel Castro, hélas, et encore, hélas, hélas. Castro is the most famous Latin American since Bolívar, one of the few to have achieved world fame. He deserves it, as a third-world revolutionary and as a survivor. There are many studies of him, and here is another, the product of some hundred hours of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, whose inexhaustible stamina in serving him up sycophantic lobs seems to have surprised even Castro himself. Though monumentally uncritical and containing few if any new revelations, it is not entirely useless. It summarises the Castro line on a wide range of subjects.
Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’), as a returning Great War soldier loathed; even as a Sussex smallholder he is a figure of fun, followed everywhere by a dog, a drake and a goat. Above all, after years of war he is forgotten as a writer, ‘as good as dead’, convinced he could no longer write. He is an outsider, a dung beetle, a ‘ruined author’, misunderstood and despised. Poor old Fraudie.
A Christmas Song Why is the baby crying On this, his special day, When we have brought him lovely gifts And laid them on the hay? He’s crying for the people Who greet this day with dread Because somebody dear to them Is far away or dead, For all the men and women Whose love affairs went wrong, Who try their best at merriment When Christmas comes along, For separated parents Whose turn it is to grieve While children hang their stockings up Elsewhere on Christmas Eve, For everyone whose burden Carried through the year, Is heavier at Christmastime, The season of good cheer. That’s why the baby’s crying There in the cattle stall: He’s crying for those people. He’s crying for them all.
I first read the Raj Quartet in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past. Who wanted to know the names of the long gone empire builders whose statues dotted cities and towns? Only a few students wanted to study imperial history. (I was one, perhaps because Canadians were acutely aware of how being part of a great empire had shaped them.) The empire to most people in Britain was an embarrassment, a joke, and a bore. It must have been galling to Scott that critical recognition of what is an extraordinary contribution to English literature was so slow in coming.