Culture

Muriel Spark rightly insists that she is a poet who, as it happens, writes novels, and that she writes novels without ceasing to be a poet. Being a poet means having the ability to recognise that the world can announce more interesting inter- relationships than common sense chooses to notice — unforeseeable collocations, intrusions into the ordinary of aspects of reality ordinarily ignored, simply because the extraordinary is what ordinary minds prefer to dismiss from their attention. One should ‘see life as a whole,’ says Dame Muriel, ‘rather than as a series of disconnected happenings’. Poetry connects them. Its unusual ability to do so can sometimes be akin to madness, as in The Driving Seat, the dark book that may be her finest.

Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is clearly an influence (notably his portrayal of Catholic martyrdom in 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory), Bennett is his own man. No one today writes with such sombre clarity of divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances. A small town in northern England is menaced by Irish vagrants and other imagined ‘Romish’ undesirables. In a panic, the town fortifies itself with harsh Puritan laws and sets out to torture and execute presumed subversives.

Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick. Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem upset when they get the heave-ho, but a big bit of me actually thinks they’re putting it on.

If a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver’s pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit. Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley case of the early 1960s and the subsequent relaxation of censorship. Novelists felt that, because they could now cram their books full of eroticism, they must. Eventually things settled down and the writers just brought in sex where, as they say, the plot required it — where poor Thomas Hardy would have liked to deploy it, and nearly did. About ten years later, raging feminism simmered down in much the same way.

On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences at which ‘as usual, we had some bonding activity, in which members of the Executive did silly things to make them feel more of a team’. Their very silly thing on this occasion was an It’s a Knockout competition, which was interrupted by a telephone call reporting that Mr Campbell had ‘gone ballistic’ before the FAC. ‘We decided to carry on the game, probably because my team was winning,’ writes Mr Dyke.

It is tempting to conclude that a subject is fished out when strange titles appear, presumably with the intention of suggesting something novel. This is Dot Wordsworth’s territory, but can there really be such a thing as ‘the biography of a battle’? Last year, Macmillan published David Cordingly’s excellent history of HMS Bellerophon — Billy Ruffian: The Biography of a Ship of the Line. This is more easily understood, perhaps, since anyone with a soul would acknowledge that a ship is a living thing. But the biography of a battle? ‘As well write the history of a ball,’ huffed the Duke of Wellington when someone proposed writing an account of Waterloo. Would a ‘biography of a ball’ be admissible?