Austen Saunders

Keats is justly famed for his late odes and their lyrical beauty. What is not so often recognised is that Keats was also a very funny poet, and that a great many of his poems are parodies, pastiches, and sometimes downright dirty. I’m afraid there’s nothing titillating about this poem, but it’s a wonderful example of how Keats used parody to expose the limitations of the famous poets of his day – even those he admired greatly. ‘Oxford’ was included in a letter Keats wrote to a friend in which he had a bit of a moan about Wordsworth (who was, all in all, a hero for Keats). He complained that some of Wordsworth’s lines are, in short, a bit dull, “in”, as Keats put it, “the Style of School exercises”.

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.

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.

Why, one wonders, would a first-time novelist having been born in London, and having spent most of his adult life living in South Wales, set his narrative in mid-century America? For so is J.P. Smythe (surely one of the finest Victorian names to grace any young writer today), billed on the flyleaf of his debut offering, Hereditation. A cockney Taffy then, but one who apparently feels the need to place his family saga on the other side of the Atlantic. One hopes this is not because proper stories only happen these days in the movies or (even worse), the twentieth century American lit module of creative writing courses. But then I suppose Shakespeare was but ill-acquainted with Illyria...

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.