Philip Hensher

When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen on violent death. I think there are 24 named characters who meet a specified death through violence in this volume, and over 50 others, we are told, are killed anonymously. To the adult reader, the routine nature of all these deaths, the inability to register much in the way of a fresh response will be troubling. We are promised grief when somebody on Harry’s side is killed, and ‘screams and cheers and roars’ when an enemy dies.

The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made out of language, you will enjoy it mostly as a dazzling game with styles and genres. Either way, there’s no denying the high hilarity and wit, in the largest sense, of this exceptional book. Michael Chabon’s conceit is that the state of Israel was briefly founded, but was destroyed almost immediately, chased into the sea in 1948. The Jews of the world found a homeland instead in Alaska.

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and dramatic of our peacetime history. Society had utterly changed, and a government of extraordinary ambition set an agenda which was to go unchallenged until 1979. It was a period of great deprivation — rationing not only continued, but tightened after the war — and memory tended for decades afterwards to dredge up the horrible occasion of the hard winter of 1947 as a sort of macabre centrepiece to the whole experience.

The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable enough but unequivocally second eleven. The OM is tops. For one thing, it is in the gift of the sovereign and so comes without any taint of party favour. ‘His Majesty entirely disregards the question of the political opinions of anyone who may be suitable for an honour,’ wrote Stamfordham loftily when Gilbert Murray’s candidature was in question.

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero’s habits. In theory, one ought to be curious how it is that someone ends up thinking it quite entertaining to cut slices off a human brain (for instance) and sauté them at table before sharing the dish with his girlfriend and the still living victim. In practice, one doesn’t give a toss. Lecter’s an aesthete/psychopath. Who cares how he got that way?

Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands war dominated the first, she would not have wanted to be in the same room as Scargill. Afterwards, of course, so comprehensive was the government’s victory over Scargill’s intentions, the question would hardly have arisen. These days, as Patrick Hannan says, hardly one educated person in ten thousand could tell you the name of anyone connected with the National Union of Mineworkers.

Listing page content here Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes riding the Underground. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in texture, all about the privations of 1948. Brave New World is about the rise of cheap popular mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Will Self’s impressive new book presents, in a way, a pure portrait of the imagined future.

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Listing page content here Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less than ten years after Peter Davison’s 20- volume complete Orwell, he has taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity of presenting this supplement. Though this decision falls squarely into the ha’porth of tar category, and the complete Orwell must have been much more commercially successful than most comparable enterprises, it’s an understandable one. Orwell’s ephemeral writings fared unusually well in the 50 years after his death, thanks to two editors.

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in understanding, as well as some deft character sketches of the necessarily rather eccentric figures in the field. Don’t be misled: Robert Irwin has Said perpetually in his sights. It is quite incredible to conceive the influence Said’s Orientalism has had, within and outside academia. Said’s point was not just that the ‘orientalist’ styles of European art and literature traduced the reality of what they purported to represent.

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some life in it; the form seemed as dead as the concerto grosso. But Zadie Smith’s brilliant On Beauty revived it with fizzing energy. On the other hand, a fictional standby which has seemed perfectly serviceable for some years may suddenly start looking creaky.

There’s an old definition of a gentleman: that he is someone who is never rude unintentionally. Rudeness, since then, has spread and spread, and 20 times a day we probably ask ourselves the same question which underlies these two books about contemporary manners. Do they mean to do it? Are they just bleeding ignorant, or does their rudeness reflect some kind of ethical conviction? One example. At my local branch of Sainsbury’s, you approach the check-out, and the operator says nothing, and does not meet your eye. If you say ‘Hello’, there is usually no response. He or she passes the goods over the scanner, ignoring you. At the end, the total comes up on the display. They say nothing; if you say ‘How much is that?

This is the sort of book we can expect to see a great deal more of in the future. After Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a study of the way products or ideas move from niche positions to mass markets — economists and journalists have been racking their brains to come up with usefully saleable theories. Each one begins with profiles in New York magazines; the book, largely made up of stories, follows; and then, no doubt, a lucrative career spinning this highly anecdotal material to CEOs. An amusing book, this one, certainly more so than the works of most practitioners of the Dismal Science. It’s best enjoyed, though, as a series of music-hall turns, tall tales and outrageous paradoxes rather than anything resembling an argument.

When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come through your bedroom curtains and abduct you; partly the idea, sinister and frightening, of a child prevented from growing up. Childhood has its own helpless fears, and it would be a strange child who found the prospect of never changing an appealing one. Really, the unanalysed dislike I had for Peter Pan was a dislike for something which evidently had undeclared designs upon me. I disliked C. S.

The time is the late 1990s; the setting a boarding school called Hailsham. This being a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy H., who attended the school, is looking back after some years and trying to make sense of her story. The school, it is quickly made clear, is not quite like other schools, the pupils not quite like people we know, and the 1990s slightly different from the decade we might remember. There is talk of ‘carers’, of the ‘fourth donation’, of ‘completing’, of someone called Madame. There don’t seem to be any holidays, and, anyway, the kids don’t have parents; nor are they orphans. In the outside world, they just have what are called ‘possibles’; people who bear a strange resemblance to them.

The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right, and the myth of Stevenson has gone on inspiring countless biographers ever since. It’s very surprising that Claire Harman’s publishers claim that ‘no biography has yet done justice’ to Stevenson.