Philip Hensher

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.

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity. At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple, clear and direct; the trappings of his novels are strikingly international.

Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don Paterson is exactly that writer, the best poet of his generation, as well as an original and lucid thinker, and his boldness in bringing out The Book of Shadows is amply rewarded by the excellence of the final result. One of the impressive things about his last collection of poetry, Landing Light, was its suggestive and impressionist strain of narrative. Here, too, the aphorisms often embark on what, in other hands, might be whole stories: ‘I came home.

One of the things which drew Nicholas Shakespeare to Tas- mania was that it was one of the few remote places that Bruce Chatwin, whom he’d spent seven years writing a biography about, had never been to. But Shakespeare has written a wonderfully Chatwinesque book about a place, in which individual historical narratives are woven in with the writer’s own research and encounters. Shakespeare doesn’t have the faint smugness of Chatwin, and the book, though containing a good deal of his own family history, is much more self-effacing; but it is just as inquisitive, and has the same energetic enjoyment of fantastically abstruse local detail, and a sheer love of story-telling. Tasmania is a very odd place.

It’s curious to reflect that in reviewing Olivia Manning’s biography alone and prominently one is paying her more attention than any of her novels had in her lifetime. They were invariably reviewed as one of a group, rather than stand-alone, and for the general reader she fell into the category of novelists whose name is somehow familiar but whose novels are not familiar at all. After her death, an excellent television adaptation of her Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson at the height of their vogue did turn her into a famous name; but during her lifetime she never attained the celebrity which she felt was her due. It must be said that her lack of success was partly her own fault.

Perhaps not uniquely, I was discouraged from reading V. S. Pritchett by nothing more than the old Penguin cover of his 1982 Collected Stories. It was simply a photograph of the author, wearing a suit, holding a pipe, with an expression of mild elderly benevolence. To callow youth, that was not what genius was supposed to look like, and I didn’t get round to him for years. Big mistake. Pritchett is a writer who delineates a unique world, and the vivid genius of his voice, encompassing so many other voices, seedy, lush, excitable, takes only a line or two to make itself felt. August’s? On the Bath road? Twice-five August — of course a knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him — her name was Price. She’s dead.

Among the great works of art written in the prison camps of the second world war are Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Viktor Ullman’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos and P. G. Wodehouse’s Joy in the Morning. Spot the odd one out. Robert McCrum, with some ingenuity, has managed to isolate some lines in Joy in the Morning, that incomparably sunny comedy, which may be inflected by Wodehouse’s difficult war. The Gestapo translates into a little sourness about village policemen, and that is about it. McCrum yields to temptation, and describes Wodehouse’s war history as the defining episode of his career, but that is not right.

A curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I mean, I’d be thrilled if anyone were interested in my views of Dale Peck’s views of Sven Birkerts’s views of Robert Musil, but you could perfectly well go and read Musil yourself, so let’s not kid ourselves.) The point about Dale Peck is that he has earned himself a notoriety by writing some fairly unforgiving book reviews.

It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense research a marvellous, immense narrative. Its ultimately stupendous effect is down to the fact that Isherwood, whatever his failings and limitations, was simply there when it counted; old enough to understand the Great War, there at the Opernplatz when the Nazis burnt Heinrich Heine’s work, and there in San Francisco for the summer of love and the birth of personal liberation mythologies.

I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am told that he or she has what I would have thought a slightly alarming habit of sitting down heavily at the end of the bed: just a previous inhabitant, whose name is now long forgotten, observing these curiously un-Italian occupants sleeping in his house with emotions impossible to retrieve. But all houses, in a sense, have ghosts, and not necessarily those of dead people, either.

My favourite titbit about the Oscars is that if at any point during the Wagner- ian length of the ceremony you get up to go to the loo, a young person who has been loitering in the aisles will instantly nip in and occupy your seat, giving it up gracefully on your return. The point is that the vast television audience must not, at any point, be shown the shocking sight of an empty seat in the auditorium. I worry about those young people: is that really what they hoped to do with their lives? If you win an Oscar, the smart north London thing to do, or so I understand, is to keep it in the downstairs loo.