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'I cannot go on'
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The second volume of TS Eliot's fiercely guarded correspondence reveals the terrible strain he was under caring for his wife and editing the Criterion. By Stefan Collini
'I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing. The writing of poetry takes time and I never have any time." That, alas, is an all-too-accurate summary of TS Eliot's life during the three years covered by the second volume of his correspondence. Its 800 pages document in dispiriting detail the life of a writer who was not doing any writing. There was just too much else to do, and much too much else to worry about.
There was, to begin with, his wife, Vivienne. As a lonely, shy American graduate student in philosophy at Oxford, Eliot had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915, not many weeks after meeting her. By 1923, the disastrousness of the marriage for both parties was becoming all too apparent. Vivienne was plagued by almost constant ill health, often severe; it may now be impossible to say how much of this was psychosomatic, and it may not really matter. The signs of mental instability were by this point hard to explain away. Eliot, with a highly developed sense of his responsibility to provide for his wife, repeatedly made himself ill worrying about her, looking after her, and needing to get away from her.
Then he had to worry about international exchange rates, the bond issues of foreign governments and the payment of war debts. Eliot, it may be timely to remember, was a banker. Since March 1917 he had worked in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank in the City, rising to a position of some responsibility, overseeing the analysis of information about the financial activities of European governments. By 1923 the strain of his divided life was becoming unendurable, and various possibilities were canvassed that would buy him out of the black-coated army, but the regular salary from the bank, and even the distant pension prospects, mattered more and more as Vivienne's future became increasingly uncertain.
And then he had to worry about the Criterion, the intellectually ambitious literary and cultural quarterly review that he edited, more or less single-handedly, in his "spare time". The review had been launched in October 1922, financed by Lady Rothermere, wife of Harold Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere. (Harold had helped his brother Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, establish the press empire whose flagship was the Daily Mail.) Eliot aspired to make the Criterion the most prestigious literary review of the day, promoting his favoured blend of modernist literature and reactionary politics, but he soon discovered the scale of the labour this required. After a while, a typist was taken on to handle some of his correspondence, and there was a brief period during which the poet and translator Richard Aldington acted as his assistant but, as the successive deadlines rolled remorselessly around, it was Eliot who seemed to be responsible for everything from commissioning contributions to correcting proofs and arranging payments.
It was all too much. "I am worn out. I cannot go on," he lamented a little histrionically as early as March 1923, but he still had a long way to go on. February 1925 found him "at the blackest moment of my life", but in reality there were blacker moments still to come. "So life is simply from minute to minute of horror," he wrote to Virginia Woolf the following month, perhaps hearing a draft line of poetry forming itself somewhere in his mind. But, as far as we can tell from these letters, during these years not many lines of poetry were forming in the mind of the figure who was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.
It is Eliot's poetry, of course, that represents his principal claim on the modern reader's attention, for all his influence as a critic, playwright, editor and cultural commentator. Only last month, he was voted Britain's favourite poet – perhaps a surprising choice when one considers the notorious difficulty of his verse, but maybe less so when one remembers that his light-hearted Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided the inspiration for the hit musical Cats. His standing as a poet does not, of itself, account for the frisson of anticipation that has for some time been building up in advance of the appearance of this second volume of his letters. The mild sense of drama attending the publication (writers and publishers lead sheltered lives, for the most part) has been heightened by Faber's unusually elaborate security measures, with reviewers having to sign legal agreements binding them not to reveal any of the contents of the volume to "any third party" before the day of publication.
A brief historical recap may help to explain some of the fuss. In 1957, when Eliot was 68, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, who was 38 years younger (Vivienne had died 10 years earlier). Following Eliot's death in 1965, Mrs Eliot and the publishing firm of Faber & Faber (of which he had been an active director for almost 40 years) controlled his estate, carefully regulating both the reprinting of published work and citation from unpublished material, including letters. In 1971 Mrs Eliot published her facsimile edition of The Waste Land, complete with Ezra Pound's annotations. She had also undertaken the huge task of collecting and editing his letters, the first volume of which (covering the years up to the end of 1922) finally appeared in 1988. In the introduction to that volume, she explained that she had intended it to go up to 1926, but that there had proved to be too much material for a single volume. Therefore, she announced, the second volume would be published "next year". The literary and the scholarly world waited, but "next year" never seemed to come.
This delay was particularly unfortunate because, in the four decades following Eliot's death, many scholars had difficulty in getting permission from the estate to consult or quote from unpublished material. When Peter Ackroyd published what is still the only serious approach to an adequate intellectual biography of Eliot in 1984, he had to record: "I am forbidden by the Eliot estate . . . to quote from unpublished work or correspondence." (He had to paraphrase his sources.) Some individual scholars were more fortunate – I was given permission some years ago, I should record, to quote from a few letters in an essay about Eliot's social criticism – but a policy that could seem to be somewhat capricious was obviously an unsatisfactory situation, especially when it was known that the estate held or had amassed a considerable collection of material, not all of which had yet been seen by scholars. Just recently there have been encouraging signs of a thaw. Plans have been announced for a multi-volume edition of Eliot's prose, under the general editorship of Ron Schuchard, to be partnered by a complete edition of his poetry, edited by Christopher Ricks. And now, at long last, 21 years after its predecessor, we have the second volume of the letters, co-edited by Hugh Haughton, with the project henceforth under the general editorship of John Haffenden.
Given this history, the stock phrases about a book having been "eagerly awaited" or its publication being "a major literary event" are in this case understatements. For, in addition to the considerable interest in Eliot's poetry and criticism, other aspects of his life and his views have attracted broader media attention and even controversy in recent years. It has, for example, been widely known that Eliot suffered acute anguish over his decision, first, to separate from Vivienne and, second, to have her committed to a "sanatorium". His responsibility for his wife's physical and mental problems has sometimes been assessed in hostile terms, a line of popular speculation fuelled by Michael Hastings's 1984 play Tom and Viv, which was subsequently turned into a film. In addition, Eliot came in for some rough handling in the wake of Anthony Julius's 1995 book, TS Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, which mounted, with great forensic vigour, the case that Eliot's oeuvre as a whole was irremediably tainted on account of a handful of allegedly antisemitic references. These controversies cannot have been welcome to the Eliot estate, and may have fuelled its apprehension about the possible public response to any further revelations.
Anticipation has been increased by the fact that the first volume of the letters was full of matter for those with a serious interest in Eliot's work and career. It covered the years in which Eliot, arriving in England in 1914 as an unknown 26-year old graduate student, emerged as the most startling poet of his time, from the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 up to The Waste Land in 1922. This was also the period in which he established himself as the critic most admired by the intellectually serious young, notably through the publication in 1920 of The Sacred Wood, a slim volume of critical essays that managed to be at once offhand, exciting and authoritative. The letters, therefore, had allowed us to glimpse the inside story of nothing less than the making of modernism. What could the second volume offer that would be of comparable interest?
"Not a lot" is the short and only partly misleading answer. After all this fanfare, these letters will, I fear, be a disappointment to many readers. Though they document the tribulations of his and Vivienne's illnesses and unhappiness in heart-bludgeoning detail, they contain no great revelations, nor are most of them captivating pieces of writing in the way in which, say, the recently published selection of early Beckett letters is. Eliot scholars, not a small tribe, will doubtless mine them for illustrative or corroborative detail, but in truth they throw little light on the poetry, not least because he was not writing any (except for sections of "The Hollow Men" and the verse-drama Sweeney Agonistes, written towards the end of this period). Nor did he write any of his major critical essays during these years, and the letters say very little about his own critical, as opposed to editorial, practice. However, if what you want is a practical handbook on how to edit, single-handedly, a high-end cultural and literary periodical, this is an essential guide. Overwhelmingly, the letters from this period were written by Eliot in his capacity as editor of the Criterion and, if this is something that interests you (I must warn you that it interests me a lot), then this volume is rich in fascinating detail.
Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.
Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.
Hand-to-mouth it may have been in practical terms, but Eliot had a pretty clear idea of the kind of review he wanted to produce. It appealed, he insisted without any defensiveness, only to "the cultivated": he reckoned that there were only about 3,000 such persons, though the basis for this high-handed piece of intuitive sociology is not clear. It was to be essentially a literary review, but "Its scope is wide enough to include almost everything of interest to people of culture with the exception of economics and contemporary politics." Lady Rothermere, who had hoped for something with rather more appeal to the beau monde, is reported as finding the journal "a little high-brow and grave" (well, if you appoint TS Eliot as editor . . .). Though it is true that the Criterion did not deal with day-to-day party politics, it nonetheless had a very marked political character. It was explicitly intended to provide a counter to "the usual Whig and semi-Socialist press of London". It was hostile to all forms of liberalism, Whiggism, romanticism and subjectivism; in its severe, aloof way, it upheld what Eliot came to call "classicism". It is from this standpoint that we find him here dismissing Arnold Toynbee as "a noxious humanitarian" and sneering at John Middleton Murry as "this apostle of suburban free thought".
In trying to establish the reputation of the new journal, Eliot had to perform the usual delicate balancing act: he wanted to publish high-quality original work of the kind he admired, but he also needed contributions from established names, which sometimes meant accepting work that was neither high-quality nor original. The correspondence of any editor might catch him out saying different things to different people, but there are some arrestingly immediate juxtapositions in these letters. When, as the editor of a new journal, he is sedulously courting the 77-year-old George Saintsbury, Eliot hastens to tell him that he is "the most eminent English critic of our time"; two years later, the journal now established, he frankly confides to another correspondent: "Saintsbury, for all his merits, now has little point." Similarly, Eliot is to be found writing to several authors in flattering terms explaining that he may be able to double the normal rates of payment to a truly exceptional contributor, "one of whom is, of course, yourself". Having already confided this, in turn, to Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, he then writes to WB Yeats's agent, saying: "For such an important contribution from so distinguished a writer I would make an exception" to his usual rates and pay double. "This is the only occasion on which I have ever offered more than the standard rate; but I have very great admiration for Mr Yates' work . . ." and so on, a profession whose sincerity, already doubtful, was made more doubtful still by his misspelling of Yeats's name.
The question of two-facedness surfaces most awkwardly in his tricky friendship with Leonard and Virginia Woolf. While jockeying to establish himself in literary London, he had been grateful for the Woolfs' patronage: their Hogarth Press published The Waste Land in book form (after it had appeared in the first number of the Criterion), and in 1924 they were to publish three of his review-essays as a Hogarth pamphlet entitled Homage to John Dryden. In 1923 the Woolfs seem to have helped to persuade Maynard Keynes to offer Eliot the position of literary editor on the Liberal weekly the Nation. The position, though attractive, would not have provided Eliot with the financial security he needed, but it is not clear whether the paper's uncongenial political identity played a part in his eventual refusal (Leonard Woolf himself took on the post).
At a less public level, Eliot shared some common ground with Leonard as a man who had considerable experience of handling the moods of a mentally unstable wife, but his direct relationship with Virginia was always shot through with distrust and a kind of literary rivalry. Neither Eliot nor Virginia Woolf gets high honours for consistent candour, and the very full annotations to these letters indicate a little of the discreditable backbiting that went on off-stage. Having cajoled Virginia to publish her (soon to be celebrated) essay "Character in Fiction" in the Criterion for July 1924, Eliot enthuses to her that the presence of her piece alongside those by Proust and Yeats means "The July number will be the most brilliant in its history". But some months later he praises the next issue to Lady Rothermere by saying: "There is nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf (neither of which I cared much about myself)."
At one point Woolf confides to her diary (quoted in the editorial annotations) the conviction that "There is something hole-and-cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious, elaborate, uneasy, about him." There was truth in this, though there was more than a touch of pot and kettle, too. At the end of this volume, Eliot leaves his job at Lloyd's to join Geoffrey Faber's new publishing firm. Part of his private understanding with Faber was that the new firm would henceforth publish Eliot's books, beginning with Poems 1909-1925, which included The Waste Land. Eliot continued to write to the Woolfs in affectionate terms while somehow managing not to tell them that the Hogarth Press had just lost one of its star authors.
But it must be said that Eliot, by fair means or by sharp professional practice, made a success of the Criterion during those years. He was justified in boasting in October 1924: "I think that at the end of the third year it will have as brilliant a record of contributors as any magazine could have in the time." He had secured original contributions from most of the leading modernist writers of the time, including Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and the review could boast a particularly impressive array of European contributors, a deliberate policy on Eliot's part, one that was not matched by the habitually parochial established journals. The critical essays and, later, the book reviews generally maintained a high, if at times highly ideological, standard. Publication in the Criterion's pages, he informed prospective contributors, ensured "more intelligent attention than a contribution to any other review". Only the circulation remained stubbornly resistant to Eliot's blandishments, sales never exceeding 800 to 1,000 copies per issue.
Beyond documenting his life as an editor, these letters add a little thickening detail to some of the already well-worn themes of Eliot biography and criticism. There is, for example, his view (to be trusted no further than several other ostensibly revealing confessions in these letters) that there were only "about 30 good lines in The Waste Land". It is somewhat more winning to find him acknowledging that his own prose has "a rather rheumatic pomposity", and a knowingness about his early critical perfomances is suggested by his advice to a young would-be review essayist: "You must begin by being or pretending to be an authority on some subject or other." Every so often the letters will contain some remark in the lapidary style of his best literary journalism: "Good verse is only recognised after five years at least. Good criticism is noticed at once. The cultivated public prefers critical to creative work." His correspondence with his mother and brother over investments shows him fully sharing the family penchant for cautious capitalism (even though he was a banker). Part of his qualification for becoming a director of Faber's new firm was that, in addition to being one of the best-connected writers and editors of his day, he was "a man of business". And, inevitably, we get a few asides about "Jew publishers" when his dealings with his American publishers were particularly vexed. No one could pretend that the writer of these letters emerges as consistently likeable or admirable, but it is hard not to feel sympathy for a man so cornered by personal unhappiness, financial anxiety and professional frustration.
Eliot often affected the identity of the "resident alien"; perhaps he came to feel that that label accurately described his relation to earthly existence as a whole. As a young man, he was not short of reasons to feel ill at ease in the world, and many of those who met him during his early years in London remarked on this characteristic. Alternating between shyness and attitude-striking, he made others feel ill at ease with him, uncertain how far they could trust this now smooth, now angular chameleon. Disguise, camouflage, adaptation: Eliot was rich in the strategies of self-protection. VS Pritchett later called him "a company of actors within one suit". Several members of the company are on show in these pages; the one constant is the suit, literally as worn to the bank every day, metaphorically in the pinstriped casing of so much of his epistolary prose.
If all of Eliot's surviving letters are to be edited on this lavish scale – and, as he became more famous in later years, presumably even more letters will have survived – one has to ask whether the enterprise is well judged. With almost 40 years of his life still to go, there could, at this rate, be a dozen volumes of similar dimensions to come, perhaps more. One cannot help wondering whether the needs of scholars might be more economically met by an electronic edition, or whether there might not be a case for a more lightly annotated edition or a volume of selected letters. Eliot is, beyond question, a hugely important writer and an intriguing man, but the spirit does not leap at the prospect of some 10,000 pages of elaborate politeness.
This edition, it should be emphasised, presents Eliot's own letters; it does not provide both sides of the correspondence, even where such replies exist. But just occasionally the text of a letter from one of his correspondents is included, and the gain in our sense of the exchange is immediate. There are, in addition, a few impressive letters from Geoffrey Faber, setting out the terms on which Eliot was to work for the new publishing firm, as well as Faber's own conception of the kind of periodical the new Criterion was to be (quite like the old, as it turned out). And there are several letters from Vivienne to other correspondents which vividly illuminate Eliot's predicament, though it is not immediately obvious why they and not others have been included.
Vivienne's letters have both a directness and an incoherence that rip apart the smooth surface of life, which Eliot's guarded prose was always trying to maintain. Two of these raw, disturbing scribbles, from late 1925, suggest something of what Eliot had to contend with, but both are also mind-searing in the glimpse they give us of Vivienne's tortured, disturbed, unendurably miserable life. The first is to the Eliots' maid, Ellen Kellond, a desperately inappropriate choice of recipient; it is a panicked and plungingly despairing wail from a woman who found herself held in a sanatorium against her will, keening for the love she believed her husband had withdrawn, and ending: "I mean to take my life . . . It is difficult here, but I shall find a way. This is the end." The second is to Eliot himself. It begins calmly enough but soon degenerates. Amid illegible words and inconsequential remarks about various possessions, she suddenly throws herself into an anguished apology: "I am sorry I tortured you and drove you mad. I had no notion until yesterday afternoon that I had done it. I have been simply raving mad. You need not worry about me." But he did worry about her, ceaselessly, and this great slab of mostly unrevealing, practicality-driven letters depicts in harrowing detail a man almost drowning in the busyness he needed to stop himself from being driven mad.
Telling tales
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Taffy Thomas is a one-time fire-eater who has just been appointed the UK's first laureate of storytelling. He joins us on this week's podcast to explain how a personal catastrophe in his mid 30s set him on course for a new life as a weaver of yarns. He also explains why lying is a noble art, why storytelling is undergoing a renaissance and how it is not just for the very young – but can be just as valuable to those at the end of their lives.
Stories of a different kind throng Michael Peel's book A Swamp Full of Dollars, just shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. He tracks the malignant effect of oil from the west African mangrove swamps to Europe's corporate headquarters, and shows how the hostage-taking bandits he encountered in the Nigerian delta were ultimately less dangerous than the politicians who have creamed off the country's oil wealth and the banks who have helped them do it. He explains why the whole world needs to sit up and listen to Nigeria's story.
Finally, David Vann talks about Legend of a Suicide, the novel that survived rejection by all the big US publishing houses to become one of the fiction sensations of the year.
Elsewhere on guardian.co.uk, join Tim Radford in a discussion of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. It was awarded – in a very informal vote – the title of the best science book ever written, but what makes it a science book at all?
Reading list
A Swamp Full of Dollars, by Michael Peel (IB Tauris)
Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann (Penguin)
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
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Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher Tayler
James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history – from 1958 to 1972 – with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred.
When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit".
Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy.
American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" – the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players – and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time".
As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world – acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze – there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults.
Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words – one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation.
Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.)
Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups.
Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies.
At first, Crutch – whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's – comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline.
This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic.
There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption.
Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how."
In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one.
These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots").
The upheavals of the 60s – Ellroy's ostensible subject – are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be.
In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best – when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting – he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself.
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
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Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS Byatt
This is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales as well as works on the Bluebeard story, Hans Andersen, and sexual murder in Weimar. Enchanted Hunters is not about classic fairytales but about authored children's writing, what children take and need from stories, and how this is not always what parents imagine.
Tatar begins with a wry analysis of how stories have the opposite effect from the desired one of making children drowsy and ready for sleep. She is splendidly contemptuous of books such as Disney's three-minute Bedtime Stories, Condensed Fairy Tales and even One-Minute Greek Myths. Good stories excite, delight and frighten. They are, as Tatar puts it, a solitary addiction, not necessarily teaching sociability or virtuous behaviour. Those of us who as children read late into the night under the bedclothes with torches know exactly what she means.
Children, she observes, do not "identify" with characters in stories. They inhabit the world of the tale, as lookers-on, learning brilliance and danger and horror in another world. There is a very good chapter on the imagined encounter with death and real danger. Tales such as Struwwelpeter (1845) "revel in images of bodily violence"; Andersen's Little Match Girl is frozen to death; the dancer in "The Red Shoes" dances on bloody stumps. Andersen is frightening as the Grimms are not. I have always thought we know where we are with the Grimms – in an unreal world with strict rules of reward and retribution – but Andersen is trying to distress his readers. (He didn't like children, as is often the case with children's writers.) One of Tatar's best and most subtle discussions is of EB White's Charlotte's Web, in which Charlotte the spider saves Wilbur the pig from slaughter by weaving words in her lovely web – and dies herself, after her success. Tatar shows how the tale is also about the power of words to weave a web of magic, to make both glamour and understanding.
She is very observant about the way in which the great storytellers construct what Tolkien and Auden called "secondary worlds" – worlds with their own inhabitants and landscapes, seas and shores, caverns and castles. She writes excellently about the inventors of Neverland and Wonderland – Barrie and Dodgson, those two childless men who constructed theatres of the imagination in order, as Barrie himself put it, to "hold on" to the attention of the boys he loved, or to entertain Alice Liddell on rowing picnics. Tatar quotes an amazing description by Barrie of the "more or less" island of Neverland with savage and lonely lairs, gnomes, princes – but also "first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine . . . and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still".
All children, except one, grow up, Barrie observed. Perhaps Tatar's most original contribution to thought about children's stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children's books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes. A particularly telling chapter is called "The Great Humbug". It discusses The Wizard of Oz and what Dorothy learns from discovering that the great magician is in fact only a timid illusionist who makes an emerald city by handing out green spectacles. Dorothy ends the story by saying that she wants to go home to Kansas and Aunt Em – thus making herself alive in the real world. In the same way Maurice Sendak's child goes home, empowered in real life by his brush with the Wild Things.
Tatar has a particular fondness for Dr Seuss, the inventor of The Cat in the Hat, whose real name was Theodor Geisel. She addresses him in the context of a 1950s discussion of "Why Johnny Can't Read", which ascribed illiteracy and childhood boredom to anodyne reading primers. I didn't know before I read Enchanted Hunters that the publishers Houghton Mifflin had a list of 348 words that should be offered to beginning readers – and that Dr Seuss crafted The Cat in the Hat with the use of only 236 and a gripping, anarchic narrative.
The net is spread wide. There are shrewd observations on JK Rowling, CS Lewis and Philip Pullman and an excellent section on The Secret Garden. All these are praised for creating and satisfying curiosity with precisely imagined places and objects – Quidditch, the wardrobe, Mary's ferocious hunting through room after room in the huge house where she finds herself. There is a good description of Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi, but I should have liked much more about The Jungle Book and Puck of Pook's Hill, both of which I lived in as a child. If I feel a need to inhabit imagined worlds I prefer Tolkien and Terry Pratchett to Lewis – they do not, as Lewis does, "have designs on you".
This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven't forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn't know.
AS Byatt's The Children's Book is published by Chatto & Windus.
'I didn't know what Adrian Mole looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly'
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Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend
It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a poignant little diary entry from Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, which covers the period from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Adrian, nearing 40, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer (the misspelling in the book's title is deliberate, and people's inability to get it right is a source of much irritation to Adrian) and living in a converted pigsty with his dangerously dissatisfied wife, Daisy, is in need of cheering up. "For some reason," he writes, "I always feel comforted when I am in Woolworths. When I was a child, I spent my first pocket money there. I was five years old and forked out twenty pence on flying saucers. It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there."
Adrian made his first print appearance in 1982, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, which followed a play broadcast on Radio 4 earlier that year. He had hitherto been part of what Townsend calls her "secret writing" – the manuscripts that piled up under the stairs, added to by night but spoken of to nobody. "He came into my head when my eldest son said 'Why don't we go to safari parks like other families do?' That's the only real line of dialogue from my family that's in any of the Mole books. It's in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that 'surely these are not my parents.' I heard him first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn't see his face, didn't know what he looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly." By way of qualification, she adds that John Major has a lovely face when he takes his glasses off, and Adrian has become steadily more attractive over the years, the more plausibly, perhaps, to stoke a future relationship with Pandora Braithwaite, his childhood sweetheart, now a polished and rampagingly on-message New Labour MP.
Pandora makes suitably dramatic appearances in The Prostrate Years, as do Adrian's parents, Pauline (now writing an entirely fabricated misery memoir entitled A Girl Called Shit) and George, his best friend Nigel ("an unpleasant blind person!" laughs Townsend, who was herself registered blind in 2001), and the Chinese restaurateur Wayne Wong, to whose premises Adrian repairs to sit near the fish-tank and eat beef in black bean sauce, one of his few indulgences in life. The ninth volume of Adrian's diaries – following updates that have taken us from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole to The Wilderness Years, The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction – is, like its predecessors, an ensemble piece smuggled into a monologue.
But, aside from much of the topical humour that fuels the book's jaunty pace and often throwaway comedy – the smoking ban, flooding, Northern Rock and The Jeremy Kyle Show all pop up – there is an undertow that makes it a far darker and at times angrier work than Townsend's readers might expect. For a start, Adrian is ill, quite possibly terminally; and, second, he writes his diary as the New Labour project shows ever more serious signs of strain. On Tony Blair's last day in office, Adrian summons up all his hauteur to write: "I expect he will have a full day trying to repair his reputation."
Townsend is unequivocal about the extent to which she feels betrayed by the Labour party and how completely her views were changed by the Iraq war. "I am a passionate socialist," she says, "but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers . . . I could still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children'. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How would he have explained it to his children? They were old enough to understand politics easily. What would he have said? I suppose that stupid line about the weapons of mass destruction. But I think he's been punished."
Nor is her disillusion confined to British foreign policy. In 1997, asked to write a pre-election dispatch for the Observer, she travelled to the Gipton estate in Leeds, deliberately distancing herself from her native Leicester, where she has lived all her life. There, she found grinding poverty and very little hope, concluding: "The vermin, as Aneurin Bevan described the Tory party, will shortly be crawling back behind the skirting-board and New Labour will be dancing a victory jig on the floor. And I hope that over the coming years a socialist Labour party will gather strength. Somebody has to care for the poor."
Revisiting Leeds in 2005, Townsend was able to report significant improvements for the inhabitants of the city's estates. But she also described the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, each of them surrounded by iron spikes "uncannily like a crown of thorns"; she inveighed against the government's attitude towards the sick, revealing how a fascination with Bevan had turned her into a childhood socialist and writing: "I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor."
Everything about Townsend's life is informed by her sense of where she has come from. Her house, a former vicarage that sits at the top of a broad, leafy avenue, is within walking distance of Leicester city centre but clearly in one of its more well-to-do suburbs. It is beautiful but not flashy. In her writing room, where we sit and talk, the walls are covered with framed publicity posters and jackets from her plays and books, but they only arrived there after a good deal of soul-searching that ended when she saw a television programme in which her friend and sometime mentor, the late John Mortimer, had decorated his study similarly. "They used to be all up in the attic," she explains, "because I was almost ashamed of it – I couldn't bear any evidence that I was a professional writer. Then I saw a documentary about him, and he had all of his posters, thousands more than I've got, and I thought, if he can do it, I will."
The eldest daughter of a postman, she was born in 1946 and brought up in a happily close-knit family who lived on the edge of the countryside, four miles from Leicester. "We were probably the last generation to be truly free to play," she says, remembering days spent stalking through the grand rooms of an abandoned mansion, foraging for berries and soft grass, building rope swings and rafts. Somewhere along the way, she also discovered reading, fuelled by the affordability of Penguin Classics, an acquaintanceship with a second-hand bookseller and a passion for the great Russian novelists, and later the Americans. At the age of 14, the secret writing began. "Nobody ever knew. I learned to hide it. It was stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations."
At the same time, Townsend's life was developing along another track. She was married at 18, and had three children by the time she was 22. The secret writing continued at night, when the children were in bed: "I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards. Television was boring in those days."
But it wasn't until her first marriage had ended and she had met Colin Broadway, who became her second husband and is the father of her fourth child, that she considered that her writing could be anything other than a nocturnal activity. Even when she "confessed" to Colin, she didn't allow him to read what she'd written or tell anyone else about it. It was only when he saw an advertisement in the local paper for a writer's group that things began to happen. In 1979, her first of many plays, Womberang, was produced, later winning her a Thames Television bursary (John Mortimer was on the panel), and the box under the stairs was opened for good. It was something of a jolt to those around her: "I was married to my first husband for seven years, and he didn't know. It was a massive surprise to him when he saw a poster in town to do with the play I'd written. Last time he sees me I'm surrounded by kids and wearing an apron, and then I've written this play, and there's an article in the local paper: "Local Mother Moves Into Theatre World". Local mother! I was a novelty, but then it was the 70s. Women had made a good stab at getting equality, but you were still fighting. Still skirmishing."
Adrian Mole went on to make her a bestselling novelist throughout the 1980s and beyond, and one of the country's foremost humorous writers. I tell her that I am almost exactly the same age as Adrian and was, as a young teenager, utterly addicted to him: his premature world-weariness, his combination of self-importance and neurotic lack of confidence and his romantic agonies struck a chord with me, as they did with teenagers (not to mention their teachers and parents) everywhere. The illustration on the front of my dog-eared copy of The Secret Diary hints at the reason, with its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other; the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail.
Now Adrian is at another of life's staging posts: on the brink of middle age, he is a man whose life still feels as provisional, bewildering and unsteady to him as it did 27 years ago. But this time, he is forced to confront a crisis that can't be wished away or played down. "I wanted him to face death," says Townsend. After his diagnosis, his thoughts are a characteristic blend of melodrama and mundanity: "I can't die yet. I've got responsibilities and a family and I have to look after my parents; they're completely irresponsible and couldn't survive without my help. And there are so many places I haven't visited yet: the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the new John Lewis department store they're building in Leicester."
Throughout the novel, Adrian goes through radiotherapy and chemotherapy but, although he ponders much on the fraught love-life of his hospital nurse, he is reticent when it comes to his own suffering. "I imagine he doesn't have the words for the fear he feels," Townsend says. "He knows it's a feeling, but he doesn't want to express it because that would make it real. That's what quite a lot of people do. I'm really good at detachment myself. It's been a handy trick over the last three months or so."
One feels that Townsend has had to do what she calls her "detachment trick" for longer than the last three months. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her 30s, having previously been fit, healthy and active. "I did go overly dramatic," she says, although everything about her suggests that this was not the case. "I did lie on the couch and employ a cleaner." Through the decades, her condition deteriorated significantly; she lost her eyesight and, over the course of five years or so, her kidneys failed. Eight weeks before we met, she had a kidney transplant, using an organ donated by her son; she had endured years of dialysis. She is still a frequent visitor to the hospital, and will remain on medication for the rest of her life.
But if illness is one of novel's most fruitful themes – Adrian's initial attempts to secure a doctor's appointment will chime with most people – it doesn't prevent Townsend addressing other concerns. Issues of paternity and family run through the Mole books (Adrian himself has three children by three different mothers), and in the wake of the latest crisis – who is his sister Rosie's real father? – Townsend dispatches the interested parties to that great arbiter of contemporary ethics, The Jeremy Kyle Show. But what you don't get is any de haut en bas satire on reality television. "I love those people," she says firmly. "I've worked with them, and I know them intimately. They're completely manipulated by the show, but . . . I think it's validating their life; being on the television is success, it doesn't matter what the context is. You haven't been able to make much of yourself because nobody's expected anything of you; first your parents, second your schoolteachers, certainly not your peer group – they're more comfortable with the lowest common denominator, because we're all in this together, so . . . I am overly sentimental, probably, about people like that."
As a child, Townsend used to sit on the bus into Leicester city centre, fascinated by the thought that the workers from the Fox's Glacier Mints factory would buy the bread made at the bakery up the road, following the chain of production and consumption as far as she could. She is convinced that the lives of the working class had more compensations than we now realise: Leicester itself had 15 working men's clubs, and most factories had several sports teams. Latterly, one of Townsend's contributions to community life has been to buy two pubs that would have otherwise disappeared, knowing that "if you gave people really good clean lavatories, not the 60-year-old urine smell, and you treated people well and were friendly, you could fill the place".
She is committed to the idea that the vast majority of people are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their best selves, and that this is being thwarted by the depredations and excesses of government – a belief that surfaces not only in the Mole books, but also in more overtly political novels such as Number Ten and Queen Camilla. Her anxiety that we are increasingly wary of one another leads her to believe that "we're on the cusp of something significant, because if it goes on that way what kind of a world are we going to be living in? We're going to be paranoid, fearful, isolated."
Townsend's novels are little hymns to the power of family and community to make life bearable. It seems horribly obvious to ask her whether she keeps a diary, but rather remiss not to. She laughs and assumes a mock-dramatic voice: "I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave . . . and beyond!"
A winter's tale
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Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasure
In 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children called "The Spring Tune", featuring Snufkin, the peripatetic musician of the Moomin stories. "'It's the right evening for a tune,' Snufkin thought. 'A new tune, one part expectation, two parts sadness and, for the rest, just the great delight of walking alone and liking it.'" As he settles down to compose, he is disturbed by a small creature, a "creep", which rustles out of the undergrowth, declares its admiration for the famous Snufkin, asks him a lot of questions, and demands attention and comfort.
Meanwhile, the tune, which until then had been forming itself out of the noises of forest and brook and the slow revelations of the season, disappears. Snufkin has to wait for it to come back. Never underestimate Jansson, who never ever underestimates her reader. This story for eight-year-olds is a sharply pertinent discourse on the relationships between art, nature, fame and identity, a discussion of the place and role of the artist and of the mysterious sources of creativity.
It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature.
Tove Jansson was born an artistic child of bohemian Finnish artists. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten, was one of Finland's best-known artists, designers and book illustrators; her father, Viktor Jansson, was a celebrated sculptor. Jansson herself became well known in her 30s for her Moomin tales and illustrations, which eventually made her world-famous. Because she was and is so recognised for her children's literature, her adult fiction, which she began writing in her early 50s (she died in 2001, aged 86) has tended to be overlooked, but in her last three decades the 11 books she wrote were all for adults. The UK republication of The Summer Book (1972) in 2003, followed by a selection of her short stories, The Winter Book, in 2006, and the first publication in English of her final novel, Fair Play, in 2007, has been revelatory for her English-speaking readership. That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal (who was also the original English translator of The Summer Book in the 1970s). The True Deceiver is another fortunate first, and it is an unassuming, unexpected, powerful piece of work.
If the Moomins are Jansson's most celebrated legacy – a community of inventive, big-nosed, good-natured beings who survive, again and again, the storms and existentialism of a dark Scandinavian winter through simply being mild, kind, inclusive and philosophical – what will happen when a real community is put in its place? What will the outcome be when Jansson tackles, naturalistically, the life of a tiny hamlet in a dark, wintry landscape – and in a book so close to real local life that the original Swedish publication carried a disclaimer saying it was in no way based on any real place, nor its characters on anybody living?
A novel about truth, deception, self-deception and the honest uses of fiction, The True Deceiver is almost deadpan in its clarity and seeming simplicity, and is at heart one of her most mysterious and subtle works. First published in 1982, it was her third novel specifically for adults. Her biographer, Boel Westin, records that she had great difficulty with it. "Its unsparing view of life," Westin comments, "is, in fact, one of the characteristics of her adult books." Jansson herself commented on how "stubbornly, labororiously" she had worked on it. There's no doubting the oppressiveness of the conditions under which her characters have to live and work. "The winds had risen. It pressed snow against the windows with a powerful whispering that had followed the people of the village for a long, long time. Between squalls there was silence."
It begins with the disarming simplicity that characterises the whole novel. "It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light." It's a book about a dark place, where snow creates a kind of claustrophobia, where "paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out", and where "people woke up late because there was no longer any morning". By paragraph two the censoriousness of small community life has set in. "It's still snowing and there she goes again," the unnamed narrator comments about Katri. Katri and her brother, Mats, are clearly not liked in the village. He's too "simple" and her eyes are the wrong colour. Worse, they aren't properly "local".
The novel's voice is flat and exact, a kind of reportage, which shifts, seamlessly and suddenly, into Katri's own voice, making it unclear who the first narrator is and unsettling all notions of objectivity. By the end of the chapter, we know that this book, concerned with locality, money, winter, wildness, social unacceptability and power, will also be about whether there's such a thing as objectivity. Objectivity and truth are Katri's obsessions. Her refusal of social niceties, her honesty, her silences and her bluntness have made the villagers uncomfortable and deeply hostile towards her, but made her peculiarly trusted and given her a great deal of power in the community.
Is this also going to be a book about class and hierarchy? Within five short pages, Katri is standing looking at the local big house, which surreally resembles a giant rabbit's face, and is owned by an artist, Anna Aemelin, who lives there "all by herself, alone with her money". Her motives are clear: she and Mats are going to move into that house. The book begins on the projected standoff, dog versus rabbit, "the real story of Anna and Katri" – in other words, the standoff of "real" versus "story". At its heart is a battle that promises to be savage.
Katri wants an obliterating purity – "I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean" – she is a personification of wintriness. Her opponent, Anna Aemelin, has no foothold on winter and is a being particularly associated with spring. "It was winter, and she never worked until the first bare earth began to show." Her art is dependent on the spring, and it almost feels, sometimes, as though the spring may be dependent upon her art. She's also a person practically disconnected from the village, an ageing child living in a veritable museum to her parents, and a famous artist, who draws forest floor pictures known the world over for their authenticity, then takes these "implacably naturalistic" pictures and adds lots of very unnaturalistic flowery rabbits, for which she is equally world-renowned, especially among small children. Who is the true deceiver here? And how does deception relate to truth? The novel, with its village full of mundane cheats and charlatans, is a philosophical confrontation between Katri's cynicism and Anna's aesthetic sensibility. Is there such a thing as kindness? Or is there only "the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want, maybe an advantage or not even that, mostly just because it's the way it's done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook"? What are flowery rabbits (or, it might be added, Moomins) actually for? Or is it Anna who's right, that the paying of attention to people's needs, though "a pretty rare thing," is a natural and uncynical part of being human? She knows what is expected of her, and she acts on it, just as she knows her own lie and finds it tiresome. But "Things are not always that simple." Katri, on the other hand, knows exactly what "simple" means. She has seen and destroyed the snow figures the village children have made in spiteful likeness of her and her "simple" brother.
Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound. "Rarely do books give as clear an impression as yours that they have simply matured to the point of inevitability," Jansson's editor at Bonnier, her Swedish publisher, wrote to her when she was struggling with difficult work; in many ways, The True Deceiver is a book about artistic maturation as well as human coming of age.
Is this an autobiographical portrait? Jansson herself commented, at the time of The True Deceiver's first publication in Swedish: "Every serious book is a kind of self-portrait." This overexcited reviewers, who decided to see the book, a subtle and calibrated work, in the simplified and reductive terms which "autobiographical" almost always means. But the hopelessly innocent Anna Aemelin, totally at a loss with the commercial spinoffs from her flowery rabbits, is laughably far from the sharp-eyed Jansson, who could write so acridly and merrily (as she did in her short story "Messages") about the flurry of requests that came in from companies and individuals concerning her "product". Jansson knew the responsibility and surreality of her position, which could result in a request like the one from a company that wanted to use her tiny anarchist figure, little My, on "a discreet new mini sanitary towel" (she said a discreet no) directly alongside one from a reader asking for a drawing of Snufkin "that I can have tattooed on my arm as a symbol of freedom".
One of its most haunting moments is when Anna, looking through reams of her parents' old correspondence, trying to find a portrait of herself as a girl, discovers that she was hardly there. She realises that she became "a painter of the ground" only after both her parents were dead and buried in it. It is a deeply poetic work, and such images, like that of the dog that finally runs mad, or the pile of rubbish left on the surface of the frozen lake – all the piled-up ephemera of Anna Aemelin's life, which will sink when the spring comes and the ice melts – are pervasive. On the surface, this is very much a book about how to survive, as well as how to deal with what surfaces in lives, over time.
The True Deceiver is the opposite of charming – and deliberately so. But this novel's presentation of itself as a tough and unresolving work is a kind of deception in itself. "There are no real answers to what is right and what is wrong," Boel Westin concludes. That's one possible reading of the novel. But look at its deep understanding of human surreality and sadness, and at Jansson's vision of the epic qualities inherent in all small things. Though meticulous in its rejection of sentimentality, it demonstrates, alongside all the cruelty, a wealth of small, real acts of kindness. By the end, its two fixed protagonists, Anna and Katri – the two opposite poles of its "real story" – have learned to shift position. This change doesn't come without fracture – ice will break in the melt. All the same, at the end of this mysterious novel, both women have changed their old tunes for new. It is one of Jansson's most deceptively quiet, most astonishing compositions.
An explosive combination
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The author and the illustrator explain how bonfire night banter ignited new careers for both of them
It all happened because of bonfire night. As he stood with family and friends amid the oohs and aahs of the village firework display, novelist Conn Iggulden found himself trying to explain, in answer to a curious child's question, how the fireworks made such pretty colours.
"So I said that they stuff a fairy inside, and that the 'whee' you can hear is the fairy screaming," he says. Before long he was telling a story about tough little fairies getting blown up which amused and horrified a small circle of his children and their friends. The illustrator Lizzy Duncan, who happened to be standing nearby, remembers "chuckling in the background, looking at all these kids' faces going 'Oh my God!'" She told Iggulden she had an image of the story in her head; he asked her if she'd draw it for him.
"I really don't think I knew who he was," she says. "I hadn't put two and two together and come up with Conn Iggulden. It didn't occur to me that the drawing would lead to anything." But the collaboration sparked that evening ignited a new career in children's fiction for the historical novelist Iggulden: he teamed up with Duncan to produce Tollins, a handsomely illustrated tale about the eponymous small flying people who live unnoticed at the bottom of the garden, in which he tells the story of how, when bumbling humans start catching them to add to their fireworks, one of them fights back.
"I went home and was so inspired," he says, "that I wrote the first story in a stream". About 5,000 words came "ever so fast, and then I polished it, and gave it to Lizzy to see what she thought. She came back with some drawings and I said 'I think we're on to something'."
Before his fortuitous encounter with Duncan, Iggulden had often wondered what it would be like to work with an illustrator, and had even tried his hand at producing his own picture book called The Magic Marigolds. "I thought, 'it can't be that hard'," he says. "My agent still talks about it as the worst idea I've ever had." But he and Duncan hit it off straight away. After spending the 1990s working in animation, Tollins was Duncan's first shot at illustrating a children's book, something she'd wanted to do "since I was very small". "Thank goodness everyone had a bit of faith," she says, "because I was coming into this with a very blank canvas." "I've always been slightly wary of those people who are precious about their art," says Iggulden. "I've always tried to be professional, and Lizzy had much the same attitude."
The Tollins, says Iggulden, are definitely not fairies; they're much less fragile. He didn't want to write a saccharine book – there were plenty of those already on his daughters' shelves. With a children's bestseller – The Dangerous Book for Boys, a manual for larking about written with his brother Hal in 2006 – already to his credit, he was confident that he could find a way of writing about small winged creatures that would appeal to boys as well as girls. "I've always understood the way that boys think," he suggests, "because I grew up with three brothers. People complain about boys not reading very much, but I'm happy to write books they'll enjoy."
Iggulden's writing career began with a bestselling sword-and-sandals series about Julius Caesar, which opened with The Gates of Rome in 2003. Flushed with success, he followed it up with the rip-snorting Conqueror series, in which he charts the rise of Genghis Khan (the series was unleashed with Wolf of the Plains in 2007, and the fourth book is due next year). True to his background in historical fiction, Iggulden picked a specific time and place for the discovery of his Tollins: Chorleywood, Hertfordshire in the years between the first and second world wars. "My instincts," he says, "are to set things in the past". He chose 1922 partly because of the perspective it affords, the ability to set things within a grand sweep, but also because of the "fairly simple technology. I enjoy poking around with it myself, so it was fun to write about it."
Science and technology play a large part in propelling the plot. The first segment of the book tells how the hero, Sparkler, launches a research project to find chemicals which the humans can put in their fireworks instead of Tollins, with the results announced in bursts of flame: "Sodium Nitrate, Copper Chloride, Strontium Carbonate". Sparkler saves his neck in the second part with a medicine to relieve gout, while the third act features a hot air balloon and steam pumps.
"My father was a physics teacher," explains Iggulden, "so I grew up with someone who was able to explain how a kettle worked, or a steam train. I wanted to be a scientist myself until I discovered that there was a glass ceiling in physics which I couldn't get through." He studied English instead, and worked as a schoolteacher before turning to writing full time, but never lost his sense of wonder in technology. "It's the human spirit," he says. "We build things, we make things – we're the monkey with the wrench."
"There's a kind of magic to an engine that works," he continues, quoting Arthur C Clarke's third law, that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic. And it's a kind of magic that kids love. "For children it's the machinery for understanding the world around them. It gives a sense of control of the world – even it that is a false sense."
Entering the world of chidren's fiction has brought a whole new series of experiences for Iggulden, but the hardest question he's been confronted with is about the age of his audience. "I've had the most trouble with that question, because it makes me laugh," he says. "I think of the book as universal – and I swear to you that's not just an attempt to get more sales." As a former teacher he's "very uncomfortable with the limiting effect of labels. If you put 'seven to nine' on a book and offer it to a 10-year-old who might have reading difficulties then that will put them right off – it would be an embarrassment." Despite his publisher HarperCollins's enthusiastic support for the controversial age-ranging scheme, he's managed to keep "any numbers off the back", but admits that he can't control what happens in bookshops. However, he says, "If there is a range then it's a wide one – six to 13."
He had no qualms about some of the darker moments in the stories, such as when Sparkler faces beheading, or is imprisoned in a jam jar, believing that "without a bit of threat and peril, you don't have a story." Look at Grimm's fairy tales, he adds. "There are some absolutely awful things in there. If you make sure you don't get too graphic then you can put in all sorts." And Iggulden's love of black humour keeps the jokes coming as the danger mounts. "I've never had the chance to write straight humour," he says. "There aren't that many laughs in Genghis Khan, so it's been great fun."
With a second volume already in the pipeline, Iggulden's looking ahead. "If you carry on with the story, there'll always be the second world war up there in the shadows. It'll be interesting to see how that works, especially in the comic mode."
Obituary: Josette Baujot 1920-2009
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When the comics artist Hergé (aka Georges Rémi) created his most famous character, Tintin, in the late 1920s, he drew the tuft-haired young reporter in black and white. His fellow Belgian Josette Baujot, who has died aged 88, was responsible for colouring Hergé's Tintin albums for more than a quarter of a century during the peak years of his popularity, and established the "colour code" that helped take Tintin far beyond Belgium and France to an international audience.
Baujot's colouring, pencilled in by hand before the age of digital enhancement, is still revered by cartoonists worldwide and is said to have strongly influenced Walt Disney. The film-makers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, currently at work on a trilogy of Tintin movies, due to start with The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn in 2011, are reported to have told their team to reflect the original colouring as much as possible.
In 1950 Hergé, overwhelmed by his growing success, had set up studios in Brussels with the aim of building a team to help him cope with the demand for his work. Edgar Pierre Jacobs was his first colourist. Baujot joined Hergé Studios in 1953, while Hergé was completing the Tintin album Destination Moon (Objectif Lune) and already planning the follow-up, Explorers On the Moon (On A Marché Sur la Lune, 1954), in which Tintin would become the first man on the moon, 15 years before Neil Armstrong.
"Hergé himself had the idea of a red-and-white chequered rocket," Baujot said, "but he asked me to add a little green in the red so that it did not appear too violent. And he was insistent on orange spacesuits for Tintin, Captain Haddock and Milou [Snowy, Tintin's fox terrier]. For the surface of the moon, he gave me carte blanche but, as it turned out, I opted for yellow, with the craters more emphasised. In those days, we didn't know what the surface of the moon looked like." Hergé was said to have been delighted with her yellowish, light-mustard colouring of the moon's surface.
Baujot had learned the art of evoking moods by creating colours through mixing, rather than sticking to the primary shades used by most of her contemporaries. She emphasised her style in the album Cigars of the Pharaoh (Les Cigares du Pharaon, 1955), the first colour reproduction of a book that Hergé had created in black and white 20 years earlier.
Although Hergé insisted on drawing the main characters himself, he relied on Baujot and his right-hand men, Jacques Martin and Bob de Moor, to draw and colour the backgrounds for the young reporter's adventures, from Tibet and the Soviet Union to Scotland and South America.
Hergé famously walked a tightrope between perfectionism and depression – perhaps, for him, they were the same thing – and Baujot became known for her straight-talking in the studios. She was said to have been the only member of the team to stand up to the maestro, notably when her boss, married and pushing 50, had an affair with a young member of her colouring team, Fanny Vlaminck. Baujot disapproved strongly and told him so. He eventually married Vlaminck and they remained together until his death in 1983.
Despite their altercations, Hergé admired and respected Baujot, and most of their disagreements would be resolved over afternoon tea with the entire team in what one of Tintin's English translators, Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, has described as the "friendly, kibbutz-like atmosphere" of the studios. In his last, unfinished work, Tintin et l'Alph-art, Hergé drew a new character called Josette Laijot, a gallery owner, and he often referred to her real-life model as La Révérende Mère du Très Saint Coloriage – "the Reverend Mother of the Most Holy Colouring".
Born Josette Marie Louise Nondonfaz in the Belgian town of Spa, she studied drawing, particularly portraiture, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Liège, and in 1944 married Joseph Baujot. Amid the confusion and mutual mistrust among Belgians after the allied liberation, the Baujots moved to Argentina, where they bought a vineyard and had a son.
In 1953, Joseph was shot dead while out hunting. There were reports that he had been shot by members of the French or Belgian resistance who had tracked him down, but he lived long enough to tell police that he had been hit accidentally by a friend. After his death, Josette returned to Brussels, immediately finding a job in the Hergé Studios. There she met Joseph Loeckx – at 17, he was half her age – who would become her lifelong companion, and a hugely successful cartoonist in his own right, now better known by his nom de plume Jo-El Azara, creator of the myopic, pacifist Japanese serviceman Taka Takata. He survives her, along with her son Michel.
• Josette Marie Louise Baujot, artist, born 17 August 1920; died 13 August 2009
Roberto Bolaño was no literary rebel, says novelist
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The myths surrounding the late Chilean author are false, says Bolaño's friend and fellow novelist, Horacio Castellanos Moya
He's been compared to James Dean and described as the "Kurt Cobain of
Latin-American literature", but the real Roberto Bolaño was very different to the myth created by the North American cultural establishment, according to the author's friend and fellow novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya.
Coverage of the late Chilean author, writes Moya in an acerbic essay for La Nacion, reprinted in English in Guernica, emphasises his tumultuous youth, his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet, his imprisonment in Chile during the coup d'état, his itinerant existence in Europe, his presumed drug addiction and premature death.
He is portrayed as a cross between Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats, but Moya says that "the majority of critics have passed over the fact that Bolaño didn't die as a result of drug or alcohol abuse, but from a case of poorly cared-for pancreatitis that had destroyed his liver; or that his case was more similar to those of Balzac or Proust, who also died at 50 after a tremendous work effort, than it was to those of North American pop idols".
Moya, born in Honduras but now living in Japan, had told himself he
wasn't going to say or write anything about Bolaño again, but he was
inspired to tackle the subject after his friend Sarah Pollack, a professor at a New York university, sent him an academic essay on the construction of the myth around the author.
Bolaño's work has grown hugely popular since his death aged 50 in 2003. His novel The Savage Detectives was one of the New York Times's top 10 books of 2007, and 2666 was on the same list the following year. This March, Picador acquired 11 novels by the author, including The Third Reich, finished shortly before his death and due for publication in 2011.
Moya believes that, as the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez
began to lose its luster for the North American reader, the cultural
establishment went looking for something new, landing upon the
"visceral realism" of The Savage Detectives and deciding it would be
"the next big thing, the new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you
will".
The North American edition of the book, he says, included a photo of a
post-adolescent Bolaño. "This nostalgic evocation of the rebel counterculture of the 60s and 70s was part of a finely-tuned strategy," says Moya. "The construction of the myth preceded the great launch of the work."
His friend, he believes, "would have found it amusing to know they
would call him the James Dean, the Jim Morrison, or the Jack Kerouac
of Latin American literature". What is not so amusing is his and Pollack's assertion that "American readers, with The Savage Detectives, want to confirm their worst paternalistic prejudices about Latin America ... like the superiority of the Protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbours to the south as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent."
Fury after women writers excluded from 'books of the year'
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Campaigners incensed after Publishers Weekly's top 10 titles of 2009 ignores female authors
US trade magazine Publishers Weekly has come under fire for failing to include a single woman in its list of the top 10 titles of 2009.
From Richard Holmes's history of science in the Romantic generation, The Age of Wonder, to Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life, Geoff Dyer's novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Daniyal Mueenuddin's short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and David Small's graphic novel memoir Stitches, Publishers Weekly's all-male line-up has drawn the ire of a group of female writers.
"The absence made me nearly speechless." said poet and creative writing professor Cate Marvin, co-founder of new US literary organisation Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA). WILLA has gathered more than 5,500 members since it launched in August with the aim of bringing "increased attention to women's literary accomplishments and [questioning] the American literary establishment's historical slow-footedness in recognising and rewarding women writers' achievements".
The group pointed to new books published this year by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker. "It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture," said Marvin.
Announcing the list, novelist and journalist Louisa Ermelino said that PW "wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration". "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet," she said, adding that "it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male".
Poet Erin Belieu, WILLA's other co-founder and director of the creative writing programme at Florida State University, said that "when PW's editors tell us they're not worried about 'political correctness', that's code for 'your concerns as a feminist aren't legitimate'". "They know they're being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that," said Belieu. "I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people - writers and readers - who don't feel good about it at all."
WILLA has now launched a wiki list of "great books published by women in 2009", which already includes AS Byatt's The Children's Book, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry.
Publishers Weekly's top 10 books of 2009
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Big Machine by Victor LaValle
Cheever by Blake Bailey
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
Lost City of Z by David Grann
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
Stitches by David Small
Obama's half-brother writes book 'inspired by father's abuse'
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Obama's father beat me and my mother, Mark Ndesandjo says, as he launches self-published semi-autobiographical novel
阅读中文 | Read this in Chinese
Barack Obama's half-brother in China has broken his media silence to launch a semi-autobiographical novel, which he said was partly inspired by their father's abuse.
Mark Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern city of Shenzhen for the last seven years and is married to a Chinese woman, said he plans to meet the US president during Obama's official visit to Beijing this month.
"My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She is his biggest fan," Ndesandjo said.
His self-published novel – like the president's memoir Dreams From My Father – focuses on Barack Obama senior.
"My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don't do that," Ndesandjo told Associated Press (AP), saying he wrote Nairobi to Shenzhen in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.
"It's something which I think affected me for a long time, and it's something that I've just recently come to terms with."
With tears in his eyes, he added: "I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds.
"I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn't know where to go."
Ndesandjo, who works in strategic marketing, had previously refused all interviews. He declined to answer many of AP's questions and would not even give his age, saying only that he was younger than his brother. The news agency said the two men had a "strong resemblance".
Several relatives of the president have books due out soon. Ndesandjo said he did not want to touch on any political themes in his novel. "I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job and I really don't want to cause him additional heartburn," he said.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the interview or discuss Obama's relationship with his half-brother.
Barack Obama senior met Ndesandjo's mother Ruth Nidesand while studying at Harvard University, shortly after divorcing the president's mother.
The couple returned to his native Kenya, where Ndesandjo and his brother, David – who died in an accident some years ago – were born and grew up. But they divorced some years later, amid allegations of domestic abuse, and Nidesand returned to the US. Ruth Nidesand took the surname of her second husband.
"I see myself in many ways as a person who has many places, has feet in many places," said Ndesandjo, an American citizen who studied and worked in the US before leaving his corporate job after the September 11 attacks.
Obama senior, who died in 1982, also had four children with his first wife.
He was largely absent from the life of the president, who saw his father only once after his parents' divorce, when Obama was 10 years old.
In his memoir, the president portrayed his father as a gifted but erratic man with an alcohol problem, who failed to live up to his family responsibilities. The book quoted Ndesandjo saying: "I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough."
Ndesandjo said at a press conference today that his brother's election victory, among other recent events, helped "peel away the hardness" that he developed during his childhood.
"I became proud of being an Obama," he said.
He told AP that the two men met in Washington and Texas last year, adding: "He came up to me, and we hugged ... I was just thinking of how happy I was and how proud and how much I loved him."
Stephen King publishes poem in Playboy
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The Bone Church, a narrative work about an ill-fated jungle expedition, appears in November edition
Marge Simpson's appearance as its cover girl has attracted a frenzy of media attention, but this month's edition of Playboy magazine contains another, almost equally unexpected celebrity appearance: from author Stephen King, making a very rare outing as a poet.
"When travelling to the heart of darkness, terror is not an emotion – it's a destination," writes King in the issue, out now, before launching into The Bone Church. Told by a man in a bar, the poem is the story of an ill-fated expedition into a jungle. "There were thirty-two of us went into that greensore / and only three who rose above it," writes King. "We were thirty days in the green, and only one of us came out."
The team is killed off, variously, by snakes, leeches ("Dorrance tried to kiss him back to life / and sucked from his throat a leech as big as / a hothouse tomato") and fevers, until three finally arrive at the bone church, "a million years of bone and tusk, / a whited sepulchre of eternity, a thrashpit of prongs / such as you'd see if hell burned dry to the slag of its cauldron". Things, unsurprisingly enough, don't end well, as "mammoths from the dead age when man / was not" start to thunder past in "endless convulsions of tumbling death".
Playboy has a perhaps surprisingly strong literary background, publishing works by authors including John Irving, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood. This summer, literary editor Amy Grace Loyd acquired first serial rights in Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished novel The
Original of Laura for its December issue. It has also enjoyed a lengthy relationship with King, interviewing the author back in 1983.
"The protagonist of Salem's Lot, a struggling young author with a resemblance to his creator, confesses at one point, 'Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night, I make up a Playboy Interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.' Ten novels and several million dollars in the bank later, your books are big on campus and everywhere else," the interviewer said to King.
The author replied that the passage reflected his state of mind in the days before he sold his first book, Carrie, when nothing seemed to be going right. "When I couldn't sleep, in that black hole of the night when all your doubts and fears and insecurities surge in at you, snarling, from the dark – what the Scandinavians call the wolf hour – I used to lie in bed alternately wondering if I shouldn't throw in the creative towel and spinning out masturbatory wish fulfilment fantasies in which I was a successful and respected author. And that's where my imaginary Playboy interview came in," he said.
King's fans have been steeling themselves to buy the new issue of the magazine. "Since I have never purchased a magazine of this calibre in my life, my wife was kind enough to purchase me a copy. She knew I would feel like a perv when paying for it and was kind enough to spare me," wrote one at StephenKing.com. "I just hope Marge's pictures aren't too explicit or my wife might not let me get the issue," said another.
Fans will perhaps feel less awkward buying the 9 November issue of New Yorker, out this week, which features a new short story by King. Set in Castle Rock – a frequent haunt for King's characters – Premium Harmony is the story of the unhappy ending to an arguing couple's trip to buy a purple ball.
And the prolific author's new novel, Under the Dome – a 900-page epic he first tried to write in the 1980s – is published next week on 10 November. With a cast of more than 100 characters, Under the Dome tells of a Maine town sealed off from the world by an invisible force field.
Obituary: Francisco Ayala
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One of the greats of Spanish literature, he spent decades in exile in the Franco era
The Spanish literary lion Francisco Ayala, who has died aged 103, enjoyed a remarkable privilege: attending a major international conference to mark his own centenary. With dozens of books to his name, he was more acclaimed for novels and short stories than for his stylish textbooks on social sciences, although he saw his academic and creative works as an organic whole.
Ayala lived through the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, defended the Spanish republic that was declared in 1931 and spent decades in exile as a result of the fascist regime that followed. He once declared: "I bear no ill-will against anyone over my exile. What I do resent is the human condition, sometimes seen at its very worst – but that, you can find anywhere." This outlook pervaded his writings. He portrayed an essential goodness in humanity that was easily dislodged in times of crisis, when people will readily exploit and oppress others. His collection Los Usurpadores (The Usurpers, 1949) reflects his view of the exercise of power as trespass against one's fellow humans.
Ayala was born in Granada to a petit-bourgeois, liberal family. His mother was a talented artist, his father a cultured but unsuccessful businessman. As a child, he read everything within reach, from comics to Don Quixote. He was 16 when his family moved to Madrid, where he later studied law. His literary debut, Tragicomedia de un Hombre Sin Espíritu (Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit, 1925) was followed by Historia de un Amanecer (A Dawn Story, 1926). They were minor novels in a dated style, but he was soon caught up in the set of avant-garde writers known as the Generation of 1927. By his graduation in 1929, he was in the circle around José Ortega y Gasset's cultural publication Revista de Occidente. El Boxeador y un Ángel (The Boxer and the Angel, 1929) and Cazador en el Alba (The Huntsman at Daybreak, 1930) showed his vanguard credentials while Indagación del Cinema (Explorations in Cinema, 1929) pioneered film criticism.
A postgraduate grant took Ayala to Berlin to study philosophy and sociology. There, he met the Chilean Etelvina Silva Vargas, whom he married in 1931. After collecting his doctorate in Madrid, he became a parliamentary clerk and a lecturer on civil rights and social legislation. In 1936, he was lecturing in South America when Franco rebelled, and hastened home to serve the republic in a variety of offices, including a diplomatic mission to Prague.
His younger brother Rafael was shot for desertion, his father jailed and summarily executed. The writer later admitted that he would have been prepared to shoot his wife, daughter and himself rather than be captured. As Franco's troops closed on Barcelona, Ayala escaped to Latin America.
In Argentina he returned to fiction, addressing moral and political themes. In El Hechizado (The Bewitched, 1944), Los Usurpadores and La Cabeza del Cordero (The Lamb's Head, 1949), Ayala established his mature voice. The latter stories, dealing with war as experienced intimately, achieved a more humane and universal reading of the Spanish conflict than other writers (André Malraux, George Orwell) who dwelt on its political and military dimensions.
He taught sociology, engaged in journalism and translation (including Rilke and Thomas Mann) and, in Buenos Aires, produced his Tratado de Sociología (A Treatise on Sociology, 1947). In 1950, Ayala travelled to Puerto Rico to found a magazine and publish further in social and cultural studies.
In 1956 he moved to the US, where he taught Hispanic literature and finished his best-known novels, Muertes de Perro (Death As a Way of Life, 1958) and El Fondo del Vaso (The Bottom of the Glass, 1962). Like Historias de Macacos (Monkey Stories, 1955), these dark tales savagely satirised tyranny.
When Ayala first returned to Spain, in 1960, he described it as "a kind of pilgrimage" to an unknown homeland. Some outstanding intellectuals of the era, including the future Nobel laureates Vicente Aleixandre and Camilo José Cela, later published a welcome-home message. Ayala was grateful; little of his work had surfaced under Francoist censorship. Like other literary exiles of 1939, his name was on university curricula across the Atlantic long before it won fame in Spain.
In New York, the widowed Ayala met Carolyn Richmond, an expert on the Spanish novelist Leopoldo Alas, and then on Ayala himself, many of whose works she edited or translated. She became his second wife in 1999.
His definitive homecoming awaited Franco's demise. Meanwhile, alongside his own works of fiction, he published extensively on classical and contemporary literature. By 1972, his genius was acknowledged in Spain, when he won the Critics' Prize for the trilogy El Jardín de las Delicias (The Garden of Delights, 1971). The post-Franco transition to a vibrant, democratic culture came from "exhaustion from the effort of having done without for so long", he said.
Having retired in 1977 from his university career, Ayala settled in Madrid in 1980. Three years later, he won the National Prize for Narrative with his two-volume memoir Recuerdos y Olvidos (Memories and Things Forgotten, 1982-83) and was elected to the governing authority of the Spanish language, the Real Academia Española (RAE), devoting his inaugural lecture to the rhetoric of journalism. Well into his 90s, he turned up for weekly meetings of the RAE.
Ayala won Spanish literature's highest honour, the Miguel de Cervantes prize, in 1991, years ahead of the already Nobel-garlanded Cela, and was himself a perennial candidate for the Nobel from 1996. He was awarded the National Prize in Spanish Letters in 1988 and the Prince of Asturias literary prize in 1998, but professed a disdain for honours. However, the Cervantes prize had a special meaning for him. The spirit of Cervantes, he said, had been present in everything he wrote since struggling through Don Quixote at the age of eight.
To mark the fourth centenary of Cervantes's masterpiece, Ayala published in 2005 La Invención del Quijote (The Invention of Don Quixote), representing 65 years of his writings on Cervantes. The RAE's anniversary edition of Don Quixote, running to 1m copies, features Ayala's preface. Granada's Ayala Foundation, created by Andalusian universities and local authorities, hosted a symposium in 2004, exploring Ayala's relationship with the Americas, and sponsored the filming of some of his stories. In 2005, he travelled with Crown Prince Felipe to open the Ayala library in the Instituto Cervantes, Stockholm.
Ayala launched his own website on his 95th birthday, claiming to be so familiar with computers that he had forgotten how to write by hand. Accepting the invitation to his centenary conference, he said: "They seem determined that I should keep on having birthdays ... I wouldn't want to spoil the show."
He is survived by Carolyn and his daughter, the art historian Nina Ayala Mallory, from his first marriage.
• Francisco de Paula Ayala García-Duarte, writer, born 16 March 1906; died 3 November 2009
Battle over Stieg Larsson's fortune
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• Bitter row over legacy of Swedish crime sensation
• Trilogy published after author died of heart attack
As the author of three dark and violent crime novels, Stieg Larsson was at home in a dysfunctional landscape of simmering resentments and rancourous family secrets. But the Swedish writer cannot have foreseen how, almost five years to the day after his death, the novels' success would lead to bitterness and paranoia in his own family.
In one of the most spectacular and unlikely ascents in recent literary history, Larsson, largely unknown before his sudden death at 50, has become one of the most successful writers in the world. Some 20 million of his books, the first of which was published in Britain as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, have been sold to date in Europe alone. Last year he was the world's second best selling author after Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, and his estate is thought to be worth more than £20m.
But because he and the architect Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of 32 years, never married and he died without making a will, the proceeds have defaulted to his blood relations, provoking controversy in Sweden and displeasure from Gabrielsson.
Today in the latest episode in the acrimonious saga, Erland and Joakim Larsson, the author's father and brother, made Gabrielsson a public offer of £1.75mto settle the dispute, telling the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, "We have to move on." Gabrielsson's response was curt: "You don't solve these things via media. It is so low. My lawyer will have to answer any further questions."
She has previously accused the Larsson family of seeking to "make money from someone who can't defend himself", saying it would make her partner "absolutely furious", and accusing Erland and Joakim of not being part of Stieg's life while he was alive.
But Erland Larsson said it was he who had insisted that his son write "something commercial", and that the Millennium trilogy, the third title of which was published in Britain last month as The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, was the result. Gabrielsson, he said, had resisted moves to come to a settlement.
"It's been almost five years since Stieg died. We have waited to come in contact with Eva but we can't wait another five years. Now we have to move on."
The acrimony over Larsson's estate surfaced a few months after his death from a heart attack in November 2004 while working as a dogged but comparatively obscure journalist, editing a Trotskyist periodical and an anti-fascist magazine, Expo, which he had founded. He had, it emerged, left the completed manuscripts for a series of three crime novels, the first of which was published the following year.
The surprise success of the novel has led, almost inevitably, to feverish interest from US directors and stars, with rumours that George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese are among those interested in bringing a Hollywood version of the character of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist to the screen.
Gabrielsson says she and Larsson never married because he had believed his anti-fascist work could have put her at risk if there was a paper trail linking them legally or financially, but that he would have been dismayed to see anyone other than her in control of the estate. "It would have been beyond Stieg's worst nightmares to know that someone other than me was handling the rights to his books and to know that the money we planned to invest is gone," she has said. Others have agreed, setting up online campaigns in Scandinavia and beyond to raise money for Gabrielsson's legal fees.
Expo says that Larsson had wanted the proceeds of the Millennium trilogy to go to anti-fascist and domestic violence charities. A will dating from 1977, which was unwitnessed and therefore non-binding, expressed a wish for his assets to be left to a local branch of the Communist Workers League.
Erland and Joakim said yesterday their lives were unchanged despite their newfound wealth, telling the magazine: "We drive the same cars and live in the same houses as before." As a goodwill gesture, they were prepared to share something with Gabrielsson. "She was part of Stieg's life. She should have a safe and good life with this," said Joakim.
"No demands or anything. But she has to call and say yes please."
Gabrielsson's lawyer, Sara Pers-Krause, said that while she had been in contact with the Larssons' lawyer, no firm offer had been made. "They have to come with something concrete and we haven't had that yet. To just meet without any preconditions we have already done," she said.
"It was untrue that Gabrielsson had not been in contact with the family, accusing them of ignoring her," Pers-Krause said. "We want to make clear that the primary question for us is how to preserve his literary assets, and we have given them different suggestions for this since spring 2006 without receiving any reply."
Most intriguing remains Larsson's laptop computer, which according to Gabrielsson contains a 200-page manuscript for a sequel to the trilogy. In 2005 she refused an offer by the family to hand over the computer in exchange for the author's half of the flat they shared, which his father and brother had inherited. There is speculation that sketched outlines for six further novels are also contained in the laptop.
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen
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Steven Poole enjoys a rigorous examination of an abstract notion
Humans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word "justice", one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called "justice" actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract animal called "justice" really is, and fail to pay much attention to problems of justice in the world.
The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting synthesis of political philosophy, economics and "social choice theory" a title that might at first appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be re-engineered to work better as a basis for "practical reasoning", such that it might improve the world.
For Schopenhauer, injustice was the analytically primary term: justice was merely the absence of injustice. (There seems to be a primordial sense of injustice: animal researchers have observed chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys showing a keen sense of when treats are distributedly unfairly.) Schopenhauer does not make an appearance in this book, but Sen's approach is arguably Schopenhauerian to this extent: "[A] theory of justice that can serve as the basis of practical reasoning," he writes, "must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterisation of perfectly just societies."
This might seem obvious to some. Aid workers, lawyers, or humanitarian NGOs might understandably have little time for perfectionist justice-talk as they go about their business. Sen argues that philosophy could help, were it not that too much talk of justice in modern political philosophy has, by contrast, been concerned with interrogating an otherworldly ideal of the perfectly just society constructed ab ovo. His main target in this tradition is John Rawls, who published his monumental A Theory of Justice in 1975. Sen calls Rawls's method "transcendental institutionism", in contrast to his own "comparative" approach.
By "comparative", Sen means first that we can compare the justice of two different situations, X and Y, without needing a perfect theory of justice, and we can also make good use of partial rankings: if X is better than Y and Z, we can choose X without waiting to know which of Y or Z is better. Secondly, the term "comparative" acknowledges that different reasonable principles of justice exist, which Sen illustrates with a beautiful parable. Suppose three children are quarrelling over a flute. Anna says she is the only one who can play the flute, so obviously we should give it to her. But then Bob says that he is the only child who has no toys at all, so surely he ought at least to have a flute to play with? Suddenly the question does not look so easy. And finally Carla points out that she spent months actually making the flute. So who should get it? For Sen, any theory of justice must begin in recognition of such clashing principles.
The contrast between "transcendental" and "comparative" theories is just one of the clarifying and useful distinctions that Sen goes on to draw, in a long argument that can at times seem slow-moving, and perhaps generously repetitive, but is also enlivened with many asides of twinkling humour. Thinkers of all political hues agree that justice means equality of some kind – the question is: equality of what? Sen's preferred answer appears to be equality of freedom: though he warns, near the end of the book, of the quixotic nature of any attempt to translate all possible values into one commensurable measure, he does do this to some extent himself: "sustainable development" becomes "sustainable freedom", and a defence of the idea of human rights near the end of the book essentially translates rights into freedoms too.
Sen is exquisitely civilised in his disagreements with other thinkers, even while he is elegantly trashing whole schools of economic and social thought. He dismisses reliance on GDP as a measure of "the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience"; and notes that the use of income as a comparative measure of wellbeing is flawed because there are differences in the rates at which people can convert wealth into other things. (This latter point is an example of his insistence that justice-thinking must take account of the lives people can actually lead, rather than the static bureaucratic situations in which they are placed.) Refreshingly, his terms of reference are not limited to western politics: he borrows an illuminating distinction from classical Indian thought, and demolishes the prejudice that democracy, if understood broadly as government by public reasoning, is an exclusively western tradition.
The very inclusiveness and generosity of Sen's thinking might invite criticism on the basis that his "capacious theory" is indeed so capacious, so concerned to be "open" rather than "closed", that there is nothing that could not, with a little tweaking, fit in it. The less a theory excludes, the more work is left up to the post-theoretical "practical reasoning". But Sen provides enough brilliant examples of such reasoning (with regard to famine, disability, disease and so on) that this comes to seem, on balance, a virtue. A second, tougher criticism might point to the apparent assumption throughout that the argument is essentially taking place between well-meaning liberals. He writes: "To argue that we do not really owe anything to others who are not in our neighbourhood, even though it would be very virtuous if we were to be kind and charitable to them, would make the limits of our obligations very narrow indeed." For Sen, that appears to suffice as a dismissal, on the grounds of implausibility, of such a view; yet it appears to be the principle behind Republican efforts to stymie universal healthcare in the US, or Conservative hopes to offload more social provision on to charities.
Perhaps, then, Sen's magisterial summation of his thought suffers from an excess of niceness; but this is surely preferable to its opposite. There is something quietly inspiring about his final chapter on the increasing reach and quality of "global reasoning", via institutions and less formal methods, which for him already constitute a kind of global democracy in embryo, and he ends on a delicately pitched note of calm optimism: "The general pursuit of justice might be hard to eradicate in human society." We can hope so.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
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This long-awaited novel recalls a dangerous era for artists. By Maya Jaggi
Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years takes a huge risk in venturing into copiously charted territory. It moves from the muralists and surrealists of the 1930s in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution to the McCarthyite witch-hunt of artists in the late 40s and 50s. Yet in crossing and recrossing the US-Mexican border, as novelists such as Carlos Fuentes have done before her, this novel reveals a singular ambition. It probes, with only partial success, the source of the vexed historical relationship between art and politics in the United States, as well as the gap between a life lived and a life reported.
The life in question is that of Harrison William Shepherd, variously dubbed Will, Harry and Insólito. Born in Virginia of an American "bean counter" and a Mexican flapper, he is raised in both countries, eventually becoming the celebrated author of American potboilers about the Aztecs. Shepherd's story opens engagingly with his boyhood in Isla Pixol, an island south of Veracruz, in a Mexico scented with "jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime". But the story comes to us in the elusive form of diaries and memoirs, letters and press cuttings. Locked for 50 years in a bank vault until all parties are dead, these fragments were saved by the novelist's stenographer, Violet Brown, from his despairing wish that they be burned.
Kingsolver meticulously inserts the fictional Shepherd into pivotal moments of recorded history, using both fictional and actual newspaper reports. As a youth in Mexico City, he sees a tiny woman of regal bearing, her hair "braided in a heavy crown", buying parrots in the street, and becomes a plaster-mixer and cook to her husband, Diego Rivera. Present as Frida Kahlo despairs of Rivera's infidelities and as Lev Trotsky seeks refuge with the revolutionary artist from Stalin's assassins, Shepherd becomes Kahlo's sometime spy and Trotsky's cook and secretary. As a naive and humble typist he plays a bit part in the rift between Trotsky and Rivera, and in Trotsky's murder. Back in the US, as the cold war hots up, these associations draw the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Shepherd's fate seems sealed by the view of a character in one of his novels that "Our leader is an empty sack . . ." – words that the novelist cannot truthfully deny are his own.
According to Violet, Shepherd was "averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood". The novel is at its best in the oblique revelation of this man, with his lacunae of privacy and passion. The young writer is an acute observer whose watchfulness derives partly from his itinerant upbringing – as a "double person made of two different boxes" – and his discreet sexuality. Guilt-ridden for failing to avert his boss's death, and disqualified from US military service for "sexual indifference to the female of the species" ("blue slip"), he spends the second world war couriering paintings to safety for the US state department.
In a spiky satire on press presumption, the novel points up the disparity between this man and the persona later ascribed to him as a treacherous "art smuggler, womaniser". A research trip to Mérida with his stenographer, an older woman, is written up in the papers as a "January-May romance". Even his sometime lover, Tom Cuddy, deserts him for his reported lack of patriotism. Yet while "lies are infinite in number and the truth so small and singular", the novel also witnesses the advent of celebrities who control and manipulate their own image. Kahlo, garbed as Mexican peasant or Aztec queen, says: "If I don't choose, they choose for me . . . The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife."
Shepherd's interest as a novelist is in "how civilisations fall, and what leads up to that. How we're connected to everything in the past". His lawyer, Arthur Gold, sees anti-communist persecution, not least of artists, as putting poison on the lawn. "It kills your crabgrass all right, and then you have a lot of dead stuff out there for a very long time. Maybe for ever." Kingsolver, who has spoken in a recent US interview of a post-9/11 backlash "against my identity as a political artist", offers a timely re-reminder – for those who need it – of an era when surrealist art could be condemned as "un-American", and foreigners deported for "working for Negro rights". Nor might an undead red spectre from the 50s be lost on an Obama administration mooting healthcare reform: "If Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down – welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy."
Yet the novel's later sections are marred by overstated irony, the dialogue too often staged between characters who agree, making for an authorial soapbox. More satisfying is an unexpectedly touching coda, in which the quietly besotted Violet keeps faith with the condemned man ("they'll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they've declared unfit to be Americans," she notes), and a surprise lacuna holds out hope of escape.
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker
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Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain
On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Maréchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer for Dover. Three months earlier David Railton, a frontline padre, had sent his idea for what Peter Parker calls "this representative of all the dead" to the Dean of Westminster, who had put it to George V. The king didn't like it, but the prime minister, Lloyd George, did, and having claimed the scheme as his own, got it through Cabinet that October. On 7 November, four unidentified bodies were exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and one randomly selected for a state funeral, at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November, 1920. Thus was a caravan set in motion that rolls to this day.
The Unknown Warrior provided a chance for the Church of England to reassert itself, writes Parker in his meditation on 90 years of British remembrance and commemoration of the first world war. The focus of grief at the 1919 anniversary of the armistice had been Sir Edwin Lutyens's temporary plaster Cenotaph in Whitehall, the permanent stone version of which was unveiled by the king, en route to the Abbey. The Cenotaph had seemed, writes Parker, "distressingly pagan" for the Anglican hierarchy – but it remains a place where dead Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Zoroastrians, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and other children of the empire, heretics all, can at home, for ever.
The Imperial War Graves Commission was already providing permanent resting places for a few of the 1,104,890 imperial dead when the ceremony took place. Yet it was the Unknown Warrior who initiated one tradition, which has now surely ended with the death, after 111 years, on 25 July 2009, of 29295 Private HJ Patch, poor bloody (Duke of Cornwall's Light) infantryman, plumber, sometime amateur geologist and pig-keeper, and hater of war. After his funeral at Wells Cathedral, Patch received a private burial in Monkton Coombe, in his home county of Somerset.
The Unknown Warrior's views are known only to God. The views of Harry Patch on such ceremonials were brisk – at least until near the end, when public acclaim for sticking around tempered his opinion. Patch had dismissed 11 November ceremonials as "show business", eschewed membership of the British Legion – until, says Parker, his last year, when he was "bribed with a bottle of whisky" – and never talked about his war during the more than half a century of his first marriage.
Patch's life, and those of other veterans who made it to the 21st century, punctuate Parker's narrative. "Most of them," the author writes, "were perfectly ordinary people." Yes, but then "ordinariness", as Parker demonstrates, evaporates under close scrutiny. The gregarious Royal Naval Air Service veteran Henry Allingham was at his death, a week before Patch, the world's oldest living man, and perhaps better copy, but Patch, splendidly oblivious, confounded stereotypes.
He did not do his bit in 1914. He continued plumbing, until conscription in October 1916. On 16 August 1917, he joined the third battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, setting out with his C company for the German lines, just under a mile away. En route the sight of a Tommy "ripped open from his shoulder to waist by shrapnel . . . lying in a pool of blood" begging to be shot seared itself, he wrote nine decades later, into his mind. Thirty-seven days after that incident, a shell exploded over his head, injuring him and killing, as he found out in hospital, the rest of his gun crew. Thus did 22 September become, for ever, Patch's private remembrance day.
It was HMS Verdun (surely the only RN ship named after a French victory) which bore the Unknown Warrior across the Channel. The destroyer emerged, writes Parker, from heavy fog as it approached Dover. My perceptions – most people's, maybe – of that war are rooted in mist, fog and, of course, mud. But Parker sketches out how attitudes have changed, from the interwar years, through the dismissive 1960s, and into today. I remember autumnal visits to another of Lutyens's cenotaphs, in Watts Park, Southampton in the 50s. Beyond the trees, in a mist, lay a dark world, still exerting gravitational pull on our family, on families across the globe.
The book bears witness to hurried completion. The ILP was the Independent rather than the International Labour party, the author's account of the British nuclear deterrent is spectacularly mangled, the awesome role of women on the western front is largely ignored, and no proper explanation is forthcoming of how, after the 60s, remembrance – or Patch's "show business" – came back into fashion. New wars helped.
But The Last Veteran also illuminates; it is full of fascinating detail, replete with ironies. It had never occurred to me how Alan Clark, diarist, minister, quasi-fascist and author of The Donkeys (1961), his wildly popular (and critically demolished) denunciation of the 1915 British high command, helped lead the left off to embrace the facile certainties of everything from Oh! What a Lovely War (1963 and still reviving) to Blackadder Goes Forth (1989 and still repeating).
I picked up a 1921 book by one General Huguet, late chief of the French mission to the British Army, about this country. "There is not a country in the world," he wrote, "where the dead are so quickly forgotten. Funerals take place without ceremony, pomp or oration." History, once again, would prove a general wrong.
Nigel Fountain's World War II: The People's Story is published by Michael O'Mara/Readers Digest.
Meltdown by Ben Elton
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Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffs
Topical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened after the dust had settled. With notable exceptions such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Neuromancer – both books which ended up shaping the eras they represented – most successful "contemporary" books arrive several years after the events they depict. What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's brilliant satire on Thatcher's 80s, was released in 1994; Phillip Hensher's A Northern Clemency, which recreated the taste of the 70s, was a Booker shortlist choice in 2008; and David Nicholls's fantastic Labour boom-years comedy One Day only came out this summer. Martin Amis's promised novella State of England may disprove this view (as Sebastian Faulks's One Week in December did not), although advance word of its Jordan-bashing, a tired red dwarf in the dying throes of its celebrity, suggests possibly not.
Ben Elton's new novel is as topical as it is possible to be; in fact, too much so. Elton, so brilliant in so many ways, always retains an element of being the wee smartypants of his class, unable to understand why the other kids don't like him for shooting up his hand and shouting out the answer before anyone else. His recent contemporary novels, such as Dead Famous (satirising Big Brother) and Chart Throb (riffing on X-Factor), worked well as closed-system, small-scale slices of UK culture. But in Meltdown he scattershots bankers, New Labour, London lifestyles, cash for honours, Notting Hill nannies, private schooling, immigration and the G8 concert of 2005, and struggles to involve us with any of it. This is the London of the Evening Standard's ES magazine, as hackneyed as someone making jokes about people with knives outside their big house in Hackney, which this book also does.
It follows four unpleasant chums from university: Henry, a Labour MP who gets done for expenses; a rude rightwing fake toff called Rupert (who sounds very like Jilly Cooper's timeless Campbell-Black, but devoid of the charm) who buys a peerage and gets pilloried for retiring with a huge payoff after running a large bank into the ground; Lizzie, a gorgeous lifestyle goddess; and Jimmy, a merchant banker who aims too high and ends up penniless in his five-storey Notting Hill mansion (though apparently not penniless enough to consider renting out any of its 30 rooms).
It's hard to see who we're meant to sympathise with. The most evil character, Rupert, is the only one who speaks any sense ("we're all bloody hypocrites: having condemned half the planet to living in abject misery to support what we see as a basic lifestyle, we then expect to be able to strut about in Hyde Park boasting about how caring and generous we are at the same time", he says of Live 8). Or is it not- that-bright insider-trader Jimmy and his saintly wife Monica, who say things like "charity is the new rock'n'roll" and donate £1m to asylum seekers when they can't afford to buy their own children shoes?
Any other novelist who stopped the narrative every two chapters to hold an inane discussion on whether to send your child to a public school or to digress on overpriced crisps would be unbearable. But because it's Elton you somehow don't mind; he's got to get in his little bit of politics, and the funny lines make it enjoyable, even as the characters themselves steadfastly refuse to be anything other than mouthpieces.
The problems of writing a novel-length work to a newspaper deadline become more apparent, however, when the platitudes just aren't fresh enough. There are observations on parenting which feel recycled from Blessed, the short-lived parenting sitcom; the villain has an altercation over how he puts his food in the fridge, echoing Elton's famous sausage routine.
But eventually, the greatest problem turns out to be the risk of just plain getting it wrong. The book is up to the minute with its echoes of Fred Goodwin and the Commons expenses scandal. But it went to press before it became clear that the banks, shorn of competitors such as Lehmans, would come roaring back like tigers; and that it's business as usual these days in the Bollinger bars of EC2. If Jimmy had just hung on for a couple more weeks, none of the confusing arson plot shenanigans would have been necessary.
The book, though quite funny and extremely readable, is not at heart a novel at all but a collection of stand-up material, dinner party arguments and anecdotes strung together by having "he said" typed on the end of every sentence. Newcomers to Elton's novels should start with the very funny and sharp Popcorn; those looking to know what went on in the crash should stick to the papers or Robert Peston; and we true state-of-the-nation novel fans should probably just hang on in there till about 2018.
Jenny Colgan's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend is published by Sphere.
Eragon's Guide to Alagaësia
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Christopher Paolini's fantasy series Inheritance has sold more than 22m copies. Now Eragon's Guide to Alagaësia issues readers with an invitation from Eragon Shadeslayer to become a new Rider
Damned minutes
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From Sacher-Masoch to Jane Austen, the novelist selects the novels which best anatomise the 'dark, interior stickiness' of a passion peculiarly well-suited to literature
Howard Jacobson is the author of 10 novels, including The Very Model of a Man, The Mighty Walzer and Kalooki Nights. He has also written studies of Jewishness, Australia and comedy and is a prolific journalist and broadcaster. His most recent novel, The Act of Love, was described by Nicholas Lezard as "an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement".
Buy Howard Jacobson books from the Guardian bookshop
"The first story I ever wrote described a bout of jealousy I had suffered. Writing about it, first comically, and then not, was the only way I could gain any mastery of it. It was as though the shame associated with jealousy needed to be expiated in prose.
"There is a strange affiliation between literature and jealousy. Jealousy is wordy; it gorges on language. It is hyperbolic, growing fatter on every expression of itself. This is delicious for any writer who is not an understater of emotion. I love the dark, interior stickiness of the subject, where torment knows it should not be left to itself, but wants it no other way, and the victim forever haunts the border between the thing he fears and the thing he longs for. This is the subject of The Act of Love.
"Tales of innocence and wonderment leave me cold. Black obsessiveness is what the novel does best. And jealousy is its natural domain."
1. Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
A great crazed story of desire, rage, real or imagined adultery – but why make fancy distinctions? – and murder, set to Beethoven's nerve-strung violin sonata. If you're going to do jealousy, this is the way to do it. In Tolstoy, the madness of jealousy goes all the way back to the madness of the sexual impulse itself.
2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Angel Clare cannot live with the knowledge that Tess has known another man. But the novel's real engine-house is Hardy's not being able to bear it either. Tess is not in the end sacrificed to the malevolent Gods but to the writer's palpitating desire to see her violated by a brute. Every sensitive man's jealous dread.
3. Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Sexual jealousy in all its minute obsessiveness, watching 10 hours for a curtain to twitch. So accurate it's boring. Not so much a book to read, as to know of.
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
The fact that Leopold Bloom has learnt to live with, and even love, his wife's infidelities, does not exclude this great comic novel from the jealous category. Only a deeply jealous man can make so splendidly complaisant a cuckold.
5. Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Pierre Klossowski
Companion short novels charting the philosophic subtleties of faithless-wife worship, though wrapped around, in the French way, with theory. These novels itch with the husband's desire to see more evidence of infidelity and suffer more jealousy than he ever quite can.
6. Persuasion by Jane Austen
Sexual jealousy is not normally what we think of as Jane Austen's terrain. But her novels are full of jealousy's tragic potential. If it weren't for her intervention, her heroines would be forever losing men to more moneyed or vivacious rivals. In Persuasion she colludes with her heroine to the extent of throwing the other woman off a sea wall. Almost as murderous in its vengefulness as Tolstoy.
7. Herzog by Saul Bellow
Bellow's heroes appear to be in charge because they are so dazzlingly smart. But they suffer tortures of jealousy at the hands of women who are bored with their dazzling smartness. Herzog more than most. If you want to write a great comedy make your hero a reflective cuckold who reads a lot.
8. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Spooky story of a man who cannot tear himself away from the company of his wife's former lover. Pinteresque in that you never know who's doing what to whom and which character is causing the other the greater sexual discomfort.
9. Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
Gleefully deranged study of a man's desire to be his mistress's slave, from which derives the word 'masochism'. The tension comes from waiting for the punishment to culminate in the ultimate jealous pleasure for the sexual masochist – the woman's infidelity.
10. Othello by Shakespeare
Only not a novel because novels weren't a going form yet. Simultaneously ludicrous and heart-breaking, this is the most convincing of all studies of jealousy's terrifying hold on the imagination, where trifles light as air hound the mind, and dread and desire are so closely intertwined as to deprive you of your reason.
The fictional world of Charlotte Grimshaw
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Richard Lea meets a writer who is acutely conscious of the tension between fact and fabrication
"Oh God, did I?" With a sharp intake of breath, Charlotte Grimshaw puts a hand to her mouth, a dim recollection surfacing in her mind. She shakes her head. "The internet ... " An embarrassed laugh. "Ah shit, I did too. I'd forgotten about that."
At the heart of Grimshaw's latest collection of short fiction, Singularity, is a story set in motion by a foul look, a look that one of her characters gives another in the street, when he recognises the author of a story that portrays him and his family in a deeply unflattering light. Grimshaw has just remembered that she's written about a look like that before, on a blog commissioned two years ago by New Zealand Book Month, but that when she wrote about it last, the author who received that look was Grimshaw herself. She laughs again, this time a little more wholeheartedly, a sly smile spreading across her wide mouth. "I thought that was going to just look like I'd invented it." It's not that she's made a habit of upsetting people, she continues, but "you know, it happens". The clash between fiction and reality is a subject she returns to repeatedly in her work. "Every now and then people get offended, but they shouldn't," she says, as if it were all perfectly obvious. "Because it's fiction."
Grimshaw only began writing short fiction after publishing three novels, when a commission sparked a pair of stories on the same theme and she hit on the idea of writing a set of linked short stories. She found she enjoyed the discipline of the shorter form and put together a collection of bleak fragments of Auckland life, Opportunity, knitted together by recurring characters and incidents, all narrated in the first person. "You can read each story as a complete story, and it has its own rationale, its own beginning middle and end," she says, "but it's adding up to something bigger." It's a construction she compares to a glass bowl filled with marbles – a large structure made up of small units which touch one another, but still leave room for air.
The first-person narration was a deliberate choice, partly to explore the idea of different points of view and partly to give a sense of New Zealand voices. But it also arose because she wanted "to be able to write in the first person without having that problem where the reader thinks that the fictional voice is the voice of the author." "I wanted to have so many voices, male and female," she says, "that they were completely distanced from myself."
Born in Auckland in 1966, Grimshaw worked as a lawyer – first for a small practice with a number of clients facing murder charges, then for a big commercial law firm. She was fascinated by criminal law, partly because there's so much at stake, she says, but also because "it's all about a human situation, a human drama, always a human tragedy. If you're someone who wants to write, that's a very rich store of data." She had always wanted to write, she says, and found she was totally uninterested in shipping law, so when she moved to London in 1993, she treated the move and her young family as an "excuse to get out". Late in the evenings, with the children in bed, she began work on a novel – and discovered a curious liberation in the distance from her homeland.
"I was able to sit at night, and write about the physical landscape of New Zealand because it was very real to me," she remembers, "and because I was somewhat nostalgic about it; I was in the middle of a long London winter. The distance made it vivid."
Provocation was published in 1999, with a lurid purple cover and a tagline describing it as "a thriller of passion, prejudice and betrayal", a marketing decision that Grimshaw resisted. The story of a young, female lawyer who is working for and sleeping with a successful lawyer acting for a number of clients facing murder charges, Provocation's firecracker plot and easy familiarity with the complications of a murder trial cannot disguise the fact that the author's interest is elsewhere. "I never wanted to write a thriller," she explains, but her second novel, Guilt, which features another young lawyer who finds herself in danger, as well as the first of a series of fictional writers in Grimshaw's work, was marketed in the same way as Provocation, much to her annoyance. "In New Zealand I had to spend a fair amount of time explaining that I wasn't a crime writer, and that I never wished to be."
Grimshaw's third novel, Foreign City, marked the beginning of a brief period of formal experimentation which reached its apogee in the Auckland polyphony of Opportunity. Split into three parts, based in London, Auckland and a fictional metropolis, Foreign City is held together by another fictional writer. She followed it up with Singularity, which returns to the same fictional Auckland, with some of the same characters threading through both collections. The stories are more tightly bound together this time, each one cast in the same spare, third-person narration.
"It's as if I fragmented completely in Opportunity and then in Singularity was moving back towards the novel form, while still having my marbles separate," she explains. "The third person permits that because it allows you to pull back and have some kind of overview." The logical next step, she continues, is to return to the longer form, a project she's already begun, taking one of the stories from Singularity as the starting point of a novel grounded in the same fictional Auckland she's been exploring in her short fiction.
According to Grimshaw it's the same spirit of experimentation, the same fascination with the way fiction is put together, that explains why she returns to the subject of writing and writers again and again. She's puzzled by the idea that the gap between fiction and reality might be something of a raw nerve for her, an itch she needs to scratch, but when I suggest that it might have something to do with her father – the distinguished New Zealand poet, critic and novelist CK Stead – she suddenly realises what I've been driving at.
"I have actually grown up with somebody in the house writing fiction all the time," Grimshaw says. When she married, she chose to take her husband's name, despite its Dickensian glumness, so that she could make her own way as a writer, rather than following in her father's footsteps. "Running along in my mind there is this awareness of what it means when somebody writes fiction, and how it should be interpreted. I've grown up with that particular problem, so I'm trying to nut it out the whole time. We'd always read my father's novels and it would be fascinating because you'd see vaguely familiar shapes in there."
She quotes Nadine Gordimer's dictum that the author must write as if dead, careless of the effects in the real world, on real people, of their fictional creations. "You've got to be pretty ruthless, because you've got to think that in 100 years you want the thing to last, so you've got to put in the thing that's true to the composition. You've just got to do what you do, and hope that you're not like Dickens, who was sued by a dwarf."
Dickens may not actually have ended up in court after his wife's chiropodist recognised herself in the "pursy dwarf, of about forty or forty-five, with a very large head and face" in David Copperfield, but it's the kind of colourful incident you can imagine happening to a fictional author in Grimshaw's Auckland – where successful doctors are only a step away from alcoholic taxi drivers living on skid row, where a party of children can get lost in hostile wilderness, or where an accusation of rape from long ago lands a policeman in court. She says she's often asked in New Zealand why she writes about these "awful people", but it's just because "they're there. I've had plenty of opportunity to see and experience people like that, so why wouldn't I?" She denies any political project, but likes "the Dickensian notion of painting a society as it is, with all its faults" and if reading about people less fortunate than themselves "makes people sympathise, or empathise, then that's good".
The intricate structures she has been exploring in her recent fiction are only her latest answer to the challenge she has pursued since the debut novel that was mistaken for a thriller: to extract something subtle from the strongest possible ingredients the world has to offer. She's never been interested in exploring the freakish, or outlandish, she explains. "My interest is more in looking at what I regard as the ordinary and then writing about what's actually going on. And really rape and murder and all that aren't really out of the ordinary."
Viz Comic takes over the Guardian
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On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! – all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz strips
This month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine that's not as funny as it used to be". Viz, Chris Donald's foul-mouthed comic, evolved from a 12-page fanzine hawked around Newcastle's pubs into one of the country's highest-selling titles, shifting over a million copies an issue with celebrity fans ranging from David Bowie to Simon Bates. Since that 1990 peak, sales have declined to around the 100,000 mark; however, the comic which first posed the then-unanswered question "Morrissey; pop genius or twat?" is still going strong as it enters its fourth decade.
Viz's influence on British comedy has been profound. Its squalid brand of anarchy and self-referential surrealism is present in everything from Mitchell and Webb and The League Of Gentlemen to Little Britain and The Daily Mash. And while its writers resist serious analysis, Viz's most overlooked quality has always been a furious intelligence.
As its numerous, pathetic imitators (Smut, Zit, Brain Damage etc) proved, a comic cannot survive on profanity alone and Viz strips like Biffa Bacon, Sid The Sexist and The Fat Slags tell you more about the national character than many literary heavyweights. In a tongue-in-cheek documentary, Auberon Waugh suggested that "if the future generations look back on the literature of the age, they'll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents". His favourite strip was The Bottom Inspectors, by the way.
The classic premise of situation comedy has always been that of a man trapped in his surroundings; and this is the case in Viz's finest strips, the characters poignantly locked in a doomed cycle by their giant testicles, religious fervour, undiagnosed autism, painful haemorrhoids, and terminal stupidity. Writer Graham Dury claims a core readership of "the well educated, the unemployed and people in prison" and Viz speaks to the parts of Britain that have a simmering and instinctive dislike of the rich, the show-offs, the moronic and the vain.
Viz has been entirely prescient about where our culture is going. Once, its obsession with third-rate celebrities, Roger Mellie's endless ideas for cheap television ("I've got an idea, Tom – Celebrity Shit Bucket!"), dishonest overselling, and ludicrously hyperbolic real-life stories seemed like flights of fancy. Now, they look like the vast majority of the modern media.
"We pride ourselves on the fact you're no cleverer when you've read Viz," says Dury. "You might have had a few laughs, but you've not learnt anything." If that really is the case, then the fault lies with the reader, not the comic.
Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review
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Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his best
Children's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic than most. By the end of chapter two, nine-year-old Will has lost both parents: his soldier father has been killed in Iraq, and his mother, on a holiday to Indonesia intended to help herself and Will to recover from their loss, drowns in the Boxing Day tsunami.
Morpurgo uses, to great effect, the reported story of a boy who survived the great wave when the elephant he was riding sensed imminent danger and ran away in terror. Will finds himself clinging to a stampeding elephant, then alone in the rainforest with no one to depend on but his new companion Oona. The ensuing tale sees Will learning to survive by becoming an "elephant's child", finding food and shelter under Oona's guidance, and later taking the role of surrogate parent to a group of infant orang-utans whose mothers have been shot out of the trees by hunters.
Parallels with The Jungle Book are clear, but in the 21st century humans are more threatening than the "weakest and most defenceless of all living things" described in Kipling's classic. Bigger even than the tragedies of the opening chapters is the destruction of the forest environment and its wildlife, and the greatest dangers Will faces come from human interference. Separated from Oona, he's captured by a hunter-dealer who has tigers shot for their body parts and baby orang-utans captured for sale.
In the manner of a Bond villain, Mister Anthony outlines his traffickings and values to Will while considering whether to have him killed; but Morpurgo uses this episode to remind us that rainforest depletion is driven by global demand for palm oil "to put in their toothpaste, their lipstick, their margarine, cooking oil, peanut butter . . . All I do, Monkey Boy, is provide what the world wants."
The story is told in the first person, and readers who notice that Will has an improbable degree of self-awareness for a nine-year-old ("From now on I would remember only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving") and precocious powers of expression ("Whatever it was had transformed her from a ponderous creature of supreme gentleness and serenity, into a wild beast, maddened by terror") will find an explanation in the short postscript.
Will's survival from day to day provides ample excitement and adventure, but behind lies the question of whether and how he will return to England and his grandparents. This is, in a way, a love story; Will's relationships with Oona and the orang-utans are too significant to be left behind.
After more than a year in the jungle, Will comes across Doctor Geraldine, a lone scientist who has devoted her life to the saving and rehabilitation of the threatened orang-utans, a small, heroic activity set against the slow obliteration of the species. It's through her that Will's future seems about to be decided, until he takes matters into his own hands.
The former children's laureate has the happy knack of speaking to both child and adult readers, and of his vast body of work some of the most successful novels (Kensuke's Kingdom, War Horse, The Butterfly Lion) are those exploring bonds between humans and animals. With its emphasis on animal instincts and social behaviour, Running Wild, part epic adventure, part plea for threatened habitats, will surely rank alongside his best-loved books.
Linda Newbery's The Sandfather is published by Orion.
John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss
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Week two: The importance of food
There seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes – colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits – but it is attached to the small details of life. Over and over again its characters find solace or disappointment, a sense of cultural identity or of cultural contradiction, through what they eat. Rarely has there been a novel that reminds characters so often of their stomachs.
When political violence erupts in the very first chapter, as a group of armed Nepalese nationalists invade the hilltop home of a retired judge, it is teatime. The judge, a brooding old man who worked for a lifetime in the British-run Indian Civil Service, is crossly demanding "a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws", while "the boys" creep across his lawn. "Something sweet and something salty." The judge, who has "worked at being English with the passion of hatred", has tastes inescapably formed by his colonial training.
In the local Gymkhana dining hall he demands "roast mutton with mint sauce" and almost begs for tomato soup. When he first employs his cook, he tells him to learn a brown sauce and a white sauce: "shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton".
His most important companion is his dog, for whom the cook must concoct elaborate recipes when political unrest ends the supply of meat. "It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this".
Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Biju, the son of his cook, is working illegally in the kitchens of cheap New York restaurants. His letters to his father tell of their bewildering variety. "He worked at Don Pollo – or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba's Fried Chicken?" He knows only that if his son is cooking "English food" he must have "a higher position than if he were cooking Indian food".
The sheer ethnic confusion of New York food is beyond his ken: Biju moves from one advertised cuisine (French, Italian, Chinese, "authentic colonial") to another, though the kitchens are "Mexican, Indian, Pakistani", or "Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian". Even when he encounters supposedly Indian food it is fitted to some "fusion trend": "the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita".
What would feature in newspaper guides as a delightful, multi-cultural variety is, for Biju, a kind of gastronomic cacophony. His fellow exile Saeed cheers himself up with a reminder of East Africa: "cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper . . . and plantains in sugar and coconut milk". "This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others".
It is appropriate that the judge lives with "the cook" (he does not get a name). Though disappointed to be working for a fellow Indian ("his father had served white men only") he has qualified with an unstoppable list of all the English puddings he can produce. ". . . applecharlotteapplebettybreadandbutterjamtartcaramelcustardtipsypud-
dingrumtumpuddingjamrolypolygingersteamdatepuddinglemonpancake-
eggcustardorangecustard . . ."
The judge's orphaned teenage grand-daughter Sai joins the household and begins a surreptitious romance with her tutor, Gyan. When Gyan and the judge speak to each other it is with the awkwardness that only a mealtime (with the eaters stuck in their places) can dramatise. The young Nepalese teacher, with his disdain for all colonial allegiances, has to join in a repast of lamb chops with peas, potatoes and gravy.
We see the occasion through the judge's eyes, as he quizzes Gyan about his literary tastes and aggressively spears and chews his favoured grub. It is an exercise in crumbling authority. "He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner".
Food travels strangely. The judge (his name is Jemubhai, but this is only ever used of his younger self) recalls how, as a student in chilly Cambridge, he read about the British in India, with their mock turtle soup and Yarmouth herrings shipped thousands of miles to reassure them. A century later, as winter closes in in the hills, Lola and Noni, the two beleaguered Anglophile sisters, take refuge in food.
"Oh, beautiful soup in the copper Gyako pot . . . mutton steam in their hair, rollicking shimmer of golden fat, dried mushrooms growing so slippery they'd slither down scalding before you could chomp open their muscle". Comfort is gastric.
As the Nepalese independence movement grows in strength, and the ethnic fissures in Kalimpong become clear, Lola and Noni – proud connoisseurs of Trollope and Agatha Christie and afternoon tea – become awkwardly aware of their tastes. "It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country." Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week Kiran Desai explains how she came to write The Inheritance of Loss.
My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes
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I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major.
He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three boys in the war. He enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909, and transferred to the regular 1st Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, later that year, becoming a lance-corporal in 1910, a corporal in 1913 and a sergeant in 1914. The fact that he was at home on recruiting duties probably saved his life, for 1st Dorsets suffered cruelly: in October the battalion lost 399 men, 148 killed, in a single action.
Sergeant Shephard joined 1st Dorsets in January 1915, and began to keep a diary. There is horror, such as his first experience of gas: "Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground . . ." There is a serious interest in food: "We made a grand stew in a washing bucket . . ." And there is an abundance of that comradeship that made war tolerable. When Company Sergeant Major Shapton was killed, Shephard wrote: "In Sam I have lost my dearest chum. We were always together whenever possible. He was an Army Reserve man when war broke out, and came from Canada to rejoin. I shall never forget the afternoon C Company was cut up . . . When I got to his trench I found him crying. He had been working like a demon, digging his men out and attending to the wounded . . ."
Commissioned in November 1916, Shephard died in January 1917, commanding a company of 5th Dorsets. His last recorded act was characteristically professional. When he knew his position was hopeless, he warned the supporting company to fall back, so as not to be overwhelmed too. Ernest Shephard is buried on the Somme, in the AIF Burial Ground at Grass Lane, Flers, and I go to see him as often as I can.
Crime novels roundup | Book reviews
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Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber, £12.99)
Irish writer Glynn's second novel is a heavyweight, grown-up thriller set in Dublin against a background of dirty politics and even dirtier business dealings. As the landscape is reinvented as a glittering monument to capitalism, morality is sacrificed to profit. When two men with the same name and from the same family die on the same night, one murdered and one in what seems to be a straightforward case of drunk driving, Gina Rafferty, aunt to one and sister to the other, starts to ask questions. When she comes upon an account of another fatal car accident, 25 years before, a pattern begins to emerge. Emotionally truthful, with a plausible cast, and told in wonderfully fluent prose, Winterland is a gripping tale of a world of greed and secrets, where public image is all that matters.
The Cemetery of Secrets: A Venetian Mystery, by David Hewson (Pan, £6.99)
Originally published as Lucifer's Shadow, this novel deals with a different sort of greed – the desire to possess beauty, whether in the form of artefacts, musical talent, or people. Two narratives, one contemporary and one set in 1733, show how the past impacts on the present, as long-buried musical treasures are discovered and fought over by collectors. The scene-setting is excellent – one can almost smell the foetid 18th-century canals – and the large cast is handled with aplomb. The pace is fairly sedate, but it's none the worse for that. Thorough research and a strong narrative make The Cemetery of Secrets a rich and surprisingly romantic tour de force. And – oh, joy! – there's a map of the city.
Bad Penny Blues, by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent's Tail, £7.99)
Cathi Unsworth's third novel is another tour de force – a panoramic story set in London between 1959 and 1965, with a strong element of roman-a-clef. The plot centres on the real-life unsolved crimes of a killer of prostitutes dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press, but there are also portraits of record producer Joe Meek, Screaming Lord Sutch, artist Pauline Boty, the over-zealous policeman Harold Challenor, and many more. However, Unsworth's ability to create the feel of the period is such that background knowledge is immaterial. Two appealing narrators – young designer and psychic Stella Reade, and copper Pete Bradley, who finds the first body – try, in their own way, to make sense not only of the mystery, but also of their rapidly changing world. Authentically atmospheric and very evocative, the book's song-title chapter headings supply an inbuilt soundtrack.
Hypothermia, by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker, £11.99)
Most things in award-winning Icelandic author Indridason's latest novel are cold, if not actually frozen, including his emotionally numb detective, Erlendur. This time, he's embarking on an unofficial investigation into the apparent suicide by hanging of a young woman with a history of depression. There's a lot of weather here, and a lot of ghosts in the landscape, not only in the form of a tape of a séance attended by the dead woman, but also two young people who went missing 30 years previously, not to mention Erlendur's own quest to discover the body of his brother, who perished in a blizzard when he was a boy. There's also the ghost of the detective's disastrous marriage, which, despite the pleas of his drug-addict daughter, he is unwilling to confront. Although Erlendur can be an infuriating character – one wishes the man would thaw enough to feel something – the narrative grips, the writing, excellently translated by Cribb, is resonant and lyrical, and the atmosphere is chillingly creepy. Brrr.
Laura Wilson's An Empty Death is published by Orion.
The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview
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M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical stories
The inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know – secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued. Obsessed by bearings, directions, instructions, they read their way towards things. In "Witness", Grete and Sam follow someone else's map through a vast, abandoned opencast mine in Germany, a place "filled with silence, the silence of afterwards, of what continues and must be contemplated after the thing is done"; after his death, the ageing students of "Memorial" remember their way back to their favourite tutor the way a pet animal finds its way home after some lengthy, unplanned journey. The couple in "The Shieling", meanwhile, aren't just making their way somewhere – they're making the destination itself, inventing it as they go.
It's a fraught task, which perhaps mimics the author's own. The reward, though, is always a quiet and perfect instant of humanity. There's not a cheap note here. People are viewed directly, but not clinically; neither are they, despite the wry humour, made fun of. The events presented are often everyday in themselves – births, deaths, meetings, partings – but they locate, just for a moment, the flicker of the ecstatic in landscapes both psychic and geographical. Each location seems enchanted – in "Living On", there's even a wood named Broceliande – and the exchanges that take place there sometimes have a mythological, though entirely unmannered, feel about them. Waters, springs, moorland pools, blessing and cursing wells, all become sites of both mystery and ordinariness.
The ecstatic isn't always beautiful – "Regrets" and "The Blind Home" are outright horror stories, although you don't realise that until it's too late – but it is always dangerous. In "Beginning" a boy meets a girl on the number 42 bus in central Manchester. He never knows her name, but she gives him a book – Wilfred Owen's poems – and the moment he opens it his life seems to change. He sees his first dead body, a man pulled out of the Irwell in a stream of dirty water, to hang and twirl, "his clothes undoing around his midriff"; but he never sees the girl again.
Constantine's prose is generally quiet, a little inturned, as matter-of-fact as the events depicted, but when necessary, for a fraction of a second, or a fraction of a sentence, it will take on completely different qualities. "I remember her eyes," says the narrator of "Beginning", "the soul staring out of them, eager and scared . . ." Suddenly you're not on a bus any more. Your way of seeing the boy and his life has been changed. This is not to say that Constantine is a writer of motive or psychology in the accepted sense. "Who knows why people do things?" one character says to another. "I'm more interested in what they look like while they're doing them . . ."
Dialogue is presented without quote marks; indirect speech is sometimes attributed rather too indirectly. As a result, it can be hard to know who's speaking, or even which character is which. There are descriptions of places which don't quite produce a picture, and actions which, described only by their emotional component, never quite come into focus as actions. The effect is sometimes powerful, in that it gives the feeling of people struggling to manage a vagueness in their lives, especially in their expectations; struggling, too, with the attempt to communicate it. At other times – as in "Words to Say It", a curiously male psychodrama of sexual dissociation and the inability to speak – it makes the narrative unnecessarily hard to navigate. You aren't sure whether you're following a subtle emotional contour or simply misreading the map.
It's possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it's the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it's something in the characters you don't want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can't stop reading. You've embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you. Perhaps the most beautiful and striking piece here is "The Cave". Lou pursues Owen, a writer who lives, self-possessed and needing nobody, in a house by the moors. Lou's sister thinks she should move on; she thinks that "if he doesn't love you he shouldn't keep doing things with you that make you love him more".
But Lou persists without knowing why, and one day Owen takes her to the eponymous cave in the limestone hills, to listen to the sound of a stream bursting out of the rock, a "churning, milling, steady mechanical cold breathing", a "pulse of inhuman life in total darkness". It's an appalling sound, and it seeps right into you. He tried to sleep there as a boy, he tells her, but the sound drove him away. "Then we'll stay," says Lou; and they do. The mythology and psychology of this are obvious. But as much as the sound of the water is a metaphor, it's also perfectly literal: the sound of geology, of the universe, of the simple, implacable, forgotten matrix of things.
If it's possible to be a romantic existentialist, David Constantine is. Lou and Owen must pitch every word they say to one another against the noise in the cave. We are all we have. But beware: this understanding, and Constantine's way with it, can leave some other kinds of contemporary fiction feeling brittle and empty.
M John Harrison's Nova Swing is published by Gollancz.
An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem
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In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present
Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock – thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me.
An Equal Voice
"We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences."
from A War of Nerves, by Ben Shephard
War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.
Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust
reports, blueprints one day and the next –
with the help of a broken-down motor car
and a few gallons of petrol – marching men
with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,
horses straining and plunging at the guns,
little clay-pits opening beneath each step,
and piles of bloody clothes and leggings
outside the canvas door of a field hospital.
At the end of the week there is no telling
whether you spent Tuesday going over
the specifications for a possible laundry
or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.
*
There were some cases of nervous collapse
as the whistle blew on the first day of battle.
In general, however, it is perfectly astonishing
and terrifying how bravely the men fight.
From my position on rising ground I watched
one entire brigade advancing in line after line,
dressed as smartly as if they were on parade,
and not a single man shirked going through
the barrage, or facing the rapid machine-gun
and rifle-fire that finally wiped them all out.
I saw with my own eyes the lines advancing
in such admirable order quickly melt away.
Yet not a man wavered, or broke the ranks,
or made any attempt to turn back again.
*
A soft siffle, high in the air like a distant lark,
or the note of a penny whistle, faint and falling.
But then, with a spiral, pulsing flutter, it grew
to a hissing whirr, landing with ferocious blasts,
with tremendous thumps and then their echoes,
followed by the whine of fragments which cut
into the trees, driving white scars in their trunks
and filling the air with torn shreds of foliage.
The detonation, the flash, the heat of explosion.
And all the while fear, crawling into my heart.
It literally crawled into me. I had set my teeth
steadying myself, but with no success. I clutched
the earth, pressing against it. There was no one
to help me then. O how one loves mother earth.
*
One or two friends stood like granite rocks
round which the seas raged, but very many
other men broke in pieces. Everyone called it
shell-shock, meaning concussion, but shell-
shock is rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk
due to the collapse of the helm of our self-control.
You understand what you see but you cannot think.
Your head is in agony and you want relief for that.
The more you struggle, the more madness creeps
over you. The brain cannot think of anything at all.
I don't ask you what you feel like but I tell you,
because I have been like you. I have been ill as you
and got better. I will teach you, you will get better.
Try and keep on trying what I tell you and you will.
*
The place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid,
titubating shell-shockers with their bizarre paralyses
and stares, their stammers and tremors, their nightmares
and hallucinations, their unstoppable fits and shakings.
Each was back in his doomed shelter, when the panic
and stampede was re-enacted among long-dead faces,
or still caught in the open and under fire. This officer
was quietly feasting with imaginary knives and forks;
that group roamed around clutching Teddy Bears;
one man stripped to his underclothes and proclaimed
himself to be Mahatma Gandhi; another sat cramped
in a corner clutching a champagne cork; one chanted,
with his hands over an imaginary basket of eggs, Lord
have mercy on us, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
*
I could feel the bullets hit my body. I could feel
myself being hit by gun fire and this is what made me
sit up and scream. What I saw round me were others
walking with the bent and contorted spines of old age,
or moving without their lifting their legs, by vibrating limbs
on the ground. All equally unfortunate, filled with sadness.
Dead friends gazed at them. Rats emerged from the cavities
of bodies. Then came trembling and losing control of legs:
you never dreamt of such gaits. One fellow cannot hold
his head still or even stand except with incessant jerking.
Instantly the man across the aisle follows suit. In this way
the infection spreads in widening circles until the whole
ward is jerking and twitching, all in their hospital blues,
their limbs shaking and flapping like the tails of dogs.
*
Naturally it can save a good deal of time if men,
before battle, have pictures from the Hate Room hung
in their minds of things the enemy has already done,
waiting to be remembered. Starving people for instance
and sick people, and dead people in ones and in heaps.
If that proves ineffective, then treatment is post facto.
Compulsory mourning is no longer recommended
whereby the hospital confines a man for three days
alone in a darkened room and orders him to grieve
for dead comrades. But other cures must be attempted,
and in some cases men wish to return to do their duty.
See, your eyes are already heavier. Heavier and heavier.
You are going into a deep, deep sleep. A deep, far sleep.
You are far asleep. You are fast sleep. You have no fear.
*
I am quiet and healthy but cannot bear being away
from England. I have been away too long and seen
too many things. My best friend was killed beside me.
I have a wife and two children and I have done enough.
I thought my nerves were better but they are worse.
The first fight, the fight with my own self, has ended.
I may be ready to fight again but I am not willing.
I am in urgent need of outdoor work and would be glad
to accept a position as a gardener at a nominal salary.
My best friend walked back into my room this morning,
shimmering white and transparent. I saw him clearly.
He stood at the foot of my bed and looked right at me.
I asked him, What do you want? What do you want?
Eventually I woke up and of course I was by myself.
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century | Book review
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A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichés
In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in which he expressed his belief that the postwar English literary scene had become insular and moribund, its poetry calcifying into the "academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgable, efficient" typified by the Movement poets of the 1950s. His anthology, conceived to counter this process, championed younger poets whom he believed capable of "open[ing] poetry up to new areas of experience"; almost half a century on, his lineup, which included Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and (in the 1966 reprint) Sylvia Plath, has stood the test of time.
No surprise, then, that James Byrne and Clare Pollard, editors of Bloodaxe's zeitgeist-chasing Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, cite Alvarez as inspiration. Their anthology, they tell us, is intended to showcase the work of poets who "address the particularity of being alive now". The undeniable value of the enterprise makes their introduction, jammed as it is with the same tired clichés that are wheeled out every time anyone wants to publicise a new poetry venture, doubly disappointing.
"For many years the poetry world has belonged to older writers. Few young poets were published and fewer were nominated for major prizes. An invitation to a poetry reading conjured thoughts of warm white wine in a pokey bookshop," claim the editors. Really? What about Simon Armitage, who published his first collection at 26, Owen Sheers (ditto), or Kathleen Jamie (aged 20)? What about Carol Ann Duffy, whose first collection came out when she was in her teens? Or Pollard and Byrne themselves, who brought out their debuts at 20 and 26 respectively? Such baggy generalisations are irritating; worse, alas, is to come. "As the credit crunch exposes the superficiality of many of the last decade's bloated, corporate values," they continue, "there is a young generation who seem to be hungering for the authentic and DIY . . . new poet-promoters are setting up their own nights . . . and magazines . . ." Goodness. While the editors do flag up several genuinely innovative schemes – Faber's new pamphlet series, for example – the suggestion that the upcoming generation invented poetry evenings and magazines would be frustrating even without the heavy-handed appropriation of the credit crunch.
Rather than being bolstered by their editors' introduction, then, the poems are left to fight their way free of it. And at this point, thankfully, things take a happier turn. The poems themselves are a mixed bag, as you'd expect from an anthology of largely untried poets, but the handful of poorly conceived or executed verses are quickly forgotten in the broader sweep of natural, vital poems that come together within these pages.
The poets themselves are presented alphabetically – a decision which, while impeccably democratic, has the effect of making the anthology feel a little jittery, with no deference paid to the idea that some might sit together more comfortably than others. Occasionally, however, this happens by chance, and at such moments the whole edifice takes flight. Just before the halfway point there's a lovely glissando through three very good female poets (Miriam Gamble, Sarah Jackson and Annie Katchinska) whose styles and subjects bleed easily and usefully into one another. We slide from Gamble's sticky mix of re-evaluated mythology and contemporary knowingness (her strongest poem, "On Fancying American Film Stars", combines voguish in-jokes with the lush imagery of "one small cloud which loiters . . . / putty grey, shedding rain like tiny lead balloons") into Jackson's close-up universe of parents and children, in which the powerful, almost threatening intimacy of poems such as "Leftovers", where a babysitter enters her charge's room and "sit[s] on stripped pine floors, / pretending it's all mine", offsets and complements Gamble's wider world-view. From there, it's a fluent segue into Katchinska's examinations of everyday minutiae, similarly small-scale but oblique, approached with an emigrant's slantwise sensibility. The sense of being caught up in an impromptu narrative is satisfying.
Away from this central arc, there are many flashes of brilliance: 18-year-old Amy Blakemore (the youngest poet here) offers a woozily glamorous description of a high-school graduation party at which "fallen silver streamers glitter in corners like smashed braces"; Joe Dunthorne's lubricious, inebriated "Cave Dive", in which the gorgeous concluding image of air bubbles as marbles ("From his lips / he scatters balls of glass") gleams on the page like a jewel; Toby Martinez de las Rivas's "Poem, Three Weeks After Conception", which reads like an updated version of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" – perfectly timeless, but (with its address to "you / for whom the best wine in the world will be pressed in Kent. / Who will live to see supermarkets dictating military policy to governments") perfectly now.
Of the 21 poets, however, three, finally, stand out. Adam O'Riordan brings an understated music to poems of birth, death and love, proving that novelty needn't be ostentatious. His poem on "The Leverets", "Clawed from its nest into the cold world / sudden and bright and, in an instant, over", stopped me in my tracks. Heather Phillipson writes with brittle beauty on the obsessiveness of love. And Jack Underwood (who, along with De las Rivas and Phillipson, features in the new Faber pamphlet series) deals out oddball meditations on animals ("So, Weasel, it has come to this; / to your thighs like tall glasses of milk, / your biscuit hair") that are striking and bewitching. It's possible, of course, that in half a century's time, their names – unlike those of Alvarez's poets – will have disappeared without a ripple. For now, though, they deserve to be read.
The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin | Book review
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First, to declare an interest: Hugo Young was a political columnist for this paper, and there is a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, the editor. But I'd choose this book even if Young wrote for the Daily Mail and the foreword were by Conrad Black. It would be irresponsible not to. (Not that, I think, he would ever have written for that paper unless with a heavy heart. As he put it in February 1997: "The prospect of a Labour government in thrall to the Daily Mail is a pretty appalling thing to contemplate.")
If anyone told truth to power, it was Young. But not in a belligerent or sarcastic way; he was cool, fluent, elegant, almost gentle, as I recall, in the way he administered the stiletto – and all the more powerful for it. Politicians listened to what he said. They might not have changed their behaviour because of it – but they still listened.
His collection of political writing "From Thatcher to Blair" was called Supping with Devils, and here, essentially, are the notes from those meals – although they actually begin with Douglas Hurd in 1969, when he was Ted Heath's private secretary. Of course there are masses of papers which have not made it into this book, but you still get the sense that Young was more far-sighted than many of his interviewees, if latching early on to Hurd is a kind of foresight. He certainly had more than Hurd, who in 1995 was cautiously predicting a Major victory at the next election.
Young, typically, would have a meeting with some influential political figure (not necessarily well known to the public, and not necessarily a politician; it could be another columnist), over, say, a nice lunch, would write nothing down at the time, but as soon as he got back home would spend 10 frenzied minutes at a typewriter before the details would start slipping away. Then he'd write a column often skewering the person he'd just broken bread with. There is an overwhelming consensus that his memory was excellent – although I do recall this paper getting a legal hammering when he quoted Norman Tebbit as saying "no one with a conscience votes Conservative", a rare lapse that may be down to his having trusted an unreliable source.
This method of composition – immediate, unmediated – has produced excellent results, and reads well even in raw form. I do not consider myself a politics junkie but I was surprised by how entertaining I found his notes, and how vividly they brought back my own fading memories of politicians gone and not gone by. I liked the "quite a pause" between his asking David Owen what the differences were between the SDP and the Tories; and Chris Patten saying, in 1987, that "we should be quietly selling Lawsons in the market" (Patten thought Lawson was past his peak – and, as it turned out, he was right).
The effect on the style was to make it punchy. Often the opening sentences are superbly arresting. "I was struck by the unreflective frenzy of his discourse" – Gordon Brown in 1993. "Major is very much a ladies' man, in what is probably an innocent sense." (Also in 1993, which was before his affair with Edwina Currie entered the public domain.)
Getting this close helps us see what makes them tick, and also what goes on behind the scenes. Robin Cook saying with "amazing relief" that Mandelson hasn't got it in for him at the moment; Tony Blair being given an hour-long bollocking by Clinton "so virulent that the minutes were not passed round Whitehall" – this is not just gossip, although it's often as much fun as gossip; this is invaluable. Young has done us a great service.
The politicians who have allowed notionally off-the-record notes to be published here are to be credited. The big absence is Blair, and if we are being generous we can suppose that this is because he's saving them up for his own memoirs; and if we are not being generous, and we really have no reason to be, we can suppose he is being counter-productively protective of his own image, or, as Margaret Thatcher would have put it more succinctly, frit.
