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Eyeless in Gaza
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Colleagues laughed when a young journalist in Palestine announced his intention to tell the story of that region though cartoons. Twenty years later, Joe Sacco is one of the world's leading exponents of the graphic novel form…
In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.
The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel.
Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn't in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you'll see that I didn't used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn't know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I've learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.
"But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief."
Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called "unique". But Sacco's work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.
Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).
"With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco," wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman's heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel.
Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren't there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?
He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh "compulsion" to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling "agitated". So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper's magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.
"We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town," says Sacco. "But when Chris's piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It's a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?"
In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah's men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply "panicked and opened fire on the running crowd"? Or was it more complicated than that?
Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?
In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.
"Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They're footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people's lives."
Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco's trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most "news" is.
Then there are the people he meets. Sacco's ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding).
But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it "sombre". It's not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or, perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: "Events are continuous."
You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself."
Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night's sleep for several years. In Sacco's drawings, Khaled's features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied.
Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. "In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life."
He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel.
It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. "I didn't have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It's so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can't just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn't even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who'd been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did."
Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? "I'll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That's when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn't get demoralised as I went along."
It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. "Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it'll be the book I'm remembered for."
In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper's about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.
When he's not travelling, he treats his work "exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don't story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It's all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way".
Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? "It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It's difficult to have a personal life when you're broke because you can't afford to go out, and it isn't that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly."
It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. "Well, I know I'm going to leave," he says. "If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That's not to say that my stomach doesn't get a little twisted up as I'm going in and as I'm leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn't say I see physical beauty in it. It's more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can't really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food." Still, for the "sake of my own sanity" he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones.
Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. "It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we've internalised all sorts of things about them.
"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."
As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last.
The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov's incomplete last novel shows flashes of brilliance, but why it was published remains unclear, says William Skidelsky
This is a book that wouldn't exist if its author had had his way. Shortly before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his wife, Vera, that she should destroy the novel he'd been working on if he didn't live to complete it. When, having spent the rest of her life procrastinating, Vera died in 1991, responsibility for the unfinished manuscript devolved to the couple's son, Dmitri. He too spent many years fretting before deciding, in his seventies, to go against his father's wishes and publish the book. This undeniably handsome – but also problematic – volume is the result.
Nabokov drafted his novels in pencil on index cards before handing them over to a secretary to type up. In order to reflect The Original of Laura's embryonic nature, the publishers have reproduced all 138 written-on cards, setting each in its own right-hand page, with the text running in type below. They have come up with the further ingenious trick (or gimmick, depending on how you look at it) of giving the cards perforated edges. This means that the reader can, if so inclined, detach them from the pages and rearrange them in his or her preferred order.
Actually, though, you'd only conceivably want to do this with around half the cards, because the first 60 or so are clearly in the right order. They tell a coherent story which suddenly breaks off and the remaining cards are little more than a collection of jottings. Presumably, some of these would have found their way into the completed novel, but many others would have been discarded. This is why the phrase "A novel in fragments", which is how the publishers have chosen to describe The Original of Laura, is slightly misleading. The book is actually a completed draft of roughly half of a (very slim) novel and a series of notes towards the rest.
In his introduction, Dmitri Nabokov describes the work as an "embryonic masterpiece". Is it? Well, it certainly is in many respects a fascinating document. At first, the story centres on an affair between an unnamed "man of letters" and a nubile 24-year-old with "squinty nipples" called Flora. This is hardly new territory for Nabokov, but he gives it a clever twist: the story he is telling emerges as only the "original", or raw material, of a novel that has subsequently been written about the affair, in which Flora's name has been changed to "Laura". The narrator informs us that this other book, My Laura, "was begun very soon after the end of the love affair it depicts, was completed in one year, published three months later, and promptly torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper". He notes that it went on to become a bestseller.
What we are being presented with, then, is a kind of literary conjuring trick. We are invited to believe that we are reading not a made-up story but a slice of real life, before it was brushed up, elaborated upon and turned into fiction. Only, of course, this is nonsense, because the work that we are reading is also a fiction, itself presumably based upon some other "original" whose nature we can only guess at. The book thus poses a chain of "originals" and duplicates, potentially stretching into infinity. If Flora is the original of Laura, who is the original of Flora?
There is something rather brilliant about this idea, which is at once simple and dizzying, as postmodern conceits should be. And Nabokov pulls it off with the nonchalance of someone tossing a ball in the air. It seems likely that, had Nabokov finished it, The Original of Laura would indeed have been an important work, if not necessarily a masterpiece.
Yet the problem is that he didn't finish it and, in fact, he was a long way from doing so. About halfway through the book, it seems that Nabokov ran into creative difficulties, because the initial narrative breaks off and the text mutates into something different: the agonised internal monologue of Flora's fat neurologist husband, Philip Wild, who, we gather, suffers from unbearably sore feet. (Nabokov, at this time, also suffered from recurring foot pains, in addition to the bronchial illness that eventually killed him.)
Wild, we learn, has a recurring fantasy of "self-deletion": he imagines himself as a stick drawing on a blackboard, which he then begins rubbing out, from his painful feet upwards, a process that brings him "ecstatic relief". Once again, this is an interesting idea, but it is hard to see how, in the context of this novel, it could have been fully realised. Wild's fractured monologue doesn't easily slot into the story that Nabokov has thus far been telling; it is almost as if it belongs to another book.
There are other things to appreciate about The Original of Laura. The style is not vintage Nabokov (he was by this point in sharp decline), but there are some nice touches. A pre-coital Laura locates a pair of morocco slippers that are "foetally folded into their zippered pouch", an image that manages to be both sweet and faintly obscene. And Nabokov's ornate vocabulary is predictably fun, especially when applied to body parts. Referring to Flora's naked back, Nabokov writes of the "mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed", which, again, is creepily delicious.
Further entertainment is provided by Dmitri Nabokov's pompous, atrociously written introduction. Having laboured all his life in the long shadow cast by his father, Dmitri is clearly determined to make the most of his minute in the spotlight. He casts himself as a latterday Max Brod, charged with a decision of monumental importance whose consequences will reverberate through literary history.
For a man with such an obvious inferiority complex, his tone is remarkably haughty. He harps on about the "lesser minds" and "individuals of limited imagination" who have presumed to conjecture about Nabokov's true wishes in relation to the manuscript. Yet he reveals his own literary ignorance by having an absurd pop at Henry Miller, whose Parisian publisher, he grudgingly notes, Nabokov was forced to share – the indignity! – when Lolita was rejected in America. The thing that you really want Dmitri to provide – an honest account of his reasons for publishing The Original of Laura – is missing. Instead, he takes refuge in windy evasions, telling us that he was guided in his preservation of the manuscript "not by playfulness or calculation, but by an otherforce I could not resist" – whatever that means.
He also doesn't say anything about money, which is surely no accident. It seems likely that this book will have a more significant impact on the size of Dmitri Nabokov's bank balance than it ever will on the world of letters.
A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow
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A bravura biography paints a masterly portrait of Charles II, says Geraldine Bedell
In May 1660, Charles II disembarked in front of cheering crowds at Dover, following a nine-year exile. He had been invited home by a parliament dismayed at the chaos caused by Oliver Cromwell's death and was warmly welcomed by a country weary of puritanism. He faced many hazards: his nation was divided by religion, its alliances were uneasy, its identity adrift.
The most astonishing thing about Charles II's reign was that it lasted a quarter of a century. His father had been beheaded, his brother would flee the country after only three years in power, and the Interregnum had left Britain overtaxed, resentful and exhausted. To maintain his position, he had to balance the interests of a mostly Anglican parliament and sizable minorities of Catholics and Presbyterians. He had to keep the Dutch and the French at bay and stay on top of a court full of intrigue. In his first decade alone, his promise of peace and prosperity was undermined by plague, fire and war.
Jenny Uglow made her name with biographies of artists and writers, inventors and scientists, notably The Lunar Men and her life of Thomas Bewick. She claims her sympathies naturally lie with "radicals and artisans protesting against the abuse of power" and acknowledges that, for her, plunging into the heart of the establishment to write about Charles II was disconcerting. But then she poses the question: "What if a person's art is also his life, his role simply 'being the king'?"
This seems a more useful way of getting at Charles than her ostensible organising principle, the king as a "gambler". Her chapters are organised under clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades and decorated (beautifully) with contemporary playing cards. But the narrative doesn't bear out the gambling interpretation. The stakes were high, but Charles didn't play them recklessly. He was a master of outward compliance and inward evasion, all coated in charm.
The book focuses on the first 10 years of his reign, on the grounds that his options narrowed subsequently. Charles comes across as calculating and pragmatic. He had learnt to dissemble in his years of penniless wandering around Europe's courts and, as one contemporary commented, had developed "the greatest art of concealing himself of any man alive". Amiable and open, yet prepared to be ruthless, this king who loved the theatre was always wearing a mask.
In one sense, this is frustrating for a biographer: where is the "real" Charles under all the womanising and sardonic humour? But contemporary readers are quite comfortable with the idea that there is no essentialist, non-performative self, that individuals are made up of the roles they play. And in this case the roles are endlessly fascinating because, to survive, Charles could never stop being the king. There was no such thing as private space.
This masterly, wide-ranging biography resists the temptation to take sides on Charles (who has variously been depicted in the past as the "merrie monarch" and a libertine let-down), though it is impossible not to find him appealing. He presided over a time of intellectual ferment and Uglow is at her best when she writes about Charles as the king of the dawning Age of Reason. There was much that was forward-looking and curious about him and she captures vividly the excitement of his arrival as a young, informal leader, European in outlook, fascinated by science, philosophy and women.
This period saw the founding of the Royal Society, the start of insurance and shipping in the City, and the tentative beginnings of a publicly voiced opposition that in time would replace court intrigue with party politics. Women could be immensely powerful and the king could father 12 children by different mistresses and go round Whitehall tucking them up at night.
Uglow casts her eye over everything in these 10 years, ably supported by the diarists Evelyn and Pepys, who provide her with much scurrilous background. I could have done with a bit more about Charles's latter years, in which he was forced to become more hardline. But this is a bravura biography, which leaves the reader with a vivid sense of what he did, and what he meant to the future.
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
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Machine gun prose meets labyrinthine plot in James Ellroy's latest, says Sean O'Hagan
The title of James Ellroy's latest novel is taken from AE Housman's poem "Reveille", a very English meditation on life's brevity. Four lines from the poem also provide the book's epigraph. Discovering that Ellroy digs Housman is one of the few surprising things about Blood's a Rover, the concluding part of the novelist's Underworld USA trilogy. It's as if Metallica had decided to call an album after a work by Vaughan Williams.
In Ellroy's fiction, blood is more often a river. Though he has long since transcended the formal constraints of the traditional crime novel, he remains wedded to its hard-boiled tone, a tone that he, more than anyone else, has contemporised. Here, as with the preceding novels that make up the trilogy, American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), the labyrinthine plot demands that the reader pays total attention throughout while simultaneously being beaten into submission by sentences that are often nasty and brutish and always short. It's quite a style and one marvels once again at the obsessively brilliant brain behind it. But, boy, is it exhausting.
It begins characteristically with a vivid flashback: a cinematically violent description of a highway robbery, LA-style, in 1964. "The milk truck driver pulled a silencered piece and shot the nearest guard in the face. The noise was a thud. The guard's face exploded. The two other guards fumble-grabbed at their holsters. The masked men shot them in the back. They buckled and pitched forward. The masked men shot them in the head point-blank. The thuds and skull crack muffle-echoed. It's 7.19am. It's still quiet."
There is much to admire here, not least the Joycean ingenuity of "fumble-grabbed" and "muffle-echoed" and the deadpan black humour of the pay-off line. At around 600 pages, though, Blood's a Rover, like its equally dense precursors, is an awful lot of short sentences. Even a third of the way in I was longing for a respite from the machine gun prose, for just one Rothian passage, a sentence that would snake on and on luxuriantly into a long paragraph. Some hope.
Since American Tabloid propelled him out of the epically adventurous but still recognisably Chandleresque territory of his brilliant LA Quartet – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz – Ellroy has adhered to this staccato but epic style. His novels also tend toward the metafictional in making use of real events, multiple, often unreliable, narrative points of view and "document inserts" – FBI and police records, journal entries, interview transcripts. His aim is to retell in a new, illuminating way the more turbulent episodes in late 20th-century American history from the point of view of those involved at both the highest levels of political power and the lowest levels of criminal activity. His subtext, though, is an old one: it was ever thus.
Here, as before, it is the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that cast a shadow over the action, while the cover-ups and conspiracies that attend the Nixon era provide the murky political and cultural landscape that Ellroy navigates in his inimitably obsessive fashion. Thankfully, on the conspiracy front, he is more Don DeLillo than Oliver Stone – it was DeLillo's Libra that influenced him most when plotting the trilogy.
As always, what entrances and appals is the extremity of Ellroy's vision. Blood's a Rover is not a book for the politically correct reader, nor the overly sensitive one. Corruption, in Ellroy's world, is always total and extreme. Only Wayne Tedrow Junior survives from The Cold Six Thousand, but now he's no longer an LAPD man, but a drug runner. He has also slept with his stepmother, Janice, who is now dying of cancer. He plies her with heroin for the pain. They have already killed his father, her ex-husband. Or, as Ellroy puts it, by way of bringing the reader up to speed: "Wayne decided to murder his father. Wayne decided that Janice should beat him dead with a golf club."
In Ellroy's world, every plot, however sub, congeals; every character, however amoral, is capable of surprising us – and himself – with some new sin. So it is with the two other main characters, Dwight Holly and Don "Crutch" Crutchfield, the one an FBI agent who is a graduate of Yale Law School and whose daddy was big in the Ku Klux Klan, the other a 23-year-old loser from a bad family who has landed a job as a wheelman. (For the uninitiated, a wheelman does the menial work for "skank private eyes and divorce lawyers", which makes them, as Ellroy succinctly puts it, "low-rent and indigenously fucked-up".)
Against a backdrop in which Nixon comes to power and America's cities explode into violent protest, Wayne, Dwight and Crutch chase their own tainted dreams of power and/or revenge. Wayne works for Howard Hughes, who is holed up in Vegas, but has both the Mob and the Feds on his tail. Dwight is trying to infiltrate a radical black nationalist organisation called, with Ellroy's usual liberal-baiting relish, the Black Tribe Alliance and the Mau Mau Liberation Front. Only Crutch is keeping it real by conforming to the conventions of the crime novel. He is chasing a femme fatale – Gretchen Farr aka Celia Reyes – who he hopes will lead him to the even more mysterious Joan Klein. If, by this stage, you are still looking for answers, Joan may have them. Me, I was still trying to figure out the questions.
Throughout, there are the usual suspects – bent cops, even more bent politicians, conmen, molls and a cast of venal and corrupt men, some of whom – against all the odds – possess just a sliver of conscience. They remain, as in all Ellroy's fiction, in the minority. It is Crutch, the most shady and sordid of the triumvirate of central characters, who redeems himself, emerging from the wreckage of the time to testify to its cataclysmic import.
For all the vivid pencil sketches, Ellroy is not big on characterisation and the density of the plot may leave all but the utterly committed utterly confused. Then again, The Cold Six Thousand made the American bestseller list, which suggests that Ellroy's late style, once surrendered to, may prove strangely addictive. "You will read with some reluctance and capitulate in the end," writes the unlikely narrator, the chief witness, in his preamble. "The following pages will force you to succumb." That about nails it.
The queen of crime
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When Maj Sjöwall and her partner Per Wahlöö started writing the Martin Beck detective series in Sweden in the 60s, they little realised that it would change the way we think about policemen for ever
It might count as one of the most remarkable writing collaborations in the history of publishing. A man and a woman, a couple, sit down every evening to write. Dinner is over, their children are in bed. She's never written a book before. He's a published author, but not with anything like this. They write in long hand, through the night if necessary. One chapter each. The following evening they swap chapters and type them up, editing each other as they go along. They don't argue, at least not about the words. These seem to flow naturally.
Ten years, 10 books. Each book 30 chapters, 300 chapters in all. Every one centred on the same group of middle-aged, mostly unprepossessing policemen in Stockholm's National Homicide Department. Often, very little happens. Sometimes for pages on end. What is more, each book is a Marxist critique of society. Their mission – or "the project" as the authors call it – is to hold up a mirror to social problems in 1960s Sweden.
Unlikely as it may sound, the books have become international bestsellers, over 10m copies sold and counting. Classics of the thriller genre, they've been made into films and adapted for television. Subsequent generations of crime writers are fans. There's no doubt that the latest left-leaning Swedish author to hit the bestseller lists, Stieg Larsson, would have read them. Some say the couple wrote the finest crime series ever; that without them we would not have Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.
Yet if Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had not met, the books would not have existed; and if they hadn't fallen in love, the books would be nowhere near as good as they are.
More than 40 years have passed since they wrote together every night, filling in each other's sentences. Today, Maj Sjöwall walks barefoot through her studio in a suburb in the south of Stockholm. Her hair is long and grey, and she's wearing a loose-fitting linen smock. The room is light-filled and simply furnished: carefully chosen pictures, notebooks, pens, everything placed just so. One might describe it as monkish, but Sjöwall's life has not been monkish, as I will find out. This is where she still works, aged 74, as a writer and a translator. There's a single bed, a fridge, a hob, for when the small apartment that she rents nearby is too stuffy during the long Swedish summer. She lives modestly. She can not afford a car. Unlike Rankin or Mankell the books she wrote with Wahlöö have not made her very rich. There has been a modest income recently from foreign sales, but the royalties she receives from her Swedish publisher are based on old contracts. She does not sound bitter about this. "Rather free than rich," she says.
Her lover and writing companion died 44 years ago, at the age of 49, just as their 10th book was going to press. She's lived now far longer than they were ever together, but she's still asked to talk about those years in the 60s. She finds this a trifle baffling. She is mystified by the insatiable appetite for crime fiction. "This is a new part of my life that I didn't expect," she says. We sit at a small square table, nursing cups of instant coffee. Like the books, she is direct, no nonsense, plain-speaking, although her voice is sometimes frail. "I never thought the books would last all my life, or that I'd still be thinking about them after all this time."
I discovered "the Martin Beck series" by accident three years ago when the collection was re-issued in handsome new editions in English. Pick up one book, preferably beginning with the first, Roseanna, because they are best read in chronological order, and you become unhinged. You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints. I began to worry that I was in love with Martin Beck, the main policeman. This was strange, because not only is he not a real person, he also isn't my type. He may be empathetic and dogged but mostly he's dour, humourless, dyspeptic, antisocial. When Sjöwall and Wahlöö invented him, the idea that a crime novel should feature a credible detective, flaws and all, was new. We've grown so used to our curmudgeonly fictional coppers, whether in books or on screen, that it's easy to forget that Beck is the prototype for practically every portrayal of a policeman ever since, in this country, or America, or continental Europe.
Beck – did I mention that I'm in love with him? – shares the limelight with a group of colleagues, all equally believable, all male. There is no one hero. The policemen irritate one another in the same way that anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognise. Mannerisms grate. Tempers flare. Yet they spend more time with one another than they do with their wives – those who can hold down a marriage, that is.
The books are set in an era when everyone smoked; there were no mobile phones, or DNA samples, or the internet. They're full of Swedish addresses which are as alien as they are unpronounceable, and as unpronounceable as they are long. Yet they don't feel outdated or off-putting. The action is often slow yet they're still hugely entertaining (and often very funny). Occasionally, towards the end of the series, the message becomes a little bit hectoring – you sense Wahlöö knew he was going to die, that time was running out – but by this point you're well and truly hooked and you can forgive the lecture.
So what makes the books so compelling? There's something inherently honourable about them, something to do with the meticulous research that went into each one before it was written, and the frail humanity of the characters. They display, say critics, a relevance and timelessness that is the mark of all good fiction. The deceptively simple style is both sparse and dramatic – an accomplishment all the more remarkable when you think that the books were written by two people. "We worked a lot with the style," explains Sjöwall. "We wanted to find a style which was not personally his, or not personally mine, but a style that was good for the books. We wanted the books to be read by everyone, whether you were educated or not." People tell her that the Martin Beck series marked the beginning of a lifetime of reading. "They picked them up off their parents' shelves when they were teenagers and discovered a love of books." Perhaps it goes back to those Marxist roots – there's a sense that it is this, and not the volume of sales, that gives her most pleasure.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met in the summer of 1962, and the attraction was instant. It all sounds very bohemian and Swedish. Wahlöö was nine years older than Sjöwall, married with a daughter. In pictures he looks a bit like Jethro Tull, big hair, big nose, big eyes, big grin. He was a member of the Communist Party. A former crime reporter, he'd been deported from Spain by Franco. By the time he came across Sjöwall he was a well-regarded political journalist. Sjöwall, both a journalist and an art director, looked younger than her 27 years. She was pretty in a fresh-faced boyish way. One of those people who look cool without trying.
She'd also lived a little, which, I imagine, Wahlöö might have liked. Her background, like his, was middle class – oppressive and chilly. Her parents were unhappily married. Her father was the manager of a chain of hotels and she grew up on the top floor of one of them, in the centre of Stockholm. Early on, she decided that society was much like an upmarket hotel, from the wealthy guests in the penthouse to the kitchen staff peeling potatoes in the basement, and that this was inherently wrong. "When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house."
How would she have described herself? "I think I was rather tough," she replies. "You get tough when you grow up unloved. People described me as a boyish girl – rather shy, but I didn't show it. I had an attitude. I was rather wild. I lied a lot because I knew the alternative was to be punished. As I got older I realised I didn't have to lie any more and it was a nice feeling. I could be myself."
As a teenager she went to pubs and restaurants on her own at a time when young women did not do that kind of thing. She fell in with a group of artists and musicians. At the age of 21 she was just starting out as a journalist when she discovered she was pregnant by a man who had already left her. Her father tried to force her to have an abortion. A friend at work, 20 years her senior, took pity on her predicament and suggested they marry. "He was nice. I wasn't very much in love with him but I admired him." After the relationship ended she married again, this time to another older man who wanted her to live in the suburbs and have more children. This second marriage didn't last either. She was a single mother, with a six-year-old daughter, by the time she met Wahlöö.
"We met through work first. There was a place in town much like Fleet Street where all the journalists used to meet," she recalls. "We all went to the same pubs. Then Per and I started to like each other very much, so we started going to other pubs to avoid our friends and be on our own." It was complicated. "I didn't like this cheating on his wife, and he had a child. So…" she pauses, leaving the messy details in the air.
Wahlöö was commissioned to write a book which he'd work on every night in a hotel room near the bar where they drank. Each day he would drop off an envelope with the work-in-progress inside, and a note. He'd deliberately leave gaps. Why don't you fill in this bit, he'd suggest in a letter. He'd give her a female character to invent.
It sounds incredibly intimate and clandestine. They were falling in love. They could not easily meet. So they did what came naturally – they wrote for one another. It was a love affair in words on a page, a courtship of sentences. Within a year Per had left his wife, packed a meagre pile of shirts into a suitcase, and moved in with Sjöwall and her daughter Lena. Their first son, Tetz, was born nine months later. "His wife hated me of course," she says. "Now we are very good friends." They would never marry. "We said, well, obviously marriage is not the thing for us," she laughs. "We just knew we really loved each other and loved not having the papers to prove it."
They'd discussed the idea of writing a series of crime books. They talked about the crime literature that they both liked to read, progressive writers like Georges Simenon and Dashiell Hammett, who took crime writing out of the drawing room and on to the street. Their aim was something more subversive than what had gone before. "We wanted to describe society from our left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality. We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer." They planned 10 books and 10 books only. The subtitle would be "The story of a crime" – the crime being society's abandonment of the working classes. The first plot came to them on a canal trip from Stockholm to Gothenburg. "There was an American woman on the boat, beautiful, with dark hair, always standing alone. I caught Per looking at her. 'Why don't we start the book by killing this woman?' I said."
Seven months of painstaking research followed, working out the exact geography of the crime, how everything would fit together, down to the distances Beck and his team would have to travel, how much time it would take. Each chapter was plotted beforehand like a storyboard. Then they wrote every night until the manuscript was finished. Wahlöö took it to his publisher. "Per told them: 'This is by a friend of mine and I just want to hear what you think.'" The publisher liked what he read and guessed that his author was involved in some way. Wahlöö explained he'd written it with Sjöwall and a deal was struck for the 10 books. Roseanna sold moderately well, there were even one or two good reviews. "Little old ladies took the books back to the shop, complaining that they were awful, too realistic. Crime stories in those days would not describe a naked dead woman as we did. Or describe a policeman going to bed with his wife. But on the other hand, students loved them."
Roseanna was followed by The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and then The Man on the Balcony, each one written to the same 12-month timetable. Their themes often followed the news agenda: paedophilia, serial killers, the sex industry, suicide. Eventually they were able to give up their day jobs, but they were never able to survive off the books alone. "Back then no one had an agent. These days crime writers get millions and millions, they can afford to live abroad," she recalls, thinking perhaps of the phenomenal success of Henning Mankell, whose central character Kurt Wallander owes so much to Martin Beck. "We always had money problems. Sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering how to pay the rent." There is unforeseen income now from foreign deals, but because the books have never fallen out of print the deal with her Swedish publisher is still the same as it was when they originally signed. She says she does not care. "I have enough. I stay afloat."
Wahlöö fell ill four years before he died. First he complained of a swelling. Then the doctors said his lungs were full of water. Eventually they realised that his pancreas had burst. "Initially we thought this could be cured. We went to all kinds of doctors, but we didn't trust any of them. Some said go on a special diet, others wanted to cut him open. In and out of hospital and all the time he was getting thinner and thinner." By the final book, The Terrorists, he was very sick. "He knew he was going to die because he had sneaked into the professor's room and looked at his notes." They rented a bungalow in Màlaga and, for once, Wahlöö did most of the writing. Sjöwall took on the role of editor. "Sometimes he would just fall off the chair because he couldn't write any more. In the morning the words would be illegible."
I ask her how she coped. It's hard to imagine: a relatively young woman, a dying soulmate, three children (a second son, Jens, had been born) and the pressure of a book, the final piece of "the project", to finish. She answers with typical honesty. "Not very good, I think. I am not Florence Nightingale. I was desperate. It made me so isolated. Yet I wanted to be with him and he wanted to be with me. So we hid. There was just Per, the children and the books."
They came home from Spain in March 1975, the book was sent to the printers and Wahlöö died in June. "He took very strong morphine tablets. Either on purpose or because, you know, if it didn't work he took one more, if that didn't work he'd take another one. He fell into a coma and never came round," she says. She pauses. "His brain was not there any more. It was terrible. I was kind of praying he would die. After three weeks he did." The relationship had lasted 13 years.
She was, she says, with a sigh, "kind of wild for a while. With guys, with pubs." With very little money, and three children to bring up, it sounds as though life was horribly chaotic. Over time there were other long-term relationships, but now she prefers to live on her own. "I know many guys. Some of them I have been together with for a while, some are just good friends. That is enough for me. I think I have a good life."
There have also been writing collaborations since, one a book called The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo with the Dutch writer Tomas Ross, which was well received. Her publishers would like her to write a memoir, "but everyone's life story is fascinating, isn't it?" she says, dismissing the idea. She still writes fiction when she isn't being asked to go abroad to speak about Wahlöö, and Martin Beck, and the 10 books she co-wrote in her 30s. She's never been persuaded to write an 11th book in the series, although she does act as a consultant on a very popular Swedish television drama based on Martin Beck. She has only one regret and that is that Wahlöö never adopted her daughter, which has meant that she's never received any money from the books, however small. "At the time we had no idea that the series would become well known." The idea that they'd be sold all over the world would have seemed outlandish.
I wonder if the society they feared has come to pass. "Yes, all of it," she replies. "Everything we feared happened, faster. People think of themselves not as human beings but consumers. The market rules and it was not that obvious in the 1960s, but you could see it coming."
So "the project" failed then?
"Yes!" she laughs. She laughs a great deal, I realise. "It failed. Of course it did. The problem was that the people who read our books already thought the same as us. Nothing changed – we changed our lives, that's all."
What would Wahlöö think now if he could see her, if he knew how admired their collaboration had become? There is a sharp intake of breath. "I think he would be amazed. I always think of him when we get a prize, or when I have to talk in public. I always think," and her voice drops to a whisper, "Per would have loved this."★
All 10 novels in the Martin Beck Series are published by Harper Perennial
Books of the year
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Was it Thomas Cromwell's machinations, a frustrated MP's diaries, or a novelist's treatment of his father's suicide? We asked a few people…
Peter Carey – novelist
Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury) has huge ambition and an author equal to the task. Travelling from Nagasaki to Guantánamo, this very beautiful novel sets out to grasp the nettle of our modern history. The most utilitarian of us will find it "relevant and contemporary". At the same time, it is a work of art, as human as the feel of another's hand. Colum McCann once wrote himself inside the skin of Nureyev. In Zoli he created Romany characters that Romany readers have been pleased to own. Now, in Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury) [winner this week of the National Book Award for fiction], he has reinvented the city of New York in all its breathing, fighting, whining, joyous clamour.
Wendy Cope – poet
In January, Areté Books published A Scattering, Christopher Reid's tribute to his late wife, Lucinda. His poems about marital love and bereavement are immensely moving. Reid is a first-rate poet and this is his best book to date. Later in the year, the same author came up with something quite different. The Song of Lunch (CB Editions) is a witty narrative about a publisher meeting an old flame in an Italian restaurant. The story is sad, as well as funny, and very enjoyable.
Kazuo Ishiguro – novelist
My reading this year was dominated by Roberto Bolaño's two massive novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both Picador). The first is the superior, but 2666, for all its occasional longueurs, is still quite magnificent. Bolaño links seamlessly South American, US and European traditions; modernism with gritty realism and the crime thriller. These are both important works and the advent of Bolaño is a significant moment in the history of modern fiction.
Peter Conrad – Observer critic
My choice is Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room (Little, Brown). Imagine the house of fiction as a clean, shining, transparent box, befouled by some of the nastiest episodes in recent history. A small saga, beautifully conceived and deeply moving.
Hari Kunzru – novelist
One of the most compelling recent fictional depictions of Manhattan is Richard Price's Lush Life (Bloomsbury), out this year in paperback, which takes place on the streets of the Lower East Side, a few blocks from where I live. Price's low-key crime thriller is also a pointed look at gentrification and social exclusion, more Zola than Raymond Chandler. His ear for dialogue is extraordinary, as evidenced by his superlative work on The Wire. Also examining the lives of the dispossessed is The Story of My Assassins by Tarun J Tejpal (HarperCollins), an Indian novel that appears to have been overlooked in the general rush to adore The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. Less crisp then either but with a much richer understanding of the politics of poverty – the author is a leading investigative journalist – it deserves wider attention.
Dominic West – actor
Josephine Hart's The Truth About Love (Virago) is a devastating account of grief and loss and the truth and lies that bind us to our family and to our country. Her language is beautiful, her characters rich and funny, and she has the courage to expose the deceit behind nationalism. It is also painfully personal and, like all great works of art, one is aware how much it cost her to write it.
Jackie Kay – writer
A very strong year for poetry. I was particularly moved by Fred D'Aguiar's Continental Shelf (Carcanet). The heart of the book is a series of elegiac sonnets about the Virginia Tech massacre. D'Aguiar teaches there; his poems evoke the process of trying to work out what life means in the face of such senseless murder. Rain by Don Paterson (Faber) was another favourite of mine. Paterson is simply one of the best living poets in the UK. Kachi A Ozumba's The Shadow of a Smile (Alma Books) is a brilliantly funny and gripping novel that examines the corruption and hypocrisy within the Nigerian justice system.
Philip French – Observer film critic
The most valuable movie book of 2009 is Joseph P Kennedy's Hollywood Years by Cari Beauchamp (Faber), a meticulously researched account of how the Bostonian scoundrel established the family fortune in the movie business and remained in influential contact with Tinseltown until his dying day. Antony Beevor's D-Day (Allen Lane) is a brilliantly organised, eye-opening epic about the world's greatest military campaign. With his second brick-sized volume, Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury), David Kynaston magnificently continues his sociocultural history of postwar Britain, bringing my formative years into sharper focus on every page.
Shami Chakrabarti – civil rights campaigner
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) has reconfirmed my long-held view that great fiction is capable of inspiring progressive insight and action well beyond the reach of political polemic, philosophy, documentary or even law. Shamsie achieves the near impossibility of a truly intimate epic tale. The multiple identities of various members of her complex family of characters are explored across continents and decades. Cataclysmic world events from the atomic bomb at Nagasaki to the Twin Towers atrocity are treated with a subtlety and humanity often lacking from political writing. I challenge anyone to put this book down lightly or not to identify with at least one of its many flawed and yet irresistibly human characters.
Kirsty Wark – broadcaster
Rarely do I read a new novel and immediately resolve to read it again, but Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking), the tender and spare story of a young Irish girl's emigration to the Brooklyn of the 1950s, merits revisiting. Tóibín has infused his group of female characters with humour and sadness, and his evocation of their precarious journey to a new life seems to me pitch-perfect. Nigel Slater's Tender Volume 1 (HarperCollins) – hurrah, there's more to come – is to be savoured as much as his baked onions, porcini and cream.
David Cameron – politician
Every once in a while, political diaries emerge that are so irreverent and insightful that they are destined to be handed out as leaving presents in offices across Whitehall for years to come. Chris Mullin's A View From the Foothills (Profile) is one such book. Its humour and self-deprecation more than make up for the nagging feeling it leaves behind that The Thick of It may not always be all that far from the truth. All politicians need to read honest accounts of war – at no time more than now – and Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club (Allen Lane) is one of the very best. There is even some humour in it and plenty of insight. Its engrossing narratives on 21st-century warfare and its effects are guaranteed to remain in the mind long after the book is finished.
Mary Warnock – philosopher
The book that has interested me most this year has the rebarbative title Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Matthew R Broome and Lisa Bortolotti (Oxford University Press). It is a collection of very varied essays on subjects such as the nature of mental illness, whether psychiatry is a science, and why so-called personality disorder can't be treated, all matters of great interest in themselves, but also of relevance to criminal law and sentencing policy. Despite its title, it is a gripping read. Not so gripping, however, as Robert Harris's Lustrum (Hutchinson). Ever since Imperium I've been longing for the next instalment and it doesn't disappoint. It's a marvellous novel.
Colm Tóibin – novelist
Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man (Jonathan Cape) is the chilling story of the death in custody of an Aboriginal prisoner in Australia. It is told with a novelist's eye for detail and flair for narrative, but there is also a passionate engagement with the story in all its complexity and a sort of rage that make the book utterly compelling. David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Viking) is equally gripping. For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure, but the story it tells – the story of the suicide of the author's father – has an immediacy and sharpness made all the more special by the tone of distance in the narrative and the beauty of the writing. In poetry, Don Paterson's Rain (Faber) displays one of the greatest poets now writing anywhere at his most wise and wry and eloquent.
David Kynaston – historian
Arguably the finest British diarist since Virginia Woolf has now, in James Lees-Milne, found his fitting memorial. Michael Bloch's biography (John Murray) is admirably judged: warm, but not hagiographical; sufficiently candid about Lees-Milne's many loves (including, in an often masochistic relationship, his ghastly wife, Alvilde); and acutely revealing about the demons that drove him. Lees-Milne may not have been quite a Pepys, and Bloch is not a Claire Tomalin, but subject and author are here perfectly matched.
Sam Mendes – director
I was touched by Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (Harper US), an honest and funny account of the struggles of being a father; gripped by Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (Allen Lane), a superbly researched and sobering take on the events surrounding the meltdown on Wall Street; and mesmerised by Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury), a wonderful book that puts its author right at the front rank of contemporary novelists.
Michael Palin – broadcaster
Sara Wheeler's The Magnetic North (Jonathan Cape) provides acute insights into life north of the Arctic Circle. Abundant energy resources and the alarmingly swift effects of global warming make this a fascinating and relevant journey; she uses human stories to inform and enlighten us.
Roy Hattersley – politician and historian
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Penguin) is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a history of the American Civil War, vignettes of half-a-dozen 19th-century American politicians and a textbook on good government. It is written in such a compelling style that, despite the complexities of the characters and the subtlety of the arguments, the reader zips through. The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Allen Lane) confirms, scientifically, what social democrats have always hoped was true: the better-off have much to gain from redistribution of wealth, since the more equal societies are spared much of the social evil that afflicts modern society. The confirmation that morality and expediency do coincide comes as a great relief in a disturbing year.
Geoff Dyer – novelist
The Music Room (Picador) is William Fiennes's memoir of growing up in a rambling old castle. This unusual home and upbringing are evoked with great beauty and poignancy (his epileptic brother, Richard, is an increasingly vulnerable and volatile presence), in ravishing prose, but the book has another, strangely hypnotic effect, enfolding the reader in memories of a child's view of the world that seems universal. Well, maybe not if you grew up in the drug-ruined ghettos of west Baltimore. The Corner (Canongate) by David Simon and Ed Burns came out in the US in 1997, but had to wait until we all went gaga about The Wire to be published here. It's an unforgettable, devastating account of neighbourhoods and generations in the process of being laid waste.
Geordie Greig – journalist
The greatest living master of the short story, William Trevor, has written a jewel of a novel with Love and Summer (Viking). It is a story set in 1950s Ireland where the small-town characters are torn by love, disappointment, revenge and compassion. At 81, this brilliant Irish author still demonstrates his ability to show the subtler shades of unrequited passion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali – writer
Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Allen Lane) zooms in on the challenges of Muslim migration to Europe, telling the story with an outsider's eye. It's a disturbing read but a necessary wake-up call.
Curtis Sittenfeld – novelist
I really enjoyed the essay collection Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman (Doubleday). A friend sent me the book after I had my first baby last spring, and I found Waldman – who graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a public defender before having four children – to be frank, insightful, and very funny. Waldman's a somewhat controversial writer in the US, known for being outspoken and also for being married to the novelist Michael Chabon, and as I read I did sometimes think, wow, you're really revealing that about yourself and your family? But her honesty kept me turning pages, and after each essay, I felt like I'd just had a conversation with a smart and outrageous friend.
Jeremy Paxman – broadcaster
There are three books that I have particularly enjoyed recently: I was gripped by Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (Little, Brown), chortled through Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (Michael Joseph) and learned a lot from Allan Mallinson's The Making of the British Army (Bantam).
Malcolm Gladwell – writer
I cannot remember enjoying a book as much as Iain Pears's Stone's Fall (Jonathan Cape). It's more adventurous even than Pears's earlier classic, An Instance of the Fingerpost. We should stop calling Pears a genre writer of thrillers and, as we have done for John le Carré, simply call him a great novelist.
Eric Hobsbawm – historian
In its original German version, I found Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Silences of Hammerstein a virtuoso combination of research, reportage and imagination, as good an introduction as any to the Weimar Republic, impossible to put down. This is the story of Kurt von Hammerstein, the last (and anti-Nazi) general commanding the German army before Hitler came to power, and his children, divided between communists, ex-communists and 1944 military conspirators. It has now been beautifully published in English by Seagull Books in, of all places, Calcutta. Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.
Philip Hensher – novelist
Two blockbusters, made out of writing of brevity and concision, were the highlights of my reading year. Blake Bailey's exemplary life of John Cheever (Picador) was full of its subject's inimitable voice, ruthless, hilarious, cruel and drink-sodden. In some ways, the story is a terrifying one – Cheever descended to psychic depths few of us will even witness – but it should always be remembered that this greatest of American novelists was, above all, extremely funny. The only thing wrong with the new, two-volume Collected Stories of William Trevor was the repulsively cheap paper Penguin printed it on – the ink smeared underneath my fingers, which is no way to treat the greatest living exponent of the short story in English. The Booker panel might, too, have found a space for Trevor's miraculous Love and Summer (Viking), a late-period summation of thought and expression if ever I saw one. But the best novel of the year was Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Faber), both traumatic and dazzlingly witty; scenes you wish you could forget, sentences you were grateful for.
Fergus Henderson – chef
My nomination is Fernand Point's Ma Gastronomie (Duckworth). It's a collection of the great man's (he truly was a great man) recipes, thoughts, menus. Point was the chef of La Pyramide restaurant near Lyon, a legend and mentor to a generation of chefs. He started his day with the barber coming to shave him and two magnums of champagne. Not bad.
Tim Adams – Observer writer
As a reminder of why great journalism has not much to do with Twitter updates and round-the-clock opinion, I've carried a couple of volumes with me: Michael Frayn's Travels With a Typewriter (Faber) and Ian Jack's The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (Jonathan Cape). Both collections are testament to a lifetime of intimate looking and to the hard labour of getting the world out there on to the page. The patience and intelligence of their storytelling is a good antidote to all that buzzes.
Daljit Nagra – poet
At this time of year, Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane) is a sober analysis of how we arrive at notions of justice. Sen uses examples from eastern and western traditions to help elucidate his abstract arguments. Sobriety is also maintained through two remarkable poetry collections. Both Christopher Reid's A Scattering (Areté Books) and Don Paterson's Rain (Faber) are haunted by the loss of loved ones. While Reid's heartbreakingly spare narrative about the death of his wife is moving for its simplicity of expression, Paterson's collection has an Augustan frankness, an Elizabethan elegance and a postmodern playfulness.
Melvyn Bragg – novelist and broadcaster
Diarmaid MacCulloch's monumental A History of Christianity (Allen Lane) is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums. Francis Wheen is a superb, idiosyncratic chronicler of our times and Strange Days Indeed (Fourth Estate) is a glittering, pinpointed view on the 1970s. Wheen has a scholar's mind, the energy of a supercharged magpie and a lofty wit that never sours.
Nicholas Hytner – director
This year, I've read some wonderfully enjoyable novels. The fastest page-turner, dry-mouthed and sweaty-palmed, was William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury). Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) was every bit as good as they said it was. And Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking) moved me more than any other book this year: a miraculously empathetic journey across the Atlantic and back again with a young Irish woman, ordinarily lonely, ordinarily in love, ordinarily fickle – but her every thought and action quite extraordinarily truthful. A short masterpiece.
Joan Bakewell – broadcaster and novelist
A View From the Foothills by Chris Mullin (Profile) is a political diary that stands with the best, alongside Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Mullin never made it to the political heights, but his experience of being a junior minister under Tony Blair – referred to throughout as "the Man" – is full of cunning humour. We know from his earlier Austerity Britain how thorough David Kynaston is, but I was apprehensive that the 1950s, which he tackles in Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury), would simply be too dull. Far from it. Kynaston has dredged reminiscences, diaries, political archives, newspapers and magazines for every scrap of interest and detail.
Bidisha – critic
I've been getting into some dark, thoughtful adult mystery fiction this year. One of my favourite books has been The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland (Michael Joseph), which is about a superstitious, uptight, pagan village of mad paranoiacs tormented by the arrival of a community of women. Think Wicker Man meets The Handmaid's Tale with a whiff of Deliverance. I was also extremely impressed by The Forest of Hands and Teeth, the debut novel by Carrie Ryan (Gollancz). It's a post-apocalyptic political zombie allegory with a gothic flavour.
Vivienne Westwood – fashion designer
My recommended read is The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock (Allen Lane). At somewhere between 400 and 500 parts per million (ppm) of CO² in the atmosphere, the Earth will settle down to a new equilibrium of 5C hotter than now. Our luscious, comfortable world will be gone. What is left will support about a fifth of the present population. We must plan.
Ken Livingstone – politician
Seth G Jones's In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton) is a devastating critique of the mismanagement of the Afghan war by the US and Britain, whose argument is all the stronger because his perspective is not from the left. The book reveals that things are worse than we suspect and even an old cynic like myself was shocked at some of the revelations. In The Spirit Level (Allen Lane), Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offer proof that most of the ills of our "broken society" arise out of the growing inequality of the past 30 years. If Tony Blair had known this, his could have been one of the three great reforming governments of the last century to stand alongside 1906 and 1945. And Mandelson would have known why he shouldn't have been so relaxed about the filthy rich.
Nick Hornby – novelist
Wells Tower's superb collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Granta), is dark and funny, and in Tower's case, the former quality does not negate the latter. When, in one of the stories, a woman finds out that her husband is having an affair because the footprint on the car windscreen does not match her own, you know you're reading somebody who doesn't come along very often. My favourite work of non-fiction this year was written by the Observer's art critic – I'm sorry, but there we are. Laura Cumming's brilliant book about self-portraits, A Face to the World (HarperPress), positively fizzes with ideas; just about every single paragraph contains a fresh observation, not just about art but about human nature. The author has got me running around galleries I haven't been to in years.
Colum McCann – novelist
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's Books; published here in February by Hamish Hamilton) is an examination of America in the time of Katrina, an indictment of bureaucracy, a testimony to the possibility of goodness, a level-headed look at Muslim America, a heartbreaking rap sheet for the Bush years, all this and more... I was completely enthralled by this book from one of the most socially engaged and provocative writers of our times. The Infinities (Picador) is John Banville's best book, I think. The prose is honed, as always, and every word matters, but the book breathes with humour and shines with a lovely discursive wink. It's also the sort of novel that you nod along to, then it swerves and you don't quite know where you are, but you experience the thrill of being suitably lost.
Mariella Frostrup – writer and broadcaster
This year's Booker winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), caught my eye early on when I interviewed her about it on Open Book on Radio 4. Having spotted its potential, I wish I'd followed through with a call to William Hill! Two novels by Antipodean authors also figured highly this year: Richard Flanagan's Wanting (Atlantic Books), a brutal evocation of the fate of a young Aboriginal girl, adopted by the governor of Van Diemen's Land and his wife, and later discarded; and David Malouf's Ransom (Chatto), a wonderful retelling of the encounter between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam in prose that's so good you want to eat it.
Andrew Rawnsley – Observer columnist
Chris Mullin produced an account, both highly hilarious and deeply depressing, of the futility of much ministerial life in his diaries, A View From the Foothills (Profile). Politics on a much grander canvas was brilliantly brought to life by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her superb Team of Rivals (Penguin) about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. A timely and penetrating audit of authoritarianism around the world came from John Kampfner's Freedom for Sale (Simon & Schuster). While highly critical of the trajectory of the present government, he does not level the lazy charge made by some that we already live in "a police state".
David Vann – novelist
Elegant and controlled, Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking), the tale of Eilis, a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to America in the 1950s, is the book that broke my heart this year. Eilis is so close and intimate. I'm scared for her, homesick, become thrilled as she falls in love and then, when tragedy strikes her family back in Ireland, the world has gone empty and I'm grieving with her. This is not the end, though. It's only the beginning of what becomes a choice straight out of Greek tragedy, a choice that cannot be made. What's at risk is everything: the new world and the old, family, love, self, belonging. I tend to like stylists, lyrical landscapes, showier stuff and I forget that the most ambitious landscape, finally, is the human heart.
Chris Mullin – writer and politician
John Campbell's Pistols at Dawn (Jonathan Cape) is a masterly account of great political feuds of the past two centuries, starting with William Pitt and Charles James Fox and ending with Brown and Blair. And something completely different was Dead I May Well Be (Serpent's Tail), part one of a gripping trilogy by Adrian McKinty, introducing Michael Forsyth, a young hoodlum escaping the troubles of Belfast only to find himself embroiled in the murky, violent underworld of New York's Irish gangsters. Taut, lean prose and dialogue up there with Elmore Leonard. McKinty hasn't had the attention he deserves.
Julie Myerson – novelist
I loved the energy, humour and fizz of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Faber) – so oddball in places that it ought not to have worked, but it did, totally. Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger (Virago) is proper, muscle-flexing storytelling – I was in awe and I just did not want it to end. And the very first novel I read this year was Anita Brookner's Strangers (Fig Tree). No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition and this book is possibly her finest.
Nigel Slater – food writer
I have been trying to read Monty Don's The Ivington Diaries (Bloomsbury) in short daily segments, so that the beautifully written story of his astonishing Herefordshire garden will last all year. I cannot bear to think I will come to the end. Phyllida Law's Notes to My Mother-in-Law (Fourth Estate) is something I wolfed in one glorious bite: funny, tender and deeply touching, it is something for the Christmas stocking of anyone who has ever had to look after an elderly relative.
Robert McCrum – Observer writer
David Kynaston's series Tales of New Jerusalem grows in confidence with each volume. Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury) takes us back to the post-austerity world of Supermac, Suez, Kenwood mixers and the Comet that now seems like a cloudless idyll. But the great quality of Kynaston's astonishing research is his cool, unsentimental eye for telling anecdote – for instance, the vicious press hysteria that surrounded the hanging of Ruth Ellis.
Romola Garai – actress
The Complete Stories of JG Ballard (published in a new edition by Norton in the US) offers the reader a minute dissection of the human heart and mind. It has been on my bedside table for months, as I couldn't bring myself to move it; I couldn't let it go. The Rapture by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury) also got under my skin. It is one of the very few books I have dreamed about. It is a powerful and violent novel and also a terrifically gripping read.
Ross Raisin – novelist
I bang on about David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Viking) at the slightest opportunity, so this seems like a particularly good place to do it. Much of the review coverage has concentrated on form – whether the book is a novel, memoir or a collection of short stories, and how our preconceptions about these things affect our reading. Interesting as this question is, I first read the book in an unmarked dustjacket with no idea what it was and it turned out to be the most powerful and lucid piece of writing I have read for more years than just this one.
Rachel Cooke – Observer critic
Like everyone, I loved Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but I was spooked by it, too. The voice is so true: I have my suspicions that Hilary Mantel actually is Thomas Cromwell. The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Fig Tree) is set in segregated Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, and it's an exciting and atmospheric story about what happens when one privileged white woman gets just a little too close to the town's maids – the "help" of the title. Anna Minton's Ground Control (Penguin) is a short but thought-provoking polemic about 21st-century Britain, with its gated communities, its privately owned shopping centres and its "regenerated" cultural and business districts. A book that will make you as mad as hell.
Tristram Hunt – historian
Three very important books for the intellectual regeneration of the left hit the shelves this year. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) delivered a statistically clinical account of the benefits of social democracy for living longer, happier and more fulfilled lives; Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (The Bodley Head) was a powerful wake-up call for the progressive left to have some faith in its Enlightenment project; and the great Amartya Sen provided a political route-map for delivering social justice in his compelling work, The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane). For sheer historical enjoyment there was Christian Wolmar's Blood, Iron and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World (Atlantic Books), which chronicles the railway's global growth with characteristic brio.
Craig Raine – poet
William Golding by John Carey (Faber) is a trove of astonishing new facts and a timely reminder of what a great, unflinching, unsparing, unorthodox, consistently surprising writer Golding was. The last hundred pages of the 800-page The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 2 1923-1925 (Faber) put us at the centre of the Eliot marriage as it detonates. Not everything is clear. It is an explosion after all – so, an eerie sensation of stillness, brute shock waves and the intimate dust still settling on the skin.
Mormon stand-up comic?
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She's funny, she's had a boob job and she's just written a book that could see her thrown out of her church. But, as Elna Baker tells Louise France, it's too late now
If I told you that Elna Baker had written a frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating which is unlike any other frank and self-deprecating memoir about dating, you probably would not believe me. However, Baker is a Mormon. A peachy, astute, witty 27-year-old Mormon who has never had sex. The book – The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance – is all about what it's like to live in Manhattan when the list of things you can't do (cigarettes, wine, coffee, drugs, swearing, sex outside marriage, marriage to someone who isn't Mormon) seems far more seductive than the things you can (studying scripture, prayer) and where the majority of your contemporaries think you might be – in Baker's words – "a whack job". Until now her faith is something she has avoided talking about when she first meets someone ("You know how in films people spit out their drinks when they're surprised, and you think that never happens in real life? It does").
I imagine the pitch to the publishers must have been tough to pull off – how about a book featuring a wise-cracking virginal Mormon, a sort of Candace Bushnell meets, erm, the total opposite of Candace Bushnell? It should not work, but it does. Something to do with the fact that Baker, who also has a stand-up comedy act, is an original voice who writes with an honesty which is both funny and thought-provoking about whether to remain a good Mormon and risk ending her days a lonely, frustrated virgin – the number of single Mormons in New York is a paltry 800 – or abandoning her faith for the sake of something most of us get out of the way by the time we're 17.
There is a genuine dilemma here that is, unlike a memoir about giving up sex for a year just for the hell of it, oddly moving. Not least because there is a very strong likelihood that her honesty will appal her devout parents, whom she loves, and have her thrown out of the church to which she's belonged all her life. Mormon message boards in America are already split: some thrilled that finally here's a Mormon that they – and the rest of America – can relate to; others warning that she should beware the wrath of her bishop. "Fifty per cent will really appreciate that there's an honest voice out there," she says. "The other 50% from more conservative backgrounds will feel upset and angry that I am trying to represent them. Unfortunately they're the type who get their rifles out."
Baker is the first Mormon I've ever knowingly met (apart from Jimmy Osmond, which was so long ago I've only just remembered it) and is full of surprises, the first being that she suggests we meet in a coffee shop (isn't that a bit like meeting Paul McCartney at the butchers? Not really. She orders an orange juice).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of those religions we know bizarrely little about. "People don't get Mormons," she says. There are an awful lot of myths about them. The biggest is that they all live in Utah and they're all polygamists (there are a few, but the Mormon church opposes the practice).
What does have some veracity to it – although even she hasn't seen them yet because she is not married – are the special garments that every married Mormon must wear and which reach up to the neck and down to the thighs and would preclude wearing anything that might show off a bosom. "Goodbye cleavage," she says, which is a shame because Baker recently had breast implants. "As a Mormon I always thought the first man to see me naked would be my husband, not my plastic surgeon."
In the book she explains how she used to be vastly overweight. A three-month crash diet, a course of possibly illegal slimming pills and one bout of plastic surgery later, she is gorgeous, with long strawberry-blonde hair and fabulous skin. Accordingly she has no shortage of male admirers. However, due to the paucity of fanciable Mormon men on the whole, she dates non- Mormons with the caveat that the relationships don't last because she won't sleep with them.
So what's a typical Mormon chap like? "It depends where you're living," she replies. "In Utah most Mormon men get married straight after their mission at 21. As a result, if you're not living in Utah and not living with that pool of guys… Let's just say it takes a particular type of man to avoid marriage when you have a whole community pushing you to do it." Most of the options are either closeted gay men or divorcés. Every year in New York there is a dance for single Mormons (hence the title of the book). "A whole room of men who have not had sex can be awkward," she muses. "I am used to dating non-Mormon men who are at ease with themselves."
She realised she had been brought up differently to most other people when her parents moved, with their five children, from Seattle to Spain when Baker was nine. Every day would begin with Bible practice. There were lessons in sewing and chastity. Magazines were banned, as were swear words. Sex was never explicitly discussed. "Part of the reason I never had sex was because I had no idea how to."
There is no happy ending. As the book draws to a close, Baker is in love with an atheist her conscience won't allow her to sleep with; bewildered by the idea that she might have to begin a life without her faith. By the time you read this, Baker may no longer be a Mormon and may have been thrown out of the church. It's possible she's trying to force the issue, although I suspect that she wrote the book in an insular bubble and did not think about the consequences – especially with the pressure of a publisher urging her to be as honest as possible. "There is a sense now that I can't go back," she says.
There is an irony here. Being Mormon is her USP: the book has already had interest from Hollywood; her comedy act is inspired by her Mormon upbringing; when a news story about Mormons breaks she's called up for a quote by the television networks. Some might argue that she's doing her religion a favour by spreading the word that Mormons can laugh at themselves. At the same time, falling in love and marrying another Mormon seems horribly unlikely in this day and age.
Can't you just be a bad Mormon instead, I wonder. "Be a pretend Mormon?" she says. "It's kind of hard to do."
• The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker is published by Dutton Books in America. Available on Amazon
Revenge of the real
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Suffering from 'novel nausea', Zadie Smith wonders if the essay lives up to its promise
Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don't know where to put them. It's a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word "essay", and what an essay is, exactly, these days. The noun has an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED.
For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays") and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: "a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range." Which is it, though, that attracts novelists – the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity?
A new book by the American novelist-essayist David Shields (to be published here by Hamish Hamilton early next year) makes the case for irregularity. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call "truthiness" – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an "unbearably artificial world". He recommends instead that artists break "ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work", via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary. And conventional structure be damned. To make the point, Reality Hunger is itself without obvious authorial structure, piecing its arguments together by way of scattered aphorisms and quotation, an engaging form of bricolage. It's a tribute to Shields's skill that we remain unsure whether the entire manifesto is not in effect "built" rather than written, the sum of many broken pieces of the real simply shored up and left to vibrate against each other in significant arrangement. The result is thrilling to read, even if you disagree with much of it, as I do.
A deliberate polemic, it sets what one could be forgiven for thinking were two perfectly companionable instincts – the fictional and non-fictional – at war with each other. Shields likes to say such things as "Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn't"; to which I want to say, "Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too". Anyway, there's a pleasure to be had reading and internally fighting with Shields's provocations, especially if you happen to be a novelist who writes essays (or a reader who enjoys both). The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk: "The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe." And: "All the best stories are true." And: "The world exists. Why recreate it?" It's tempting to chalk this up to one author's personal disappointments with the novel as a form (Shields hasn't written a novel since the early 90s), but in expressing his novel-nausea so frankly he hopes to show that he is not alone in having such feelings – and my sense is that he's right.
An excited American writing student gave me a proof copy of the book, and during a recent semester spent teaching I met many students equally enthused by Shields's ideas. Of course, it's easy to be cynical about this kind of student enthusiasm. Generally speaking, there are few things more exciting to a certain kind of writing student than the news that the imaginative novel is dead (with all its vulgar, sentimental, "bourgeois" – and hard to think up – plots, characters and dialogue). When your imagination fails you it's a relief to hear that it need no longer be part of a novelist's job description. But if "cui bono?" is a reasonable question to ask of writing students who may fear fiction is beyond them, who benefits when it is the novelists themselves who are grave-dancing?
I ask because Reality Hunger comes with "advance praise" from an impressive clutch of imaginative writers – Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Tim Parks, Charles D'Ambrosio and Rick Moody, among others – all apparently eager to commit literary hara-kiri. Most striking is the response of John Coetzee, worth quoting in full: "A manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a 'Make It New' for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) 'a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking'. I, too, like novels that don't look like novels."
Coetzee is one of our finest novelists, and one whose nausea with the novel's form grows more evident with each publication. First-person journals, the wholesale importation of the autobiographical, philosophical allegory and the novel disguised as public lecture – he has used all these to circumvent the "well-made novel", that rather low form of literary activity that even as relatively un-neurotic a novelist as EM Forster found himself defining with a sigh: "Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story." But while aesthetic and ethical objections to the "well-made novel" are not difficult to understand, we should be careful not to let old literary pieties be replaced with new ones. This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, "well-made novel" seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for "novels that don't look like novels" is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.
But even the most conventional account of our literary "canon" reveals the history of the novel to be simultaneously a history of nonconformity. For as readers we have loved and celebrated not some hazy general idea of the novel but rather the peculiar works of individual imaginations. Even in those familiar lists of "great novels", classics of the genre, and so on, it's hard to find a single "well-made" novel among them, if by well-made we mean something like "evenly shaped, regular, predictable and elegantly designed". Is War and Peace, with its huge tracts of undigested essay, absurd plotting and obscene length, a well-made novel? Is The Trial? And those neat Victorian novels we're now expected casually to revile – is it not only from a distance, and in the memory, that they look as neat as they do? Which of them is truly "well made"? Jane Eyre seemed hysterical and lopsided to its earliest readers; we now think of Middlemarch as the ultimate "proper" novel, forgetting how eccentric and strange it looked on publication, with its unwieldy and unfeminine scientific preoccupations and moral structure borrowed from Spinoza. In our classic novels there always remains something odd, unruly, as distinctly weird as Hardy's Little Father Time. Novels that don't look like novels? When it comes to the canon – to steal a line from Lorrie Moore – novels like that are the only novels here. And though it may well be the case that the pale copies of such books to be found in bookshops today are generic and conventional and make the delicate reader nauseous, is the fault really to be found with imagined narrative itself? Will the "lyrical essay", as Shields calls it, be the answer to the novel's problems? Is the very idea of plot, character and setting in the novel to be abandoned, no longer fit for our new purposes, and all ground ceded to the coolly superior, aphoristic essay?
In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are "conventional" and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels, and I don't doubt the sincerity of Shields or Coetzee or any writer who responds strongly to Reality Hunger as a manifesto. A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality, and does indeed make you hunger for a kind of writing that seems to speak truth directly. But I also feel, as someone who just finished a book of more or less lyrical essays, that underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest. In "The Modern Essay" Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. "There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay," she writes. "The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.
Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".
These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion's fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley's comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through! And naturally writers who feel a strong sense of nausea towards their own fiction are even more likely to feel it when reading the fiction of their peers. It's hard to read a novel with any pleasure when you can see all the phoney cogs turning. I'm willing to bet that the great majority of proofs sent to novelists by other novelists barely get read beyond the first two pages. ("The Corrections" writes Shields, in aphorism no 560, "I couldn't read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a 'good' novel or it might be a 'bad' novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.") Tired of the rusty workings of one's own imagination, it's easy to tire of the wearisome vibrancy of other people's, and from there it's a short skip and a jump to giving up on the novel entirely.
Except, except. Then something remarkable comes into your hands. Not very often – no more or less often now than in the 1930s, or the 1890s or the 1750s – but every now and then, you read something wonderful. (Despite all the dull talk of the death of literature, the rate of great novels has always been and will always be roughly the same. By my reckoning, about 10 per decade. Although behind them are dozens of very good novels, for which this reader, at least, is grateful.) Every now and then a writer renews your faith. I'm looking around my desk at this moment for books that have had this effect on me in the not-too-distant past: Bathroom and Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Number9Dream by David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel's An Experiment in Love, Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread, The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, the collected short stories of JG Ballard.
Some people are not condemned to the generic by their use of plot and setting and character. Some people are in fact freed by precisely these things. Whether what they write is disappointingly "well made" I can't say; certainly there is something a little queer about them all, though that queerness comes not from an excess of the real but from the abundance of their own imaginative gifts. "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion," wrote Francis Bacon in his essay "Of Beauty". Well said. This year Ballard's stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well made, full of the supposedly contemptible components – plot, setting, character – and yet irreducibly strange in proportion. It's a marvel how implacably and consistently weird he managed to be despite appearing to use all the normal tools at the disposal of any English short-story writer. All in all there is something a little shaming in reading Ballard: you have to face the fact that there exist writers with such fresh imaginations they can't write five pages without stumbling on an alternate world.
When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it's easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there's no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples. (In Coetzee's oeuvre, of course, we have better examples. The fully imagined artistry of novels such as The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace offer their readers distinct pleasures, not easily dismissed, and not easily found in those impressive but rather anaemic later works, the essayistic and self-referential Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime.) It may be that this idea of the importation of "more reality" is exactly the call to arms a young writer somewhere at her desk needs at this moment, but for this writer at this desk, the argument feels ontologically dubious. When I turned from my own dirty pond to a clear window, I can't say that I felt myself, in essence, being more "truthy" in essay than I am in fiction. Writing is always a highly stylised and artificial act, and there is something distinctly American and puritan about expecting it to be otherwise. I call on Woolf again as witness for the defence. "Literal truth-telling," she writes, "is out of place in an essay." Yes, that's it again. The literal truth is something you expect, or hope for, in a news article. But an essay is an act of imagination, even if it is a piece of memoir. It is, or should be, "a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking", but it still takes quite as much art as fiction. Good non-fiction is as designed and artificial as any fairy story. Oddly, this is a thesis Reality Hunger readily agrees with: in its winding way it ends up defining the essay as imaginative at its core, and Shields wants to encourage its imaginative qualities – it seems to be only in the novel that the imagination must be condemned. It's a strange argument, but I guess the conventional form so many imaginative novels take has been enough to give fictional imagination itself a bad name.
For myself, I know, now that I've finished them, that I wrote my own essays out of exactly the kind of novel-nausea Shields describes. I was oppressed by a run-of-the-mill version of that narrative scepticism Kafka expresses so well in one line in "Description of a Struggle": "But then? No then." Simply put, my imagination had run dry, and I couldn't seem to bring myself to write the necessary "and then, and then" which sits at the heart of all imagined narratives. When you're in this state – commonly called "writer's block" – the very idea of fiction turns sour. But in a strange circular effect, it has been the experience of writing essays that has renewed my enthusiasm for the things fiction does that nothing else can. Writing essays on Kafka, on Nabokov, on George Eliot, on Zora Neale Hurston, I was newly humbled and excited by the artificial and the fully imagined. The title of the book, Changing My Mind, is meant to refer to the effect great fiction like this always seems to have on me. I once thought, for example, that I didn't want ever to read another lengthy novel about family life – and then I read The Corrections. That book gave something to me I could never get from an aphoristic personal essay about the nature of art (I think that "something" might be "a convincing imitation of multiple consciousnesses", otherwise known as "other people"). And vice versa. I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. As general readers, who thankfully do not have to live within the strict terms of manifestos, we are fortunate not to have to choose once and for all between two forms that offer us quite different, and equally valuable, experiences of writing.
The last essay in my book considers the work of David Foster Wallace, a writer as gifted in fiction as in essay. I can't offer a better example of a writer whose novel-nausea was acutely developed, whose philosophical objections to the form were serious and sustained, and yet who had the cojones and the sheer talent to write them anyway. Like all great fiction writers he is hard for other writers to read because his natural ability is so evident it makes you nauseous by turn. But that's fiction for you: it taunts you with the spectre of what you cannot do yourself. Meanwhile, the essay teases you with the possibility of perfection, of a known and comprehensible task that can be contained and polished till it shines. For the reader who cares above all for perfection, there are many sophisticated, beautiful and aphoristic side roads in literature that will lead you safely away from the vulgarity of novels with their plots and characters and settings. Off the top of my head: David Markson's Reader's Block, Peter Handke's The Weight of the World, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and Kafka's own Blue Octavo Notebooks . . .
But after you have raged at the impossible artificiality of storytelling, once you have shouted, with Kafka, "But then? No then", well, maybe you will find yourself returning to the crossroads of "And then, and then", if only to see what's going on down there. Because there is a still a little magic left in that ancient formula, a little of what Werner Herzog, talking recently of the value of fiction, described as "ecstatic truth". And every now and again some very imaginative writer is sure to make that "And then" worth your while.
Martin Amis says new novel will get him 'in trouble with the feminists'
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Author expects criticism of The Pregnant Widow, but insists it's "actually a very feminist book" that shows how his sister fell victim to the sexual revolution
Martin Amis's new novel The Pregnant Widow will explore his belief that the apparent freedom of the sexual revolution actually placed huge pressure on women, with his late sister Sally one of its victims. The author has written his sister – who died in 2000 after periods of depression and alcoholism – into the forthcoming book's storyline, and has attributed many of her problems to the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.
"She was pathologically promiscuous. She really had the mental age of someone who was 12 or 13 and I think she was terrified. I think what she was doing was seeking protection from men, but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up," Amis is reported by the Evening Standard to have told a London festival audience earlier this week.
"She died at the age of 46, not of anything sudden; she was one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution. It would have needed the Taliban to protect her."
The Pregnant Widow will also include "a minor Islamic theme", he told the Epsom Guardian, which "has to do with how Muslims and Christians seemed to be getting on reasonably well and we had no idea that this millennium old hatred would burst forward on [September 11]."
Amis has previously come under fire over Islam, with Terry Eagleton accusing him of views appropriate to a "British National Party thug" following Amis's comment to a newspaper that "there's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
He has been accused of misogyny in the past, but told the Richmond Book Now festival audience he was a feminist himself. "Women can't rise far enough to suit me," he said. "I'm a gynocrat – I'd like rule by women."
The Pregnant Widow, described by its publisher as a tragicomedy, follows the lives of six young people spending a long, hot summer holiday in an Italian castle during the sexual revolution and the "sea change" of 1970.
Amis said he had been told it would get him "in trouble with the feminists", but he insisted that it was actually "a very feminist book" and that "they haven't got a case".
The title of the novel, which will be published in February 2010, is taken from the Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, who said that after a revolution we are left with "not an heir but a pregnant widow".
"In other words, revolution isn't a flip," said Amis. "It's a churning process that goes on for a long time before the baby is born. It's not the instant replacement of one order by another."
Colum McCann wins National Book award for fiction
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Irish-born writer's novel Let the Great World Spin, focused on Philippe Petit's World Trade Centre tightrope walk, acclaimed as 'gravity-defying feat'
Colum McCann won the fiction prize at the National Book awards in New York last night for his novel Let the Great World Spin, an allegorical story inspired by the events of 9/11 and set around Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the twin towers in 1974.
McCann, who grew up in Dublin, moving to Manhattan more than a decade ago, dedicated his win to fellow Irish American Frank McCourt, who died earlier this year. "I think he's dancing upstairs," the author said.
He was cited by judges for achieving "a gravity-defying feat". "From 10 ordinary lives he crafts an indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying New York City, and offers through his generosity of spirit and lyrical gifts an ecstatic vision of the human courage required to stay aloft above the ever-yawning abyss," they said.
The eminent US literary awards, which are in their 60th year, also honoured 84-year-old novelist, playwright and essayist Gore Vidal for his "distinguished contribution to American letters", and presented Dave Eggers with an award for "outstanding service to the American literary community". As well as being an author, journalist and screenwriter, Eggers is co-founder of 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing and tutoring centre for young people, and of independent publishing house McSweeney's.
The non-fiction prize was taken by TJ Stiles for The First Tycoon, a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, builder of the original Grand Central railway station in New York, while the poetry award was won by Brown University professor Keith Waldrop for his three related poem sequences, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.
Children's author Philip Hoose was named winner of the young people's literature prize for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, an in-depth account of the life of the early civil rights champion. In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, the 15-year-old Colvin did the same thing in Montgomery, Alabama, and found herself shunned by her community. She went on to become a key plaintiff in a landmark case which struck down the segregation laws in Montgomery.
Colvin, whom Hoose interviewed extensively for the book, was at his side as he accepted the award. "Because of this woman, our lives have changed," he told the audience.
The evening also saw The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor named the best of all the National Book awards' fiction winners in the last 60 years, as voted by readers. O'Connor beat past winners including Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner and Thomas Pynchon to take the prize.
The other winners, selected by a five-member, independent judging panel for each genre, received $10,000 and a crystal sculpture.
Museum of storytelling planned for Oxford
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Anonymous £2.5m donation paves the way for a major new children's attraction, due to open in 2014
From Lewis Carroll's Wonderland to JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth, CS Lewis's Narnia and the parallel universes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Oxford has played host to some of the UK's most enduring literary creations. Now a £2.5m donation from an anonymous private benefactor means the first steps have been taken towards the creation of a museum dedicated to storytelling in the city.
The Story Museum has existed online for the past four years, holding events across Oxfordshire and running storytelling pilots in schools, but the donation enables it to start constructing a permanent home in Oxford. It has just signed a lease on Rochester House, a Victorian building a stone's throw from Christ Church College – where many scenes in the Harry Potter movies are filmed – on Pembroke Street. It now needs to raise a further £11m to transform the building into a museum, which will aim to attract 100,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2014.
Children will be able to listen to stories at the museum, to "walk through" them, to create stories of their own and to "open windows and go through doorways into other worlds", according to the team behind the museum, described as a cathedral to the children's story by trustee and children's publisher David Fickling.
"Dreams do come true: we are absolutely delighted to have a real home at last," said the museum's director Kim Pickin. "Rochester House has its roots in the Victorian era, when Oxford began producing children's stories that are known and loved across the world. Lewis Carroll himself would have known the building." Spokesperson Cath Nightingale said the donor wished to remain anonymous.
Pullman, who lives in Oxford and set his bestselling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials in two different versions of the city, is a patron for the museum, along with fellow former children's laureates Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson. "The Story Museum will be a wonderful gift from Oxford, where so many stories have begun, to the whole world," Pullman said. "The whole atmosphere of the city is rich with fantasy. Indeed, the very idea of having a museum devoted to story is itself such a fantastical notion than no other city in the world could have given birth to it."
Carroll wrote his Alice books in Oxford in the 19th century, Tolkien and Lewis would meet to discuss their work in the city's Eagle and Child pub in the 1930s and 40s, and Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows in Oxfordshire. "There must be something in the waters of the Isis that gets into the system of Oxford residents, magically causing them to think of and bring to life unforgettable characters and plots," said Oxfordshire-based children's author Mary Hoffman.
Oxford resident and Duncton Wood author William Horwood said there was "clearly something going on in Oxford which doesn't happen in other cities". "From where I'm sitting at this moment I've got within a radius of less than two miles Kenneth Grahame, Charles Dodgson [Carroll], Tolkien, Philip Pullman and CS Lewis," he said. "There is a literary tradition associated with Oxford going back to medieval times. People read here. The spirit of the word is here. Also there's the fact that the colleges are basically monastic institutions – you've got corridors within corridors, staircases within staircases, doors which open onto magical gardens. It's hardly surprising that something like Alice in Wonderland came straight out of Oxford."
The museum's team is now planning a feasibility study to establish how to create the Story Museum, and is also putting together a "major public campaign" for 2010 to raise the £11m it needs if it is to open by 2014, in time for Oxford's bid to become Unesco's World Book Capital that year.
Andrew Motion to chair Booker prize judges
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Newly free from his duties as poet laureate, the poet will lead deliberations to find 2010's best novel
Former poet laureate Andrew Motion will chair the judging panel for next year's Man Booker prize, following an eclectic roster of former chairs including Michael Portillo, PD James and Douglas Hurd.
Philip Larkin, the subject of a prize-winning authorised biography by Motion, held the position in 1977, when he and his fellow judges selected Paul Scott's Staying On, the sequel to The Raj Quartet, as their eventual winner. Former chair of the Financial Services Authority Howard Davies, author Fay Weldon and poet Anthony Thwaite have also chaired the Booker judging panel in the past.
Motion, who stepped down as laureate in May after a 10-year term, said the role was "an honour" and "an exciting challenge".
"A lot of difficult decisions lie ahead," he added. "I greatly look forward to a year of reading voraciously."
Last year's judges, chaired by broadcaster James Naughtie, read a total of 132 books, whittling this down to their eventual winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which has now sold more than 120,000 copies in the UK.
Motion and his fellow judges, who have yet to be announced, will begin their reading in January. The Booker rules allow each publisher to enter two novels for the prize, in addition to previous winners and shortlisted authors from the previous five years. Editors are also allowed to recommend up to five other titles from their lists, with judges then able to "call in" those they wish to consider. They must call in a minimum of eight and a maximum of 12 additional novels.
With Motion in the chair, 2010's judges will unveil their longlist of 12 or 13 titles next July. The shortlist will be revealed in September, and the winner announced on 12 October.
Motion, who is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive, is currently professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College. He was knighted for services to literature earlier this year.
Portobello Books signs up Herta Müller's new novel
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Independent publisher sees off competition in fierce auction for rights to Nobel winner
Nobel laureate Herta Müller's new novel Atemschaukel, which follows the story of a German-Romanian teenager deported to a Ukrainian labour camp, will be published in the UK next year after independent press Portobello Books fought off five other publishers to acquire translation rights.
Associate publisher Tasja Dorkofikis said she had been negotiating with Müller's German publisher Hanser before the author was named winner of the Nobel last month, only for the win to provoke a multi-publisher auction for her books as a flurry of interest in the German novelist kicked off.
She has now bought UK rights in Atemschaukel, Müller's 1992 novel Der Fuchs War Damals Schon Der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then) and a selection of essays, as well as an as-yet-unwritten future title – potentially a memoir - by the author.
"We had a very long, protracted discussion with Hanser about buying this book [Atemschaukel, or Everything I Possess I Carry With Me] and a new book. It was all pre-Nobel," said Dorkofikis. "Then she won, so things changed a bit – many others stepped into the negotiations, but we held out ... There were five other publishers involved, auctions all over Europe – in Italy 10 publishers were involved."
Müller's second new full length title, Dorkofikis said, "could be a memoir or a novel". The author's novels already draw extensively from her own life, her oppression under Ceausescu's Securitate and her subsequent exile in Berlin, where she now lives. Portobello Books hopes to publish Atemschaukel next September.
Dorkofikis praised Müller's "masterful, poetic and precise" writing, which "without a word out of place ... truly illuminates and explains the human condition [and] forces readers to look at the dark and complicated realities of European history".
The author was praised by Nobel judges for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose".
The Book of Genesis illustrated by R Crumb
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Robert Crumb's straight retelling of Genesis lacks his trademark humour
It's the old story. Milton tried to retell the Bible and discovered that Satan was a more interesting character than God, and now, three centuries later, Robert Crumb confirms that God is a hell of a lot less fun than Fritz the Cat. "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" declares the cover of this 214-page comic version of Genesis, and for a moment you think it's a teasing double-entendre, capitalising on the fact that Crumb's depictions of sex have always been "graphic" in the porno sense of that word, and that there's plenty of deviant behaviour in the Old Testament that an impious illustrator might relish. But no. Crumb's Genesis fulfils its blurb on a solemnly literal level.
All 50 chapters are present and correct, and, apart from some discreet nudity when there's begetting to be done, there's nothing to disqualify this from being sold in the staidest Christian bookstore. The text, heavily reliant on a recent translation by Robert Alter, reads like the King James partially revised, in haste, by a primary school teacher. Crumb is a non-believer but frowns on the liberties taken by some other graphic adapters of the scriptures. "This is a straight illustration job," he states, "with no intent to ridicule or make visual jokes." Intentional humour is indeed scarce, although the bit in Chapter 28 where God and the messengers of Abraham float down a heavenly ramp has a Teletubbyish daftness that made me smile.
If the book does not intend to ridicule, what exactly is its intent? Hard to imagine. Crumb's lack of religious fervour means the images lack the weird mystery that suffuses the visions of, say, William Blake or David Tibet. But, with his gifts for satire and grotesque playfulness locked away, Crumb merely manages to depict the soap-opera antics of primitive Israelites in a manner that neither illuminates nor nuances them. His drawing style here – unexaggerated, painstakingly cross-hatched – is the same as he's used for other "serious" works in the past, such as his adaptations of Boswell's journals, Kafka's life story, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, or the biographies of various American blues singers he adores. The difference is that there's no one, in the narrative of Genesis, through whom Crumb can vicariously live.
Of course there is some fine artwork. In a project encompassing one and a half thousand panels, there ought to be. The evocation of human wickedness that precedes God's decision to flood the world has a nauseous pall of Bosnian war crimes about it. Noah's construction of the ark is masterfully handled. The genealogy pages swarm with tiny yet distinctly characterful portraits of semitic faces. Abram's haunted sleep when the Lord tells him his seed will be scattered for 400 years is powerfully imbued with preternatural dread. Too much of the book, however, differs too little in conception from the many other graphic Old Testament stories that have been produced by inferior artists. In his foreword, Crumb thanks a pal for supplying him with source material in the form of "hundreds of photos from Hollywood biblical epics". Contempt for the mainstream entertainment industry used to be one of Crumb's strongest instincts, so it's sad to think of him earnestly studying kitsch Hollywood movies for inspiration.
In the long term, I suspect this book will be regarded as an inessential curio in Crumb's oeuvre. In the short term, it's likely to win lavish praise from people who are dazzled by the halo of "magnum opus" radiating off its hardback bulk (even the gothic lettering under the dustjacket is lustrous gold). It's a godsend for those sensitive souls who always wanted to admire Crumb's oft-trumpeted genius but couldn't stomach the copious lashings of bile and sperm.
Actually, this is not Crumb's first attempt to infiltrate the bookshelves of respectable folks. In 2006, MQ Publications brought out The Sweeter Side of R Crumb, an anthology of miscellaneous sketches picked by "Mr Nicey-Nice Himself" specifically to charm those who might regard him as a "misanthropic sex pervert". That book was enlivened by flashes of inspiration: the pure urge to capture in ink whatever delighted or possessed the artist at that evanescent moment. The Book of Genesis, by comparison, comes across as the fruits of indentured drudgery. Not since Crumb last worked 9 to 5 – for a greetings card company in the mid-1960s – has his talent been so cramped, so subservient to the service of another agency's agenda. While I don't expect a man of 66, living contentedly in the south of France, to rail against the world as he once did, I can't help believing there must be more spirit in the old devil than this tome suggests.
Michel Faber's latest book is The Fire Gospel (Canongate).
Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters
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Van Gogh's letters provide an extraordinary map of the artist's interior world
Michelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable's correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.
Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.
The new book (or rather the new books – there are five large volumes of correspondence and a sixth of associated material) is one of the major publishing achievements of our time. It contains fresh and accurate translations of all his surviving letters (819, of which 658 are to his brother Theo) and a further 96 that he received from friends and family. Each is fastidiously annotated, which means that a sense of context is always present – no detail, however small, seems to have escaped the editors. Does this mean the main text is drowned in pedantry? No. That danger is dispelled by the large format of the volumes, and the treasure trove of illustrations: every picture Van Gogh mentions, whether it's by him or not, is reproduced, giving a virtually complete map of Van Gogh's interior world.
In its capaciousness, the book also reminds us of a fundamental truth about Van Gogh: his ambition as a painter depended on words to give it focus and direction. We see this most obviously in the correspondence with Theo. "Writing is actually an awful way to explain things to each other," he says at one point – but the exasperation here is revealingly akin to the way his paint pushes against the limits of what can be rendered and recognised as the essence of a thing. In the same way that his art often manages to make ordinary things – chairs and potatoes and sunflowers and beds – seem charged with a numinous inner life, so some of his word-descriptions catch the miraculousness of the ordinary. Writing on 31 July 1888 to Theo from Arles, he says: "I saw a magnificent and very strange effect this evening. A very large boat laden with coal on the Rhône, moored at the quay. Seen from above it was all glistening and wet from a shower; the water was a white yellow and clouded pearl-grey, the sky lilac and an orange strip in the west, the town violet. On the boat, small workmen, blue and dirty white, were coming and going. Carrying the cargo ashore. It was pure Hokusai. It was too late to do it, but one day, when this coal-boat comes back, it'll have to be tackled." The language here is more than just the counterpart to a picture. It is actually a step in the process towards the picture. It's a different kind of proof of Van Gogh's practicality – and of the way that practicality is often linked to something like exhilaration.
Exhilaration, in turn, is always either threatened or bolstered by a sense of its opposite. The story of his time in Arles with and without Gauguin is celebrated proof of this. But many of the tensions that arose during that ménage a deux had roots in Van Gogh's early life. His father's adherence to the Groningen school of theology may have opened up a pathway to the idea of divine grace being bestowed on each individual, and on the capacity for joy inherent in this idea, but it also helped to give him a moral structure that later developed distinctly oppressive aspects. As a young man in the mid 1870s, he writes: "When I think of my past life and of my father's house in that Dutch village, [I have] a feeling of 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of the hired servants. Be merciful to me'." Some of these religious severities troubled him until the end of his life – though others were transmuted into theories about ways of living that do and don't benefit the painting. Writing to his painter-friend Emile Bernard, he says: "I already told you last spring. Eat well, do your military drill well, don't fuck too hard; if you don't fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it."
Right up to the day he shot himself (27 July 1890 – he died of the wound two days later), and in spite of periods of catastrophic breakdown, Van Gogh retained an exceptional capacity for careful attention to the world, and for delight arising from that attention. We can see it bravely contending with despair in very late pictures such as Wheatfield with Crows, where even the darkening sky, the ominous birds, the track vanishing into the cornfield cannot entirely obliterate the joy of its intense colours. In his final letter to Theo, which he was carrying with him on the day he shot himself, he wrote: "Ah well, I risk my life for my own work, and my reason has half foundered in it." That "half" is a vital sign.
Because this book is very expensive, not many people will be able to own it. Just as well there's a good website, on which appear all the letters written by and to Van Gogh (vangoghletters.org). Although the correspondence and its associated material have been well known and well loved for almost a century, we have never been able to enjoy them as deeply as we can now.
Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías
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The culmination of a triumph of storytelling
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 560pp, Chatto & Windus, £18.99
Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.
At once comical and appalling, absurd and yet governed by its own weirdly invincible logic (the oafish diplomat has been dancing too close to the wife of a mafioso contact of Tupra's and has scratched her face with his hairnet – yes, his hairnet – so naturally must be punished), the scene leaves Deza shocked, both by his boss's violence and by his own failure to interfere. "You can't just go around beating people up, killing them," he protests as they leave. To which the imperturbably ruthless Tupra replies, "Why can't one do that? Why can't one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them?"
The retort takes us to the heart of this extraordinary enterprise, its essential moral conundrum, and is repeated early on in the third and final instalment, Poison, Shadow and Farewell. Here, the slow-motion delirium of that evening at the disco continues with Tupra driving Deza to his house in Hampstead in order to show him clandestine footage of public figures participating in compromising scenes that include torture and bestial rape. The footage is intended to force Deza to reconsider his own assumptions about what is and is not morally permissible – would it not be permissible to harm these people? – and it succeeds with a vengeance.
In the mesmerising narrative that follows, the basic situation of doing harm unto others is revolved in a series of episodes in which Deza implicates himself, directly or indirectly, deliberately or by passive acquiescence, in various acts of violence, the most dramatic and disturbing of which is a savage beating that he inflicts on his estranged wife's abusive lover. These scenes are framed by brutal episodes from the Spanish civil war in which Deza's father (modelled on Marías's own father) was victimised by the Francoists, and then further refracted through allusions to the effective but morally questionable disinformation tricks perpetrated against German civilians during the second world war by the "black propaganda" intelligence unit, predecessor to the unit Deza himself works for.
Between these episodes, and within them, Marías probes the psyches of his characters with an exhaustive, hyper-articulated precision, assessing in minute detail the effects of their actions on their sense of who they are. Who they are today, and who they are going to become "tomorrow" (the phrase "Your Face Tomorrow" is adapted from a line in Henry IV where Hal begins to realise that he is turning against his former companions). One knows, for example, that the Deza cold-bloodedly smashing the hand of his wife's lover is no longer the Deza he was before he began stalking the man through the Prado and the streets of Madrid (richly sinister scenes); that however understandable and even necessary his actions may be, a rupture has occurred, and that a reckoning is going to be required. Much of the disturbing force of this prolonged central episode comes from the mutually exclusive moral perspectives through which we are made to view it. The book as a whole functions as a kind of experiment in forensic ethics: a study of the shifting aspect of good and evil over time.
As in any ambitious experiment, the context has to mimic the real world while at the same time enhancing the focus of the investigation, and to this end a certain selective distortion is employed. Describing the odd "enchantment" of Tupra's house in Hampstead, Deza says: "There came into my mind the image of a more welcoming and, in fact, unusual, but, how can I put it, not entirely non-existent London . . ." The last phrase is applicable to the entire version of reality offered by the book, which is certainly unusual and yet "not entirely non-existent". On the one hand there is the solid factuality of the underpinning – the historical material (documented by Sebaldian photographs), the fastidious, engagingly raffish erudition that revels in every aspect of English and Spanish life, from obscure etymologies to the cheesiest scraps of celebrity culture. On the other hand there are those dreamily perverse oddities – that sword, another attack by spear, and of course the whole preposterous yet somehow compelling nature of Deza's spy-work, which, in keeping with the book's abiding preoccupation, consists of "interpreting" individuals of interest to his boss: analysing their characters and predicting their future behaviour, their "face tomorrow"; a metaphor, among other things, for the art of the novelist himself.
All of which suggests, perhaps, a rather solemn, self-important book, whereas Your Face Tomorrow is in fact a work of sublime lunacy, closer in spirit to Sterne or Cervantes than some of the more modern mega-tomes – A la Recherche, for instance – to which it has been compared. (Musil might be more apt than Proust, with a dash of Anthony Powell to take care of its peculiar Englishness, but even that fails to do justice to the book's sheer waywardness.)
I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality.
Its humour, too; aside from being one of the most poised and cultivated of fictional narrators, Jacques Deza is also one of the most amusing. His defiantly snobbish asides on the trashiness of our times are priceless, while the situations he finds himself in, however unpleasant, almost always have something farcical about them that keeps laughter in play along with horror.
A little patience, in other words, is required of the reader, but it is amply rewarded. By the second volume all cylinders in its large and powerful engines are purring smoothly. And with this triumphant finale – the longest and best of all three – it becomes impossible to resist the thought that this deeply strange creation, with its utterly sui generis methods, its brilliant disquisitions on love and loss, its dark playfulness, may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.
James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Jonathan Cape.
To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon by Richard Shelton
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Giles Foden is carried along by a holistic view of the salmon's lifecycle
When Richard Shelton's first book The Longshoreman: A Life at the Water's Edge was published in 2004 it was acclaimed by Telegraph and Guardian readers alike. The main reason for its cross-cultural appeal was the engaging prose style in which Shelton described life as a waterfowler, fisherman and biologist; but there was something more to it. Here was a man who had lived a tweedy country life and was a keen angler and hunter, but who also had ecological knowledge and scientific credentials (he was director of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory in Pitlochry from 1982 to 2001) that are perhaps more usually associated with left-leaning environmentalists.
In his new book Shelton continues in the same vein, but with rather more tweediness flowing alongside the science. Perhaps this is inevitable given that his subject is the extraordinary and mysterious life of the Atlantic salmon, for at least a century the fish of choice for anglers who can afford the very best waders. The skeleton of the book dramatises the life of an individual salmon as it progresses from Scottish burn to the Atlantic and back again ("less than a short January day had passed since the lordly cock salmon had exchanged the cooling sea for the biting chill of the river in winter").
This exploration of the lifecycle of the species is supplemented by information about the fish's evolutionary context and threats to its survival, from global warming to overfishing. Very frequently, personal anecdote and historical reflection interrupt the scientific narrative as Shelton puts the salmon in a human context, from the Pict who incised a design of a salmon on a monolith, to a Victorian ghillie.
Sometimes the human context is that of Shelton's own family (we visit the ghillie's life "through the eyes of his granddaughter, Catherine Forrest, my dear wife's late aunt"). On other occasions, the context is that of the various scientific endeavours in which he has been involved, as when he shocks his scientific peers inspecting fish traps on the Girnock Burn by producing a Victorian, leather-covered flask: "Drawing it triumphantly out from among layers of tweed and pouring a 'wee suppie' of the golden liquid into the measure, I asserted that surely now, under such majestic surroundings, there could be no better occasion than this one for my new colleagues to share a nip of 'the auld kirk'."
We would all wish to be permitted such indulgences and they do have a place in a book of this kind, but now and then the onset of what used to be called "colour writing" threatens to obscure Shelton's ostensible subject.
One of the focuses of anecdote is the great Victorian naturalist Frank Buckland, surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards, author of Curiosities of Natural History and pioneering inspector of salmon fisheries. Buckland was a fascinating character who did sterling work in enabling salmon populations to recover from the ravages of the industrial revolution and setting the foundations for the modern revival of the species on the Tweed and other rivers. We are told that Buckland favoured field mice on toast for tea; but did we really also need to know about the uses of ratskin in clothing manufacture, or the chances of hippophagy solving a working-class food crisis?
Chairman of the Buckland Foundation, Shelton himself is very much in the same mould. By the end of the book you realise that like The Longshoreman, it is really about him – about his passion for the natural world and the individuals who have inspired him in trying to conserve it. If, sometimes, there is too little distinction between significant and non-significant information as regards the life of the salmon, then that's fine. This is a book with a large hinterland written by someone whose outlook is genuinely holistic. At a time of ecological crisis, when there is a requirement to perceive how all parts of the environmental system interact, we need people such as Shelton to inspire us in turn.
Giles Foden's Turbulence is published by Faber.
A life in books: Mavis Gallant
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'I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write'
A couple of months ago Mavis Gallant had a dream. A messenger came to the door carrying a cardboard box with a lid on it. On top was written "Mavis Gallant" in big letters – and underneath it "Bad Prose". "I was devastated. Devastated for days. I thought, they aren't telling me the truth."
In fact, Gallant is often cited as one of the best living short-story writers, inspiring reverence among devotees of the form, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, who credits her as the most significant influence on her own writing. At the age of 15 Gallant told a friend – who reminded her of it many years later – that when she grew up she would live in Paris and be published in the New Yorker. Next year she will have spent 6o years in her adoptive city and has had nearly as many stories in the magazine as John Updike.
"They were all in a strange land and out of context," one of the characters reflects in Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first (of only two) novels, written in 1959. A Canadian in Paris who has devoted her life to writing, she is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally. Reading too many of her stories at one time leaves the reader feeling strangely adrift, the world slightly askance. She has travelled extensively, usually alone, across Europe. "Only personal independence matters," she once wrote, quoting Boris Pasternak, and this might well be her motto.
We meet in Le Dôme, a notorious hangout for writers and artists in bohemian Montparnasse and long a favourite with Gallant, who lives what used to be for her just a nip around the corner, but is now – due to increasing frailty – a short taxi ride away. She first came to the restaurant when she arrived from Montreal in 1950. "It was a terrible winter and I used to come here because it was warm and I didn't have any electricity in my apartment. Can you imagine – the French giving anything away free!" she says, her handsome face crumpled by a chuckle. Now 87, she is a famous regular herself; the only time she is unable to secure her own spot – the cosy "Picasso booth" – is when Paloma, the artist's daughter, is in town.
"I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river," she writes in the introduction to her Selected Stories. Indeed, the life and work seem almost indistinguishable: she speaks in a succession of stories, as effortlessly as bubbles blown through a loop, smaller tales attached to larger ones. She is pin sharp: if you aren't careful, and push for direct answers, the stories burst in your face. Her osteoporosis is forgotten (sitting for long periods, and even writing, are painful) as figures from her past, or characters from her fiction – both seemingly as real to her as each other – are recollected and reanimated. She recalls how, reading one of her stories, "The End of the World", to a group of bored schoolchildren, she started to cry because she had forgotten the ending and suddenly realised one of the characters was going to die – and her eyes, just a minute before creased with laughter, fill with tears across the table. "I could only stop myself by saying: 'It's only a story, pull yourself together.'"
Gallant's life seems richer in stories than most. She made the first of her "escapes" when she was 18, turning up on the doorstep of her old nurse in her childhood city of Montreal, leaving her mother in New York. An only child, she was shunted between a bewildering number of boarding schools. When she was 10 her father, an amateur artist, died, and her mother's remarriage left her feeling abandoned. This unhappy childhood seeps like a stain throughout her fiction in the recurring neglected children and strained filial relationships – "You have to observe it and overcome it," she says now.
When she was 21, she got a job on the English-language weekly, the Standard, "dead and buried now", only, she says, because all the men were at war. One of the highlights was interviewing Sartre, and she promised herself that one day young people would come to interview her. Journalism was her "apprenticeship", and while she enjoyed thinking up features ideas, occasionally getting into trouble for her outspoken views and chafing against the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, after six years she handed in her notice. "I liked the life, but it wasn't the life I wanted." She felt she couldn't go on living in her native city, and she chose Paris because of "the black and white films, the paintings. I thought that France must be enchanted magic. I wanted to be among those people."
She was 28 and already divorced (she had briefly married a musician called John Gallant) with one story accepted by the New Yorker. She gave herself two years, vowing that if she could not live on her writing, "I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way. Whatever happened, I would not enter my 30s as a journalist – or anything else – with stories piling up in a picnic hamper." In a fateful episode, this was very nearly prophetic. Gallant was living in Spain at this time, sending stories to her agent in New York. "I admire you very much," he wrote back. "But the New Yorker have rejected your work." She was "dead broke and desperate". Cold and hungry, she took refuge in the American library in Madrid, where she came across one of her stories in an old copy of the New Yorker. She wrote to the fiction editor, William Maxwell, to reproach him, not because she hadn't received any payment, but for not sending her proofs. He replied to say her agent had told them she lived in Capri and to write to the General Post Office there as she didn't want to be disturbed. "It was a terrible thing to do to a young writer," she says. She later heard that the rogue ("the naughty agent" as she calls him now) had been killed in a car crash.
It was, however, the beginning of a long and fertile relationship with the legendary Bill Maxwell, to whom, she writes in the introduction to the Selected Stories, she owes everything. Gallant can – and does – count on one hand the stories among her prodigious output that were not published in the New Yorker. After he retired Maxwell reread all his writers' work, including Gallant's, and he wrote to her apologising for not running in full the novella The Pegnitz Junction, which she still considers to be her finest work. "He wrote 'my mind must have been out for lunch.' What editor would do that?"
One of the most striking things about Gallant's work, including The Pegnitz Junction, is its cinematic quality, shifting perspectives and chronology, resulting in what Lahiri calls "narrative that refuses to sit still". Gallant is dismissive of analysing or explaining her work, and distrustful of academic attempts to do so. "If I thought about what I do, I think I'd stop writing. Really," she says with feeling. "I would tell you if I knew. It just happens." For her "the first flash of fiction is like a curtain going up on stage, and you wait to see what's happening. The characters aren't speaking to me, exactly, but I get lines of dialogue. I know who they are, what they do and what they are saying to each other. And I know more than they do, because I know about all of them."
The characters also come with names, like photos with captions underneath, which can cause problems: Florence in Green Water, Green Sky, is schizophrenic, and in Gallant's mind was originally called Caroline, the name of her goddaughter. "But I had to finish the novel with her name because I couldn't have written it otherwise." Brief, intense and technically dazzling, Green Water, Green Sky was conceived and is published as a novel, but Gallant wasn't satisfied. "I felt there were only four important things – so I broke the novel into four stories." (The New Yorker ran the first three, declining the last because it can't be understood in isolation.) Her only other novel, A Fairly Good Time, is out of print. Has she, like other writers committed to the short form (Alice Munro, for example), felt under pressure to write a novel? She sinks her head in her hands with a dramatic groan. "Publishers send me so many new novels – I hardly dare answer the postman. A lot of it is just stuffing between the important things. In between is nothing."
For a year in the early 80s, she was writer in residence at Toronto University, "a completely useless job. You are with people who have no talent whatever, and if they had they wouldn't come to me." The only good thing was that she had 20 per cent off at the campus book store. To those students who showed any promise she would give copies of Nabokov, or EM Forster, "always good for the soul". Otherwise, she would give them Raymond Carver.
Despite the inexorable popularity of the short story on creative writing courses, she thinks teaching fiction is a "dead loss. I never asked for help. I didn't even show my friends what I was doing." She has only two words of advice for aspiring short story writers: read Chekhov! "Anybody who has the English language and doesn't read the wonderful translations of Chekhov is an idiot." She also admires Eudora Welty, Marguerite Yourcenar and Elizabeth Bowen, although she was disappointed to read Bowen's letters to her lover Charles Ritchie, whom Gallant knew. "She turns out to be a snob. It is a division in the brain, between what one is as a writer and what one is as a person."
The structural mastery of her stories, coupled with their fluid morality – you are not entirely sure, which, if any, of the characters, deserve sympathy (well-intentioned "liberals" come in for a particularly hard time) – has led to accusations of emotional coldness. In the New York Review of Books in 1980 – in which Gallant was reviewed alongside the "arresting new talent" in English fiction, Ian McEwan – VS Pritchett found her "brittle". While Pritchett concluded that, despite her "sharp", "clever" comedy, "Miss Gallant has compassion", John McGahern, writing in the New York Times more than a decade later, complained that her "witty, controlled prose is functioning at the expense of her characters". "I don't sit weeping as I write," she retorts impatiently.
On a more positive note, she recalls a review by John Updike, in which he wrote that she doesn't "belittle men, that she seems to really like men". Indeed, her chat is scattered with recollections of flirtatious exchanges, as light and colourful as confetti: giving bothersome Italians the slip by vanishing into art galleries; going gambling in Monte Carlo; even being asked out to dinner over the coffin at a funeral by the brother of a Jewish poet who had killed himself. But a committed reader of Gallant's fiction might be forgiven for asking if she believes in love. "Oh yes! Oh of course. I don't say that it will last 50 years. I never intended to marry. I fell in love!" Was she ever tempted to remarry? "No."
But that doesn't mean she was always alone. Just as in her 20s she gave herself two years to prove she could be a writer, so in her 30s she promised that she would give herself two years to see if she could live with someone else. She left almost on the day. "I went to stay on a farm outside Salzburg and every morning I woke up and thought 'I'm free.'" She hardly wrote at all during the two years. "You have to stop and think – 'Oh I must get the bread for supper' – I didn't even eat bread because I didn't want to get fat! I didn't like being half a person with half of another person attached. It wasn't his fault, he didn't do anything wrong, anything mean or nasty. As a couple you only ever see other couples. It was so boring, I was so bored," she says with feeling. "I was going out like a light. But if everyone was like me the human race would run out."
Although she writes about children with beguiling empathy, she knew she never wanted to have any of her own. To illustrate the point, she tells another story. After lunch with a lawyer friend on a trip to Montreal in 1955, he drove her back and stopped in front of "a very charming looking house with vines growing up it. 'I'd love a house like that,' he said. And I said, 'It's not for me.' Saying, 'How was your school day?' every evening . . . I'd run away. I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write."
Which for the next few decades was all she did. But it wasn't until the 60s that she feels she fully developed her own style. Gallant has been rereading her work from this period for a new collection of her early and uncollected stories, published by Bloomsbury in the UK this month as The Cost of Living. It opens with "Madeline's Birthday", the very first story accepted by the New Yorker. Ironically, today when being Canadian seems almost to be a criterion for the job description of short story writer, Gallant was only the second Canadian to be published in America's most prestigious magazine and feels her nationality was a "handicap." "To them I was like an Eskimo with talent. A hick. They were surprised when they got 'Madeline's Birthday', which takes place outside New York."
Three of these early stories were turned down by the New Yorker because they were considered "inauthentic". This early rejection has continued to haunt her, feeding her fear that she might have "inherited a flawed legacy", like her artistic father, afflicted with "a vocation without the competence to sustain it". When the collection was published last year by the book imprint of the New York Review of Books, she "nearly fainted for joy", when the editor told her that one of the rejected stories is "authentic even for New York even now". "I had put those stories out of my mind. I took their word for it that they were no good. But I did know what I was doing. I did know what I was talking about. And the stories work."
She is very proud that her fiction is firmly rooted in the time in which it was written, and it was at her insistence that the Selected Stories are chronologically ordered and dated. It wasn't, she says, until the Selected Stories were published, and received such positive reviews, that she really felt able to relax. "I felt like Queen Alexandra – when she said 'They do like me'."
But then there's that dream, she remembers sorrowfully – even in a year when she's had seven books published (reissues in different languages). The Spanish edition of the Selected Stories is particularly pleasing to her. It took the translator two years, and because Spanish sentences are longer, it is even fatter than the English edition squatting unignorably on the table between us. In a strange echo of her nightmare, of which Gallant herself seems unaware, she recalls its arrival: "I had forgotten even signing the contract. The messenger delivered it. It had Mavis Gallant on it" – and not, of course, a word about bad prose. "It is divine", she says. Perhaps she can finally lay those doubts to rest.
I'm writing the new Doctor Who
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This past year or two I've been revisiting what you might call my cultural roots. Because I was distracted almost daily by treatment for a wounded foot and unable to work much, I began re-reading the PG Wodehouse, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sexton Blake stories I enjoyed as a kid. From these I went on to movie and TV favourites, some of which proved to be pretty dreadful. Among them were Hopalong Cassidy, The Prisoner – and Doctor Who.
I have to admit that, while I watched most of his episodes as the Doctor, I disliked William Hartnell, the first occupant of the Tardis, who barked with the authority of his sergeant from The Army Game. Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor, brought an absent-minded quirkiness to the character which stayed with him at his best. Jon Pertwee took him back to his more authoritarian mode and then came the glory years of Tom Baker – reasonable complexity, wit and an aptitude for ad libbing which was wonderful to watch but must have been murder for the other actors.
Every Saturday was organised around the Doctor's adventures in Time and Space, with plenty of hiding behind available furniture (you couldn't actually get behind our sofa) and there was even a visit to White City to meet Tom Baker and the Daleks in real life. I remained unimpressed by 2001, A Space Odyssey, but I'd go to considerable lengths not to miss an episode of The Brain of Morbius.
I think I like the character mostly because he remains largely unrationalised and ambiguous. Russell T Davies understood this and made it the Doctor's most attractive quality. All lasting characters, from Richard III on, have at least a duality which makes them appeal to new generations. Like Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Becky Sharp, the Doctor is infinitely interpretable.
About the only real science fiction I've written since the 1960s was The Dancers at the End of Time stories, all done in the 70s. They're comedies set in the distant future with a nod to the fin-de-siècle of Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, Ernest Dowson and The Yellow Book. Both comedy and SF depend on compression and exaggeration and are very often entertaining when combined. There's a long tradition of it: even Wodehouse wrote a funny, futuristic story early in his career (The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England). In the SF magazines, writers such as Henry Kuttner, Robert Sheckley and L Sprague de Camp were best loved for their comedy. Douglas Adams, of course, hit the jackpot in the 1970s with The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Davies and his writers realised this when the Doctor made his comeback some five years ago with Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant in the role. Both actors have a talent for comedy and melodrama. The plots became increasingly complex, playing with ideas of time and space, and I became an addict again.
Eventually, my well-springs replenished and my foot on the way to healing, Doctor Who became almost the only escapism I allowed myself. Though I have written little SF recently, I have begun a series of autobiographical novellas and novels in which I examine my taste for romance and fantasy: my characters are thinly disguised versions of writers and others associated with New Worlds magazine in the days when we tried to find new approaches to literary novels by using the methods and ideas of science fiction.
This trilogy of books, featuring a version of myself in a somewhat re-invented London, is intended to examine the appeal of fantastic adventure stories of the kind inhabited by my most popular character, the albino sorcerer-prince Elric of Melniboné. Elric is my Sherlock Holmes – a protagonist better remembered than most of my others, but in my case not the burden Conan Doyle felt Holmes to be. I'm very grateful that Elric continues to keep me in my old age, together with other stories I've written set in my "multiverse", a term I invented (or reinvented, since I wasn't originally aware that William James coined it to describe the many worlds our minds inhabit) in 1962, for a near-infinite system of parallel worlds in which subtly different versions of our own universe exist simultaneously. The term caught on well enough to be used for a variety of purposes in popular fiction and theoretical physics and was incorporated into the lexicon of Doctor Who. There's nothing unusual in this. Terry Pratchett said generic fiction is a big pot from which one takes a bit and adds a bit. I'm flattered that some of my ingredients became staples, but it's always a pleasure to use what was once a private vocabulary in another medium.
When I was first offered the chance to write an original Doctor Who novel I hesitated. I felt I'd had enough fun and should settle down to the autobiographical stuff I'd mapped out for the next year or two. Then I realised that not only might I enjoy writing an original adventure, I could also take a look at what a character who has become part of our national folklore has come to mean. I could do, in fact, what SF does best for an intelligent, knowing audience. So I told my agent to go ahead and draw up the contract.
Now the vast potential of what I can write is beginning to dawn on me. Far from thinking in terms of fun I've become a little scared. All time and space is open to me. I have to mix comedy and melodrama while telling an epic adventure story featuring a complex protagonist capable of ranging across the entire multiverse. I'm increasingly overawed as I consider what I must live up to. Hardcore fans are already questioning my qualifications. I can only hope I'm equal to the job.
Morocco bound
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On the 10th anniversary of Paul Bowles's death, Paul Theroux remembers the writer and traveller who set him on his way
The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles's first novel and, although he honed his art almost to his dying day – novels, poems, stories, translations, as well as musical scores – it was this strange, uneven and somewhat hallucinatory novel, and a handful of disturbing short stories written around the same time, that seemed to locate his fictional vision for good in the minds of his readers. So at the age of 38 he was defined, and that definition dogged him for the rest of his life. Even in his 80s he was pestered about details in the novel. I know this to be true because I was one of the people pestering him when he was that great age.
I found him sitting on the floor of a back room in a large, chilly apartment in a grey building on a back street in Tangier. It was October, and clammy cold. To drive the dampness away Bowles had a sort of superior blow-torch going, a fizzing blue flame heating the curtained-off cubicle where he was seated like a hawker in a bazaar, on a mat, back straight, legs out, because of a leg infection. Around him was a litter of small objects, notebooks, pens, medicine bottles; everything within reach, a teapot, a cup, spoons, matches, as well as shelves with books and papers, some of them musical scores. A metronome sat on a low table nearby, among bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled "Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc", a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.
With a pad in his hand, he was translating a novel from Spanish. His illness and his age gave him a strangely sculpted and skeletal dignity. He seemed sure of himself, and (as a chronic vacillator myself) I admired him for being uncompromising.
Because I did not want to inhibit his talk by taking notes of our conversation, I stopped in a café, the Negresco, on the way back to my hotel, and described this meeting in my notebook. I wanted to make it an episode for the end of my Mediterranean journey, the book I was to call The Pillars of Hercules. I wrote: "He seems to me a man who masks all feelings; he has a glittering eye but a cold gaze. He seems at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, sceptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, fragile, egomaniacal, frank, and hospitable to praise. He is like almost every other writer I have known in my life." Seeing me scribbling, a Moroccan sitting nearby asked if I happened to be a writer. His name was Mohamed Choukri. He knew Bowles. He disparaged him in a genial way then said, "He is a nihilist."
"Everyone is always leaving tomorrow," Bowles had said to me when I told him I was taking the ferry back to Spain the next day. But Bowles never left. His was the classic case of the person who detaches himself and swims away from the mainstream, to go far away to pursue anonymity – no phone, no name on the house – and discovers that the world beats a path to his door. (B Traven in Mexico and JD Salinger in New Hampshire are two other examples of this paradox.) Bowles had first visited Tangier with Aaron Copland at the bidding of (so he told me) Gertrude Stein. Copland went home, Bowles found the place to his liking, and there he thrived, part ascetic, part snob – as he seemed to me; and in his way distinctly rebellious, going against the grain, because the dampness and his rigorous living conditions and the decay of Tangier all seemed to be life-shorteners. But unlike all those others he was a resident, and a traveller, not a tourist.
"I felt strongly then about my not being a tourist as my protagonist Port did in . . . The Sheltering Sky," he told one of his biographers. He states this early on in the novel, speaking of Port: "He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveller. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly . . . from one part of the earth to another."
Bowles started the novel in Fez late in 1948, and after writing 150 pages went to Oran in Algeria and travelled south, manuscript in hand, to Oujda, to Colomb-Béchar, a French garrison, then Taghit, a day's journey by truck, then Béni Abbes and Timimoun, and finally back to Fez. Novelists can be extremely misleading about their methods and motives (Bowles claimed that this book came to him when he was riding a bus up Fifth Avenue), but it seems certain that he wrote the book and gathered these details on his trip through Algeria as, he later explained, "a combination of memory writing and minute description of whatever place I was in at that moment".
On his ramble through Algeria, he was writing each morning, elaborating details of places he'd seen. He was also experimenting with drugs, notably hashish and majoun ("cannabis jam"); he claimed that some of the novel was written under the influence. This was quite the opposite of the romantic idea of emotion recollected in tranquillity, much more the insertion of raw experience on to the page, the travelling author creating a picaresque narrative by adding detail to the storyline from his peregrinations: the hot nights, the long rides, the wrong turns, the unreliable locals, the hideous tourists – here the Lyles, mother and son.
And the seedy hotels and the bad food. The Grand Hotel in Aïn Krorfa in this novel takes the cake as one of the worst hotels in fiction: the fountain at its entrance contained "a small mountain of reeking garbage" as well as some human infants, naked, their "soft formless bodies troubled with bursting sores ", and inside the "predominating odour was the latrine". Here the travellers "engaged three smelly rooms", one of which has "a jackal skin on the floor . . . the only furnishing". The meals in this hotel and elsewhere are so bad as to be almost comical. Weevils in the soup at the Grand, and later Kit "found patches of fur in her rabbit stew". In the kitchen a knife was stuck into the table and "under the point was a cockroach, its legs still feebly kicking".
The note of fascinated disgust that echoes through the novel is struck at the outset, with the three travellers in the seedy café in Oran, studying their maps. The Arabs sit outside, the Americans inside, "cooler but without movement, and it smelled of stale wine and urine".
This motif of grotesquerie occurs so frequently that it becomes a dark version of comic awfulness and reminds us that the greatest terror in fiction is often achieved by way of black comedy. Bowles was possessed by the notion of extremes, dramatised in the mounting persecution of the professor in "A Distant Episode", surely one of the most terrifying short stories in any language. Bowles claimed The Sheltering Sky was "really, a working out of the professor's story in 'A Distant Episode' . . . the same story retold".
The structure of the novel is episodic and seemingly random. Three Americans set off, going south from Oran. They have different personalities. Port Moresby's name is an intentional joke by Bowles: Port Moresby is, of course, the capital of Papua New Guinea, named in 1873 by Capt John Moresby after his father, Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby. The Port of the novel is thin, "with a slightly wry, distraught face" and a sense of non-attachment. His wife Kit is a high-strung socialite with a trunk full of evening gowns and make-up – we even see her in a desert outpost wearing a backless number of pale blue satin, for no apparent reason. The third member of this ménage à trois – as it turns out to be – is Tunner, an opportunist, who cuckolds Port and is surprised at one point that it doesn't rain much in the Sahara.
They are wanderers. The second world war has ended, and they are now free to travel. Knowing almost nothing about North Africa and ambivalent about it from the outset, why have they chosen this destination? "It was one of the few places they could get boat passage to [from New York]."
The Lyles are Australian, offering farcical comedy of shrieking, racist mother and creepy son. For long stretches, as much as 170 pages, they drop out of the story. They add little to the narrative but they are presented with such gusto that they have a point. Tennessee Williams was an early admirer (and reviewer) of the novel, and this mother and son seem like stock figures from his cast of characters.
The Americans move south. Many of the places can be found on a modern map – Messad, Tadjmout, El Ga'a, Adrar, and even distant Tessalit, over the Algerian border in Mali.
It is in Port's nature to nose around, uncomprehending yet undeterred. He is a searcher – but for what? I suppose, the wish to go to extremes; yet he is chronically restless. When he finds a willing local woman, Marhnia, the whole affair lasts "not more than a quarter of an hour". Later, there are quarrels, misunderstandings; the food gets worse, the weather hotter. "The room was malignant" is one description, and even dawn is tainted: "the pale infected light of daybreak".
Port's inwardness and sense of self-destruction are intensified; his illness seems to be an illumination, but then – long before the novel ends – he dies. Bowles's biographer wrote: "[Bowles] told Jane that he meant to kill off his hero halfway through the book. 'He lingers in an agony instead of dying. But I'll get rid of him yet. Once he's gone there'll be only the heroine left to keep things going, and that won't be easy either.'"
The novel moves from observation to observation, rather than from incident to incident. The image of the sheltering sky is enlarged in the unfolding narrative, and of course calls attention to itself. "The sky here's very strange [Port says to Kit]. I often have the sensation when I look up at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind." And he explains: "Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night."
Ambiguity is menace for him, leading to death, and when Port dies, the darkness behind the sheltering sky is revealed: "A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." Port's death, "seen from the inside", as Bowles wanted it, is a form of passion. None of the sex or love-making in the book – Port and Mahrnia, Tunner and Kit, Kit and her numerous lovers – is described with the power that Bowles gives to this lingering death.
What are we to make of it all? These people are trespassers – not only going too far, but in the wrong place. The desert is described as lifeless, and Bowles writes in one of his grimmer passages, "Now there was a grey, insect-like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred." But is it really grim, or is it over-egged horror writing, something out of HP Lovecraft? I think it is both.
Kit's ordeal, not erotic in any conventional sense, is sexual sadism – written coldly, rather than (as much erotica is written) in a mood of excitement. For many readers this pitiless woman's journey was the heart of the book, the pretty New York socialite in the desert, rather foolish and ultimately unbalanced, passed from one tribesman to another, subjected to sexual barbarities and ending up in far-off Tessalit. It is she, not Port, who is a version of the professor in "A Distant Episode".
Bowles was a poet as well as a novelist and short-story writer; this novel especially highlights his poetic gift. As for its unspiritual essence, it was written at a time when the word existentialism explained a great deal of fiction. It is perhaps one of the important existential texts, many of its effects achieved through ambiguity and vagueness, contrasted with the harsh concreteness of physical description. In this sense it represents a bitter view of life, but it is no more a tragedy than Camus' The Outsider is a tragedy.
Yet The Sheltering Sky matters particularly to me – this book and others helped to direct my writing and my travelling life. I was still a student when I read it, along with Bowles's other novels, Up Above the World, The Spider's House, Let It Come Down, and many of the stories. As a traveller, as a writer, I have learned from Bowles's habit of observation, his love of extreme situations, his curiosity about cultures, his love of solitude and, most of all, his patience. I am not sure what this novel adds up to – a meditation on death? A warning to the curious? It is a wilful adventure story, with all the elements of an ordeal. The desert is fatal to strangers. Bowles said he had no message, or rather, "Here's my message. Everything gets worse." But it is obvious that he wanted to give the desert a face and a mood – or moods; he often depicts a landscape in anatomical terms, and he could only do that by describing people somewhat like ourselves crawling around it and becoming its victims.
The Sheltering Sky will be reissued next month as a Penguin Modern Classic.
The Paris Review Interviews Vol 4 edited by Philip Gourevitch | Book review
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Jack Kerouac, William Styron and VS Naipaul among others offer stunning insights into the art of writing, says Jessica Holland
Writing is difficult and painful and writers are all a little mad. That's the first impression you get from this fourth anthology of interviews with authors about their art, which are arranged chronologically from William Styron in 1954 to Marilynne Robinson in 2008. "Let's face it," Styron says, right off the bat, "writing is hell."
Of course, it offers highs as well as lows and both are fascinating to read about. Aspiring writers should find plenty of tips to prod them into action: stick to a schedule, find a quiet place to write and don't worry about plot and characterisations: in the words of Paul Auster: "You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job."
A 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac is a highlight – he's as excitable and hyperbolic as you'd hope, improvising poems between swigs of liquor, playing the piano and telling wild stories. Asked why he's written copiously about Buddha but never about Jesus, he's explosive: "I've never written about Jesus? In other words, you're an insane phony who comes to my house… and… all I write about is Jesus."
VS Naipaul also stands out, because he's so damn difficult. He constantly asks the interviewer to rephrase questions, takes offence at most of them and describes himself (at Oxford University) as "far more intelligent than most of the people in my college or in my course" and his own work as "extraordinary". The punchline comes when he asks, wrapping up the session, "Do you think I've wasted a bit of myself talking to you?" The interviewer responds with good grace: "Not, of course, how I'd put it."
While you may not instantly warm to all 19 writers interviewed, it's invigorating to spend an hour or so in the company of each vicariously. Most of us are never going to be part of a dazzling creative community like the Bloomsbury set or the Algonquin group, where we can exchange devastating quips and discuss art with the most brilliant minds of a generation. We'll just have to see The Paris Review Interviews as a great consolation prize.
What I know about men | Catherine Millet 60, writer, in a relationship
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Catherine Millet 60, writer, in a relationship
The older I get, the younger I like my men. Young men have an energy that middle-aged ones don't. I live in artistic and intellectual circles, where the men are all a bit depressed and out of sorts with life. My generation of men have lost their belief in change, in utopia. With young men there's no such disillusionment. As the editor of Art Press, I work with more and more young men. I think their naivety is a good thing, something I hope to learn myself.
My younger brother died in a car accident. He was very important in my life and I regret that there's no longer anyone to discuss my childhood with. It's important to be able to share these memories. Maybe my relationship with younger men is all about my brother.
The lovers and close male friends I've made through my life have showed me the ropes, showed me how to live. For women of my age, men were always the sexual initiators and therefore the teachers. In my youth I always went for older men. When I was 25 my lovers were 45 and 50. Now the roles are reversed. As an older woman, I teach younger men – both in work and in sexual relations. I'm cool with that, and I'm cool with mixing sex and work.
I was about 12 years old when I first became sexual. I was on holiday, and the grandfather of a friend felt me up. I became suddenly aware of my breasts. After that there was a long period of flirting, but I didn't have sex until I was much older. The first man I ever had sex with asked for a blow job. I understood what he meant, but I thought it wasn't normal. I learned quickly, but the learning of my own sexual pleasure? That came much later in life. The first man I lived with, at 20, was the one I entered the art world with. He helped me become who I am today, but the man with whom I now live brought me calm. Serenity. Except for the jealousy. When I found out about his affairs, and went through my crises, there was no way I could have spoken about it out loud, even to my closest friends. Now I've written it all down I have distanced myself.
As a young girl I cut out photos of Rock Hudson and Anthony Perkins, and stuck them on my wall. I loved big American actors and people who played gangsters. It was their physical beauty, their obvious virility. The man I live with is not dissimilar to the hard men I liked then. He is stout. Stocky. He rides large bikes, but recently downgraded to a BMW because riding pillion on a Harley Davidson was not comfortable for me.
I'm quite sure that the success of my book [The Sexual Life of Catherine M] is because I am a woman writer, but there are few men who have been as explicit as me. It was the first time a woman had written so honestly about her sexual life. I hid nothing, and wasn't scared to share. Women are more realistic in the way we write and paint about sexuality. Women and men read the book in different ways. Women read it recognising their own experiences and feelings, but men saw it as a come-on. They communicated with me as a possible sexual partner. I didn't take up their offers.
As a teenager I didn't think I was very beautiful, so it was only by seeing myself through the eyes of the men I met that I learned I was desirable. I got reassurance from them. I think a deep relationship with a man allows you to express feelings you didn't know you had, as well as to find out who you really are.
• Catherine Millet's Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M is published by Serpent's Tail, £10.99
Friedrich von Schiller: the Romantic lover
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Film and biographies mark 250th anniversary of passionate 'Ode to Joy' poet
He is the "rebel from Arcadia", the author of the lyrics to the modern European anthem, Ode to Joy, and a passionate champion of free spirits. But for some time Germany seemed to forget all about the man who was arguably the country's most famous Romantic thinker. Not any more. Friedrich von Schiller is back, along with a new fascination with his tumultuous love life.
Just as Britain has been rediscovering the attraction of its Romantics, after documentaries about Byron by actor Rupert Everett and the release of Bright Star, the new Jane Campion film about Keats, Germany is also enjoying a romantic revival. And the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth has given scholars the chance to rediscover one of its most distinguished poets and philosophers.
A racy new film, Schiller, portrays the poet as a dashing, flame-haired womaniser, mixing high philosophy with simple lust, and dramatises his feverish search for recognition and success as an author.
Meanwhile, a string of biographies have revealed, among other things, that piano music and foul apples inspired Schiller to write, that a brothel visit probably triggered his first passionate scribblings ("Your glances, when they smile love, could stir marble to life"), and that the loves of his life were two aristocratic sisters to whom he penned a joint love letter.
Birgit Lahann, author of Schiller: Rebel from Arcadia, describes how the poet became the "pop star of his time" and a "cult throughout Germany": the author of Ode to Joy, which Beethoven set to music in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, and of the plays Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans and Don Carlos. His charm lay as much in his disorganised, chaotic appearance as in his brilliance. "He was scruffily dressed and had unkempt hair," writes Lahann: a kind of 18th-century role model for high-minded rebellion.
But most intriguing of all is what she refers to as his "double-love" – "his relationship to two women which was the stuff of the best type of scandal".
Detailed in Volker Hage's book, From a Fireball to a Classic, is the "dare-devil" Schiller's erotic obsession focused on two sisters, Charlotte, 21, and Caroline von Lengefeld, 24, the latter of whom was unhappily married. Schiller, then 29, spent the summer with them in 1788 – "a summer which he so didn't want to end he dragged it out until November until the concerned mother of the young ladies told him it was time to go home," according to Hage.
Schiller, who died at 45 in May 1805, expressed his love to the women whom he referred to as "the angels of my life". The phrase was coined in a single letter in which he wrote: "To be able to live only in the two of you, and you in me – oh, that is an existence which would put us above all other humans." He eventually married the younger Charlotte and had four children with her. Schiller said the marriage brought him the "harmonious parity" he needed to be able to write.
Some of his love letters are on display in the newly reopened Schiller National Museum, located in his birthplace, Marbach in southern Germany. The museum boasts 700 exhibits, including a sample of the green wallpaper in his workroom that scientists have discovered contained lead, copper and arsenic that might have contributed to his chronic lung complaint and premature death.
Also on show are his shoe buckles, spoons and hand-warmers. Restored by the British-based David Chipperfield architects, the museum places on display everything from the writer's toothpicks to his blue-and-white-striped silk stockings.
The most disappointing aspect of the commemorations for enthusiasts – albeit a stark illustration of the lengths Schiller experts have been prepared to go to find out as much as possible about him – is the discovery that the skull that his great friend Goethe displayed on his desk, apparently believing it to be Schiller's, did not belong to him.
Extensive forensic investigation over years, costing tens of thousands of euros, including taking DNA samples from Schiller's descendants, has revealed that the skull is probably a fake.
Rüdiger Safranski, a Schiller expert, has delivered a fresh and touching account of the friendship between the two poets, and how they inspired each other, in Goethe and Schiller: History of a Friendship. The two men even composed poems together, despite the difficulties they had in reconciling their different daily rhythms – Goethe was a morning person, Schiller, because of the cramps he suffered at night, decidedly a nightbird. Goethe, he relates, was nonplussed at Schiller's insistence on maintaining a drawer full of rotten apples in his workroom, claiming he needed their decaying scent in order to be able to write.
The new Schiller revival, believes Safranski, may be a short-lived and bittersweet affair, in the best Romantic tradition. Safranski, who also wrote Romanticism – A German Affair, points to the nation's current mediocre capacity for the grandeur of Schiller's passions, observing: "From a romantic point of view, we've reached the end. Romanticism is dead, our sense of possibility is dried out."
The Habit of Art | Theatre review
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Lyttelton, London
WH Auden, the Oxford oracle, is peeing into his washbasin. He's waiting for a rent boy to arrive in his college rooms; he's stuck over his stanzas; he looks not so much like a bag person as a crumpled plastic bag. A floor above him, Benjamin Britten, sleek as a whippet, is at the piano, with poker back and pumping arms, cajoling a young treble into song: "Oh lift your little pinkie!… It's meant to sound horrid. This is modern music." Set in a rehearsal room, watched over by a playwright, observed and explained by a biographer of both Britten and Auden, Alan Bennett's imagined late meeting between composer and poet has inverted commas around every invert. It's a gloriously sustained, constantly shifting piece of irony. Irony doesn't, of course, preclude pathos. After The History Boys, the Musical Men.
Bob Crowley's clever, messy, open-to-the-backstage design is, as is everything in Nicholas Hytner's fleet production, at least two things at once: a set within a set for a play within a play. Richard Griffiths comes on dying for one twice over: as the actor playing the poet, anxious to get off and do his voiceover for Tesco, he's desperate for a cigarette; as the candid, repetitive, smelly old Auden, he is longing for the rent boy. Alex Jennings is trim and buttoned-up as Britten; as the actor who plays the composer, he is lissome, arch and knowing.
Both Griffiths and Jennings are terrific, though neither of them are particularly like the famous men they play: they are actors not impersonators. Michael Gambon, originally down to play Auden, was jowl-casting. Griffiths, who stepped in when Gambon was taken ill, doesn't have those lugubrious dewlaps: he's dishevelled but dainty, both swarmingly anxious and buoyantly breezy. The non-resemblance becomes one of the points and jokes of the play. History and biographers can't get it right, Bennett implies, and to rub it in he makes his commentating biographer spectacularly unlike the real-life model. Adrian Scarborough's Humphrey Carpenter is a beaky, neat, plaintive chap. Carpenter was exactly not like that: apparently bumbling, actually ultra-industrious, his default mode was affability rather than querulousness; he would never have carried such a spruce satchel – he used rather to heave his many manuscripts around in multiple plastic bags. He explained that he had to work in radio rather than telly because "I always come out looking like everyone's mad aunt".
The dissimilarity is outed by an actor who carps that the real Humph was handsome. The Scarborough Humph, wheeled on to fill in biographical details and explain what's true and what's not, has another complaint. "I'm just a device," he sobs. He's right. Bennett's play is full of devices and intricate ploys. The meeting between Britten and Auden is encircled by wonderfully comic dramatic tosh. Tables, mirrors, even the creases on Auden's face are personified, and mimed to the accompaniment of silvery chimes. John Heffernan, as an assistant stage manager stepping up to fill a vacant acting spot, is particularly droll as he manfully, sceptically, assumes the part of a talking chair.
It's striking that, despite all its sardonic surroundings, the central encounter – which touches on broken friendships, Thomas Mann, coming out of the closet, boys, and the grim necessity of continuing to write – still registers as moving and true. It has, of course, a history behind it: The Habit of Art takes off from Bennett's earlier work both in its preoccupations and in its casting (Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour). It's not a sequel to The History Boys, which since it triumphed at the National five years ago has spun across the Atlantic and into celluloid. Still, there are notable overlaps: the teacher who fumbled his pupils was looked on with indulgence in that play; here, faced with Britten's sexual primness as he composes Death in Venice, Auden suggests that some sexual liaisons between older men and boys might be better called not corruption but collaboration. Oxford (which National theatre audiences will know is not a town but a university) looms large. And the difficulty of being a writer's biographer was first floated by Bennett more than 20 years ago in Kafka's Dick.
Actually, though, the lure of a Bennett play doesn't lie in historical themes; it comes from sentences, riffs and free-standing blasts. Audiences go to hear not just his voice, ventriloquised through his characters, but his views. Bennett has just as many arguments and ideas as David Hare, though they aren't honed and sequential. The structure is precarious, sometimes ramshackle as it skips from scene to scene. But that ricketiness ceases to matter when it is engulfed by a tsunami of jokes, a tidal wave of argumentative statements, a gorgeous gust of opinion.
Which attracts first-rate performances. Stephen Wight as the rent boy for one. And Frances de la Tour for the other. As the stage manager who has to run the show, her nonchalant, sceptical intelligence rolls through the play, as it did in The History Boys. She can suggest without saying a word both determination and depression. She does so with a drop in her mellifluousness, but also with a slight curve of her long spine: she bends as if she's just been socked in the back with some slightly familiar bit of bad news. No one has ever made "Love you" sound so completely lowering. No one has ever made lowering sound so funny.
The Physiology of Taste – Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat–Savarin | Book review
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This 1825 account of one man's passionate relationship with food remains an appetising read, says Mary Fitzgerald
Since its completion in 1825, this handbook has appeared in so many different guises – from 1889's Gastronomy as a Fine Art to The Philosopher in the Kitchen in 1970 – that much of its wisdom has become idiomatic. Brillat-Savarin was, for example, the first to coin the phrase: "You are what you eat" – item four in a long list of "Aphorisms of the Professor" intended as "a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy". In fact, Brillat was no professor, but a judge who often worked on his magnum opus while presiding in court. His life (1755-1826) spanned perhaps the most turbulent period of France's history. As Bill Buford writes in the introduction, he was "witness to what France no longer is and what it was about to become – especially in the way it thought about food". It would be hard to place this book, which meanders from ruminations on the "inconveniences of obesity" to the philosophical history of cooking, in any one genre; it is perhaps best characterised as an intimate account of a man's passionate relationship with food. "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star," Brillat insists and furthermore: "The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves." His pronouncements are both serious and self-parodying, often lascivious ("A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye") and, in this volume, amplified by the playful, wise commentary of MFK Fisher, who translated the text in 1949. "I could be accused, I know, of letting my pen run away with me," Brillat acknowledges. But the result is certainly appetising.
V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries
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Donatello was the first genius of the Renaissance, but his raw, expressive work also challenges all our assumptions about the period. He is justly the star of the V&A's triumphant new galleries
The Ricordanze of Giovanni Chellini da San Miniato are terse little comments, on the whole. It was the custom for men of substance in Renaissance Florence to keep a kind of economic diary, mostly a record of debits and credits, of dowries paid and daughters married off. Some of these manuscripts break out of genre to become personal, but Chellini's is pretty matter of fact. It takes an earthquake to get this medical man excited; that, or Donatello.
"I record . . . that a terrible earthquake visited Florence", he writes breathlessly one day, telling how people went in their panic to the church of the Santissima Annunziata, the city's holiest shrine. A few years later he's shaken again, this time by joy, at a very special gift from a celebrity patient: "I record that on 27 August 1456, when I was treating Donato, called Donatello, the singular and leading master of making statues of bronze and wood and terracotta . . . in his kindness and for my effective treatment of his illness, he gave me a tondo the size of a plate."
You can see why the doctor was so excited, looking at Donatello's gift in the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A. It was a masterpiece. Donatello deliberately makes the Virgin Mary too tall for the little circle that holds her. She bends her head down toward Christ, but this is essential because if she straightened up she'd bump her head on the top of the roundel; a structure in front of her stresses enclosure, two angels prevent sideways movement. It is a compressed image of maternal love: Donatello contrives a sense of claustrophobia to convey the most intimate of human bonds.
Chellini's record of his gift from a famous patient is a rare glimpse into the real world of art nearly a century before Vasari came along to write up the lives of Italian artists. It reveals that in Florence by the 1450s, artists were stars. Donatello could pay his bills with art. But this isn't what matters. What matters is the emotion it exposes. Chellini seems touched by Donatello's "cortesia", and a little surprised. And what comes to us down the centuries is the passionate personality of this artist. The roundel was probably something he already had in his workshop – it is made so you can cast glass replicas from its reverse, and he had perhaps already done that. But it was a beautiful, special thing. He picked it up that day impulsively and gave it to Chellini, who struggled to make sense of the generosity – it must have been down to the "merit" of his medicine, he supposed.
This marvellous gift is all of a piece with the tempestuous personality and art of Donatello, the first expressionist. Nearly 500 years before Van Gogh equated art and emotion, Donatello was making art that rejects beauty in favour of emotional truth. You see it in the willed awkwardness of Mary's posture in the Chellini roundel, bending down to fit in the picture, where a conventional artist would have scaled her down to leave space between her and the edge. The love between her and her child is squashed into the image, something vast held in a small bronze. What could be further from the clichéd modern idea that Renaissance art is all about harmony, beauty and grace?
Paradoxically, however, Donatello did as much as anyone to invent Renaissance art. He started something that was still being worked out long after his death in the art of Titian and Tintoretto. That is why he is the star of the great new galleries of Renaissance art that are about to open at the V&A.
The bronze becomes even more moving when you set it alongside the portrait bust of the same Giovanni Chellini that Antonio Rossellino carved in the year Donatello made his gift, 1456, when the doctor was 84. You can do that in South Kensington because, remarkably, both works are owned by the V&A. This museum quite simply has the best collection of three-dimensional Renaissance art outside Italy. Other museums – the Louvre, the Met in New York – have their Renaissance marvels but you'd have to go to Florence to find a more first-rate, more intimate collection of 15th- and 16th-century Italian objects than the V&A's. Giambologna's towering sculpture of Samson Slaying a Philistine – a violent masterpiece in the same league as his Rape of the Sabines, which stands under the Loggia of the Signoria in Florence – and a bronze trial piece for the snake-haired head of Medusa made by Cellini when he was casting his Perseus for that same place make this a collection that goes to the heart of its subject. For a long time the grandeur of the Renaissance collection was hidden by dowdy presentation, but now it is to hold court in triumphant new galleries. New rooms dedicated to medieval art suddenly open out into the light and space of the new age that started in Italy in the early 1400s in a soaring hall with brightly painted sculptures by the Della Robbia family, austere tombs, a working fountain, even an equestrian monument – it's an indoor piazza leading to more intimate spaces where a Leonardo da Vinci notebook will be on display among all the bronze satyrs, opulent tapestries, ceramics and frescos.
While the museum's Leonardo manuscript is incorporated in its displays of the Renaissance world, Donatello is given a special suite. That is only right, because he was the first genius of this art movement – one of its founders, and the most soulful of them.
There's a danger in abundance. The V&A owns an unrivalled host of luxury early modern objects, and not just Italian ones – there are plenty of silver grotesques from Nuremberg, too. This feeds a current academic fashion to see the Renaissance as above all a consumerist splurge. It was the first consumer society, we're told, with rich merchants spending their cash on sweetmeat trays and gilded gods: we should see these as evidence of lifestyle choices, not high art. The catalogue for these new galleries is subtitled "People and Possessions".
I'd prefer "People and Art" because, in the end, what's amazing about all these objects is not that people spent money on stuff. They always do that. The Medici and the Rucellai and the Strozzi in 15th-century Florence could have bought trash. But in fact they sponsored a cultural revolution, a renewal of imagination, an explosion of experiment. That is why it's only right that Donatello gets a special place in these galleries. He reminds us that the Renaissance wasn't just about marriage chests; it was about genius.
Donatello's career is a constellation of firsts. He created the first perspective picture in a relief carved beneath his statue of St George in a street tabernacle in Florence in about 1417. A few years later he brought perspective to perfection in his relief of The Feast of Herod on the font in Siena's baptistry. He also created the first free-standing nude statue since antiquity, his bronze David. He was part of an avant garde group who saw themselves as renewing art. The group's spokesman, Leon Battista Alberti, wrote to their mutual friend Filippo Brunelleschi, architect of Florence's cathedral dome, expressing his joy that, just when he thought the miracles of the ancient world would never be repeated, "I recognised in many, but above all in you, Filippo, and in our great friend the sculptor Donatello . . . a genius in no way inferior to any of the ancients who gained fame in these arts."
The Renaissance was a conscious attempt to resurrect the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome. It started in Florence, where intellectuals translated Plato and rediscovered the works of Lucretius and Tacitus – and where Donatello and his circle began to emulate and even compete with the classical remains in which Italy is so rich.
The Renaissance is born in Donatello's works. In his early marble figure of David, the sinuous, eccentric lines of gothic carving, soon to be dismissed in Italy as barbarous, are still visible – the body curves weirdly and David is clothed, typically for medieval art but in a way that would soon be anathema to classicising Italians, in carved skins. As if in a textbook demonstration of change, Donatello later returned to the theme of this biblical hero to create what is essentially the first true Renaissance statue: his bronze David, erect, naked except for ornate armoured legwear and a tilted hat, hand on hip, explicitly rivalling all the statues of naked young men that survive from ancient Rome. But Donatello's art explodes every assumption we have about the Renaissance.
At the V&A you can see not only his marble relief of the assumption and his Chellini gift but also – thanks to those wacky Victorians who created this museum's unique Cast Courts, with their full-scale replicas of sculpture and architecture – copies of his large-scale masterpieces in Florence. Above all it's worth looking at the V&A's cast of his cantoria, a gallery created for Florence cathedral whose original is today in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in the city where it was made. Here you can see what is so original about the way he responded to classical models. The shape of the cantoria – a rectangular box – resembles a Roman sarcophagus, and Donatello makes its classical quality explicit by decorating it with ranks of repeated ornament. But between the columns there's an explosion of life – lots of naked children running about wildly, as if bursting out of the controlling frame. Donatello doesn't find calm in classical art – he finds drama. The very strength of the classical frame is a means to energise the figures, to show them erupting from their confines. The cantoria is like a burst of trumpets.
Look at his nude David, and the tension is multiplied. The nude had been lost to European art for a thousand years for a reason – it was seen as devilish. Christianity associated nude statues with the devil: on a stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral, Christ leads pagans away from a blue statue of a pagan god that is simultaneously a classical nude and an image of the devil. When a classical Venus was dug up in Siena, the crowd destroyed it as a thing of evil.
Donatello made his nude to stand in the courtyard of the Medici palace, protected from the common herd, to be understood by the intelligentsia who saw that nude Greco-Roman statues unveiled the body's true beauty. But it is not complacent. It is provocative. The sensationalism of his bronze David is still vivid more than 500 years after it was made. He emphasises the youth's shiny buttocks, deploys the helmet and leggings as fashion objects to accentuate David's nakedness – like Renaissance lingerie. Why would an artist making the first nude statue in centuries deliberately draw attention to its dangerous sexy qualities? He doesn't want blandly to posit the nude as fine art. He openly associates it with carnal desire. His image of a body makes us aware of our own.
This brings us back to the gift that the sculptor, in old age, gave his doctor. The creator of beautiful bodies now had an old, sick body. After a lifetime's creation that took him to Siena and to Padua to spread the Renaissance message, Donatello came back in the 1450s to Florence. There's one obvious fact about the roundel he gave to Chellini – he was grateful because Chellini healed him. In other words, his health was poor, his body fraught, and this shows mightily in his late art. In 1456, when he was treated by the doctor, Donatello was about 70 and had a decade to live. It was a decade of agony, or so Donatello tells us in his art. If Chellini healed him, it was only temporarily. Whatever was wrong, it seems to have eaten at his imagination. His art is always highly expressive. In his last years it becomes nightmarish.
This is true of his Judith and Holofernes in Florence, with its dark vision of a cowled woman about to behead a drugged man, a statue that stuck in the throat of Florence, to paraphrase a poem about public art by Robert Lowell: at once admired and feared. It is true of his painted wooden statue of an emaciated Mary Magdalene, her once beautiful flesh scorched and withered. And it is true of what is, for me, the V&A's greatest work by Donatello. Many would say this is his marble relief of the assumption, which uses the same revolutionary technique as his relief of St George and the dragon. The gathered disciples have cavernous faces, Leonardesque faces. And yet, the work that most holds and startles me here is another, less perfected piece – his late Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, a wild silhouette of grieving bodies.
The people mourning a Christ whose face seems based on the Turin shroud are waving their arms, clutching their faces, running they don't know where. Realism becomes surrealism, as long hair like matted rope flows and tangles in shapes that have nothing to do with observation, and everything to do with giving shape to emotion. Picasso, centuries later, would portray a weeping woman whose tear nurtures a butterfly. Donatello creates a scene that seems to have taken shape from tears. But he does not have Picasso's optimism. This is a scream of despair – an acrid refusal to be consoled. To emphasise its rawness, he didn't polish it, preferring to leave it in the rough.
It might be tempting to say that Donatello has somehow "abandoned" the Renaissance in this work – that in his macabre late sculptures he repudiates the poise and grace of classical art and returns to a medieval gloom. This would be a misunderstanding. There's as much classicism in the Lamentation as in any of his works – in fact, the figures, especially those at the upper right, refer directly to Roman scenes of grieving he saw on sarcophagi.
We have got the Renaissance wrong. We think it's about beautiful Madonnas, lovely objets d'art, and a smooth classical harmony. But we're confusing it with the later, completely antithetical classical revival in the 18th century. Look, in the V&A, at Canova's 18th-century neoclassical marble of Theseus defeating the Minotaur: now there is smooth, untroubled, rational classicism crushing the irrational – easily, beneath its chilly foot. The Renaissance is the opposite. It is about energy and life, and the idea of reason triumphing over feeling would have puzzled Donatello as much as it would have startled the crazed, impulsive rulers of the age, such as Henry VIII or Cesare Borgia.
Renaissance art is not just a thing of beauty, but of self-expression. It is strange, it is disconcerting, it is all the things we, today, want art to be. You can see that in Donatello and throughout these wonderful new galleries.
The Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A open on 2 December. Tel: 020 7942 2000.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet
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In the fourth of a series of Q&As with the shortlisted authors, Reif Larsen discusses his novel
What moved you to write an illustrated account of a child prodigy's adventuresome life?
This book, like most creations, grew in fits and starts. Maybe some writers already have the master plan for their Bildungsroman before they even punch their first keystroke, but I certainly didn't – I wandered, lost in the jungle for a long time before I struck upon the particular strange alchemy of this book. First it was finding the voice of TS, which I circled around like a blind dog. TS was originally drunk and 50 and in prison. After a while, I found this was not right at all: he was actually 12 and stuck on this ranch in Montana. The illustrations only came much later, when I had almost completed a full draft of the book and realised that they must be there to shine the torch into the darkness of his mind.
Was it your first attempt at writing?
God, no. My mind works by twisting up stories out of pieces of twine and glue and feathers. Like most young writers, I started out by writing short stories, but these are actually much harder to write than novels. It's difficult for a young writer to know what not to say, and the unspoken forms the spinal cord of the short story in particular. Spivet was my first crack at a novel, and as soon as I was inside the project I felt like I could breathe again; the corset was off; I could follow various rabbit holes (or worm holes) and see where they led me.
What came first in the novel?
I would like to say the voice of the character, but as I mentioned above, there was some revisional hopscotch before this clicked into gear. Maybe I really began with the lurking sense that I wanted to investigate the cowboy as archetype – why this figure has endured in the American dreamscape for so long. I had been working on a documentary about Crawford, Texas, with a friend of mine and encountered a real, live, modern-day bronc-buster; I was struck by the clash of old and new, the articulacy and self-awareness of the man. American myths always have had this meta-gesture imbedded within them: they are conscious of themselves as myths.
What were the hardest bits?
The endless revision, the shaving of words, commas, passages, knowing when the soup is cooked but not too much so that the carrots are soggy. This process never gets easy, I suspect. Emma's back story was also technically challenging to get right because multiple balls were in the air, character-wise.
How did you research the novel?
There was a lot of research for the book: about the history of science in America, westerns, beetles, horse tack, dolphins, the bones of the hand, geese migration, cartographic instruments, love. A novelist's particular brand of research is peripheral and always surprising, since you're never quite sure what you're looking for. The ladies of the Butte archive thought me strange in that I couldn't tell them exactly what I wanted to find, just the feel of a place, really, which always manifests in tiny details: the name of a slain miner, the technology of street lamps, a thumb-smudged photograph of an Irish slum. These bits and bobs begin to form the hidden tapestry that becomes the world of your book.
How did it come to be published?
Well, I laid the book out almost exactly as you see it now, and I knew this was a risk because obviously publishers are not used to seeing a book designed as such, but I knew it was a risk I had to take because the layout was critical to the narrative scope of the book. I was very lucky to find several people interested in the project. A lot of this is due to a terrific agent. Also, I drugged everyone that I met.
What are you most pleased with?
It's been amazing to meet readers from all over the place who have had very personal and moving reactions to the book, and many of them quite different from one another. It's been quite cool to watch the book slowly spread like a (benevolent) virus of diagrams and hoboing.
Who are your literary models?
If you are asking which writers I love and admire, then I would have to say: Conrad, Melville, Bruno Schulz, García Márquez, Nabokov, Borges. If you are asking for models for this particular book, this is more difficult. But certainly medieval illuminated manuscripts were influential, Holling C Holling's work, Nicholson Baker, and various flight safety cards that you find in the back of airplane seats.
Listen to Reif Larsen discuss his novel at guardian.co.uk/books/guardianfirstbookaward
Ten of the best: teachers
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Abelard
Abelard was a brilliant early-medieval theologian and rhetorician who agreed to take on Héloïse as a pupil. The two began an affair, and when it was discovered, she was sent to a nunnery and he was castrated. The story has often been retold, notably by Alexander Pope. "From lips like those what precept failed to move? Too soon they taught me 'twas no sin to love."
Holofernes
The schoolmaster in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost is a loquacious pedant whose version of English boasts itself "full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion". No pupil can have understood him.
Thwackum
The eponymous hero of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is adopted by Squire Allworthy, who is obtuse enough to hire a man called "Thwackum" to educate him. Thwackum is a clergyman who "maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity" and "whose meditations were full of birch".
Mr Squeers
In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens put a psychopath in charge of the classroom. Up in dark, cold Yorkshire, one-eyed sadist Wackford Squeers presides over Dotheboys Hall, where parents dispose of children, and where Nicholas gets a job. Squeers thrashes them and Mrs Squeers feeds them brimstone and treacle.
Lucy Snowe
The heroine of Charlotte Brontë's last novel, Villette, finds employment teaching in a private girls' boarding school in Belgium. Plain and brainy, she's scornful of the silly, rich girls she has to teach. The school hums with sexual tension, and Lucy falls for first the school doctor, then a teacher.
Anne Shirley
She was once "Anne of Green Gables", but in LM Montgomery's sequel, she has become "Anne of Avonlea", a teenage teacher at Avonlea School. The awkward orphan has become attractive and accomplished, and teaching is the appropriate occupation for such a high-aspiring girl. Naturally, her former foe, Gilbert Blythe, also becomes a teacher.
Paul Pennyfeather
Sent down from Oxford after being debagged by hoorays in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, what can Paul do? Become a prep-school teacher, of course. He finds himself at a school in Wales staffed by misfits, criminals and drunkards. At sports day, the wig-wearing Mr Prendergast shoots a pupil, Lord Tangent, with the starting pistol.
Quelch
Greyfriars schoolboy Billy Bunter may be cowardly, selfish, lazy, dishonest, and irredeemably greedy, but he wins your allegiance by having (and often failing) to dodge the cane of Mr Quelch. While keen on corporal punishment, however, Quelch is himself not unsympathetic, being merely a scholarly man frustrated by his pupils' ignorance.
Miss Jean Brodie
Based on one of Muriel Spark's own teachers, Jean Brodie is dangerously charismatic. She talks of being in her "prime", and captures the spirits of a few chosen girls at a posh Edinburgh girls' school. She tells them about art and Italy, but her lessons often allow her to express her admiration for Mussolini's fascists.
Hector
The eccentric English teacher in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys wins the allegiance of his pupils at a Sheffield grammar school with his disregard for "best practice". He conveys his love of Housman and Hardy, but also likes the contact of a young chap riding pillion on his motorbike. JM
Tony Williams debut poetry collection | Book review
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Frances Leviston is charmed by a vision of northern England in a debut collection
"O collapser of delicate moods and arch lyrical poignancies! / damper of youthful enthusiasms! / user of out-of-date prophylactic sheaths!" The target of this vatic homage is the mostly fictitious Julian Metcalfe, a "lecherous old time-travelling scoundrel", object of equal parts disgust and fascination, and presiding spirit of Tony Williams's first collection, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Metcalfe's portrait ransacks history for all the trappings of the quintessential English rogue, from misadventures in the far east to open defiance of PC protocol: "putter of brown glass / into green bottle banks!" This sort of avid collection and juxtaposition of ideas continues throughout the book, presenting us with a vision of northern England, Derbyshire and Sheffield in particular, that feels totally contemporary, but not reductively so. By layering cultural references and registers like sediment, a deep, imaginative landscape appears, industrial and feudal, suburban and gone to seed, where doggers and spliffs and curates and cribbage-games meet. Indeed, when we read of "The Corrugated Soul" that "it isn't so much a gestalt / as a mere aggregate – / specifically, a pile of aggregate / turning moss-green under an oily rag", it might just as well refer to the notions of Englishness the book sets out to explore.
Williams writes mostly free verse, but shaped with impressive formal dexterity, the kind that can turn bitchy Pope-ish couplets without sounding stiff, and a strong, studied feeling for the rhythmic integrity of the line. The authoritative poems that result from this are often expressly put to the task of undermining or dismantling their own power: Williams is both the serious poet and the drunken heckler in the crowd. At its most crude, this makes for a couplet such as, "Remember when we watched the sun go down in the Gulf of Tunis? / That was before my conviction for sexual assault." Clearly, this plays the punctured "moment" for laughs, but Williams's fooling of our lyric expectations has a more serious agenda, too. Slipping in and out of the bloodier parts of English history – as when a strawberry conjures a stream of violent images from the reign of Henry VIII, or a parkland lime "hides the idea of Charles I in its huge bole" – his poems insist that conflicts of state are embedded in the country itself, and in the memories of its people; thus, a row of golden-leaved trees become "bursts of lost stars or gunfire / lighting up a frontier sides still care about".
This keen awareness of civic power marks Williams out as a decidedly public poet and perhaps explains his interest in revitalising pastoral and country-house poems, as well as his sense of humour. "Great Edwardian", a portrait of an English gent taken just before the wind changed, captures with brilliant economy the sordid little demesne:
A cock-pheasant on the steaming
muckheap:
Prospero admiring all. Those deep
inks,
the bludgeoned, sexual midnight
and a pope's
vermillion, are his interiors. He
stands,
coat-tails trembling in the breeze,
and smokes
and gazes out across the wooded
sea.
The comparison with Prospero is perfect, showing the cultural arrogance of the man while also acknowledging his power. In this context, the ability to laugh at yourself, to undermine your own authority, begins to seem like a safeguard against corruption.
Just as Williams's poems resist the usual lyric formulae, so they resist our attempts to understand them by the usual means. In "The Carp", his cousin appears at his bedside with two fish on a plate, one of them a trout and the other "more medieval but less good to eat . . . something unspeakable for us to share". The exact nature of this gift or the bond it implies remains obscure, but the sense of distaste and complicity is palpable enough. Similarly, in "The Vile Organ", a disturbing poem set in tsarist Russia, boastful Rebrakov comes to a society party with a human eye in a box. The eye fascinates everyone who sees it, but it won't be made to stand for anything other than itself. The significance we give to it belongs to us, just as the blow that separated eye from owner belongs to Rebrakov and the world from which he comes.
Poised on the edge of revolution, "The Vile Organ" marks one of many calms before the storm. Williams is ever alert to the wildness and decay that are waiting to rush back in and reclaim what is rightfully theirs, as in the excellent title poem, which ends with a vision of "Nowhere breaking loose". For middle-class paranoids in search of what Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion", this is terrifying. But alongside that something-in-the-woodshed feeling comes a strange contentment. Compared to a politicised mansion house, the humble garden shed is a place of safety, a retreat from the demands of the all-singing, all-dancing world, where gentle, amateur pursuits such as knocking together a table or brewing your own beer happily serve no purpose. Williams is giving us a glimpse of a different kind of Prospero, on a different kind of island. As "In Praise of Tinkering" puts it, "true alchemy's the will to make / a stilled self and a plume of smoke". Likewise, from all our cultural loam and junk, Williams has made real magic.
Frances Leviston's Public Dream is published by Picador.
The Good Parents by Joan London | Book review
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Clare Clark on a tangled family web
Maya de Jong, an 18-year-old girl from small-town western Australia, moves to Melbourne. There she tentatively embraces her adult self, renting a room in the house of an experimental film-maker and embarking on an affair with her boss. She cannot imagine what her backwoods parents will make of her new life when they visit. But when Toni and Jacob arrive, Maya is gone. Her message says only that she has gone on a business trip. She does not know when she will be back.
The scene may seem set for a pacy thriller, but the novel that follows is anything but. While Maya's absence alarms her parents, it is not, as Toni quickly discovers, a matter for the police. Maya after all is a consenting adult, free to make her own choices and set the course of her own life. There is nothing her parents can do but wait for her to come back. But, far from home, denied the comforting structure of routine and trapped by their enforced helplessness, both fall to questioning the choices that have shaped their own lives.
At first Toni and Jacob appear as unworldly as Maya believes them to be. But, as their stories develop, Joan London peels away their protective skins to expose layers of complexity and contradiction. Both have themselves rejected the conventions of their own upbringings. The young Toni, to the horror of her resolutely bourgeois parents, became involved with a notorious racketeer, while Jacob, left by his dressmaker mother to bring himself up, sought comfort in the fraternity of a hippy commune. Neither can explain exactly how or why they made the decisions that they did and it is only with many years' distance that either can begin to understand the significance of those decisions. As Toni observes at one point, "you go so lightly and then it defines the rest of your life".
The Good Parents examines how as young adults we seek to make our own lives, cutting ourselves out of the family narrative only to repeat patterns already traced by our parents. As Toni and Jacob's stories grow, they encompass an ever-expanding cast of characters, each caught in their own tangled family web. It is testament to London's skill as a storyteller that she not only contrives to control what might, in lesser hands, become a sprawl of diffuse ramblings, but that almost every one of her characters is fully and compellingly realised.
As the narrative spreads across Australia, she evokes place with a similar vivid precision. In her lyrical prose landscapes and buildings, even rocks and trees, have an almost human quality; a lonely bungalow "sat with its back turned" to the road, while a teenager's room with its "artery of wires" is the heart of a house. Her characters are formed at least as much by place as by genetic imperative. Almost all of them are trying, in one way or another, to escape; those who come back must accept the responsibilities that come with being rescued.
The novel is not without its flaws. Some plot devices are unconvincing, in particular the re-emergence of one character in the guise of guardian angel. Teenage Maya never quite shakes off the opacity of the novel's opening pages and remains too much the composite of other people's points of view. But these shortcomings are more than compensated for by London's gentle acuity and the compassion with which she dissects her characters and brings them, if not to redemption, then at least to something approaching self-knowledge.
Towards the end of the novel, unable to comfort each other, Toni retreats to an ashram, while Jacob consoles himself with an almost-affair. Caught up in the painstaking and self-absorbed process of deconstructing their lives, they almost forget how to put the pieces back together again. It is a curious warning from London, herself so meticulous a practitioner of human analysis, but such ambivalence is typical of this subtle, tender novel, a hymn to holding the precious close and to letting it go.
Clare Clark's The Nature of Monsters is published by Penguin.
