Literature

Critical injuries

A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically. My wife reproved me: ‘What did you do that for? For a fee of a few hundred pounds you have made a dozen entirely gratuitous new enemies. If you don’t have something good to say about books, don’t write about them.’ Honest reviewing would grind to a halt if all its practitioners deferred to her advice. It is nonetheless true that victims of an unfavourable notice seldom forget or forgive. As authors, we commit our souls as well as our bodies. Memories of the most flattering reviews of my own

Another tale of star-crossed lovers

It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts just such a shrine. It celebrates Pan Tadeusz, the verse novel written in his Parisian exile by the poet, dramatist and freedom fighter Adam Mickiewicz in the early 1830s, and now taught as a keystone of collective identity to every Polish schoolchild. Even the idea of a ‘national epic’ sounds like a great big bore, especially as the action of this one turns on a sideshow in the Lithuanian backwoods during the Napoleonic wars, while ‘the wide world ran riot/ In blood and tears’. Certainly, no previous translation has done

Sins of the fathers | 13 December 2018

‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of Owl-Light. Stephen Dedalus puts it differently in Ulysses: ‘A father is a necessary evil.’ But later, he qualifies this: ‘Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ Colm Tóibín has repeatedly squared up to fathers as well as mothers in his own work (a dead father haunts the family in Nora Webster, and fatherhood is a central theme in The Heather Blazing). His new book takes on the theme of fatherhood in relation to three

Adventures with robots

Imagine a world where we’re all hooked to our individual electronic devices, which feed us our music, communicate with our friends and know our needs; imagine a tech company that dominates an entire city, where your social pecking order is reflected in the devices you possess. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. It’s all there already… Apple, Google, Facebook. So Jinxed, by the young Canadian Amy McCulloch (Simon & Schuster, £7.99), is very much of the moment. It’s set in a city in Canada dominated by a tech corporation: ‘The final goal of Moncha Corp is to make life better… And to make people happier.’ Its academy is where every

Impish secrets

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures, White peeped through the foliage with the smile of some demonic faun come to spread ribald chaos in the service of the great god Pan. I remembered that look when, in this patchwork of pieces about his life as a reader, he discloses that a heart attack followed by surgery in 2014 had one weird

Feminist children’s books

A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’, books about the female condition from a feminist perspective. ‘Grit lit is over,’ she says wearily, referring to edgy books about the marginalised. ‘Now publishers can’t get enough of the feminist trend about women who for centuries have been airbrushed out of history by toxic masculinity and oppressive patriarchy. Airbrushing the toxic white male. Female tribes. Modern courtesan. Now it’s draining down into children’s books too.’ It started with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a collection of accounts of inspirational role models; Malala, Maya Angelou et al, which was

Three concepts of freedom

There’s a tiny mistake in Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays. She describes Geoff Dyer’s unimprovably funny ‘trick while introducing an unsmiling J.M. Coetzee at a literary festival’. And it’s a suggestive mistake. The moment she refers to is Dyer, bashful, blurting that he wondered how his younger self would have reacted if he’d one day known he’d be sharing the stage with ‘a Booker prize-winning, South African, Nobel prize-winning novelist’… and then deciding that his younger self would have said: ‘That’s incredible, because Nadine Gordimer is my favourite writer.’ The joke is all the funnier because the camera pans to Coetzee, utterly stony of face as Geoff giggles. (It’s

Books Podcast: Mohsin Hamid

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the award-festooned writer Mohsin Hamid about his latest novel Exit West — touching on the effects of technology, the migrant crisis, political writing and why his eight-year-old daughter is shaping up to be an emo kid. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this, every week.

Cat among the pigeons

Back in 1990, Roald Dahl wrote a book called The Minpins, which was illustrated by Patrick Benson, a very good artist. By now we regard Dahl (when writing for children) to be inescapably linked with Quentin Blake, to the point where any other combination seems fundamentally unsatisfactory, like trying to decouple Goscinny and Uderzo in the Asterix books, or Kenneth Grahame and Ernest Shepard for The Wind in the Willows. The whole is somehow bigger than both halves. So it’s a matter of pure delight that Blake has now illustrated the book (Puffin, £10.99). At a stroke, the atmosphere of the story has changed from menacing to spirited and intrepid.

A h(a)ppy ending for Nicola Barker – a true experimentalist

Nicola Barker has just won the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction with her new novel H(a)ppy. She earned it. If anyone is writing fiction that deserves to be called experimental at the moment (the rubric for the prize is ‘fiction at its most novel’), it’s Nicola Barker. Everything she does, as far as I can tell, is completely original – her work has included medieval jesters, dyspeptic golf pros, Indian mystics, Paraguayan guitarists and David Blaine – and each novel finds its own completely new form. In the case of H(a)ppy, that form is in a constant state of collapse and reinvention – to the extent that certain words in the

How I write

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the authors of literary nonfiction go about their work is interesting. If, as Kingsley Amis argued, most of a writer’s work is the application of the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of the chair, it’s legitimate to ask: what trousers, what chair, sexuality where and when? In my experience the answers are wildly different

A bookseller’s duty

To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you don’t borrow them. But both have a duty to provide books (space and budgets allowing) reflecting a wide range — as wide as possible — of interests, reading tastes, subjects and points of view. Walk into one of either and there are the thoughts and feelings, beliefs and dreams and creations and discoveries of many men and women, and that is part of their never-ending excitement. If you are, say, a Christian bookshop, and advertise yourself as such, or a Middle Eastern bookshop, or a communist or a feminist bookshop,

The classic that conquered the world

Somewhere between his first and second drafts, Victor Hugo decided to change the title of his great novel from Les Misères to Les Misérables, shifting the focus from society’s problems to the people suffering them. And what problems they were. Hugo had never been brutally poor himself, but he’d borne witness to enough brutal poverty around him to know it was real, and to understand what it did to people. He knew, too, how ill-equipped his society was to help the poor, or to fix the causes of their predicament. Not least because in the 1840s, when he started writing Les Misères, only land-owning citizens voted, so as long as

From Balzac to the Beatles

All biography is both an act of homage and a labour of dissection, and all biographers are jealous of their subjects. Most keep it cool, but some like it hot and have created a distinct category in which jealousy becomes murder followed by necromancy: the one they hug is asphyxiated — but lo! — they breathe their own air back into it. Sartre’s book on Jean Genet is such a work, as are Brigid Brophy’s on Ronald Firbank and Roger Lewis’s on Anthony Burgess. Claude Arnaud’s on Jean Cocteau is yet another. Its approach is intensely romantic. Everyone is heaving in lurid colours. Arnaud certainly knows his material; and that

A bit player in the great drama

There’s a glorious scene in Astrid Lindgren’s first Pippi Longstocking book in which her fearless, freckled heroine strides to the centre of a circus ring and briskly lays out the World’s Strongest Man. Like most of the adults who expect to control her, he quickly learns that his inflated size, age and title are no match for the child’s bold pin-wielding attitude. As a little fan myself in the early 1980s I probably giggled as the strongman toppled. But reading it to my own children this summer I also felt a deep lurch of sadness. The strongman’s name was Adolf, and the book (published in 1945) was written as an

Intoxicated with ink

One of the charms and shortcomings of biography is that it makes perfectly normal situations sound extraordinary. According to Michel Winock, Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), the author of Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale, contracted ‘an early and profound aversion to mankind’. To Gustave the schoolboy, man was nothing but a coagulation of ‘mud and shit… equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab-louse’. This might have been the influence of his freethinking father, an eminent Rouen surgeon, but perhaps it was just the spirit of the age. The Napoleonic adventure was over; the sun of Romanticism had set. As Winock reminds us, quoting Alfred de Musset’s Confession

How to understand the human side of a financial crisis: read a book

One of the occupational pleasures, and occasional hazards, of being a financial journalist is the need to keep up with your reading. I’ve consumed a stack of books about the financial crisis and its aftermath, including Michael Lewis’s The Big Short and Vicky Ward’s riveting account of the downfall of Lehman Brothers, Devil’s Casino, notable for its portrayal of the designer clad bankers’ WAGs, whose minutely-observed social hierarchy mirrored the ups and downs of their husband’s careers. (At a City dinner a few years ago I sat next to a former Lehman banker who appeared fairly prominently in the book – to my amusement, he was not remotely mortified but

Five Go Back to Blyton

Six years ago, the publishers Hachette took the well-meaning yet preposterous step of making ‘sensitive text revisions’ to Enid Blyton’s classic Famous Five books. So ‘tinker’ was changed to ‘traveller’, ‘mother and father’ to ‘mum and dad’ and ‘awful swotter’ to ‘bookworm’. The suggestion that tomboy George needed ‘a good spanking’ became ‘a good talking to’, while girly Anne’s assertion, ‘You see, I do like pretty frocks — and I love my dolls — and you can’t do that if you’re a boy’ had its final clause removed, rendering the sentence throwaway rather than poignant. Unsurprisingly, given that all the charm had been stripped out of them, the revised editions

Gale-force lyricism

Centuries before their footballers learned giant-slaying ways, Icelanders knew how to startle the world with tall stories. In the moonscape that birthed Sagas and Eddas, little grew but epic tales. When this novel’s protagonist, the troubled poet-turned-publisher Ari, announces in an interview that he has given up authorship, his aunt Elin sends him a heartbroken letter. To see ‘one of our own’ write books, she writes, ‘made us feel almost as if everything had meaning’. Especially for a restless kid from the black lava fields of Keflavik, ‘this peculiar town situated behind the world’, where nothing happens and ‘it’s just work, just fish, the Yanks and the wind’. Those Yanks

No happy endings

Between agreeing to review this book and receiving it, I got worried. Like many, I adore Doctor Zhivago with its tragic love story between the eponymous doctor-poet and the beautiful Lara, set in post-revolutionary Russia. When in Moscow, I followed the trail of literary pilgrims to Boris Pasternak’s dacha in the writers’ village of Peredelkino. I also had fond memories of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in David Lean’s epic 1965 film; never underestimate the enhancing effect on romance of fur hats, sparkling snow and long-distance trains. Anna Pasternak, the writer’s great niece, is a journalist and Daily Mail columnist who made her name with Princess in Love. This 1995