Literature

The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at least one of them set in the here- and-now, but Palliser’s fifth outing straightaway returns us to the world of creaking lawsuits, high-grade subterfuge and lickerish kitchen-maids in which he made his reputation. In fact the territory occupied by Rustication is so familiar as to make the case-hardened reader of A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and

Colette’s France, by Jane Gilmour – review

Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious output, theatre reviewer, beautician, seducer, the most feline of cat-lovers and, ultimately, garlanded literary lioness. Yet her phoniness should not deter people from reading her books. Although most of her work resembled an imaginary autobiography, it was never self-obsessed or constricting. On the contrary, she used her fictionalised self as the centrepiece of a worldly

What if Byron and the Shelleys had live tweeted from the Villa Diodati?

It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom the married Shelley had eloped two years previously, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress. The weather was terrible that year – so bad they called it ‘the ‘year without a summer’ – and the party spent most of their time indoors, gathered about the fireplace in Lord Byron’s drawing-room. And it was there,

Lose weight the Muriel Spark way

Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from Mrs Hawkins, the heroine of Muriel Spark’s wonderful novel A Far Cry from Kensington. Mrs Hawkins, with her unfortunate ‘Rubens quality of flesh’, only starts to worry about her weight when she gets a new job and notices that all her colleagues suffer from some kind of affliction. These range from stammers to stomach ulcers, pock-marked faces to war-wounds, and so, lying awake one night, she wonders what her own ailment might be. She gets out of bed to look at herself in the mirror: ‘I stood there, massive in my

Elmore Leonard dies aged 87

Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. Leonard began his career as a hack and ended it as a modern master. His rule was: ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. His writing became sparer over the years, perhaps reaching its purest form in Get Shorty, his best known work. His total war on adverbs and adjectives placed all the reader’s focus on his dialogue. Luckily, Leonard understood how speech worked both on the page and in the ear, and he grasped how characters could be developed through dialogue rather than description. This might explain why so many of his stories have been successfully adapted for big and small screens. The Spectator has not reviewed all that many of Leonard’s recent books;

The week in books – Tudors, thinkers, dreamers and boozers

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them. The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins. ‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated

Mind your language: The springs before the Arab Spring

Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able ‘to breathe a second spring’. The phrase second spring was picked up by John Henry Newman, in 1852, to describe the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy under Cardinal Wiseman. This was ‘a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries’, he declared. ‘It is the coming in of a

Would you hide the cover of your book from prying eyes on the Tube?

‘Would you mind if I asked what your book is?’ She was in her late-thirties, with dark hair and a serious demeanour. Her reply to my question took a few seconds to appear, the short period in which a woman assesses whether the man sitting opposite her in a not-very-busy Tube carriage in the middle of the afternoon is or is not a weirdo. ‘Er … why?’ The words revealed a Spanish accent. They were delivered perfectly politely. ‘It’s just that I haven’t seen a book covered like that in ages.’ Since I was at school, in fact. The brown paper, which Ms Jubilee Line had folded into exquisite hospital

Which Ulysses is the most heroic?

From ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson                                     Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic

Summer reading? What about summer re-reading?

What will you read over the summer? The newly announced Booker longlist? A selection of books from newspaper and magazine summer reading lists? A book that a Spectator columnist is taking on holiday? There are so many good new books to read – if not newly published, then at least new to you – and now is a good time to get stuck in. Why not, however, also choose something to re-read this summer? There is something about summer and its particular feeling of stepping off the treadmill and slowing down that makes it ripe for taking the extra time to re-read a book. It’s a good moment to look

Alexander Pope, mock-epic, modernity and misogyny

from The Rape of the Lock And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, Each silver vase in mystic order laid. First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores With head uncovered, the cosmetic powers. A heavenly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears; The inferior priestess, at her altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumbered treasures ope at once, and here The various offerings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil. This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise

‘The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum’ – review of The Dostoevsky Archive by Peter Sekirin

After you decapitate someone, might their severed head continue thinking? Prince Myshkin holds his audience spellbound with this macabre inquiry in The Idiot, a great novel whose author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was once called the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. Each of his great novels concerns a murder (one a parricide); most also touch upon the sickening theme of the rape of a child. The writer Lafcadio Hearn warned that reading him might actually drive you mad: it can certainly invoke pity and terror, embarrassment and laughter. Dostoevsky’s life was even weirder than his fiction. He was born in 1821, the son of a surgeon whom he believed to have been

The 10 “best” historical novels, sort of…

The BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, which began last Sunday, has led numerous books editors to pick their 10 best historical novels. I played this silly dinner party game last year (although I forget the inspiration). And, while admitting that it was nigh on impossible to pick 10, I came up with: J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander Robert Graves’s I Claudius JM Coetzee’s Disgrace Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Pat Barker’s Regeneration Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard There were some

Ben Fountain interview: Lies are an affront to writers because lying is the corruption of language

Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It would appear that it was well worth the wait, as it immediately met with praise, awarded both the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting Award. This success continued when his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was published five years later. In the last six months alone, it has won two awards in America, including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award, and nominated for a further two here in the UK. His short story collection explores America’s

A dream come true

It only took me twelve years as a published writer to get round to seeing one of my own books being printed. But when it came the experience set off all sorts of thoughts about books, how we see them and what their future might be. From the outside, the CPI Mackays factory on a small industrial estate outside Chatham looks just like any other factory. In fact from the inside it looks just like any other factory. Long rows of clean, modern machinery shunt products along the production line, partially hidden at just about every stage by glass-sided covers. It’s only when you peer through those glass sides that

Sheila Heti: ‘I did worry putting sex in the book would eclipse everything else’

There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in the book will have been transformed by art, and isn’t something that comes straight from an author’s imagination more autobiographical, more telling, than things that might have happened to them, anyway? But these serious maxims don’t always quell your desire for real-life incident or gossip. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, subtitled ‘A novel from life,’ had me googling paintings by Margaux Williamson: Heti’s best friend in real life and a character in her book. How Should A

Amateur fantasies and professional realities

As was to be expected, it rained. Drizzle was in the air at times yesterday when the Authors XI turned out to mark 150 years of The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (the latest edition of which the Spectator reviewed here). Sebastian Faulks, Ed Smith and Kamila Shamsie were among the players, all of whom were dressed in Victorian garb and wore joyous grins. The Author’s XI has a book out; an account of their tour recent of England. It is a gently beguiling book, revealing something of life, the writers and, of course, cricket. It’s a perfect match. As Sebastian Faulks puts it in the foreword: ‘Amateur cricketers tend to be vain,

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has

Jane Austen’s pinny

This is the third entry in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the other instalments here. It’s almost two years since the Bodleian celebrated its hard-fought acquisition (nail biting auction) of Jane Austen’s manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons. Thank you again National Heritage Memorial Fund, Friends of the Bodleian, Friends of the National Libraries, Jane Austen Memorial Trust and all supporting Janeites everywhere. Once a manuscript has been fetched into the bosom of the Bodleian, repaired, shelf-marked, and safely housed, it needs to be studied. So it was that at a seminar with Professor Kathryn Sutherland,

Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to