Writers Write/ Writers Read/ Kill Your Parents

Any of you who have been with me since the start will recognise these three injunctions as the Imperatives of Marchant delivered as with lapidary permanence by my first creative writing tutor.

I have found the first of these difficult to observe of late, rather feeling that what little I have got to say has already been said. As for the second, well I drift in and out of reading - I'm in one of my good phases at present. I alluded to this in my last entry. Since that entry I have completed Waugh's Men at Arms and have saved the next instalment of Sword of Honour for later, treating myself now to an interval of Simon Raven. I have read and re-read his Alms for Oblivion sequence countless times already - first encountering him from the fiction shelves of Erdington library as a teenager, pointed in the direction of this magnificently louche author by my father. To repeat the most oft-used critical estimation: the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel.

So it is that I am a hundred pages into Friends in Low Places, the second novel of the sequence. In my mind I had thought that this was one of the weaker books of the ten. Either I have hitherto been wrong or the whole shebang is even better than I had thought. Entrancing - no that's not quite the bon mot - let's try raucous and compelling, which is two bons mots. Just writing this piece is making me want to get back to read some more.

There is a temptation to read into the fictional mind of Raven's proto-novelist Fielding Gray something of Raven himself:

But what then? Suppose his work found favour with Somerset and his novels were published by Gregory Stern, suppose, even, that they achieved some measure of public esteem, what was to follow? Would there be anything more to say? Could he face the prospect of carrying on indefinitely with such a career? For did not even the two existing manuscripts pose the question, "While this is quite well done, was there ever, in truth, any real reason for doing it?"

I think we can take it as read that Raven himself would not have set much store by the opinion of a jobbing commercial lawyer but for what it's worth Simon old boy, these novels have been important to me. And here is another sample of why - this is the Marquis Canteloupe's reflection on his first meeting with the gruesome Somerset Lloyd-James:

In short, Somerset Lloyd-James would do. That he was manifestly not only a gentleman but also a howling shit did not deter Canteloupe one iota: for one thing, as he reflected, he was a shit himself, and for another he preferred working with them. For the great thing about shits was that they got on with it (provided the price was right) and didn't ask damn silly questions.

Delicious and so so right, as any honest jobbing commercial lawyer will tell you. Mind you, good luck in finding such a tradesman who is both jobbing and honest.

Away from books and outside on the mean streets of Britain, coronavirus continues to hold us in its invisible grasp. The Prime Minister has gone down with it now, not to mention the heir to the throne. The Roberts household is fine thus far and indeed Big Fat Pig is rather relishing the feeling of virtuousness that comes with regular exercise - two runs this week and an outing on the Precious Bike. All of this the Pig reports to you exactly one calendar month away from his sixtieth anniversary.

The mood of the domestic incarceration we are all enduring is no doubt made lighter by the gorgeous Spring weather we are enjoying. When, as it must, rain keeps us from even the sole exercise excursion we are permitted each day, the national mood may darken. As for how people will feel when we finally emerge blinking into the sunlit uplands of normality is a more troubling question - because then we will survey the full wreckage of our economy. But that is for another day.