Advent 24 Canon

When you stop to think about it, reading is one of man's many remarkable skills, arguably the greatest. The act of writing gives words a portion of permanence and the reading of that script allows reception and adaptation to mediate the text. Reading is a singular experience - yet it opens up to communal reception. It is in that context that compiling this year's Advent calendar has been a privilege. Not all of the books reviewed have been of the first rank but even the feeblest of them has provoked thought and added to my sum of knowledge.

A year in which you read The Leopard and Behind the Scenes at the Museum can be nothing but a good one. These are remarkable novels. It is then all the more notable that neither of those offerings is quite the best thing I have read this year. That accolade belongs to a book I had been running scared of for too long. Booker Prize winners can disappoint and Midnight's Children is probably the most trumpeted of those victors. It is a six-hundred page slab of a book, a size that can be forbidding. If you have not read it yet, don't delay any longer. For once the back-cover blurb is right, quoting the New York Review of Books, 'One of the most important books to have come out of the English-speaking world in this generation'. This is a generous, mordant, uplifting and magical history of the miracle that is modern India. It defies easy definition.

So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. 

That is it for another year. It has been a blast. Happy Christmas and may your god go with you. 

 

    

Advent 23 Fiction

Just occasionally you come across a novel that achieves that metaphorical feat of blowing your socks off. Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum is one such. It is brilliant. That it was a first novel defies belief. Simply staggering - not just one of the the best novels I have read this year but one of the best I have ever read.

A modern (and better?) stylistic cousin to Tristram Shandy, the digressive narrative is carried along with winning skill. Its penultimate paragraph builds to a philosophical crescendo with one of those sentences you just wish you had conceived yourself:

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Tomorrow we reach the crescendo of this calendar. Given how I have raved about Advent 23, you may (correctly) judge that you are in for a real treat tomorrow. 

Advent 22 Non-Fiction

I started this Advent thread with the shameless promotion of my own thesis. But now Christmas Day is hard upon us and it is time for the really good stuff. Concise, provocative and eminently readable, Kenneth Minogue's Politics: a Very Short Introduction is the best non-fiction book I have read this year. Period.

 

I quote at length Minogue's explanation of how constitutions function. My thesis (at greater length and far less ably) tries to touch on these matters. As you read the brilliant paragraph below, just imagine trying to explain it to the closed mind of the Donald. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The set of offices by which a polis was governed, and the laws specifying their relation, are the constitution. Government without a constitution would lack the very kind of moral limitation which distinguishes politics. Constitutions function in two essential ways: they circumscribe the powers of the office-holders, and as a result they create a predictable (though not rigid and fixed) world in which the citizens may conduct their lives. It is constitutions which give form to politics, and the study of them led to the emergence of political science. 

Advent 21 Canon

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was an Italian nobleman who lived the life of a literary dilettante. He published nothing in his life but left behind his sole completed novel (though even that was accompanied by additional fragments) The Leopard. It stands for some critics as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It is a superb evocation of the death of a particular kind of nobility.

I cannot recommend this book too highly. That it is not the best book I have read this year is merely an indication of how fortuitous I have been on my journey. I read it in the Vintage edition, translation from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and replete with foreword and afterword that help open up this great literary achievement. I choose one of the gentle elucidations of the dwindling status of an aristocracy to illustrate the precision of the novel's analysis. All you need to know is that Donnafugata is a place:

And he added, turning to the others, "And after dinner, at nine o'clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends." For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never would he have issued so cordial an invitation: and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige. 

Advent 20 Fiction

If pressed (go on, press me) I confirm I would describe the late John le Carre's spy fiction as canonical, most particularly The Spy who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and A Perfect Spy. These are brilliant literary novels that evoke an underworld born of the dangerous times in which I grew up. Le Carre's later, post-cold-war novels I find a little overwrought and marginally too polemical. That is probably just me.

Nick Harkaway is le Carre's son and a very accomplished writer (this is an understatement) and he doubtless comprehended the dangers in penning a novel that fills in the gap in the dramatic timeline between The Spy who Came in, and Tinker Tailor. Karla's Choice is that book and Harkaway succeeds supremely - the three novels now stand as a captivating trilogy. I will not run any spoilers in case you have yet to encounter le Carre's (and now Harkaway's) George Smiley. I envy you the journey. For those of you who are already acquainted with Smiley, I hope the following description of this most unlikely super-spy will reassure you how well Harkaway has inhabited his leading character:

Without  a tie and with several pairs of spectacles distributed around his reading-room lair, you might have taken him for anything from a schoolmaster recovering after the term time's excessive use of restorative alcohol to a bibliophile ticket collector newly pensioned from the Cornish Riviera Express. 

  

    

Advent 19 Non-Fiction

I have to admit that even reading books that I rate can sometimes feel like a chore. It is probably a fault in my mental disposition. I like reading but sometimes it is just easier to switch on the tele and watch one of my precious documentaries. Alan Bennett's Writing Home presents no such problem. It positively flows off the page and swims in your mind. It is witty, urbane and highly educated, a collection of essays, diaries and prefaces.  

I must confess that I have carried a mild and guilty prejudice against Bennett - a prejudice I now judge to be thoroughly wrong and born out of an unseemly jealousy. Bennett gives every impression of wearing his education (a substantial one) lightly. In the past I took this to be a deliberate affectation on his part. I regret that I felt that way. Writing Home is a damned good read. Here is a nice bit of self-effacement from Bennett's diary on 20 August 1988:

Watching Barry Humphries on TV the other night I noticed the band was laughing. It reminded me how when I used to do comedy I never used to make the band laugh. Dudley [Moore] did and Peter [Cook], but not me. And somehow it was another version of not being good at games. 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 5 & 6

Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe directed by Ridley Scott, no wonder American Gangster is such a good film. How had it passed me by for so long? Oh well, rectified now. Watched it at Plas Piggy (where I accidentally found out that the tele-box thing can record) in the company of a nice Italian red - is there any other sort, certainly when exposed to my stray-dog palate. The film seems to be in rotation on Film 4 so if you haven't seen it yet, set aside some time to do so. Some have incorrectly characterised it as the 'Black Godfather'. That is unfair to both films - The Godfather is a better film (but, of course, better than most other movies) and American Gangster is not a mere derivative. A fine take on the warping of the American Dream. 86/100.

Our children are of exactly the right age to have been caught up in the maelstrom of Harry Potter mania. DN1 and DN2 both read the books and I feel no shame in saying that I read them as well. There is some ghastly snobbery about these books but as ripping yarns they know few equals and if they brought a new generation to reading then so much the better. What about the films? Not quite on the same level but they do capture some of the atmosphere and for me they always have a Christmas resonance because I remember the excitement of taking the girls to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on a chill winter's day. This is the first of the eight films and the child acting is patchy but not such as to stop you enjoying it. 64/100.

 

Advent 17 Fiction

Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes. 

Translation is a form of adaptation. Whenever I read a book in translation I am troubled by the thought that something will have been lost in translation. It never occurs to me that something may have been gained. Well, my French is not close to good enough to read Simenon in his native tongue so my introduction to Inspector Maigret is in Nigel Ryan's translation.

Simenon published over four hundred novels. I repeat that - four hundred! Bloody impressive. My Friend Maigret (1949, translation 1956) is a rattling good read and, so far as this uneducated critic is concerned, a laudable translation. It captures a world of instinctive (and occasionally brutish) police work that is long gone.  

Advent 16 Non-Fiction

I love Len Deighton's fictions. He is not, I suppose, canonical in the manner of Le Carre (whose spy fiction I deeply admire) but Deighton has a pace and lack of political pretension that I find enviable. If (and this will never happen I know) I were to teach a course on creative writing I would set my students to read his Game, Set, and Match trilogy as an exemplar for good professional writing.

But today is not about fiction. We are in the non-fiction aisle  of my little library and it is Deighton's excellent account of the Battle of Britain that I want to recommend. Deighton loses none of his stylistic pace and tells the story of an epochal conflict with a commendable freshness. He is not afraid to slay some myths along the way. Fighter is as good as popular history gets. I particularly enjoyed Deighton's pithy evisceration of the reputation of the dreadful Joe Kennedy:

When the election came, Kennedy gave Roosevelt all the support he needed to win. The mystery of his turn-round has never been satisfactorily explained. On the matter of Britain's imminent defeat, Kennedy also changed his mind, but now Britain no longer cared. Robert Vansittart - Halifax's Chief Diplomatic Adviser - wrote, 'Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double-crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of this type.

Now which modern leader does that put you in mind of? Plus ca change .... 

 

Advent 15 Canon

My tentative efforts to address the chasms in my reading have proved fruitful. I came to E.M. Forster with no great expectations. As it turns out I should have turned to him at an earlier time. Where Angels Fear to Tread is a concise, clever and provoking novel. It says much about the nature of prejudice and the daftness of English bourgeois attitudes. It contrasts such attitudes to the looser codes of Italian behaviour, though that is to over-simplify the text. It can be light and comedic which makes the intrusion into the plot of tragedy all the more telling. I quote a quite briliant passage on the allure of Italian cafe society, at least for the male of the species. I'm not sure this is quite what that old romantic Tony Blair had in mind.

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of socialism - that true socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democrarcy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is achieved at the expense of the sisterhood of women.

A guilty part of me might admit that this is a good description of the milieu of the old-fashioned rugby clubhouses I used to frequent. 

 

 

Advent 14 Fiction

I am not an unbiased man but I feel the time has come for me to heap some grudging praise on an Old Edwardian. For those of you not of the cloistered world of the King Edward VI Foundation, an Old Edwardian is an alumnus of King Edward's School Birmingham, a private school of some standing. I am a lesser type of Edwardian (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek like a proper grammar school boy) that is to say an Aston Old Edwardian - state educated to the hilt!

Enough of such drivel and on with the praise. Gavin Lyall is the Old Edwardian in question and the particular novel in focus today is Shooting Script. I have read a few of Lyall's books and this is the best I have yet encountered. It has no pretensions to high literature but is fast-paced (I would say Chandleresque) and concise. Lyall's work attracted praise from the ultimate professional wordsmith P.G. Wodehouse. Praise does not come any higher. Try this for a slab of colour:

I'd cheerfully said I'd 'see' him up in the 24th floor bar, but I'd forgotten the lighting they went in for there: a small frosted-glass lamp parked in front of each drinker. Just enough light to make every woman look beautiful and every bar bill unreadable. A big hotel thinks of such things. 

Advent 13 Non-Fiction

Tall Tales, Test Match Special. Now, let's be clear, I bow to no man (or woman) in my love for Test Match Special, one of the last great remaining pillars of public service broadcasting. But this book of sketches (for that is what it is) is a mildly disappointing hotch-potch of retold favourite stories, and, most criminally, some of those are even repeated within the confines of the text. Badly edited, enjoyable enough but best read when drunk.

Advent 12 Canon

At the last canonical entry on this year's calendar (Advent 9), I made so bold as to compare Trollope and Dickens. I made the insolent (not to mention pseudish) comment that I find Dickens a little de trop. Well today I find myself only three days down the line and having to walk back my prejudice. I have actually read A Christmas Carol. It is, of course, nigh on impossible to come fresh to this text, besieged as we are by any number of adaptations and parodies of it. However I find myself able to say that the original is terrific. 

Dickens is a sentimentalist but a master of the cleverly inserted authorial voice. Take this passage for example where he affectingly draws us in so as to be at his very shoulder as the story unfolds itself. If I were to teach on writing (which thank the lord I do not have to do) I would be very tempted to get my students to excavate this passage for technique and meaning:

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow. 

God Bless Us, Every One! 

Advent 11 Fiction

If he was wrong about the man, it didn't matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else; if he was a look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn't worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche's naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

In matters of fiction, I long ago learned to respect the judgement of one of the best-read men I have known - my late father. He was a man of catholic tastes but he liked a tale that rattled along, preferably with a twist in the tale. Modern(ish) crime and spy fiction fiction fits the bill, Anthony Price most particularly. I have pilfered a few dog-eared Price novels from Dad's shelves (I also got my second-hand-bookshop mania from him) but I found Soldier No More for myself and paid 50p for it. Bargain.

Advent 10 Non-Fiction

Francis Fukuyama may or may not regret having written The End of History? What I would say is that his prognostications under the banner of that title have been wilfully misunderstood, vey often by people who did not trouble to read the text. But that is not my concern today. Instead the slimmer volume, State Building, catches my eye. It was written in 2004 when even the most jaundiced commenatator could surely not have predicted the Trump phenomenon. However Fukuyama's defence of the properly constituted nation state as the bedrock of decency and the rule of law, makes particularly poignant reading as Trump tramples the rule of law underfoot whilst ironically (ironic because his small mind could not fathom the truth) uncovering the importance of the nation state. 

A great deal of both international and national law coming out of Europe consists of what amounts to social policy wish lists that are completely unenforceable. Europenas justify these kinds of laws by saying they are expressions of social objectives. Americans say, correctly in my view, that such unenforceable aspirations undermine the rule of law itself. 

Advent 9 Canon

The irony of that socialist Roy Hattersley being a snob seems to have been lost (as was much else on this undeniably educated man) on the man himself. Hey ho. I remember a television programme celebrating the novels of Anthony Trollope in which the editing had cleverly inserted Hattersley right after an enthusiastic commendation of Trollope by John Major. Hattersley ventured that Trollope was enjoyed by people who didn't really like/understand literature. Now that I have read The Warden, I am afraid that I must confess myself of Major's persuasion. I must also repeat my confession that I find much of Dickens rather de trop. Hey ho.

The Warden is the first of the Barchester novels and I was rather surprised to find it witty, readable and rather enchanting. There is none of Dickens' intricacy and hectoring. Does this make me a bad person - or perhaps a mildly thick one? Hey ho. How about this on the act of writing:

It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines. Or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages and of completing that pleasant task - a novel in one volume.     

Advent 8 Fiction

That Ben Elton's Stark was written the best part of four decades ago is quite staggering. I won't spoil the plot for you but some of its more extreme prognostications are now echoingly pertinent.

Elton's early writing is like his early comedy - noisy, profane and driven by anger. It can at first be unsettling but once you have submitted to the authorial voice, this is an important book. I read it at the same time as I was conquering my fear of Jane Austen (see Advent 6) which made for quite a contrast. I do not share Elton's politics (no shit Sherlock) but I do have to admire his evisceration of the capital markets. Has anyone articulated the true socialist's bafflement better:

And so the house of cards came tumbling down. That fragile global structure behind which we all shelter. A castle, built on shifting sands from little more than faith, hope and greed, came tumbling down with a crash that shook the world. A mighty crash indeed, considering that the castle was not made of anything of any substance. In fact, it was a castle that existed only in the minds of men. Constructed from nothing more solid than the financial pages in newspapers and the blips on a million computer screens. It was not a castle built from iron, or steel, nor cotton, oil or food. It did not fail because there was no more coal left or because all the cows and sheep had died. There was no physical reason for its collapse, because it was made of nothing at all. You couldn't touch it, smell it or climb it, but without its shelter, despite the appalling heat of the southern summer and the mildest ever winter in the north, the world turned suddenly cold. 

 

Advent 7 Non-Fiction

I'll let you in on a very badly kept secret. The bibliography in my doctoral thesis runs to thirty pages. I haven't read every page of everything cited. I know, shocking isn't it. I don't speak for all academics when I say this but my guess would be that I speak for a majority. The way things work is that your first port of call when faced with a learned text is the index to check for direct references to the item you are researching. This is only the same as the way one uses legal texts when advising on a topic. It's not cheating.

Anyway, I mention all of this because as part of my reading this year I pulled a critical text off the dusty shelf and read it from start to finish. The lucky text was Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: an Introduction. This one doesn't get a mention in the aforementioned thesis, rather it was acquired for a module on the degree course. It's surprisingly readable if a little on the dry side. I was going to quote a pseudish passage about homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, but that sort of thing is too easy a target for the cynical. Oh and we should say that Armitt has a point about Tolkien. No, here is a nice take on how fantasy fiction justifies its place in Genre Studies and the wider world of literary criticism:

There is no more pertinent or influential question in the current field of fantasy than the question of the role genre plays in it. We have established fantasy, here, as the type of writing that questions what happens beyond the horizon, but in doing so we remain defined by that boundary, even in the act of crossing it. In effect, the boundary marks the point at which the worlds begin and end - the Primary World versus the Secondary World, the point at which sleep becomes dream. In realism we never reach those boundaries, and so are less conscious of their presence. As a result the realist world gives the illusion of being boundless, but only because we never get the chance to test its limits.       

 

Advent 6 Canon

It says something of both our education system and my own laziness that a man can flaunt a doctorate in English Literature without ever having had the stamina to finish reading a Jane Austen novel. This has been rectified and I will confess that it was at times a chore - Austen is just not my cup of tea. I spent a good part of Sense and Sensibility merely wishing that the worthy Elinor would give her sister Marianne a good slap. 

However it is the way of these things that you get to the very end of a book (Chapter Fifty in this case) and a paragraph leaps off the page and assaults you with its concise beauty. This is writing of luminescence and the journey is worth the toil:

Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again.

Advent 5 Fiction

I would like to have met Kurt Vonnegut. I have raved previously about his masterwork Slaughterhouse 5, and also about the Sky Arts documentary on him - use the search engine at the top of the blog and you'll trace my ravings. Aren't computers clever? And just a tad frightening.

Today we consider Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Definitely one of the best books I have read this year. It is coruscatingly funny yet laden with deadpan tragedy. Its point-of-view is artfully all over the shop. Mesmerising. I will set out a sample below. Those of you paying close attention may trace an echo of another (and on balance slightly lesser) novel mentioned later in this Advent strand.

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.