Recent Reading

Not as good as other books I’ve read by the author. I have the impression he set himself the task of writing a novel a year, or similar, and as a result he ploughed on to get one out as each temporal milestone loomed up, regardless of its quality. Moderately entertaining.

Favourite quotation: “His chronic sense of the perplexing character of the moral universe descended upon him heavily.

Well-written, slightly dated stories set in the nearish past. Possibly the nearish past is the time most likely to seem slightly dated, as it is the period that many readers remember and, in reading it described, they recognise suddenly that it no longer exists. In a way the stories are horror stories, in that they concern a world where there is very little love. The general tenor of the book is faintly melancholic.

Favourite quotation: This isn’t exactly a favourite, but it gives a sense of the book’s tone and the writer’s power of observation - “It was years since he had ridden in a bus. He had forgotten how the seats smelled, made hot by the sun through glass, and the rough white tickets that came whirring out of the machine.”

This began intriguingly but ended up as a bit of agit-prop about why we should be nice to illegal migrants. The idea that people who oppose unrestricted migration need to have it explained to them that illegal migrants are as human as they are is a patronising one. The question of open borders is not about emotions but about the practicality of large numbers of people who don't like aspects of the places where they live abandoning those places and movng to better-run, more orderly places, bringing with them all their cultural differences, unresolved resentments and inflated expectations. Leaving everything else aside, what becomes of the place they leave behind? Is it morally acceptable to give up on somewhere and see whether you can hitch yourself to another nation that has, through centuries of political convulsion and struggle, reached a place of stability and shared vision?

Favourite quotation: If I were to quote a sentence from the book, I’m sorry to say that it would only be to point out that the line editor did not do a careful enough job. Some clunky, ungrammatical lines have been left in, together with some analogies that don’t really work.

This book, an updated version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, has had some terrible reviews, mainly because for some people Jane Austen is an object of worship and therefore it is sacrilege to play around with her work. I find Austen’s authorial voice irritating and therefore am not bothered if someone plays around with her work. I really enjoyed this clever, light hearted book.

Favourite quotation: The book is very light and I am not sure that any one line or paragraph is really worth repeating but I liked the modern twist given to the younger sister's rogue lover.

An extraordinary book about a man’s dedication to obeying God’s will. Highly recommend for those interested in Christianity.

Favourite quotation: “The work of the kingdom, the work of labouring and suffering with Christ, is no more spectacular for the most part than the routine of daily living.”

(I took this at random, where the page fell open - there are plenty of other candidates within the book)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, given that it is whimsical. I went on to read another by the same author, the name of which I have forgotten - something involving lanterns? I am baffled by how much I enjoy the light dreamy atmosphere of Hoffman’s books. They are like pastries made by an expert pastry chef.

Favourite quotation: Like Anne Tyler, the authorial voice in Hoffman is omnipotent, telling the reader everything (compare Jane Gardam’s method in her story Blue Poppies, which is a masterclass in how to create a fictional world in a less intrusive way). However, Hoffman pulls off the same authorial voice as Tyler without being maddening, perhaps because the world she creates is not a real one, but slightly magical and clearly make-believe, the stuff of legend, which needs a narrator - “She’d already had more than her share of botched relationships, yet she’d agreed to have dinner with Eric, ever hopeful despite the statistics that promised her an abject and lonely old age” provides an example of what I mean. I forgot to say that recently I did actually drag myself through Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and I couldn’t bear it, because I felt she sets up characters and moves them about like chesspieces. They have no depth, no reality. It is campfire storytelling. Of course it is also a matter of taste and it is not to my taste. Returning to this book, “There are those who will use any excuse to throw caution to the wind” is a mildly amusing Hoffmann aside, I suppose; however the sentence goes on to descend into whimsy.

Spark is having a moment, thanks to a new biography about her. I think she is often almost brilliant and almost always fairly annoying. The book is concerned with evil and with madness - and, after Spark's odd fashion, Catholicism. 

Evil is a fascinating subject, but Spark doesn’t deal with it particularly satisfactorily here, preferring to amuse herself and slightly forgetting about pleasing the reader, (as elsewhere in her work, there is a faint sense that she rather despises her readers - and possibly all human beings). 

Favourite quote: Spark's description of EU bureaucrat Ernst's addiction to trying to imagine what things might be worth at auction:

"When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn't help calculating the Pope's worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Vatican and contents...) Ernst knew it  was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what beauty ws worth on the current market." 

Additionally, despite the book being published in 1990, Spark has a character who has “a job as a junior researcher in artificial intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence: the study of animal intelligence systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a mixed science involving electronics and biology.”

I bought this because I wanted to get a glimpse of life among ambitious and upwardly mobile citizens in Lagos. It was vivid and I quite enjoyed it, although the ending was mildly puzzling.

Favourite quotation: There is an interesting admission that slavery has been practised by people other than whites - "We sold slaves to them. We had slaves too, in Africa. Before and after.” 

Mind you the character who says this is disapproved of for doing so.

A well-meaning attempt to raise awareness about grooming gangs via fiction, this novel reveals the fact that Scruton, like Barry Humphries and AA Gill, could not write a good novel, despite being an exceptionally brilliant person. At least he was in good company.

Favourite quote: better not to go there.

Reading - Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark and Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

By chance, just after finishing reading a novel by Muriel Spark and one by Iris Murdoch, I came across a review of two of their novels by John Updike in the first issue of the New Yorker in 1975. 

As so often, Updike had interesting things to say.

First of all, I was heartened to see that my experience of Iris Murdoch's novels - that they leave no lasting impression, despite being well-imagined - was something Updike also experienced. He remarked that her characterisation and story telling is:

"so vivid & impressive ... endowed with all the substance her remarkable powers of imagination & introspection could fabricate" 

and yet his impressions of what he had read:

"do not last. Miss Murdoch is less Shakespeare than Prospero, holding us enchanted as long as we stay on her island, then the insubstantial pageant fades.”

I'm not certain that his identification of Murdoch's main theme is correct or more a reflection of his own obsessions:

"Her theme is "erotic love is never still.” In some of her novels the shifts of allegiance and attraction wrought by the inexhaustible, tempestuous force of erotic love approach the mechanical and unintentionally comic; a kind of square dance passingly links every character to every other. And, as in a mystery novel the murderer can be spotted because he is the least likely candidate, so the Murdochian hero or heroine can be counted upon to love, at last, and truly, the most repulsive figure of the opposite."

Updike's observations on the two novelists and their place in the literary order are perceptive, and I particularly like his observation about the legacy they contain from Shakespeare:

"They constitute a class by themselves—both so intelligent and fluent, so quizzical and knowing, both such resourceful mixes of feminine clairvoyance and masculine generalship, both such makers. Miss Murdoch, true, is copious and explanatory where Mrs. Spark is curt and oblique; she can hardly turn around in fewer than a hundred thousand words where the other can't bring herself to exceed novella length; she is wistfully theistic rather than flatly so, and concerned with goodness instead of with faith. The two of them together reappropriate for their generation Shakespeare's legacy of dark comedy, of deceptions and enchantmеntѕ, оf shuddering contrivances, of deep personal forces held trembling in a skein of sociable truces."

I like especially the understanding exhibited by the phrase "concerned with goodness instead of with faith"

Here are my more pedestrian comments on the particular novels I read by the two women:

Territorial Rights is set in Venice, and Muriel Spark moves her characters around that city as if they were chess pieces. They inhabit the usual Spark quasi-surreal atmosphere and coincidences abound. Everybody is absurd, no one is virtuous. A recurring Sparkian element, the possibility that reality is a novel written by an unseen hand, is once again hinted at. An easy read that I suspect is not quite as clever as Spark thought it was. 

Under the Net is an amusing, baffling book with some lyrical moments and quite a few laughs. It is narrated by a cheerful, fairly  aimless soul, and I suspect the meandering story is some sort of everyman parable of life's amiable meaninglessness. Or maybe it is just a meandering story. It is quite engaging and faintly intriguing while you are reading it, but it washes over you and is forgotten in a trice. Perhaps prophetically, it contains a piece of anti-Semitism uttered by a character called Lefty. 

The book is dedicated to Raymond Queneau, which probably provides a big clue to whatever was the author's intention.

Battered Penguins - The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

I have several secondhand Muriel Spark books, and as I make my way through them I feel persistently confused. I cannot dismiss her, but I don't always enjoy her. In the case of The Bachelors my problems began when I read what a couple of earlier owners wrote on the frontispiece of my copy:

T.L. Jupp's judgment having read the book in April, 1963 was as follows:

'Pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-social, pseudo-humourous. Readable and yet failing any tests for profound literature.'

Someone identifying themselves only as M. P-R added a one-word verdict: 

'Unreadable.'

These comments prejudiced me as I approached the opening page and echoed in my mind as I progressed through the novel. 

The truth is that the book isn't unreadable; all the same, it doesn't make you grab it off the bedside table, excited at the prospect of ploughing on. I think at least for those who are unreceptive or a bit resistant, as I was, it is a book that needs a second reading (Note No. 1), It is only in looking back over it that I have begun dimly to discern something strange and haunting in the book. I can't quite make it out, but it is definitely intriguing - although possibly not so intriguing that I will leap back to reading it again soon, or probably ever, to be quite honest. 

The central difficulty that I have is that Spark doesn't give the impression that she cares about making her readers happy or comfortable, but she does give the impression that she quite likes showing off. She starts from a position of contempt for humanity. If she includes herself in her contempt, she to some extent gives herself a pass for being intelligent enough to recognise everybody else's despicable self-delusion. She may be right to consider herself god-like in her lack of illusion about humanity, but she lacks the Christian god's supposed affection for our species. The fact that she despises everyone is understandable but not terrifically enjoyable. 

The book opens with a chance meeting between two acquaintances. One is Ronald Bridges, a 37-year-old curator who at 23 started to have epileptic fits and who, as a result, was unable to become a priest and feels that he is possessed by a demon and yet at times feels he has become 'a truth-machine, under which his friends took on the aspect of demon-hypocrites'. At one point later in the text, we see him overcome by such 'melancholy and boredom' that he must recite 'to himself as an exercise against it, a passage from the Epistle to the Philippians, which was at present meaningless to his numb mind, in the sense that a coat of paint is meaningless to a window-frame, and yet both colours and preserves it' After coming home from a party, he uses this passage, when, in retrospect the 'party stormed upon him like a play in which the actors had begun to jump off the stage, so that he was no longer simply the witness of a comfortable satire, but was suddenly surrounded by a company of ridiulous demons' Philippians is to him 'a mere charm to ward off the disgust, despair, and brain-burning.'  

The person Ronald runs into is Martin, a barrister of 35 who has a rather pallid relationship with someone called Isabel - Spark is brilliant at describing his ambivalence about her, (Note No. 2). Martin lives with his mother and an old nurse called Carrie who is now his mother's housekeeper. Spark's shrewdness is brilliantly in evidence in her description of Martin's dealings with these two women: 

'He tried to entertain them and to be a good son', she explains, 'They bored him, but when they went away from home he missed the boredom and the feud between them which sometimes broke into it' 

Martin's mother tells him that Carrie, his former nurse, should go into a home, but he insists she remain with them. 

'"You're after that money of hers...", his mother said. He hated her fiercely for her continual robbing him of any better motive. "I'm fond of Carrie," he said. But now his mother had left him wondering if he really meant it.' 

Spark has caught the subtle way in which a parent can undermine an adult child. 

Ronald and Martin talk about the price of frozen peas and shopping in general, until they spot 'a small narrow-built man...thin, with a very pointed, anxious face and nose, and a grey-white lined skin. He would be about fifty-five. He wore a dark blue suit.' This is Patrick Seton, who Martin will soon be prosecuting in the magistrates' court for fraud.

Patrick Seton is a wonderfully creepy character. He is devastatingly amoral - Spark explains, writing about someone's correct suspicion that Patrick intends to kill someone, 'If you could call it an intention, when a man could wander into a crime as if blown like a winged leaf.'

The plot involves séances and a Catholic priest called Father Socket, who says, among other things, 'There is nothing like having a card index in the house. You can always produce a card index. It puts them off their stroke', a gay man called Mike, to whom 'Father Socket cited the classics and André Gide, and although Mike did not actually read them he understood, for the first time in his life that the world contained scriptures to support his homosexuality which, till now had been shifty and creedless.'

As in Graham Greene's The Human Factor the only truly decent figure (Note No. 3) in The Bachelors is a person without guile or subtlety. Her name is Elsie Forrest, a young woman who begins as a devotee of Father Socket - 'To Elsie it was a labour of love typing out his papers on the subjects of the Cabbala, Theosophy, Witchcraft, Spiritualism, and Bacon wrote Shakespeare, besides many other topics', (such a wonderful charlatan's list) - but is shocked out of her hero worship. She has a rather Beckettian tone when she observes of Seton, 'I always said he wasn't much of a man to look at. Thin about the thighs. You can't disguise it', but my favourite Elsie line is the profound yet banal: 'I think it's better to be born. At least you know where you are.'

The book is haunted by faith, whether the faith of the women Patrick seduces, (which is sometimes more fear than anything, just as religious faith can be), the faith of those who attend séances, and the faith of Ronald, who is Catholic. When Spark describes how Ronald is used to hearing over the years from hostesses at the social events he attends the statement 'I'm anti-Catholic' and has 'devised various ways of coping with it, according to his mood and to his idea of the Hostess's intentions', I suspect she is really relating a piece of her own experience. In any case, the passage provides some amusing ways to counter those who do challenge one's faith: 

'If the intelligence seemed to be high and Ronald was in a suitable mood, he replied, "I'm anti-Protestant" - which he was not, but it sometimes served to shock them into a sense of their indiscretion. On one occasion where the woman was a real bitch, he had walked out. Sometimes he said, "Oh, are you? How peculiar." Sometimes he allowed that the woman was merely trying to start up a religious argument and he would then attempt to explain where he stood with his religion. Or again he might say, "Then you've received Catholic instruction?" and, on hearing that this was not so, would comment, "Then how can you be anti- something that you don't know about?" which annoyed them; so that Ronald felt uncharitable.' 

Later, Ronald tells another character, 'As a Catholic I loathe all other Catholics', which made me laugh out loud. In that scene he goes on to say: 'Don't ask me .. how I feel about things as a Catholic. To me, being Catholic is part of my human existence. I don't feel one way as a human being and another as a Catholic.' I think many Catholics would understand that well. 

Although I have not fully understand how, it is fairly clear that Ronald is the lynchpin of the book. It is he who accompanies us through the final paragraphs in which, as elsewhere, if he is not exactly a godlike figure, he is at least the closest person in the book to the supernatural elements of the deity:

'Ronald went home to bed. He slept heavily and woke at midnight, and went out to walk off his demons.

Martin Bowles, Patrick Seton, Socket.

And the others as well, rousing him up: fruitless souls, crumbling tinder, like his own self which did not bear thinking of. But it is all demonology, he thought, and he brought them all to witness, in his old style, one by one before the courts of his mind...He sent these figures away like demons of the air until he could think of them again with indifference or amusement or wonder ... It is all demonology and to do with the creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought, who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

He walked round the houses, calculating, to test his memory, the numbers of the bachelors - thirty-eight thousand five hundred streets, and seventeen point one bachelors to a street - lying awake, twisting and murmuring, or agitated with their bedfellows, or breathing in deep repose between their sheets, all over London, the metropolitan city.' 

In this overview, with its remote gaze giving a perspective on humanity as a whole rather than as individuals, there is something strange, although I am ashamed to say I cannot quite understand what exactly. But perhaps it is mystery itself that we are being directed to notice, and it is mystery after all that lies at the heart of existence. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note No. 1: When forced to write essays on things that I'd read, I used to wonder how the activity was justifiable; I couldn't see how it benefited anyone. Finally, I realised that the main purpose of writing about a work of literature is to force oneself to examine what one has read in a thoughtful way.  Nostromo by Joseph Conrad was the book that made me understand this. I read it when I was sixteen and thought it was the most boring thing on earth, until I was asked to answer a question on it and had to think about it carefully and was unable to escape the recognition that it was brilliant, complex and wise.

Note No. 2 'He had poured their drinks when she returned with new make-up on her face. He had often felt the only safe course would be to marry her, and he felt this now, with fear, because she did not always attract him, and he was not sure she would accept him. At the times when she stood out for her rights, not crudely, but with all the implicit assumptions, he thought her face too fat and found her thick neck and shoulders repulsive.'

Note No. 3: Colonel Daintry

Battered Penguin - Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

Loitering with Intent is, like much of Muriel Spark's work, very readable and amusing, despite being complex and not easy to understand.  Extracts from Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini's memoirs are interwoven through the narrative, which is a novel, although its narrator, a novelist, claims it is an autobiography.

The book opens with the phrase, "One day in the middle of the twentieth century." The narrator, Fleur Talbot, tells us this day "was the last day of a whole chunk of my life, but I didn't know that at the time" ,and explains that she was sitting in an old graveyard which she observes, puzzlingly, "had not yet been demolished", suggesting we are in a world that is not quite our own. She is approached by a policeman who "only wanted to know what I was doing", although "plainly he didn't like to ask", which is confusing - did he ask, or does the narrator simply know that that is what he wants? As the novel progresses, this question becomes less and less easy to answer; the lines between fiction and reality become increasingly blurred; finally, looking back at that opening page, it is hard to know whether the policeman stepped out of fiction and into the reality of Fleur's day or stepped from that reality and into fiction.

In other words a major theme of the novel is an examination of what exactly fiction is. In that context, Spark's narrator tells us a lot about writing and being a writer. "I talk very little" she explains to her new employer, "although I listened a lot", she adds in a kind of aside to us, continuing  "I have always been on the listen-in for ... phrases."

"Contradictions in human character" she goes on " are one of its most consistent notes ... Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory."

It becomes clear as Fleur and her friend discuss the novel she is writing during the period in which this novel (autobiography?) is set that Fleur sees a clear distinction between fictional characters and reality. When her friend declares that one of Fleur's characters is "a personification of evil", Fleur retorts, "Marjorie is only words", adding for our benefit, "I knew I wasn't helping the reader to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think...I wasn't writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them."  Paradoxically, when Fleur tells her friend that she cannot explain why she is concerned about the activities of certain people in their own real lives until she has written more of her novel - "It's the only way I can come to a conclusion about what's going on ... I have to work it out through my creativity" - she seems to be indicating that for her reality does not really exist until she has written about it.

Adding to the confusion, the characters and events in the novel Fleur is writing increasingly become the characters and events in her own life - in that order: that is, she invents and then the invention comes out of the fiction and into reality. "What is truth", Fleur asks at one point, and the reader - this one anyway - becomes less and less clear what the answer is as the book goes on.

Never mind, there is much rather heartless humour in the novel and many vivid and marvellous characters, above all Lady Edwina, "a tall, thin and extremely aged woman with a glittering appearance, largely conveyed by her many strings of pearls on a black dress and her bright silver hair ... her face cracked with make-up, with a scarlet gash of a smile ... her fingernails, overgrown, so that they curled over the tips like talons ... painted dark red", who uses "the blackmail of her very great age." She will be my role model from now on.

At the very end of the book, Fleur sees that friend with whom she discussed her earlier novel and has "a row with her on the subject of my wriggling out of real life", which I take as a statement about more than Fleur's decision to remain single and childless. There is something as intriguing but also as difficult to fathom as quantum physics here, which cleverer readers may be able to grasp instantly, but I cannot. I don't mind though. Spark has constructed something strange and intricate and often funny. The author - or at least the narrator - is someone who sees that all human activity is, from a divine perspective, mere foolishness. But, if she is godlike in her perspective, she is no Christian kind of god, for she sneers at her fellow humans rather than feeling any obvious affection for them.

The book closes with Fleur leaving her friend's flat and having a faintly transcendental experience:

"I came out into the courtyard exasperated as usual. Some small boys were playing football, and the ball came flying straight towards me. I kicked it with a chance grace, which, if I had studied the affair and tried hard, I never could have done. Away into the air it went, and landed in the small boy's waiting hands. The boy grinned. And so, having entered the fullness of my years, from there by the grace of God I go on my way rejoicing."

On reading this I felt as I usually do when arriving at the end of a piece of Muriel Spark fiction - no sense of dissatisfaction, as the spectacle has been entertaining, but faintly disturbed, having been made aware, that I am, compared to Spark, sadly, rather dim.

I Heard That - London Fields by Martin Amis

Phew.

I have at last reached the end of Audible’s unabridged version of Martin Amis’s London Fields. What an enormous relief.

I resorted to Audible because I have never been able to persist with any of Amis’s novels in their on the page manifestations but was convinced that I ought to have at least one of them under my belt. For most of my adult life, after all, I have been under the misapprehension that Amis is a giant of our culture and one of the late 20th century’s truly gifted writers. Thus, my lack of persistence has seemed to me to be a shameful failure which has left a great gaping void in my cultural experience.

I have filled that void now; I have made my way to the end of the unabridged text of one of Amis’s novels. In the process, I had hoped to become a member of the Amis fan club. I believed that the result of my hours of listening would be that I'd turn into an Amis admirer, able to share the enthusiasm that so many others feel for the great man.

Sadly, things didn't work out that way.

I do of course recognise that Keith Talent is, in theory, a hilarious creation - in the mould, perhaps, of Toby Belch or Falstaff or - well someone. And Marmaduke is too - despite the fact that each time his name rang out from the narrator's mouth all I could think was, “Oh for pity’s sake, not another hyper-exaggeration in prose form of dressing or doing other day-to-day things with a small child; flipping hell, we get it, Martin, get rid of that trowel you’re ladling it all on with, please"

To put it another way, while recognising that each and every character in the novel is a richly comic creation, I was distracted by a nagging question - aren’t things that are richly comic supposed to raise at least the occasional laugh?

Because, you see, for me nothing did.

Really, I mean it.

Or, to adopt for a moment the tiresome approach to prose chosen by Mr Amis, let me spell it out longhand: in the laughter stakes the book achieved a result of exactly zero, so far as I was concerned. That’s the big O I’m talking about. Yes, precisely nil on the scoreboard in the game of mirth provocation. Nada; niente; nichevo; totally, utterly, completely zilch. Not one solitary, damn, miserable, infinitesimal trace of a faint guffaw; not a skerrick; not a sausage. The novel turned out, so far as I was concerned, to be an absolutely, undeniably, appallingly, unspeakably and tiresomely giggle free zone.

Possibly the repetitive, Thesaurus-influenced approach is simply not for me. It makes the whole thing seem so laboured. Using a verbal sledge hammer is an odd way to generate laughter, in my experience. Never trusting the reader enough to allow them to work out for themselves that a joke is being cracked - or is about to be - seems to me a condescending kind of method.

Yet every single time Amis is about to articulate something he considers amusing, he cannot resist flashing textual warning lights and setting off verbal sirens, just in case you might be too thick to pick up that he is on the point of being - or at least trying to be - droll.

It is like being locked in a cupboard with the literary equivalent of that nudge-nudge Monty Python character. Throughout the entire work, he is there, looking over your shoulder or squeezing up beside you, winking and digging you in the metaphorical ribs. It wouldn't surprise me if in the Kindlefire version of the novel blinding neon signs have been inserted around the edges of pages, to alert you  to humour by flashing the words, “JOKE IN PROGRESS” at appropriate points. Amis seems unable to cope with the possibility that you might not recognise exaggeration or grotesquery or whatever effect he intends to blast you with. He becomes the joke teller who laughs at his own punchlines. He revels so in his own originality, doubling up at his own gags, (which you could see coming several miles off), that he leaves no opportunity for you to edge in a faint chuckle of your own.

But I suppose it is all down to stylistic taste. Clearly, one of the points of Amis is his labouring and his exaggeration and his repetition and his baroque heaping on of more and more and yet more verbiage. While these are all elements that I dislike in his writing, I assume that he - along with some of his contemporaries, e.g. Will Self - is in revolt against the Hemingway/Chandler et cetera crisp, streamlined model of prose. In other words he is self aware; he is banging on and on completely deliberately. His repetition laden mode of operation is knowing, rather than the result of an inability to be succinct. The fact that the great steaming pile of verbiage that results does not interest or entertain me is not necessarily a sign that it is bad; it is at least done intentionally, with the aim of not being short, sharp, minimalistically to the point. Therefore, possibly the problem is not that Amis is no good so much as that he is no good for me. That is to say, what I demand from fiction is not what Amis is intending to provide.

It is therefore unfair to condemn Amis’s work, except on the grounds of my own personal taste. Within the scope of Amis’s own private conception of what literature should be, he may well succeed. He may well have achieved that which he planned. Starting from the position that we all share one huge insight and that is that humans are universally idiotic and vile and life is a huge joke played by an indifferent universe, he sets out to create a world where the loathsome, despicable creature called man is systematically stuffing everything up. There is much evidence that this may be a horribly accurate assessment of existence but it is still a very bleak scenario. Reading a novel where the reader is invited simply to stand back and sneer at the antics of his fellow humans is ultimately a dispiriting venture, in my opinion. However, after a discussion with a member of my family who is loving London Fields, I realise that it can give pleasure to others who demand exactly this level of cynicism and despair from a work of fiction.

Which leaves me only able to say that I personally hated the book - and also that I thought it was utterly unoriginal, indeed possibly plagiaristic. That is, in its plot the thing is a straight out steal of Muriel Spark’s The Driving Seat - at least that’s how it appears to  me.

On the Way

Somewhere in this blog, (but finding anything in here is a bit like trying to find something in my desk drawer - "Che casino", as Italians would - or at least when I lived there in the '70s they would - say), there is a post about how being on a long plane journey has one great advantage: it provides the opportunity to read, uninterrupted, and therefore to catch up with all sorts of interesting things.

Unfortunately, since Singapore Airlines began offering as 'inflight entertainment' incredible numbers of films and telly shows and operas, (although the Salzburg Festival Magic Flute they were showing was, despite beautiful singing and, of course, among the most indescribably lovely music ever written, so incredibly drearily staged that at least it wasn't a temptation), the opportunity to read undistracted has been somewhat undermined. I'm ashamed to say that, after a few hours I put down my book and fell, mysteriously, under the spell of House of Cards.

(In my defence, I should add that, after a few hours more, I also fell back out from under that spell. The trouble was the programme makers went for melodrama, which was fine - but then they went a longish way too far. As my suspension of disbelief evaporated, I was left with nothing, since none of the characters had depth enough to hold my interest. The wife was deeply mysterious to the point of being baffling and her husband, plus the girl called Zoe, were one-dimensional and thus unengagingly meaningless, because not really believable.)

Anyway, before I disappeared down that televisual dead end, I did manage to get through an article on Muriel Spark, one of my favourite writers. One aspect of the article that I found particularly interesting was the section on her conversion to Catholicism. She ascribed her conversion to Cardinal Newman - his reasoning, she claimed:

"is so pure that it is revolutionary in form."

Becoming a Catholic, according to Spark, was:

"an important step ... because from that time I began to see life as a whole, rather than as a series of disconnected happenings."

In the article, she was also quoted on the subject of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, (which the writer of the article claimed was her favourite novel). Spark said it exhibited:

"something of a tremendous value to the Christian imagination, a sacramental view of life which is nothing more than a balanced regard for matter and spirit."

I shall try to bear this in mind as I continue listening to the audio of the work - I have to confess I do often find myself growing very impatient with the thing, plus its author, but I should clearly see things in a different light.

I also made my way through the 21 June 2012 issue of the London Review of Books. I am growing more and more convinced that, like other great magazines, (the New Yorker comes to mind, although I'm not sure it's all that great any more, sadly), the London Review of Books is better after being cellared, (and, for that matter, is the London Review great? It certainly gets a lot wrong politically, I reckon - but I digress, as usual).

In the 21 June 2012 LRB,  there was a very good review by Jenny Diski of Downton Abbey, the new Upstairs Downstairs and a couple of novels dealing with the same 'great houses, great families' kinds of story lines. My favourite bit was when she described Alistair Cooke in his incarnation as host of Masterpiece Theatre at PBS:

"Alistair Cooke can be seen in an old TV clip, thanks to the bottomless well that is YouTube, carefully cross-legged, wearing a blazer, a discreetly silver-striped black tie on a pearl grey shirt, and what can only be called slacks. He sits on a high-backed black leather and polished mahogany library chair. Behind him to his right, hung on flocked wallpaper, is an ornately framed landscape painting winking 'old master', on the other side an overarching potted palm, between them a window hung with heavy, draped velvet curtains, and beneath his elegantly shod feet ... a fine oriental carpet ... 'Good evening', he says, in his immaculately trimmed mid-Atlantic accent, so reassuring that you wonder if perhaps he is going to sound the nuclear alert."

There was also one of those reviews that introduces you to a character or subject that are in equal part fascinating and repellent, so that the review performs a great service, in allowing you glimpses of something intriguing, without forcing you to plunge right into the full vat of the thing.

The vat - or subject - in question is a poet I'd never heard of called Peter Redgrove, who I think was probably a genius but hopelessly warped in what I suspect may be a particularly English way. I'm glad to have been informed of his existence but also extremely pleased that I haven't ever had to go beyond that superficial knowledge level.

Due, perhaps, to a rather strait-laced father and an insufficiently strait-laced mother, Peter Redgrove ended up associating 'mud with eroticism' and developing something called 'the Game', which involved rolling in or bathing in mud and various other substances, (and that, the writer hints, was the least of it). A poem Redgrove wrote celebrating his marriage and family is apparently "filled with wildly energetic dark spatterings, slime-slides, sprays and haemorrhages". In a prose poem called Mr Waterman, a speaker tells a doctor of his fears that his garden pond is going to commit adultery with his wife:

"I invited it in as a lodger, bedding it up in the old bathroom. At first I thought I would have to run canvas troughs up the stairs so it could get to its room without soaking the carpet, and I removed the flap from the letter-box so it would be free to come and go, but it soon learned to keep its form quite well, and get about in macintosh and goloshes [sic], opening doors with gloved fingers."

Passing strange stuff, which I'm glad I know exists but I wouldn't want too much more of.

Following that, came an article reviewing a book about opium, Opium: Reality's Dark Dream. This interested me, because pain relief and its regulation interests me. Perhaps because a few people have abused various drugs - they always have and they always will - there is a growing wowser element in the medical profession. Many vocal doctors seem to be bent on deciding for their patients how much pain relief they may have, convinced that none of us are capable of determining that for ourselves.

Someone in my family had several vertebrae destroyed, leading to appalling pain and the supply of oxycontin and endone, together with the instructions that she would probably have to take them forever. At a certain point, my relative decided for herself that she did not want to continue to be zombified with these drugs and weaned herself off them entirely independently. She knew when she needed their help and when she didn't and was quite capable of making her own mind up about what she took and for how long. I would hate to think that some bossy doctor would ever have presumed to take that autonomy of choice away from her - either denying her the medicine when she needed it or forcing her to take it when she'd realised she'd had enough.

Anyway, one thing that I discovered from the review of the opium book was that things are not progressing in this regard so much as regressing - the writer of the book, Thomas Dormandy, the reviewer tells us:

"writes powerfully, as he has elsewhere, of Cicely Saunders's struggle to establish palliative care for the dying, from whom opiates were commonly withheld on the grounds that they are addictive"

The review also ends with a wonderfully resonant quote from Walter Benjamin. The reviewer claims that Dormandy's book "suggests that in the modern era we have also become addicted to what Walter Benjamin called 'that most terrible drug - ourselves - which we take in solitude'."

If all that is a bit too depressing, let me finish with a quote from an article on Martin Amis by Adam Mars-Jones. It seemed to me that Mars-Jones levered this into his piece somewhat, but then again who wouldn't? It's the only full transcript I've ever seen of probably the greatest of all the Monty Python sketches:

"- There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road.
- Cardboard box?
- Aye.
- You were lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to have to get up every morning at six o'clock, clean the newspaper, go to work down mill for 14 hours a day week in week out for sixpence a week. And when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
- Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hours a day at mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
- Well of course we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked 24 hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
- Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing, 'Hallelujah'."

Oh, and, given I can't find anything in here, I'm not sure if I've already put this in another post, but it is one of my favourite pictures, and it swam to the surface of my papers as I was packing before leaving home:

It's Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera, taken in 1923.