A Good Read?

Well, congratulations to Julian Barnes for winning the Booker this year though commiserations for winning it in a year when the literati have deemed the contenders as very poor. The last time I can remember there being such a kerfuffle was when Martin Amis wasn’t nominated for London Fields. If you missed it, the starting point was the alleged poor quality of the shortlist, though we tend to get that every year, but what set the whole thing ablaze was the judges’ statement that their main criteria for making an award would be ‘readability’. Well, with all the fuss this caused they might have well said ‘font used’ or ‘number of chapters’ or whether there’s character called Elspeth or not or how many paragraphs had ‘Ineffably’ as the first word. Not since Caesar burned the library at Alexandria has a cultural elite been so put about.

And the curious thing, of course, is that apparently ‘readable’ has become synonymous with ‘shallow’ or, according to a piece in today’s Guardian, ‘marketable’. We have been here before. One of the reason why Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads made such a stir was that they aimed for readability and accessibility against the high stylisation of 18^th century poetry*. George Herbert went to some difficulty to ensure that his poetry would be comprehensible to all of his congregation and Jonathon Swift read out bits of Gulliver’s Travels to passing workmen to ensure that his writing was not too high-falutin’.

*discuss with diagrams, all workings must be shown and the examiners’ articles cited

I blame the Bloomsbury set*. Or maybe the Modernists. Perhaps James Joyce. But it’s become very common to assume that acknowledged classic novels are hard to read and it very often isn’t the case. I shot through Joyce’s Dubliners and found what I’ve read so far of Ulysses easy enough, the fact I didn’t finish it had nothing to do with its alleged difficultness. War & Peace, the ‘hard to read’ poster child of fiction is perfectly easy to read once you get past the first chapter which introduces about every character in a couple of pages and just about all said characters have, of course, Russian names. Meanwhile, my friend and fellow blogger, o**, is currently shooting through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. For those who are waiting for the film to come out, Clarissa is a breathtakingly long book (1, 500 pages in the current penguin edition) which has the reputation of being unreadable. When the BBC commissioned a couple of Oxbridge academics to do the television adaptation, the joke went round that they were the only people in the country who had actually read it. Well, o is loving it and would find it impossible to put down if only it were possible to lift it in the first place.

*but then I blame the Bloomsbury set for most things up to and including the fact that the 306 bus is almost invariably late on a Sunday. I also blame Brideshead Revisited for most of what’s wrong in early 21^st century England. But I digress.

**there’s a story there, I’m sure of it

Alas and alack, I perceive an odour of snobbery here, an assumption that great writing can only be appreciated by a select and if a novel becomes too popular then it cannot logically be much good. Sometimes that may be the case, but I think it is sad that a major criterion on which we designate ‘good writing’ is its failure to readable.

Never mind, Terry Pratchett’s got a new one out, so I’m happy.

Is It About A Bicycle?

This week (yesterday to be fearsomely precise) saw the centenary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan, Irish civil servant. Here’s a photograph of him:

He is better known, and has appeared as such in this very blog, as Flann O’Brien under which name he wrote novels. Specifically he wrote At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It is sometimes said that Evelyn Waugh’s Decline & Fall is the novel most undergraduates would wish to write which is true if said undergraduates were self-loathing misanthropes who could only live with themselves by insisting on their unproven superiority to the working class. For the rest, it has to be At Swim-Two-Birds. After all, it is a novel about a student who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel. It is also about a demon; Finn MacCool, legendary hero of old Ireland; the various effects of drinking porter; a poem about beer and according to a brother who knows about such things, an excellent translation of the Madness of Sweeney.

I actually prefer The Third Policeman. Not read it? Do so. Now. Find a copy by any means at your disposal. I care not if you lose your job and/or your family and/or loved ones. Published in 1967 but completed in 1940 it is a brilliantly funny work which will delight you and for a brief but gloriously happy period, you will be unable to look at a bicycle without giggling.

Under the name of Myles na nCopaleen he wrote regularly for the Irish Times and here as a taster is his Catechism of Cliché:

Catechism of Cliché

What is a bad thing worse than?
Useless.

What can one do with fierce resistance?
Offer it.

But if one puts fierce resistance, in what direction does one put it?
Up.

In which hood is a person who expects money to fall out of the sky?
Second child.

If a thing is fraught, with what is it fraught?
The gravest consequences.

What does one sometimes have it on?
The most unimpeachable authority.

What is the only thing one can wax?
Eloquent.

Yes, More of It

What happens to blows at a council meeting?
It looks as if they might be exchanged.

What does pandemonium do?
It breaks loose.

Describe its subsequent dominion.
It reigns.

How are allegations dealt with?
They are denied.

Yes, but then you are weakening, Sir. Come now, how are they denied?
Hotly.

What is the behaviour of a heated altercation?
It follows.

What happens to order?
It is restored.

Alternatively, in what does the meeting break up?
Disorder.

What does the meeting do in disorder?
Breaks up.

In what direction does the meeting break in disorder?
Up.

In what direction should I shut?
Up.

Dead English

When things are few, what also are they?
Far between.

What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low?
Running.

How low are they running?
Dangerously.

What does one do with a suggestion?
One throws it out.

For what does one throw a suggestion out?
For what it may be worth.

What else can be thrown out?
A hint.

In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it?
It can be dropped.

What else is sometimes dropped?
The subject.

A pint of plain is your only man.

I'll Tell Thee Everything I Can...

Watched Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film the other night and it confirmed for me once again what odd books Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass are. The film, as you probably know, is actually a sort of sequel with a teenaged Alice being bullied into marriage and escaping down the rabbit hole. According to imdb.com Burton disliked the original stories as they had no plot. It was just Alice meeting various odd people/animals/chess pieces and then waking up*. This, apparently, was not acceptable to young Burton so he provides us with a story involving the Red Queen ruling Wonderland as a capricious tyrant and Alice has to find the vorpal sword in order to slay the jabberwocky and so free the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat et al.

*http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/trivia

All this goes to confirm to me once again what deeply odd books these two Lewis Carroll classics are. Tim Burton is meant to be one of the most imaginative and ‘off-the-wall’ film directors operating at the moment yet when faced with adapting these books to film, he had to impose a, let’s face it, rather standard to the point of clichéd storyline involving a quest, a wicked queen and a good queen (the White Queen in this case) and heroic helpers to aid in said quest (the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse and so on). He also gives everyone names apparently unhappy that all of Carroll’s characters are known only by their title with the only exceptions of Alice herself, Dinah (her cat), Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I don’t think anyone else is named in either book but feel free to correct me, preferably without too much smug superiority, thanks. My point however stands. Tim Burton seemed to have thought that these were books that needed to be tamed. Certainly they are deeply subversive, more so than is initially apparent. After all, Looking Glass must be one of the few children’s classics to have a joke about child murder in it.Honest, it’s in the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ chapter after he’s asked Alice’s age:

‘Seven years and six months!’ Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. ‘An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked my advice I’d have said “Leave off at seven” – but it’s too late now.’

‘I never ask advice about growing,’ Alice said indignantly.

‘Too proud?’ the other inquired.

Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that one can’t help growing older.’

‘One can’t, perhaps,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.’

As I said. Odd.

The last word though, goes to Charles Lamb who made this helpful observation in a letter he wrote in 1808:

Why do cats grin in Cheshire? Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.

Most Haunted

Just what is the difference between a ghost story and a horror story? This is a question that has vexed me, if no one else, for over twenty-five years. It was raised when, while an eager undergraduate reading English Literature,* I asked if I could do a dissertation on the ghost stories of M R James. Having established, with some difficulty, that I did not mean Henry James, doubts were raised over the academic value of studying horror stories to which I retorted that, no, these were ghost stories. And what, pray, was the difference? I was asked over a light sherry.** To this day I still cannot provide an answer to my, or anyone else’s satisfaction. The best I have ever been able to manage is that horror stories strive to gain their effect by describing something physically horrific while ghost stories strive to gain their effect by not doing so, I suppose, I don’t know. All I do know is that ghost stories do have to have a supernatural element. Lacking that means that they are stories only. Good ones, maybe, even touched by transcendent genius perhaps, but not ghost stories by definition. No, ghost stories need, not necessarily ghosts, but the supernatural. Beyond that, I am stymied.

*as we used to say on University Challenge when it was proper with Bamber Gascoigne not that Paxman fellow, now there’s a chap who looks like he had to buy his furniture

**well, it would have been a light sherry had I gone to Oxbridge rather than the concrete slab university which suffered my presence for three years, cheap instant coffee if memory serves

And if you haven’t read M R James, you really should, or listen to Michael Hordern reading them as he was born to do. You won’t regret it, though you may never sleep quite so well.

An Obligatory Blog

In this time of fear and uncertainty it is beholden on the blogging community to make some judgmental and ill-informed contributions. Never let it be said that I shirk my duty.

No, I am not going to share my pet, and indeed pat, theories, save only to note that riots happen for a reason or reasons and to attempt to discover those reasons is not to condone the rioters’ behavior as some commentators would have it.

But thankfully we have incisive political leadership at this hour. David Cameron returned with the illuminating announcement that the rioters were criminals which was helpful as I was under the misapprehension that they were mormons. And as today’s Guardian reminds us, certain prominent tories know of where they speak when it comes to the wanton destruction of small businesses:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-boris-johnson

It is a sobering thought that if Angus Deayton had tied a knot in it, London wouldn’t have that clown as mayor.

At time of writing, the north east remains calm. I was in the city centre on Tuesday night and passed a group of about fifty young people, mainly in hoods on a warm sunny evening, and there was a mood of nervous anticipation but nothing seems to have come of it. There were not enough and the mood had not hit that twitchy tipping moment when a group become a mob. Why not? No idea. There were a couple of police officers but no more than that. The council was doing an open air showing of The King’s Speech just up the road and maybe Geordies don’t riot when superior and slightly smug British cinema is playing in the vicinity. Thank God it wasn’t Sex Lives of the Potato Men. The consequences could have been awful.

I Quite Liked It Actually...

A friend and fellow blogger has had a somewhat severe reaction to Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory as you may read here: http://delaisse.blogspot.com/2011/07/wasp-factory.html (warning: spoilers).

While I was not greatly enamoured of Mr Banks’ gothic effort, I can’t say I disliked it that much but I do appreciate the concept of the polluting book, the novel whose very presence on your shelves can even corrupt your other books so that you become scared to read them again in case Mrs Gaskell has mutated into the Marchioness de Sade. I do not, and have never had, any such book with the possible exception of a self-published fantasy which chunters along for about forty pages until the author gets bored and then breaks off with a note informing the reader that what you have just read actually belongs in a later unwritten novel and now he’s going to start the story proper. As far as this reader was concerned, he was on his own there. While I agree with Flann O’Brien that ‘one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with’ I felt this was taking things a touch too far. But I do not loathe nor yet fear that book.

No, the only novel that I’ve had such a major reaction to was Martin Amis’ Dead Babies which gave me an intense distaste for Amis fils both as a writer and a human that nothing he has written or said since has dispelled. A milder reaction was provoked by D H Lawrence’s Women In Love which I was required to attempt to read as a student. At the subsequent seminar, it was revealed that everyone in the room had hurled the book at the most convenient wall at the same point in the narrative, the famous nude wrestling scene, so I suppose that can be classed as an achievement. Also, an excellent performance of The Three Sisters that I saw as a depressed teenager upset me so much that I still cannot bear to watch another Chekov play. But that last was down to the skill of the then RSC ensemble and that of young Anton and the translator.

As to young Iain, the only other thing of his I’ve read is The Crow Road which I recommend to just about anyone. He also writes science fiction under the not very mysterious pseudonym of Iain M Banks. This is, I suppose, to ensure that no reader of serious contemporary fiction should find himself reading about spaceships portrayed non-ironically, which I think we all agree is a kind act on behalf of the author.

Having expunged the early Banks oeuvre from her life, my friend contacted me this morning to inform me of a startling thematic link she had discovered between Trainspotting and The Wind in the Willows. She's not wrong.

Poop! Poop!

Crime and Bureaucracy

As part and parcel of the application process for a new job I was recently required to undergo a CRB or criminal records bureau check. This, for the uninitiated, is to confirm that you have no criminal convictions and certain jobs demand it as a condition of employment. Certain voluntary roles do also and I had to have one a couple of years back when I applied to help out at a children’s centre.

It is, with the best will in the world, a somewhat nerve-wracking procedure. The form is simple enough but the wait can be bloody. Now, I do not have a criminal record but I still find myself distinctly tense until a bureaucrat confirms this. Apart from the fact that mistakes and errors do occur even in the most perfect of systems, and this is not one of those, I still have the vague and worrying feeling that I have, at some point, been arrested, charged, prosecuted and convicted for something and then forgotten about it. Unlikely I know, but like Douglas Adams when posting an important letter, I fret that the post box might be, in some obscure way, ‘broken’.

Well, I passed, and even better, this time I passed an Enhanced Disclosure which, I think, is rather more impressive than passing a standard (or vanilla, as we enhanceds like to call them) one.

Of course, all this proves is simply that I have not been caught doing anything wrong and the whole apparatus exists, I suspect, for the protection not of vulnerable people but of the organizations that work with them. But the fact remains that I did pass and I am childishly proud of that.

So, if anyone wishes me to look after any money or valuables they may have, please contact me below. After all, I am as honest as the day is long and I have the paperwork to prove it.