Christy Wampole and the decade that perhaps never happened

Christy Wampole’s interesting article about ironic hipsterdom in the New York Times includes this paragraph, suggesting that in the last decade of the 20th century, sincerity ruled:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.

Now, I’m a little older than Ms Wampole, but I’m not yet quite so senile that I’ve forgotten that decade completely.  And my 1990s may have included a bit of grunge earnestness at the beginning (incidentally, Wampole seems to have overlooked Cobain’s wit, and that of the smarter punks), but it was also about the pop postmodernism of The Modern Review and the raised-eyebrow laddishness of Loaded (before it became just another vehicle for tits), the louche poses of loungecore, Jarvis Cocker vs Michael Jackson, Madonna when she was still funny, the Young British Artists ditto, Tarantino in his trash-referential pomp, Trainspotting, the hilarious implosion of John Major’s government, Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt. Irony wasn’t just a desperate pose to fend off the reality of economic and environmental omnishambles by growing a moustache. It was just how it was. With great big air quotes around it.

So is this divergence between Wampole’s memories and mine a matter of age or gender or nationality? Or was everybody’s decade just entirely different? In my book about the Noughties, I suggested that it’s very difficult to find a generic image that sums up the 1990s, which distinguishes it from the preceding decades (mini-skirts and flowers; flared trousers and picket lines; power suits and Filofaxes). I even posited the idea that the decade never happened at all, existing merely as “a history-free buffer zone between the ideological polarities of the 1980s and the socio-religious anxieties of the Noughties.” So there. And lest I be accused of even more egregious touting of my wares than is normally the case, I’ll balance it by recommending John Robb’s excellent tome about the 90s, aptly subtitled What The F**k Was All That About?

But anyway; how was it for you?

Savile, McAlpine, Petraeus and the truth about Leonard Cohen and me

 I wasn’t going to say something about the latest bizarre developments in... well, what I don’t even know what to call it for a start. It’s not Savilegate, because things are moving so fast that Jimmy Savile, who a few weeks ago had become some sort of conceptual synthesis of Myra Hindley, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Satan himself, has almost been forgotten; when you’re brought on as a stooge so that a not-fondly-remembered Doctor Who can say he didn’t like you much and oh, by the way, I’m going into the jungle with Nadine Dorries, then you know you’re on the margins. Well, you would know if you weren’t dead.

No, the story’s moved on, spewing out rumours and counter-rumours. Reputations of the living and dead have been left in shreds; not least that of the BBC, which was still apologising for not acting on allegations of sexual abuse when it was forced to apologise for acting on allegations of sexual abuse. Lord McAlpine is threatening legal action, even though he was never actually named by Newsnight; maybe he’s going to sue Philip Schofield’s piece of paper.

Two things, though. First, this is by no means a new story; I first became aware of the (unfounded, scurrilous, etc) allegations about McAlpine over 20 years ago. There’s been lots of grumbling about how various social media are to blame for rumour and innuendo taking hold, but in truth the likes of Twitter only amplify and accelerate the effect. The other point is that, allergic as I am to most conspiracy theories, I can’t help but wonder if somebody with an agenda (Anti-BBC? Anti-Twitter? Attempting to discredit accusations of abuse and those who make them? Any or all or more of those?) set some sort of journalistic honeytrap, an apparently solid story that was going to fall to pieces as soon as it saw the light of day, thus destroying the credibility of those involved in bringing it to public attention. Again, I’m not suggesting that MacAlpine was any part of this; he’s a MacGuffin.

But I wasn’t going to talk about that, was I? In the States, they’ve got a sex scandal that seems to be – on the face of it at least – far more straightforward. David Petraeus, the boss of the CIA, has resigned because he’s been having an extra-marital affair. Now I’m not sure whether he’s broken some particular clause in his contract, or if he’s just falling on his sword (oo-er) because he feels he’s brought shame upon his office; if the latter, it seems terribly old-fashioned, but there you go. No, the weird thing is... well, the first weird thing, as a number of people have pointed out, is that the whole messy business seems to have been prefigured in a problem page in the New York Times back in July (see the second letter). But the really weird thing is that the woman with whom he was cavorting is also his biographer. Which raises all sorts of questions about objectivity and the awkward threesome formed by subject, writer and reader. I mean, would we read Boswell’s life of Dr Johnson differently if we found out that James and Sam were an item? What of Charles Moore’s only-when-she’s-dead tome about Margaret Thatcher? Paradoxically, I suspect that even as the credibility of Paula Broadwell’s book about Petraeus falls apart, sales will rocket.

So I suppose it makes sense for me to announce, in the light of disappointing sales for my 2009 biography of Leonard Cohen, that I have enjoyed regular bouts of rudeness with the septuagenarian crooner, although he kept his fedora on at all times. Hallelujah, indeed.

PS: Ooh, and the New York Post does well on the Petraeus front:

PPS: And a rather good blog post concerning the meme that says Morrissey knew all about Savile way back when...

PPPS: And yet more; Buzzfeed kicks Petraeus when he’s down, but does it well.

The death of fiction?

A sequel of sorts to the previous post, prompted by a piece in the Globe and Mail. Ignore for a moment that the author begins his narrative while he’s doing a poo and focus on his argument for the resistance that his students display to reading long books:

English teachers have held on to the 19th- and 20th-century novel with grasping, wrenching fingers. I’ve been one of them, and truthfully I’m not sure why. The novel is a distinctly Western convention, and a new one at that – it arrived two centuries after the printing press. The Industrial Revolution increased leisure time, so longer pieces became more attractive – and writers benefited from being paid by the word. While a teen’s reading material 100 years ago might have been as narrow as a few books on a bedroom shelf, a student in my class today has an endless range of possibilities.

All true; and moreover, the notion that novels written in English could be the subject of serious academic study, on a par with Greek and Latin classics, is even newer. But if its period of cultural ascendancy is at an end, we have the problem of a period of transition. Older people will hold that knowledge of Austen, Dickens and Updike is a crucial part of our culture, even if they haven’t actually read them; the young can’t even be bothered to pretend. I don’t know if Hirsch has a prescribed list of novelists that must be “known”, but this does again suggest that by the time anyone has identified such a canon, the goalposts will have moved. 

Hooray! It’s the return of old-style blogging!

This blog has been going nearly seven – count them – not that it’s all that much effort to count them – unless you’re really bad at counting – although, thinking about it, that “nearly” does make it a bit trickier, so maybe the last one’s a sort of “seve” rather than a “seven” – years. And this is my 1,251st post, which means... well, it certainly means, although whether it means anything in particular. Maybe that I missed some sort of milestone in the last post? Dunno. Anyway, yes, right, and in that time, well, woo, hasn’t everything changed? Well, not really, give or take a few iPhone models. But this blog has changed, and so has blogging as a whole.

I mean, back in those oldenny timey days I had no shame in doing compendium posts on any number of only tangentially related subjects, usually ending with an arbitrarily chosen picture or YouTube clip; and everyone would weigh in with their contributions and contradictions and corrections and it was, as the sainted Patroclus called it, one big conversation; but then something happened somewhere along the line; and I’m still blogging, but Cultural Snow seems to have turned into a continuum of discrete articles, each about a subject. And plenty of people are reading what I’m writing (I don’t know if it’s more or less than it was in the old days, because I’ve only had the magic thingy wotsit that tells me how many people are reading for the past three years) but far fewer are commenting.

So, if I were blogging now under proper old-style blogging conditions (only one substitute allowed, two points for a win, highlights later on Match of the Day), I’d probably have some choice words for Booker judge and all-round silly sausage Peter Stothard, who said of the rise of literary bloggers:

Eventually that will be to the detriment of literature. It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers’ opinions are as good as others. It just ain’t so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off. There are some important issues here.

...to which I’d point out that bloggers are simply people with opinions, just like professional literary critics and that while there are doubtless some literary bloggers who are a bit crap, anyone who tries to argue that every paid literary critic on a highbrow newspaper or magazine knows what s/he’s talking about is either arrogant or stupid or probably both. And then I’d point out that criticism is no longer (never was, to be honest) about a select few handing down verdicts from above; it’s about argument and dialectic and kite-flying, and about how very often a statement can be wrong, but can still have value because of the intellectual fireworks it provokes in others; and I’d probably remind my readers that this is what Stothard is saying is pretty much what Andrew Keen said, and Keen was talking bollocks as well. But it doesn’t matter because between them they’ve prompted me to say something far more sensible, which is how this whole thing works, so thanks guys, you bloody imbeciles. And this would have been pretty much par for the course, because looking back, we didn’t half blog a lot about the nature and purpose and meaning of blogging.

And that line of argument would sort of trail off a bit, and I’d start talking about how I don’t much like the sound of Steven Poole’s new book, which appears to argue that because he’s not that interested in food, we shouldn’t be either. And then I’d remember that I was quite rude about his previous book as well, and then felt very guilty because he was subsequently very generous about my Radiohead book, but in fact I didn’t feel guilty, it was just an excuse to squeeze in a mention of my Radiohead book and maybe some of the others.

But then I might have changed tack completely and reflected on the most recent episode of Dr Who, with its scary cherubs and time paradoxes and, ooh just a little splash of Dennis Potter, maybe. And then I’d ponder the metafictional nature of Melody’s pulp novel, with its plot lines that the characters are doomed to follow, which rather obscures the fact that the characters are really doomed to follow the diktats of Steven Moffat, who wrote the script. And I’d ask whether the Doctor cheated by reading the chapter headings, whether they exist in advance of the action or in parallel to it. 

And I’d make a clumsy effort to pull together various elements of the above (blogging and self-aggrandizement and postmodernism, basically) and suggest once again that you really ought to be reading my Infinite Jest blog, in which I am currently exercised by David Foster Wallace’s cavalier attitude to chapters and chapter headings. Oh, and snot. There’s lots of snot going around.

And then I’d say, yay! That Rockmother’s blogging again!

And finally I’d probably put in a picture of Helen Mirren and/or Charlotte Rampling not wearing very much, but still tasteful, like. OK, Helen it is:

But of course I won’t do any of that, because we don’t do that old-style blogging any more, do we?

Jean and Haruki sitting in an artificial tree, K-I-S-S-1-Q-@-∫-¶-¿

I seem to remember that I once joked, probably on this blog (because, frankly, who else would listen?) that if Haruki Murakami and Jean Baudrillard were ever to meet, something inside my head would happen akin to that science-fiction trope of two parallel worlds coming into contact, which usually means the destruction of everything, or something. But I can’t find it anywhere, so maybe I imagined it or dreamed it, or said it in real life, which doesn’t have a search function. And anyway, then Baudrillard died.

Well, here’s the next best thing, or next-next best at least. From a review of Murakami’s 1Q84, by Jess Row, in The Threepenny Review:

The dispersal and demise of modern subjectivity has long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have chronically complained about the absence of selfhood. The postmodern erasure of history is the stuff of Japanese nativist religion (shintoism) in which ritual bathing is intended to cleanse the whole past along with evil residues from the past. Japanese hostility to logic and rationalism is a clichéd source of embarrassment to native philosophers… so much so that Karatani Kojin and Asada Akira could boast to Derrida that there is no need for deconstruction because there has never been a construct in Japan. Even Baudrillard might find Japan’s devotion to simulacra a little frightening. And finally, so desubjectified and decentralized, citizens simply live—produce and consume, buy and sell—in late stage capitalism, and politics (that is, a critical examination and intervention in interpersonal and intertypological relationships) has been practically abolished.

Oh, Jess. You had me at “intertypological”.
 

Another bloody blog

Small Boo is away looking at dinosaurs, leaving me alone in the house for the weekend. I suppose it’s a sign of my advancing decrepitude that instead of staging a wild and destructive party, my immediate instinct was to go to YouTube in search of that Yellow Pages advert about wild and destructive parties. Oh, and to start a new blog as well. Ha! That caught you out, didn’t it? Or maybe not. Anyway, this one’s about the novel Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. It’s over here, although it hasn’t really started yet. 

Older readers may recall that I tried something similar a few years ago, but I’m hoping that this will be a bit more satisfying. Chasms of the Earth was an attempt to work out why such a badly written book was so successful. Actually reading the bloody thing was easy enough, like gorging on cheap chocolate, but finding something worthwhile to say about it was a tougher call and I gave up at about the halfway point. (To be fair, I had by then answered my initial question; lots of short sentences.) Infinite Jest, on the other hand is rather longer and – according to those who have attempted it – better and more difficult. Even if Bret Easton Ellis begs to differ.

Anyway, we shall see how this one goes. Normal Cultural Snow business will be maintained as per usual, although I suspect there may be one or two blog posts about blog posts appearing. And now I’d better go and start reading the bloody thing...

Stephen Leather and the sock puppet blues

There’s been something of a commotion in that murky space where writing and commerce meet on the web. The thriller writer Stephen Leather has admitted to creating various online identities with which to praise his own titles and disparage those of his writers and RJ Ellory has been caught out doing the same; meanwhile, John Locke bought 300 reviews to raise the profile of his self-published titles. This is nothing new of course; the novelist John Rechy was caught out as far back as 2004. Before these misdeeds are dismissed as a problem solely for the cut-throat market in genre fiction, let’s not forget that the (previously?) respected historian Orlando Figes was busted on much the same charges a couple of years ago; and as Christopher Howse points out, Walter Scott and Walt Whitman also transgressed, albeit not on Amazon. Much of the more recent nefarious activity has been exposed thanks to the sterling efforts of the author Jeremy Duns, and he’s among the signatories to a letter in the Telegraph deploring such activities and vowing never to transgress in a similar manner.

Now let’s put this in context, which is not to acquit Leather and Ellory and co of any apparent wrongdoing. There are too many books and far too many authors and not nearly enough readers. This has always been the case. In the last few years, technology has made it even easier for wannabe authors to get product into the public domain, but they usually have to do so without the professional advice and support of conventional publishers. At the same time, those who do have professionals behind them find that the level of back-up is being reduced; a publishers will attend to editing, printing and distribution but the burden of raising a work’s profile increasingly falls on the author. And someone who knows how to write a readable thriller or cook book or erotic blockbuster may also have the savvy for self-marketing and social media, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.

And this is where things start to get a bit grey. Ian Hocking has mused with his customary sagacity about the dilemmas encountered by self-published writers. I’ve always had a bit of corporate heft behind my own modest efforts, but I’ve still had to do quite a bit of donkey work. I haven’t taken to bestowing five stars upon my own books, but I have made efforts to raise my own profile on Amazon and elsewhere. If I send free copies to friends, on the understanding that they’ll write an online review at some point, is that a bad thing? When posting such reviews, should they make clear that they know me? (Some do; some don’t.) Am I entitled to get annoyed with the ones who don’t keep up their end of the bargain. Or do I just assume that they’ve posted negative reviews under a pseudonym and haven’t told me? What about the Amazon Vine system, or LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers, by which free copies are sent out to people who request them? Is that more or less needy than sending a review copy to The Guardian or the New York Times? What about the mutual back-scratching that Private Eye always identifies with its round-up of the books of the year. Is that better or worse than what RJ Ellory has done. Are there rules? Conventions? Should there be a law?

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the writers who signed the Telegraph letter, but I’d hazard a guess that Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Joanne Harris don’t feel compelled to check into Amazon every 20 minutes to check incremental shifts in their sales ranks, or whether “A reader from Norwich” has given their latest opus three or four stars. And again, I don’t condone what the likes of Stephen Leather have done. But I’ll admit to a twinge of sympathy for someone who pushes the ethical envelope a little too far in an effort to rescue his or her life’s work from oblivion.

Of course, the problem isn’t confined to authors and similar fey ponces. Review sites for restaurants and hotels become all but useless when they’re taken over by PR hacks. And despite all the  complaints about Wikipedia being a platform for know-nothings, I get far more annoyed when a page has clearly been tidied up by someone rather too close to the subject. I’ve said before that Andrew Keen got things wrong in his silly book, but as social media becomes ever more important, I start to see that the reality is the exact reverse of what he describes. Pretty soon, it’ll be just another Cult of the Professional. And they’re the ones who really should know better.

PS: Alison Flood in The Guardian covers much the same ground, but some of the comments are interesting. Not sure if the pro-Leather one is sock-puppetry or sarcastic or sincere or what.

PPS: More on the historical perspective.

The half-arsed metafiction of Ian McEwan

When I was young and thin and floppy-haired and given to spouting Situationist one-liners while wearing my late grandfather’s trilby and drinking tequila, the book we were all talking about was If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino. This was a piece of metafiction, a novel that acknowledged and drew attention to and played about with its own fictional status. You could tell this from the off because the first line was “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller.” 

Of course, metafiction wasn’t new, even that long ago; think Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, back to The Odyssey and probably even earlier than that. But once you’ve had your eyes opened to it, you see it in the unlikeliest places. The example I always use to explain it is this reaction shot from the movie Trading Places, where Eddie Murphy doesn’t so much demolish the fourth wall as tap it lightly for a moment, just to remind you it’s there. In fiction, it seems to drift in and out of fashionable acceptability. Douglas Coupland, David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan have had fun with it in recent years, but champions of earnest, caring seriousness such as Jonathan Franzen disapprove of such japes. And there appears to be a worrying new trend opening up somewhere between the two schools of thought, where it’s acceptable to write 95% of a serious, straightforward, linear novel with a beginning and a middle and no characters who share the author’s name and then in the last few pages to say, look, sorry, all that stuff you were just reading? All that emotional investment you made? I didn’t really mean it. It was Just A Story. Now, where’s the invitation to Hay? It’s as if metafiction has been degraded, from an attempt to challenge complacent literary conventions, to a lame punchline, the and-then-I-woke-up ending that’s taken an MA in creative writing. The revolution went backwards; Elvis joined the army and all we were left with was Pat Boone and Cliff Richard. Yann Martel did it in Life of Pi, as did Jonathan Coe in his most recent, deeply disappointing effort, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

But the big one was Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which a good chunk of the plot is revealed at the end to be a self-redeeming fiction created by a novelist suffering from dementia. Whereas Calvino or Sterne would be happy to introduce the befuddled writer at an early stage, drifting in and out of the narrative, challenging and cajoling the reader who might be expecting a nice little country house potboiler, McEwan doesn’t trust us. We have to be fully absorbed into the world of the characters or we may just jump ship. In fact, it would be quite feasible to read the book without the dénouement.

Atonement did very nicely, thank you, and they got a big movie out of it, but you would have thought McEwan might have got the whole metafiction thing out of his system, or alternatively had the guts to write a metafictional narrative that was upfront from the first line. Instead, he’s written Sweet Tooth. On the face of things, it’s a spy thriller. The most obvious debt is to John le Carré, but most specifically to the recent movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, because McEwan really piles on the early-1970s period detail; le Carré didn’t bother, because he was writing in the 70s, so he didn’t need to discuss Ted Heath and the IRA and the three-day week and Jethro Tull. It wasn’t period detail, it was now. (In the acknowledgements, McEwan thanks several of those pop history books about the 1970s that everyone was reading at the end of the Noughties, when they should really have been reading about the Noughties. Just thought I’d mention that.)

Although Sweet Tooth shares the glum griminess of le Carré’s Circus, McEwan’s protagonist Serena Frome is far down the pecking order from George Smiley et al. Rather than overseeing deep-cover agents in Moscow or Belfast, her role is to headhunt and subsidise writers whose work might provide intellectual heft to the western, anti-communist cause, without them realising they’re effectively MI5 stooges. Serena loves books, especially novels, although parental pressure contributes to her reading mathematics at Cambridge (and getting a third) rather than the Eng Lit degree she should have taken. This gives McEwan the chance to place in her mouth disobliging remarks about postmodern jiggery-pokery and how she favours more conventional narratives. “I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page,” she declares. And:

I suppose I would not have been satisfied until I held in my hands a novel about a girl in a Camden bedsit who occupied a lowly position in MI5 and was without a man.

which is followed by a dig at Borges and Barth. We also get walk-on parts from literary big hitters of the time, including Martin Amis, Angus Wilson, the publisher Tom Maschler and the editor Ian Hamilton. But McEwan doesn’t write himself into the plot (as Amis did in Money), presumably because that would tip off the reader that something funny was going on. Tom Haley, the author that Serena inveigles into her scheme (and with whom she embarks on an evidently doomed relationship) clearly has some similarities with the novelist, not least his background at Sussex University and the content and style of his short stories; although the novel that makes his name seems to be a reworking of The Road, albeit one written 30 years before Cormac McCarthy had the idea, which takes us into Death of the Author territory. The combination of all these nose-tapping hints suggests to the alert reader that there’s something clever-clever coming along at the end, which makes it feel even more like a gimmick. I won’t spoil things if you’re going to read the book, but just remember that one of the central characters is a novelist. OK?

McEwan can still write of course. The first line of his first book is still one of my favourite opening gambits: “In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an auction of articles of ‘curiosity and worth’, my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873.” And that skill hasn’t deserted him in Sweet Tooth: “Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.” But it would be nice if he remembered how to tell a story; and to have the guts, where necessary, to tell us that he’s telling a story from the beginning, rather than leave it as a lame, postmodern punchline.

In defence of stylish exclusion

There were verbalcuffs at the Edinburgh Book Festival last weekend, with Irvine Welsh grabbing the biggest, splashiest headlines as he accused the Booker Prize of squeezing out British regional and vernacular voices in favour of the posh and the exotic. His wingman was another Scottish author, Alan Bissett, who argued that “protectionism for local cultures is sometimes necessary” but then appeared to contradict himself:

I worry how style can exclude. You think about the people who are not convinced by literature and find it for a small elite… Style risks becoming fetishised and it becomes stylish people talking to one another.

Well, yes, but if you’re reading from outside a particular regional tradition, such as the urban Scots of Bissett and Welsh and James Kelman, does that style not have the potential to exclude as well?  Especially if it’s protected; what are we talking about, Celtic quotas in the Booker shortlist? And how much effort should an author put into reaching out to the excluded and the unconvinced? If style – fetishised or not, whether it derives from Hampstead or Hampden Park – is such a barrier, maybe we should all write in the manner of government websites, with clarity and ease of comprehension the only criterion that matters a damn. Which would of course not only disqualify from consideration the kinds of book that tend to win the Booker Prize but also those that offer a gateway into what Bissett would describe as “local cultures”. I’m guessing that Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave is the sort of book that Bissett and Welsh would hold up in opposition to the consciously stylish Hampstead tendency, but I found it pretty bloody exclusive when I first read it at the age of 12 or so; I didn’t talk that way, didn’t know anyone who worked down t’pit, didn’t feel any particular desire to train a bird of prey. For the first few pages I wasn’t really sure what was going on. But I persevered and became utterly absorbed in Billy Casper’s world and remember sobbing myself to sleep after I’d finished. And if I hadn’t believed there might be something for me there, I might not have pushed on with Joyce or Nabokov or BS Johnson. I’m not saying that writing must be challenging to be good, but for every reader welcomed in by a writer who goes out of his way not to exclude, there will be another who just gets bored by the blandness of it all. Inclusiveness also excludes.

And in any case, is there really such a thing as style-free writing? I’ve seen the prose of Magnus Mills described as such, but the apparent blank artlessness he offers is surely a style in itself. Or is it just a euphemism for mainstream fiction, where function takes precedence over form? In a recent piece about the film-maker Christopher Nolan, David Bordwell confronts those who take issue with his sometimes clunky story-telling style:

Can you be a good writer without writing particularly well? I think so. James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other significant novelists had many virtues, but elegant prose was not among them. In popular fiction we treasure flawless wordsmiths like PG Wodehouse and Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, but we tolerate bland or clumsy style if a gripping plot and vivid characters keep us turning the pages. From Burroughs and Doyle to Stieg Larsson and Michael Crichton, we forgive a lot.

I’m guessing that in the last sentence he means Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle rather than William S and Roddy, but you never know, do you?

On a vaguely similar note, the annual to-me-to-you about whether exams have been dumbed down up or sideways prompted me to take a look at some recent GCSE papers. One English exam from last year had a practical criticism component, comparing two poems about social outsiders. No problem there, except that the examiners were helpful enough to define three apparently difficult words therein; namely “chide”, “gibber” and “dissuade”. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on the first two; but if candidates can’t work out unaided that “dissuade” is pretty much the opposite of “persuade”, I don’t think their grasp of English – as distinct from their ability to regurgitate what the teacher has told them is going to come up in the exam – is all that great. Sorry, is that too exclusive? Too stylish, maybe?

And while I’ve got you, I’ll just reiterate my response to Rachel Cooke’s description of Ian McEwan as “the nearest thing to EL James that literary fiction has right now”. Eh?

Hitchens, Orwell, Lenin and the virtual slop-pail of fame

In his introduction to a 2010 edition of Animal Farm (also included in the almost-posthumous collection Arguably), Christopher Hitchens makes this observation on Orwell’s cast of characters and their equivalents in the Russian revolution:

There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig... Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

Well I noticed when I first read it, probably around the age of 14 or 15, at the same time I was covering the revolution in my O-level history class. And I’m sure I pointed it out at the time, although I wouldn’t be surprised if none of my peers paid any attention. And I’d be astonished if thousands of people over the years hadn’t read the book and stroked their chins and thought, “Hang on...” Of course, that’s not what Hitchens means. He means that nobody within his golden circle pointed it out, nobody with whom he was at Oxford, nobody who wrote for the New Statesman in the 70s or Vanity Fair in the 00s, nobody with whom he drank and smoke and roistered and even doistered. If I’d had a blog (OK, its analogue equivalent) back in the early 80s I might have raised the matter then, but I suspect even if I had it wouldn’t have come to his attention. Some writers, it would appear, are more equal than others.

Incidentally, if you key “animal farm” into google.co.uk the first site that comes up is an adventure park in Somerset, where you get to meet Peppa Pig. Maybe she’s Lenin.

Fifty Shades of Grey: taking your mind off the ironing

No, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James’s mummy-porn blockbuster. The last time I made a conscious effort to read a book simply because people were arguing about how bad it was, I ended up creating a whole new blog about the bloody thing in a vain attempt to analyse the weird, compulsive appeal of its awfulness and I really don’t want to take another trip into that cul de sac of brain-sapping banality.

Not that I really need to read Fifty Shades to hold an opinion on it, because the debate has moved on beyond whether the book is any good or not, in literary terms at least. The word is that it’s reaching out beyond the main book-buying markets, luring previously reluctant readers into bookshops (real and virtual), reminding them that reading isn’t just something that other people do. And, goes the argument, if a small fraction of those converts go on to become regular book-buyers and/or book-readers, that can only be a good thing. It’s another matter whether the potential benefit of these eager new customers turns out to be enough to counteract the depressing reality that agents and editors will ignore for the next three years any author presuming to write anything other than monochrome-covered tomes oozing with female-friendly spanky smut. On the other hand, in the last decade it was all pubescent wizards, so at least this is something slightly different.

One thing that many observers have noted is the way Fifty Shades has divided its readers, with the number of 1- and 5-star reviews on Amazon dwarfing the middle ground. This is probably inevitable when so many people are reading it less in anticipation of pleasure and more to see what all the fuss is about; I guess Lolita or Lady Chatterley would have elicited a similar spread of reactions. The difference is of course that Nabokov and Lawrence were deemed to have written proper literature; EL James is writing for a mass market and her fans inhabit a broad demographic. A skim through those who gave her book full marks throws up the likes of:

I am not a fan of reading but all girls i work with are reading the triology and everyone rated it so i gave ib an actually bought all three at once (the only books i have bought in past are for uni. I started reading them on Saturday 2nd June and by the evening of the 5th /june i has finished the lot, i loved everey book and gutted that i have finished them, its true they are kinkier than expected but there is a story line behind it. I just hope the movie livesd up to the book when they decide on a cast :)

...which may simply reinforce the prejudices of Grey-haters, as well as giving some ammunition to those who bemoan the current state of higher education. More interesting is this comment:

I read with interest the reviews before buying. They seem to come from two angles. Those with their literary glasses on and those expecting a bit of escapism. Now I've read it the literary reviews seem laughable. Prose? Grammar? Syntax? This is simply a book that is meant to take your mind off the ironing and it certainly does that.

Rather than taking on the one-star haters, who criticise the clunky, repetitive style and the two-dimensional characters, the argument seems to be – to the above reviewer at least – that such niceties simply don’t matter. No, EL James is not Prince Nabokov, nor was meant to be. A book such as Fifty Shades of Grey is allowed to be poorly written from a strictly literary point of view, but can still succeed on its own terms, temporary displacement of domestic duties included. The real question is – and I asked this about The Da Vinci Code and never really came to a satisfactory conclusion – does it actually *have* to be badly written? 

PS: And then there’s the brown sauce story.

PPS: And this is quite funny (with a tangential Fifty Shades mention at the end). 

PPPS: And for more Amazon reviews that fart in the face of the critical consensus, go here.

PPPPS: And yet more – this absolute gem, flagged up by the lovely Broken Biro, makes me even more glad I never bothered to read the bloody book. 

PPPPPS: But what’s this? A defence of the book, in the New Statesman no less.

The return of the neezled gobslotch

Now that mass media ensures most of us speak some variant of estuary, it’s hard to believe that less than 200 years ago, people from different parts of England would have had immense trouble understanding each other. Old House Books have republished a rather magnificent work from 1839 by one William Holloway, in which he sought to record examples of regional dialect, partly because he was aware that social upheavals would soon make English more homogeneous. Retitled Telling Dildrams and Talking Whiff-Whaff, with an introduction by the big daddy of modern linguistics David Crystal, it’s clearly a project of amateur enthusiasm rather than diligent scholarship on Holloway’s part. The author himself seems baffled by some of the definitions and derivations – “I never heard the word” he protests under the entry for punger, a Kent/Sussex term for a crab – and his grasp of the subject is also stronger for some parts of the country than others. But that doesn’t really matter, as the book will offer hours of delight to anyone who revels in the vast daftness of the English language.

Some of the entries are simply synonyms for words and concepts that are still familiar, but they deserve to be revived because they sound so magnificent. Just roll a couple of these round your mouth: clinkabell (icicle); flurch (abundance); grobble (to make holes); neezled (slightly intoxicated); rumgumptious (pompous); trollibags (tripe); aren’t they so much better than the words we use now? Others (askew, butter-fingered, dumpy, mug for a face, sack meaning dismissal) would require no explanation to a modern reader, so appear to have made the tricky transition from obscure regional dialect to standard usage since Holloway’s time. Handy insults abound, whether you’re confronted with a fudgy (“a little fat person”), a gobslotch (“such a one being apt to gobble his food”) or a loll-poop (“a sluggish, sedentary lounger”). But there are others where even the definition will leave the modern reader demanding a little more clarification: copper-clouts are glossed as “a kind of spatter-dashes, worn on the small of the leg”, loblolly is “any odd mixture of spoon-meat” and a cow-jockey is “a beast jobber”.

The last may sound a bit hog-grubbing (“swinishly sordid”), but early Victorian sensibilities demand that the sorts of words for which 12-year-old boys used to trawl dictionaries are absent. Where any sort of improper behaviour is under consideration, the good Mr Holloway is careful to highlight his own stern disapproval. A dolly-tripe, a mawks, a rubbacrock, a sosse-brangle and a trub are variously defined as sluts and slatterns while mending-the-muck-heap is 

A coarse, vulgar, romping bout; where, if one falls down others fall over, till there is a promiscuous heap of either, or of both sexes, of course not always very delicate nor very decent.

which sounds pretty good to me. In fact, a number of words that we might expect to be indelicate turn out to be entirely innocent: crap is “a smart, sudden sound”; a pissmote is just an ant; to poo is to pull or pluck; and a shag is variously a cormorant, a blackguard or a humble piece of bread and cheese.

The whole collection brings to mind those writers who were adept at creating words that sounded crazy but plausible; it could be a concordance for Lear and Carroll, Joyce and Dahl, maybe even Rambling Syd Rumpo. So don’t be a pollrumptious grizzle-demundy. Just get yourself a copy of this lexicographic gape-seed and let’s see some of these words back in action. Otherwise I’ll become frampled and may even hit you with my plunt.

PS: And here’s some more fun with funny words. Hat tip to Samira Ahmed.

Helene Hegemann and the sincerest form of self-flattery

The controversial German author Helene Hegemann is interviewed in The Observer and (inevitably) on the agenda are the accusations of plagiarism that surrounded her novel Axolotl Roadkill. Apparently she lifted a total of 14 sentences from a blogger called Airen, but the act is pretty explicitly flagged up because the lines in question are specifically about the whole ill-defined area of theft and appropriation and cultural sampling:

Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man… I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination… because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from – it’s where I take them to.

And then, just in case we haven’t got the joke, the English translator interpolates the exchange:

“So you didn’t make it up?”
“No, it’s from some blogger.”

Hegemann defends herself further, pointing out that Airen half-inched the disputed lines from the film director Jim Jarmusch, who took them from Jean-Luc Godard and a sign in a gallery. (Do bloggers operate under a laxer moral code than published authors have to endure, one wonders? And if so, is it OK to lift from them even if they’ve lifted, or is that a bit like receiving stolen goods?) Ultimately, though, she questions the very basis on which such finger-pointing is founded: “But I’ve said it again and it’s still my best defence: there’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity.” And she certainly has said it many times already, and was saying it over a year ago when I first wrote about her. Which does prompt the question of whether it’s permissible to plagiarise oneself, in which case any number of writers (Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Haruki Murakami all come to mind, and I’m sure you’ve got a few candidates of your own) should be thrown into the mix alongside Hegemann. In any case, new editions of Axolotl Roadkill will come with detailed footnotes attributing all the borrowed material, even if that flies in the face of her own contention that everything’s borrowed anyway.

There have, of course, been footnotes in works of fiction before, but they tend to occupy the same fictional universe as the main text (eg Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or The Third Policeman); a real-world reader won’t be able to toddle off to the library and check the references. Even when a writer appears at first glance to be playing fair (I’m looking at you, Mr Eliot), the notes usually provoke further puzzlement on top of the questions they sought to answer. I can see why Hegemann and her publishers feel the need to clarify matters; ultimately though, they should ask if the footnotes are just to keep the lawyers off their backs, or whether they actually make for a better book.

In defence of pretension

So I was reading Richard King’s How Soon Is Now, about the people behind the rise and fall of (ugh) indie music in the UK and I was thinking there really wasn’t anything else to say (Tony Wilson was on the telly, Geoff Travis had an afro ho ho, Spiral Scratch, yada etc) when we get to Daniel Miller aka The Normal and founder of the Mute label. And then this:

The tracks ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ were two corrosive and minimal songs that sounded as though they had been intimidated out of a synthesiser.

“Intimidated”. Yes. Oh, yes, that’s good. Oh no, hang on, perhaps it’s pretentious. Actually, that may not be such a bad thing, according to Pat Long’s The History of the NME, another recent book that covers much the same ground as King’s, from a slightly different perspective. In it, Ian Penman stands his ground:

The cliché that grew up at the time around me and Paul [Morley] was that we were pretentious, which I’m not ashamed of... Pretentious is just another word for aspiring to something, for trying something out.

Phew.

Parsons in paradise: Catching the Sun

I read a Tony Parsons book once, you know. The Big Breakfast of blessed memory wanted to set up a readers’ panel, offering opinions (and marks out of 10) on books that hungover students might want to take on holiday with them. The books they asked me to check out were Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which I’d already read and enjoyed, and to which, I decided, I would give eight; something utterly horrible by Marian Keyes that involved a female protagonist so utterly wet and useless that the whole thing was, I concluded, some sort of hamfisted satire of post- (or maybe pre-) feminism, and I gave it two; and one by Tony Parsons. I think it was Man and Boy. It was OK, and I thought it deserved maybe five or six. Then The Big Breakfast decided they wouldn’t be doing the readers’ panel after all and I never read another Tony Parsons book again.

Until now. Glancing at the best-seller lists and the displays in airport bookshops, it would seem that Mr Parsons’ career as a fiction writer seems to have been ticking over quite nicely without my patronage – better than The Big Breakfast managed, at least. As I understand it, he deals with ordinary, imperfect but essentially decent blokes, at odds with the modern world but with a core belief in family and doing the right thing that sees them through in the end. It’s Nick Hornby, if Nick Hornby hadn’t been to Cambridge; Parsons men are pricklier, more raw, without a semi-ironic attachment to Arsenal or Springsteen they can use as an emotional carapace; Parsons men are not played by Colin Firth or John Cusack, certainly not by Hugh Grant.

The only reason I picked up Parsons’ latest novel, Catching the Sun, is that it’s set in Thailand. Apart from that, it seems to fit the successful formula: the central character, Tom Finn, is a solid fellow, a builder-turned-driver, bit of a temper but basically a good bloke, beset by the economic and social vicissitudes of contemporary life, but kept going by his devotion both to his family and to the notion of family itself. A run-in with the idiocies of the English legal system (he apprehends two burglars but he’s the one who finds himself in court) coincides with the chance to start a new life on the island of Phuket. So off he goes, wife and two kids and all.

I should point out that there have been many, many books written by foreigners about Thailand. The majority of them are shockingly inept, badly written, shoddily produced, cheap concoctions of cliché and wish-fulfilment, mostly about prostitutes and/or private detectives. Simply by virtue of having received the attentions of a professional editor, Parsons’ book leaps into the top 10 per cent. I found no spelling mistakes. There’s a start.

Of course, there are still areas where one could nitpick. The older Thai couple who become surrogate parents to Tom and his family are referred to as Mr and Mrs Botan, which immediately hits a wrong note. Surnames are rarely used in everyday discourse in Thailand, the standard form of address being an honorific – usually the non-gender-specific “Khun” – followed by the first name or nickname; so the couple would be known as, say, Khun Somchai and Khun Pu.

More significantly, the mechanism by which Tom and his family get to stay on Phuket really strains the bounds of credibility. When he gets there, he’s employed by a property shark as a driver, a job which would almost certainly go to a local; his appointment would attract bitter resentment. Thailand is cheaper than Britain, but we never find out how much he’s paid or how that’s supposed to support him, his wife and two kids. When his employer is busted for running a boiler room scam, Tom is allowed to stay in the country, despite the fact he’s been working without a permit, a redemption that would only happen upon payment of substantial backhanders to the police and other authorities involved. Indeed, the corruption that bedevils Thailand is barely mentioned; the only visible policeman is a gruff xenophobe but seems to be entirely clean. Such cops do exist in the country, but their presence would be a matter for some surprised comment at least, especially in the distinctly Wild-West locale of Phuket. The 2004 tsunami strikes about halfway through the narrative, but the plucky locals pick themselves up and work together to rebuild their lives. The vexed questions of illegal development and property fraud that accompanied the disaster are discreetly avoided.

Parsons does touch on some of the downsides of this supposed paradise isle, such as prostitution and the sometimes uneasy relation between the various ethnicities that form the country, contrary to the veneer of happy unity; Mr Botan’s distrust of the chao ley (sea gypsies) is pretty true to life. But his narrator seems for the most part to have swallowed the tourist board depiction of the place. The people are, for the most part, kind and friendly and helpful, a tired stereotype that has been part of Thailand’s corporate branding for the past few decades. Every few pages there’s yet another reference to how lovely the beach is, or the blueness of the sea, or the glories of the wildlife.

The latter gives us some nice descriptive pieces, as Tom’s son is a budding naturalist and a trove of information about the local gibbons and turtles. The debt to My Family and Other Animals is obvious, as Parsons has happily acknowledged, but he seems to have forgotten that half the delight of that book came from Gerald Durrell’s observations of his barmy relatives. Parsons seems rather better at depicting animals than people. The locals remain ciphers, but this may reflect the narrator’s inability to get under their skin; most of the farangs seem to amble around in a daze of sunshine, cheap beer and cute women. They’re intoxicated by the whole thing, but we don’t get a sense of why they are happier here than they would be in Ibiza.

This inability to build characters would be annoying enough if Parsons were being explicitly polemical and his creations were mere props for his opinions. But he doesn’t even try to do that. Every now and then Tom makes the point of reminding us, sometimes while choking back tears, that family is important; the scenery on Phuket is wonderful; it’s wrong to hurt animals. Well, yes. And? If the book has a purpose, it’s to take a Parsons man and plonk him down somewhere unlikely, as if he’s desperately trying to squeeze a little more juice from a dying franchise. If it’s Book Five, this must be Thailand.

One of Tom’s fellow expats is Nick Kazan, a tabloid hack who takes an interest in his legal plight in England, then implausibly finds himself on the same beach a few months later. Although the lure of Phuket is too strong for him to resist, Nick’s muse doesn’t stay around for long:

“But it’s strange. When I had been here for a day, I felt I could write a book about the place. Then when I had been here for a week, I thought I could write a short story.” He smiled and shrugged. “And now I don’t know what to say.” 

Nor, apart from repeated affirmations that family and home and beaches and gibbons are all essentially good things, does Parsons.

New nods and updated winks

In a piece of research that will startle very few, mathematicians at Dartmouth College have shown that modern writers are far less influenced by “the classics” than their predecessors were. Well, yes, um, maybe. Of course, nobody reads Walter Scott any more; or, more to the point, nobody feels the need to pretend to have read Walter Scott any more. The canon is still there, but like a football team or the cast of The Archers, the list of names has changed; so we get that slew of novels about Henry James a few years ago, or maybe Martin Amis rehashing his fanboy schtick about Saul Bellow.

So writers are still influenced by writers, but they’re different writers. What’s really changed is that the references aren’t just to writing. A Victorian author might have expected readers to pick up on references to Shakespeare or Virgil or the King James Bible; her 21st-century successor will pack in nods to the Zapruder film or Ricky Villa’s goal in 1981 or the structure of DNA or Donna Summer’s sighs in ‘Love To Love You Baby’. And writers already have the ability to offer their product in formats that can include not just references to those memes, but actual pieces of footage and audio embedded in the words – and the academics at Dartmouth will have to work out a completely new method of textual analysis to pick that up.

In fact, pretty soon there will come a time when Literature – as the name for a discrete academic discipline – will fail to do its job. What’s going to replace it? Media Studies has been pretty much discredited. Any thoughts?

Marginalia: the blue-ink brigade

When I acquired a Kindle, I wondered whether I might never buy a book again. But then I remembered that when I bought my first CD player, some time back in the early 90s, I didn’t stop buying vinyl. OK, so if a new album came out, I’d probably buy the small expensive version in the case that cracked, rather than the larger, slightly less expensive version in the sleeve that bent at the corner and split along the edge. But I’d still be mooching around dank second-hand shops and windy car-boot sales for Northern Soul singles and kitsch MOR LPs and limited-edition translucent 10-inch discs by cod-psychedelic wastrels from Ashton-under-Lyme.

So it’s not terribly surprising that last weekend found me taking away very nearly an armful of variously damaged paperbacks, including Toby Litt’s Finding Myself. One of the quirks of this 2003 novel is that the text consists of documents supposedly retrieved from the laptop of a fictitious author, Victoria About, with blue, handwritten amendments, corrections and suggestions from her editor all over the hard copy. For those used to pages of neatly justified, spaced and kerned black-on-white type, it might be a tad distressing.

But I vaguely remembered hearing about this gimmick when the book originally came out, so I didn’t embarrass myself by asking for a clean copy or demanding a discount. In fact, I went to the opposite extreme: when I found squiggly add-ons in the next book I picked up –  Retro: The Culture of Revival, by Elizabeth Guffey – my instinctive reaction was that this was all part of the author’s intentions as well. The following is underlined in angry biro:

The literary historian Jean Starobinski has suggested that it was only with the advent of bacteriology and pathological anatomy in the late nineteenth century that nostalgia disappeared from medical journals, becoming the province of poets and philosophers rather than doctors.

Now, Dr Guffey didn’t provide the underlining on that bit. But I bet she wish she had done.

(The image is the title page of a biography Jorge Luis Borges, with contributions by its owner, the late David Foster Wallace.)

PS: A different angle on the paper vs digital debate: Julia Jones on the fire that destroyed 40 years’ worth of her partner’s work.