Bookface

The Raising

2011-04-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

The publisher's sales pitch for Laura Kasischke's The Raising runs thus: "Imagine if Donna Tartt and Audrey Niffenegger wrote an episode of Twin Peaks..."

Well, obviously this was a red rag to a bull, as far as I was concerned, and I simply had to get hold of an advance copy to prove to myself that it couldn't possibly be as good as that fanboy-wishlist-boxticking tagline would imply. After all, aren't Laura, Donna and Audrey all characters from Twin Peaks? Spooky...

The book that arrived looked, for a worrying moment, to be a young-adult supernatural romance novel in the Stephanie Meyer mould. But fear not.

The novel begins with a death - a terrible accident with a supernatural flavour, which befalls two presumably lovely college students. From there it develops into a campus novel peopled with characters pretty familiar to us all by now: the quiet, buttoned-down room-mate who has to share a dorm with the drunken lout who is sleeping with his childhood sweetheart, the 30-something professor who half the students fancy yet whose home life is disintegrating, the lesbian in the music department, the girl on crutches with a terrible secret, and the Sorority house full of secrets, rumours and mysteries.

So, is it particularly reminiscent of Twin Peaks? No, of course not. The magic of that show was all in the soundtrack, the lingering direction and occasional moment of raw horror these two devices could combine to produce. You can't do that in prose (well, I can't, leastways) and all we're left with in the similarities column is that both the book and the TV show begin with the discovery of the dead body of a beautiful, wholesome all-American girl who is revealed, as events follow, to be at once far more and less than she first appears. One could also argue that the Girl on Crutches is not a million miles removed from the character of the Log Lady. But there's nothing in the characterisation within this novel to justify any comparisons with David Lynch and Mark Frost's masterpiece. no-one is as odd, quirky, crazy or stylised as the characters in Peaks.

Are there elements of Donna Tartt? The obvious similarity with The Secret History (it's a campus novel) aside, then still yes. The writing is crisp, occasionally very clever and sometimes funny enough to elicit a proper laugh. The main similarity with Tartt's work is actually with her second novel, The Little Friend, however, in that as you finish the last page, your initial reaction is a frustrated cry of "....AND?"

And is it reminiscent of the writing of Audrey Niffenegger? Again, yes, more or less. The artistic yet craftsmanlike structuring of this novel is its towering accomplishment, as with The Time Traveler's Wife. Two stories unfold in the book simultaneously: the story of what happened after "the accident" and the story of what led up to it. It's a delicate juggling act which Kasischke pulls off expertly. Her writing contains much that is familiar without quite being a cliche, even when writing about over-earnest college kids and their love-lives. The sex was never clumsy or forced, (which is odd since it often involves teenagers...) The atmosphere and tension was ramped up as if by a master of the suspense genre.

I know nothing about Kasischke other than she's a Creative Writing professor, which could make her an American equivalent of Scarlet Thomas, although as a novelist Kasischke is effortlessly superior to Thomas in both skill, style, structure and pacing. Thomas's books are not as clever as she thinks they are, and often her characters prove vastly irritating, with very poor dialogue. You are in a much safer pair of hands with Kasischke. This is a great book which will hold you enthralled right up to the last page.

I imagine that, if Tartt and Niffenegger had got together to write an episode of Twin Peaks, it wouldn't have been a particularly good episode. I'd rather have this book on the shelf than have had an extra episode of my favourite TV show written by two literary fiction writers trying to out show-boat each other in the middle of someone else's franchise. If I want to watch a great TV show interrupted by a famous genre novelist's take on the format, I'll watch the forthcoming episode of Doctor Who written by Neil Gaiman.

But I digress. Read this, if you like the sound of a campus crime thriller tinged with the possible touch of the supernatural. For it is excellent.

Shaun the Happy Grape.

2011-03-09T01:10:00.000-08:00

Today's hilarious announcement from the world of publishing is that there is to be an autobiography from shoegazing Indiepop coke-hoover Shaun Ryder.

Armstrong and Miller came up with a great line on drugged-up poppists: "If you can remember being in Chumbawumba then you weren't in Chumbawumba."

I would suggest that the same is true of the Happy Mondays/Black Grape frontman. If he can remember anything at all which happened to him from about 1987 onwards, I'm a dutchman...

If only the Decepticons had had Alastair Campbell...

2011-02-26T02:46:00.000-08:00

When you can't keep up the frantic literary pace, Booksface recommends regressing into comforting reads from your childhood. I picked up a copy of 'Classic Transformers volume 1', a bind-up of all the comic strips I hand-on-heart adored when I was nine. The UK comic differed from the US - we had our own stories, power-struggles, history and mythology. Some critics have argued the UK Transformers comic was the most powerful and consistently inventive political and mythological tale ever told in the comic format. Well, Bookface thought, if that's the case, Alastair Campbell must have covered it in his diaries. So I delved into his memoirs from the 1980's...

Mon September 12

Megatron keep to maintain the pressure on Optimus Prime and the Autobots. I agree this is the best thing to do while we've got the interest of the electorate.

Had a strategy meeting with M, also Shockwave and Soundwave, who was keen to keep promoting our main lines of attack: that people are sick of the Autobot government, time for a change, etc. Shockwave wanted to re-establish our progressive stance, and remind people that the Autobots are hopelessly divided on Europe and haven't recovered from the miner's strike. In short reiterate how Optimus Prime is out of touch and struggling with a divided party. Basically, said Megatron, our people need to get serious if we're going to start winning.

Tue September 13

Why do the Decepticon party despise Soundwave so much? He's got a huge majority in Hartlepool and his mastery of the media is beyond question, but every time you mention that he's steering policy, our rank-and-file become twitchy. Maybe it's his soft-spoken, slightly sinister air.

Wed September 14

The argument at the top seems to have died down - for now. Apparently Megatron and Shockwave met in secret last night, at Granita; just round the corner from Megatron's. Shockwave has come away from the meeting with the impression that Megatron has agreed to stand down as leader of the Decepticons after his first term in office, although a casual chat with the boss revealed he feels he had made no such promise. We need Shockwave's strategic brilliance, but he's a grumpy, irrational and paranoid micro-manager who just doesn't have the people skills to lead. Or the charisma. On the way to Millbank he even referred to a member of the public as a "bigoted woman", while Soundwave was still broadcasting. Total disaster.

Thur September 15

Day one of conference. The Sun ran an editorial about how Optimus Prime was going to revive the fortunes of his party, so I rung up the editor and tore him a new one. Meanwhile the row on the opposition front bench about Maastricht rumbles on. This election can't come soon enough. Megatron gave great speech at the conference. "Tough on Prime, tough on the causes of Prime" was a great little soundbite.

Q Plays a Blinder

2011-02-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

'Come in, 007.'

'Why thanksh.'

'How are you getting on?'

'Bit of a quiet patch, Q. Shmersh and Shpectre are keeping pretty quiet, and no sign of activity behind the iron curtain either. Between you and me, until M givesh me a job I'm jusht twiddling my thumbsh. What are you up to down here, Quartermaster?'''

'I'll show you. Read this press release from an American publisher.'

'There couldn’t be a better combination than world-renowned secret agent James Bond and thriller master, the bestselling Jeffrey Deaver. Selected personally by the Ian Fleming Estate, Deaver was the first choice to write a swiftly-plotted, high-octane, dazzling thriller to resurrect 007 for the 20^th Century. Deaver has outdone himself in recreating the beloved character of Bond, his intelligence and instinct, his wit and seductiveness, in a novel that captures everything you loved about the classic books along with an updated espionage thriller plot that will entertain even the most jaded reader. Sharp, sexy. And smart, Project X has all the makings of a perfect beach read and runaway bestseller. Pretty hyperbolical shtuff.'

'Let’s look at that again, shall we, through these special sunglasses that I've made, which filter out publishing bullshit.'

'They're a shnug fit. Let'sh shee: There couldn’t be a better combination than world-renowned secret agent James Bond and thriller master, the bestselling Jeffrey Deaver. (Well, okay, there could, but we’re too scared to see what Jodi Picoult, Jean Auel or Paul Auster would do to the franchise.) Selected personally by the Ian Fleming Estate, (Ian’s insane grandson Hemming Fleming, who lives beneath a metal volcano where he builds rockets and keeps henchmen) Deaver was the first choice (after Sebastian Faulks) to write a swiftly-plotted, high-octane, dazzling thriller to resurrect 007 for the 20^th Century (Again. Just like Sebastian Faulks did in 2008.) Deaver has outdone himself in recreating the beloved character of Bond, his intelligence (British Intelligence, arf arf!) and instinct, his wit (when not on a mission, Bond would often pitch up at open mic night at the Comedy Store) and seductiveness, in a novel that captures everything you loved about the classic books (which is very little) along with an updated espionage thriller plot that will entertain even the most jaded reader (Martin Amis, perhaps). Sharp, sexy, and smart, Project X (or Carte Blanche, as everyone else is calling it) has all the makings of a perfect beach read (apart from being a hardback, of course) and runaway bestseller (it won’t shift a quarter of what Devil May Care managed).'

'What do you think of them, Bond?'

'Theshe are pretty powerful shpecsh, Q. Can I borrow them?'

'Of course, James- where are you going?'

'Up to Pershonnel. I want to reread my employment contract with these babiesh.'

Apology

2011-02-16T06:35:00.000-08:00

I am reading Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones.

It is enormous. And I'm in no mood to rush a novel this excellent.

Therefore, there is no hilarious blog post this week.

I'm sure you understand. You're very kind.

It's just so brilliant.

I'm only on page 80 out of about 800.

It's so incredibly detailed and sustained, I simply can't quite believe it's fiction. (Obviously, much of it isn't, I know how writers operate, the whorish tricksters.)

It's utterly immersive and comforting, and like the first installment (Pilcrow) it contains an embarrassment of riches. A veritable multitude. Each bite-sized piece of prose is perfect and profound, if you'll allow me alliterate.

There are to be four volumes in this series, apparently, when it is complete. In a hundred years from now, they will be held in the same regard as books like Ulysses and, more closely, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I honestly believe that.

Anyway, this is why there's no new blog post this week. I'm very sorry.

Do say you'll wait for me. I'd hate for this to be the end of the road for you and I.

But I'm just a bit busy right now.

Please can this win the Booker Prize?

How To Remember

2011-02-03T20:31:00.000-08:00

Previously on Bookface: My favourite novel of 2003 was Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart by Marius Brill, who hasn't published anything since...

www.goodreads.com can be a marvellous website, allowing you to record all the books you can remember ever having read, so you've always got them to hand if racking your brains about something. You can use it to review everything you ever read in glorious purple-prose and give every book five stars in a naked and shameless attempt to attract the attention of the publisher and be "discovered", if that's the sort of person you are. Me, I just like the virtual library it affords me while my real book collection is in my Dad's attic 4000 miles away. How I miss my little paper babies. One shortcoming it has is that its book search is powered by Neilsen Bookdata, so you can only add books still in print, and not books which are so new they've not yet been added to the interweb.

Which brings me to the very kind thing which 'a source close to the publisher' did for me recently when I noticed a new book due for publication in late 2011. On your behalf, dear readers, Bookface got in touch with Doubleday to try and find out if the new book is indeed a novel, the long-awaited second novel from the amazing mind of Marius Brill. Two weeks later, without being all vulgar about the disgusting perks one can expect as a book industry fiction-slut, I can reveal that I have now read the new novel, entitled How To Forget. But since it won't even have an ISBN number for another month or two, or be published until Sept, I can't add it to my www.goodreads.com library, so that, ironically, I might forget about it.

I'm kidding, of course. There's no danger of me forgetting a book this good, and if you've got any sense you'll clear the decks in September when the hardback is released and hunker down with this great novel.

What sets it apart from most is the jack-of-all-trades approach taken by Brill, who is clearly reluctant to merely excel in any one field of the writer's craft. This amounts to a laugh-out-loud funny book written by a shameless gag-merchant, yet one with the addictive unputdownability and mastery of structure and plotting which would make Fleming, Deaver, Dan Brown and all the bestselling thriller writers gape and fall weeping to their knees in jealous despair, grinding their teeth and muttering dark imprecations.

For such a book to combine two usually incompatible animus qualities like this is bad enough, but Brill is there with the anima, too. The romantic sub-plot is genuinely charged, leading not only to the most erotic passage in a book I can remember since...er.... but also to a concluding hundred pages where the reader is emotionally pounded, minced, grilled and stuffed before having their hearts handed back to them in a brown paper bag.

If you're still not impressed there's lengthy digressions on the subjects of memory and psychology, and a rather nice Shakespearean allusion running merrily through proceedings too. It's a great novel of revenge (in precisely the way Stephen Fry's The Stars Tennis Balls wasn't) and subterfuge, with FBI agents, television mind-botherers, senile old men and hassidic henchmen running amok.

I'm not going to recount the story, because I want you all to read it for yourselves.

Now go and get a pen. Got one? Good.

Now.

Write down:

Books of 2011 which I must read:

1. How To Forget by Marius Brill

The Four Hour Bullshit

2011-01-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

Bookface does not, as a rule, read self-help books, because he knows a lost cause when he sees one. However, sometimes, if the claim is really outrageous, he'll have a flip through the book, identify the central premise, realise it is not something that can be applied to his life, then forget all about it. This is why he can't shift those last 6 lbs, or the first 300 lbs he needs to shift before he gets to the last 6 lbs, and why he persists in writing about himself in the third person.

(The last person to do this in public was Noel Edmonds in a leaked draft of his contract for more Noel's House Party in which he wrote "Noel Edmonds, hereafter referred to as The Creator" at which even the BBC Light Entertainment Division could no longer pretend not to have noticed that Edmonds was insane and promptly pulled the plug on the Saturday evening TV cackbubble.)

However, intrigued by the sales of Timothy Ferriss's Four Minute Body, I decided to buy a copy and see what the fuss is all about. He goes on for about five hundred pages, in a forced and blokey fashion, swearing about stuff that doesn't seem to make any sense to make him seem like you or I (but he's not, he's a very fit, rich, and no doubt utterly villainous man.) Calories, for example. He thinks calories are 'bullshit'. He pisses all over established scientific wisdom at every turn.

His great trick is disguising his actual content (of which there is very little) amidst pages and pages of empty waffle and hyperbole, which reads like the patter of a stage magician. However, to save everyone the bother, here is the secret to having a perfect, superhuman body which only requires four hours of maintenance per month:

Do the Atkins diet, and the Kettle ball swing. Once your body is perfect, stay perfectly still and never again touch anything that may contain a calorie for as long as you shall live.

Deaver Fever

2011-01-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

Bookface was lucky enough to scoop free tickets to Jeffrey Deaver’s first public appearance as a James Bond author yesterday, which was the usual stroll around the wry, urbane (he would say “sick”) mind of the crime author.

He gave little away about the secrets of the forthcoming 007 novel Carte Blanche, but we know it’s set in the modern day, Bond is in his early thirties, and there’s a breathless chase around Deira, the ‘vibrant’ part of Dubai.

As the audience, and indeed the compere, asked him about the honour and challenges involved in taking over from Ian Fleming and writing a new Bond novel, the elephant in the room was clearly Sebastian Faulks and his recent Bond book Devil May Care. As Jeffrey “00” Deaver squirmed with embarrassment as he was serenaded by local celebrity Celeste to the tune of ‘Nobody Does it Better’, you have to hope he does it at least as well as Faulks did, or he’ll get a critical drubbing. Personally, I think he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to plotting and thriller-construction, so I’m looking forward to an excellent read come May 26^th.

Little prospect of a critical drubbing – in the tabloid press at least – for Monica Ali who has written her new novel as a thinly-veiled reimagining of the life of Princess Diana. What you see here is, I suspect, a writer desperate to have another bestseller, as neither Alentejo Blue or In the Kitchen set the tills alight. If it works, you’ll see other ‘commercial-dry-spell’ writers looking for other much-loved dead celebrities to fictionalize. I for one would love to read Zadie Smith’s “I Is Jade Goodey”, Tony Parsons’ “Mutha Teresa” or David Baddiel’s “Michael: King of Pop”.

2011 Wish-list

2011-01-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

As the 'New Year' starts to feel suspiciously similar to the old one, and broadsheets are churning out 'coming in 2011' lists designed to make you mentally earmark music/books/films/clothes/holidays further down the line, so that when the time comes you spend the money without thinking about it, thus stimulating our sluggish and ailing economy. I thought, as an antidote to these lists I'd prepare a wish-list for the books I'd personally like to see published in 2011. This is therefore a fairly safe list to read, as there is little risk that many if any of these books might see the light of day.

1. The second novel by Marius Brill.

Making Love - which is beyond brilliant, came out back in 2003, and since then we've heard nothing whatsoever from Mr Brill. But - wait a minute! What's this? It seems he's publishing something in 2011. Can't be sure it's a novel, though. If it looks like a bit of psychology (Mr Brill's day job) I'll buy it anyway, but I doubt it'll be as funny, clever, rude, romantic and frankly glorious as his debut.

2. The Autobiography of Axl Rose.

My specific area of interest here would be the chapters devoted to the 'missing years' (1994-2008) when, apart from a few tours with Guns N' Roses, the man was a total media recluse and no-one in the world seems to know what he was doing. Now, it doesn't take 14 years to write, record and release a record, so I don't buy the offered explanation that he was quietly chipping away at his masterpiece Chinese Democracy all that time. No. I reckon he was doing some kind of secret work for the US government. I picture him as a short-tempered, foul-mouthed cross between Flashman and Jack Bauer, forever being sent on deadly missions. But I could be wrong. Maybe he developed an addiction to the internet, and just never left his house. Maybe he became agoraphobic. Maybe a series of disastrous haircuts meant he just couldn't go out in public or give an interview or anything. Whatever, I'd be fascinated to find out.

3. Another literary novel by Paul Hoffman.

Wisdom of Crocodiles and The Golden Age of Censorship were two amazing books, and I look forward to Hoffman's next adult novel. However, he's busy with his young teen/adult crossover fantasy series, and volume two is out later this year.

4. That next book in the Millennium series which Steig Larsson's life partner claims to have on her laptop.

(Even if she's just written it herself in the years since Steig's death. After all, didn't she "contribute significantly" to the first 3 books? And, again, it's not as if she could be worse at writing dialogue, right?)

5. New fiction from Nigel Williams.

What has happened to our greatest comic novelist? Williams is another writer who last blessed us with a new novel back in 2003 - the enjoyable Hatchett and Lycett. Since then he's been busy with screenplays and a radio comedy series, but has he really called time on his fiction career? It would be a huge loss. Come on, Nigel, just write us another book. You can even set it in Wimbledon again. We'd love that.

6. Unrelenting Stuffing: The Erotic Fiction of Nigella Lawson

It'll happen sooner or later, folks. Though I'd personally wait for the author-performed audiobook, as hearing words like 'girth', 'clitty' or ' leather tawse' delivered in her posh, jolly-hockeysticks delivery would make any ill-written pornography seem infinitely more transgressive.

7. A new novel from Robert Newman.

Dependence Day and Manners were amazingly good reads, marking the comedian Robert Newman as a major literary voice. Then he went all ethical, wrote an anti-globalisation novel for Verso (the moving and powerful The Fountain At The Centre of the World, back in - when was it - oh yes, 2003) and since then, all has been silence. In an interview from a year or two back, Newman alluded to a new novel, but will it ever get published? I've heard he can be 'awkward'...

8. A new Adrian Mole diary.

Paul 'the Blez' Blezard told me that Sue Townsend has implied that another volume is in the works, and after the emotionally charged The Prostate Years, I think we all need to find out what happens next, and just what's in Pandora's box...

9. The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy eBook.

Just for the delicious irony.

10. Another volume of autobiography from Russell Brand or Peter Fucking Kay.

Just kidding.

List over.

Sit Down: Comedy

2011-01-09T04:44:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading Stewart Lee's book about standup comedy, How I Escaped My Certain Fate. The book reproduces the scripts of three of his shows performed in the last decade, with linking text and numerous footnotes which allow Lee to explain the genesis and evolution of his routines, and the story of his life offstage which is fairly essential reading to understand how and why he ends up banging his comedy brain against the range of subjects he does in order to shake free the many fruits which topple, so abundantly, to his feet.

The book is justified as being 'about how comedy works', and is perhaps intended as some sort of semi-academic text for anyone enrolled on the stand-up degree courses currently offered by some of the UK's less academically rigorous universities and colleges. (You know, the sort of courses about to be axed by impecunious universities over the summer.) Mainly, and basically, it's an opportunity to read the scripts, have a giggle, and read around the subject.

Lee is clear that stand-up shouldn't work on the printed page - his argument is that, without the cadenced delivery of the performer, what is left is just 'some funny writing'. Well, there's nothing wrong with funny writing, and the routines do work on the printed page. Anyone who, like me, suspects they could write a passable stand-up routine but lacks the basic human courage to ever march onto a stage and actually perform their monologue, will be encouraged to know that, on the evidence of this book, there might be mileage in writing your routine and trying to get it published. (Although the obvious title for such a book, Sit Down Comedy, has already gone.)

What, after all, are the meandering ruminations of W G Sebald if not a loosely-themed discussion of various topics linked through various techniques and devices familiar to all kinds of story teller? Admittedly, Sebald's wistful miserablism is as far from comedy as you can get, more like a printed documentary, although equally far from the concept of comedy is the material produced for and performed by Russell Howard which, bafflingly, some people somewhere must sometimes laugh at or else why is the jerk on TV? So if a book can be a monologue of wonderful facts, there's room, too, for a volume where a writer just goes on a long exploratory ramble with the sole intention of being as funny as possible. This is not that book, this is more a memoir, of sorts, refracted through three chunks of rewarding and generally excellent stand-up.

I read it as an eBook, and probably had a better time with it for this reason. There are so many footnotes, which must run over the page now and then, and I can't stand it when I get so deep into a footnote of a footnote of a footnote that I forget which page I'm meant to be reading, and often indeed which book. The Ereader guides you through this merciless forest, this Myrkwood of anecdote and exposition, in a rather seamless way. So, an example then of a book improved by it's digital rendering.

But Ebook pricing is still, to quote a significant figure in the UK digital book retail sphere, a total goatfuck. As a consumer, a customer, the book pricing argument runs thus:

If I buy a hardback book, for about twenty pounds, I get all the words written by the writer, printed and bound in a luxurious handheld format which is tactile and eminently collectable, will look spiffy on the shelf, and should last me a lifetime. (Unless it's a vegetarian cookery book and your attempt to create one of the dishes from it goes dramatically wrong leaving your book covered in boiling asparagussy single cream, as happened to me in 1999.) If I buy a paperback, for around seven pounds, I still get all the words as written, plus a nice physical storage item through the use of which I can enjoy them. It won't last forever, perhaps, but it will still perch on a shelf so that all my houseguests can see it, assume I've read it, and will then marvel at how clever I am.

If I buy an Ebook, though, I just get the words, almost as written but with the odd, inexplicable question mark here and there, and odd pagination. I have to provide my own physical storage object to read the words on, too, and Ereaders can cost anything from eighty to four hundred pounds, if you really need to have an iPad. (I'm pretty sure I need to get one, but I couldn't tell you why.)

So, if a hardback is about 20 pounds, and a paperback is about 7 pounds (or 3.50 if you buy books in Asda, and if you do then I hate you and all that you stand for,) then logically an eBook should cost - what? Two pounds? Three? All that's happening is that someone's emailing me a word document.

Publishers, of course, hear this argument and smile benignly at my naivete and stupidity. "Ebooks are very, very expensive to produce. We have to get the shy but posh work experience girl to convert the author's manuscript into a PDF file from a Word document - a mystical process none of us bumbling chumps and duffers could ever hope to manage by ourselves. Then she has to sort of electrically mail it off somewhere and it's ready to be bought by the customer for an eminently fair and transparent price. Usually £16.02."

2011 should see the shock ubiquity of Amazon's Kindle - the big bestseller over Xmas - begin to dictate a more sensible price structure. If authors, and their agents, can sell a book's content to us direct, the traditional publishers will have to find ways of justifying their existence, and arriving at a reasonable and attractive pricing structure for digital editions would be a good place to start.

That sounds like an aggrieved, even perhaps faintly bitter rant. It wasn't.

I got my copy for free.

I'm Not Dead!

2010-12-23T04:04:00.000-08:00

...But I'm halfway through John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River and so there will be no more book-related hijinks from me this year. (Unless I have a few sleepless nights and finish the beast unexpectedly early.)

En passant, though, I'm also racing through Russell Brand's Booky Wook 2. I've never liked Brand, never watched him in anything or heard any of his radio shows, but like Dandy In the Underworld by the late Sebastian Horsley, I'm finding stylish prose and a car-crash narrative hugely compelling. So worth a try, young people! (I still wish Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew would release a memoir just so it could be marketed as My Wookie Book.)

On the radar for 2011, I intend to re-read a recent classic, Nicola Barker's Darkmans, to see if it is still as brilliant as I thought it was when it first arrived, and there are some very exciting books being lined up for publication: Jeffrey Deaver's Bond novel, and my early pick of 2011, Adam Mars-Jones's Cedilla, the sequel to the astonishingly beautiful and masterly Pilcrow, which, as I seem to say every time I post, you must now go and read if you have not already done so. Go on, or you'll not be welcomed back. Tsk.

Have a distinctly Merry Christmas and a happy, happy New Year!

'Face xx

Rivers of London

2010-11-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

Something that's been sorely lacking in 2010 is a one-sitting read: a book you just have to sit down and finish as quickly as possible, while everything else you're supposed to do can go hang. Well, the good news is that there is such a book due in early 2011, Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. It's a fantasy novel about a young policeman, Peter Grant, who is destined for deskbound tedium until a chance encounter reveals he might, after all, possess special skills which could see him join a secret and fairly unpopular secret part of the Met. Then we're off, following our young hero with his unhappy home life as he is taken under the wing of a sprightly old wizard and taught the secrets of magic. What follows is entertaining, clever, innovative and compellingly readable.

The central crime thread is strong enough to be followed avidly, while daft enough to afford the book a kind of 'cyberspace ending', but there's a jaw-droppingly good reveal at the end of chapter seven which is worth the book's cover price in itself.

Aaronovitch takes pains to raise his hands when the book's subject-matter inevitably veers things close to pastiche, his characters often warning each other away from "any of that X-Files stuff", calling each other "Harry" or "Voldemort" when the idea of learning magic is presented, and there's a great gag about Midichlorians, too. However, despite the book's first-person narrative, it occasionally falls down with the things Peter isn't telling us. Just once or twice in the first quarter of the novel, he really needs to turn to the camera, look the reader in the eye, and actually show his astonishment. Without seeing the limits of his own credulity tested by events, we're not sure how much of a reliable everyman he really is.

It's been described, lazily and tediously, as 'Harry Potter meets The Bill', though actually it's more reminiscent of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell being smashed into Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere in a Hadron Collider. In fact Gaiman's Neverwhere is the closest comparison I can think of, although Aaronovitch is by far the better writer of prose. There's also the kind of research into the Met and policing which made Robert Newman's Manners such an awesome novel. The second book in the series is due for publication in April, so you won't have to wait too long for more.

Now, I need to find some sort of support group for people who've fallen hopelessly in love with Beverley Brook...

"Up against a global brand"...

2010-10-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

It is possibly the most eagerly anticipated book in music history. Tony McCarroll - the drummer sacked from Oasis for not being good enough, in 1995, before recording began for their album What's the Story? (Morning Glory) - is finally releasing his version of events to set the record straight.

Wow. I know: wow. I'm so excited by this essential memoir that I can hardly think about anything else. The book - Oasis: The Truth - will be published soon enough, but I've got a sneak peek to share with you below.

McCarroll, who describes himself as "the little man, acting for the little men" by "going up against a global brand"rather than as, say, a mediocre drummer once a member of a defunct band, is coming out with all sorts of ludicrous quotes to drum up (sorry) interest in his book. The central villain of the book, Noel Gallagher, who I'm pretty sure couldn't give a toss, has already had the presence of mind to release an album about five years ago called Don't Believe the Truth, which is probably as good a review as any. But here is an excerpt from this book which promises "shocking revelations"...

In the studio, work continues apace on our album "Definitely Maybe". My head is full of complex contrapuntal rhythms which makes experimenting with music such a visceral joy. Liam and Noel sit together at the desk hammering out lyrics - Liam, in his paisley smoking-jacket, drinking endless cups of Earl Grey, wants the album to lyrically address global politics, while Noel has in mind a concept album built around Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

Bonehead walks in, and tells everyone how much he's enjoyed the new Blur album 'Parklife', so we send out for a copy. Liam is moved to tears by the album, and Noel nods somberly at the conclusion. "We need a brass band on our record. And lots of oompah-oompah."

But Liam looks pensive. "Maybe...I don't really want to..." He scratches his chin. "No."

"Write that down, our kid!" Noel grins.

Liam blushes. "It's hardly Larkin." Liam is a massive fan of Philip Larkin's poetry, and we've just recorded a sensational demo of him reading the poem "Sunny Prestatyn" over an hypnotic, psychedelic and almost Beatlesesque groove.

Everything looks great. Once we've finished the record, and toured it, I'm going to resume my PHD in thermodynamics and Liam is halfway through writing a novel. Noel plans to travel the world with his Bible group.

The only blot on the horizon is this meeting later on today with a PR company who claim to have the perfect idea for how to "package us as a hard Northern band of scallys." Oh, dear lord, let it not involve cans of lager, football, vulgarity or playing at crass Northern stereotypes". We'd never fool anyone...

Lights Out on 2010?

2010-10-18T00:13:00.000-07:00

I've just finished the new DBC Pierre novel Lights Out in Wonderland, and I can't help wondering if that's basically it for great fiction in 2010. In what has been largely a year to forget, we've seen but a handful of great novels emerge, and some major prize-winners which interest virtually no-one, at least as far as the book-buying public are concerned. I already know of a couple of interesting titles due for publication next year, so perhaps it's time to start looking forward to a better vintage.

But what of Dirty But Clean Pierre, I hear you ask? (Aside: I don't hear you ask. I can't hear you at all. You could be screaming in agony for all I'd know.)

He's an author I wasn't expecting too much from: I couldn't face reading his debut novel, Vernon God Little, on the grounds that I thought it looked awful. I locked horns with his second book Ludmilla's Broken English, to see if he was an author really deserving of a Booker prize, and discovered a hollow, lukewarm novel with little to recommend it.

However, I've been looking forward to Wonderland since I saw the brilliant jacket design Faber have bestowed upon the hardback. With a cover like that, I reasoned, well, it must be good. In terms of rock n' roll front covers it's up there with the paperback of Will Self's Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe.

The tale which unfolded within the book was easily the equal of the cracking cover, which is of course the best way to judge a serious work of fiction. I'm not going to give it a thorough review - you don't really care what I think, and your shopping activity should never be driven by stuff you read on the internet. But let me say that the author's tropes about capitalism, consumerism and the essential vacuum of life strike quite a deep chord.

His argument that the moment of crossing into adulthood now happens a lot later in life can't be argued with (certainly by me, I'm in my thirties and I have a pair of Incredible Hulk underpants.) His exploration of Berlin, far more than London or Tokyo, was a fascinating and brooding evocation. There was, of course, a straightforward narrative capering and tumbling in the foreground for the reader's attention, but this book is all about the knowing wink, the subtext, the theme and the allusion. The writing is remarkable, sharp, rich and deep like one of the finest wines mentioned in the novel.

In terms of getting a profound, literary, satisfying and entertaining read, I have no hesitation in declaring this the finest new novel I've read in 2010. But I really hope I find something else as good, or even half as good, between now and the end of the year.

One interesting addition to the publishing schedule is a pre-Christmas book about the global economy and how to manage it by one Gordon Brown, last seen being crowbarred out of Number Ten Downing Street like some sort of stubborn, pallid and unpopular limpet lacking the presentational skills essential in a modern Prime Minister. What's interesting is that he's playing the fiscal genius card once more: after proving to be an unmitigated chump of a Prime Minister, and having single-handedly broken New Labour, he's taken refuge behind the mask of the Iron Chancellor once again. Someone tell the insane old curmudgeon that he's not actually running the economy anymore, or he'll start ringing David Cameron every day, demanding that he "honour their agreement and stand aside so Gordon can finally take over."

Dementia is a terrible thing.

Do You Know Where You Are?

2010-10-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

So Howard Jacobson has won the Booker prize. How very interesting. (Aside: it's not remotely interesting, and I'm not going to read it.)

It's high time Bookface presented a review of the new book from Will Self, which is called Walking To Hollywood. (Note the capitalised "T" - yup, it freaks me out, too.) However, in the interests of fairness, I thought I'd ask an actual resident of Hollywood for their opinion.

Step forward our celebrity book reviewer, Mr W. Axl Rose, who has written this review for us, to the tune (so I'm told) of Guns N' Roses' 1987 hit 'Welcome to the Jungle'. This, of course, explains why the review is over a month late.

Walking To Hollywood

It's the new Will Self

Not, perhaps, his finest work

So leave it on the shelf.

In which he tries to pin the blame

For the death of cinema

But I can't tell you if he does

Because I just couldn't read that far.

To Hollywood, Walking To Hollywood

It will bore you half to

s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sleep, sleep,

the circumlocutory creep.

Walking To Hollywood

Barely better than "The Butt"

Ironically, any director

Woulda long ago called "cut!"

Self's a very brainy guy

He knows film history

But this book is so sudorific

You'd better not bring it near me

To Hollywood, Walking To Hollywood

Feel my, my, my, reviewer's spleen

oh, it's gonna make you scream.

Walking To Hollywood

It gets worse page by page

Though he knows his Odessa Steps

And his Hollywood Golden Age

It's just too tough a book to love

Tho well-written and alive

But I knocked this fucker on the head

At page one-eighty-five.

To Hollywood, Walking To Hollywood

It will bore you half to

s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sleep, sleep,

the circumlocutory creep.

To Hollywood, Walking To Hollywood

It will bore you half to

s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sleep, sleep,

the circumlocutory creep.

It's gonna make you -

yawn.

The E-Book Song

2010-10-07T03:48:00.000-07:00

For your delectation this week, Bookface presents an ode to the ebook, to be sung to the tune of Yellow by Coldplay:

Look at my books

Look how they fade and curl

The bindings come unfurled

The pages turned yellow

The spines they crack

The spines they crack at you

And sellotape won't do

The pages turned yellow

The musty paper

Smells of ill health

Like Autumn

On a bedroom shelf

Do you know I love them so

They know I love them so

I threw them out

It was a tough decision

I bought digital editions

Which won't go yellow

I downloaded

Each and every single book

At which I'd ever looked

And none of them were yellow

Freed up much space

Got rid of the odour too

What a great thing to do

eBooks won't go yellow

It's a sheen

The lovely e-ink screen

Love your eBooks

And they will love you too.

In the Toilet with Tony Blair

2010-09-28T01:12:00.000-07:00

Last night I nearly dropped my Sony Reader when I reached a particularly TMI passage in Blair's bestselling memoir A Journey.

Discussing the gastric plight of the globetrotting world leader, a role in which one is apparently liable to all sorts of stomach upsets from all the time-zone-jumping, the foreign food, and of course the stress of the job, Blair mentions how other nations do not seem to share our British appreciation for "time and comfort" in the loo.

Blair himself apologises for giving us too much info on his protracted potty-visitations, but this is too little, too late. Now I have visions of the former PM sat there, knickers round his ankles, sudoku underway, enjoying a three-term, progressive and centrist dump when the pallid, hirsuite hands of the Chancellor start banging on the door of the gents, bellowing:

"Come on Tony, get out! It's my turn now. You promised! How much longer are you going to be?"

Ah, satire. Dear me.

Countdown to the Booker...

2010-09-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

Are you excited by the imminent unveiling of the winner of the 2010 Booker Prize???

No, me neither.

It's not just sour grapes (though I maintain, for David Mitchell not to make the shortlist at the very least is a bit of a joke) but a genuine lack of interest in any of the books.

What I've read of C makes it look like a wearying tale, overly familiar in execution and achingly keen in its capering. Peter Carey has never tempted me, especially if he's going to saddle books with titles like Parrot and Olivier in America. Andrea Levy's The Long Song was a perfectly good, if deathly dull bit of slavery-fiction, but it's a genre which has been done to death in the last decade, and while it's well-written, it has no place on a Booker shortlist, for much the same reason that books by Michael Dobbs or Lyn Andrews don't.

I'm not remotely drawn to read Emma Donoghue's Room, or Galgut's latest offering. This leaves The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which is many people's tip for victory, but as David Miliband said, "that don't count for shit." OK, he probably didn't say that. But you get my point.

Still, there's always the Costa Book Prize (Jan) to look forward to: it'll be the first test for DBC Pierre's Lights Out in Wonderland which could take the prize given the lack of credible fiction titles due between now and 2011. I'm enjoying this book so much that I'm eking it out ridiculously. It's not a new story, (readers of Edward St Aubyn will find themselves tapping a foot impatiently, as will fans of Withnail and I) but Dirty-But-Clean has found a real depth and magnificence as a writer.

Two other books I'm looking forward to next year: Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, the greatest writer even to pen a sci-fi TV tie-in novel who is going all legit with a tale of metropolitan coppers and, um, wizards... Aaronovitch is an agile, incisive, and clever writer - and as a story-teller he is mighty - and this book should delight all those who bought Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

And, as you'd expect, I'll mention Adam Mars-Jones's imminent Cedilla, too. It is the follow-up to 2009's Pilcrow (and how dare you come round here without having read Pilcrow? How dare you? You claim to like fiction??? PAH!) and it will, like its predecessor, prove to be a bountiful treasure chest of beautiful moments and glorious writing.

So 2010 might have proved to be something of a damp squib for fiction, but already 2011 looks like it might be a distinct improvement. Phew.

Meanwhile, apologies to anyone waiting for part three of my Will Self article. I love Will Self, but I'm halfway through his latest book and I just can't pick it up to either finish it or throw it out with the trash. It looks across at me, like a kicked puppy, every time I go in the living-room and don't pick it up.

Reader, I've stopped going in there. I can't handle the guilt. Who needs the telly, when there's so much to rea- oh.

Another Astonishing Blair-raising Moment

2010-09-07T00:42:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the shoe-and-egg-throwing protestors at his Dublin signing (surrealists, I'm guessing) James Tiberius Blair has cancelled his signing at Waterstone's Piccadilly, which is a shame.

I've just found a passage in his book which I really wanted to ask him to read aloud. It describes secret and covert attempts to get Peter Mandelson back into the Cabinet, for a third time, in 2003.

After the Hinduja affair and the home-loan scandals which caused Mandelson's first two sackings, the wary PM summoned Mandelson to appear before a panel comprising Chancellor Gordon Brown, Alister Crowley the Director of Communications, John Prescott the Deputy PM and Home Secretary Jack Straw, to pitch for a role in Government.

"Jack asked, quietly, how Peter thought he might best contribute to the forward momentum of the parliament.

Peter climbed slowly to his feet, and then, astonishingly, to the tune of Britney Spears' hit single "Womaniser", Mandelson began to body-pop, while singing:

"Moderniser, moderniser, ooh I'm a moderniser/you're a moderniser, he's a moderniser ooh/ Tony don't try to front I know just what you are/ Gordon don't call me a c*nt, i know just what you are/ Moderniser moderniser moderniser...."

Spittle flew from Prescott's maw. "What the hecking buggery is this, Peter?" he bellowed. Gordon sniggered to himself.

I shook my head and caught Aleister Campbell's eye. There could be now way back for Peter. not after this display of immaturity and mercurial albeit flawed behaviour from the third man."

There was no mention of this meeting in the Mandelson book, you know.

Blair's Journey: exclusive preview

2010-08-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

Bookface has been lucky enough to receive an early-reading copy of Tony Blair's memoir A Journey. Despite having signed a confidentiality agreement not to put any of the text into the public domain ahead of publication, I did want to share one particularly eye-opening section from the middle of the book:

The relationship between myself and Gordon Brown deteriorated further at a meeting in June of 2003, to discuss the metric tests and our likely entry into the Euro. I expected little from the meeting besides the usual blinding by mathematics and fudging, but I was stunned when Gordon burst into my office and hurled his file of notes to the floor before fixing me with a furious glare of malevolent rage. Spittle emerged from his mouth, as he barked "when are you going to leave office?" As his two henchmen, Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan sidled into the room, Gordon sank to his haunches and assumed the posture of an enraged baboon, before beginning to chant "When are you going to go? When are you going to go?" while hopping gently up and down on the spot in a primal display of power borrowed from our furry antecedents.

As his chanting built into a hypnotic rhythm, Whelan and Balls began to perform a complex and obviously over-rehearsed dance routine. I shuddered to imagine them preparing this nonsense during working hours, at the tax-payer's expense. Open-mouthed, I turned to my Director of Communications, but Alistair was already on the phone to someone at the Treasury.

"Someone had better come and get these arseholes out of Number Ten," he roared down the phone, as Balls and Whelan executed a graceful pas-de-deux.

I recall tightly gripping the back of my armchair and regarding Gordon in mounting anger. I suspected that, this time, there could be no way back for us...

Now hush, I've got to go and read the whole thing. If any other amazing passages leap out at me, I'll be sure to share.

Will Self, part two

2010-08-29T05:14:00.001-07:00

In this, the second of three posts about the work of Will Self, we’ve reached the high point of his output.

How the Dead Live sees the author expand upon the premise of the short story “The North London Book of the Dead” from The Quantity Theory of Insanity. In it, our “Joycean heroine” (as many critics would style her, simply because, as with Molly Bloom in Ulysses, we have a female character who doesn’t flinch or baulk from getting earthy, crude and dirty) dies, and discovers that the afterlife merely entails a flit to a different part of North London, and a whole bunch of bureaucracy to get a new phone line, join a support group, and generally adjust to this mind-numbing and frankly terrifying denial of release. There are some marvellous ideas and riffs in this novel, a degree of it is quite challenging (for which, read “gross”) but it’s his most satisfying novel thus far.

His next novel, Dorian, represents for me his finest stab at long-form fiction. It is of course a cover-version of Oscar Wilde’s classic The Picture of Dorian Gray, which obviously gives Self a head-start overcoming his early problems with plotting, and the tricky business of beginnings, middles and endings, as here he’s free to cut and paste plot elements. His masterstroke is transplanting the tale to 1980’s New York, a homosexutopia for the voraciously gay main characters – Dorian, obviously, and the frankly Withnaillian Henry Wootton, who like the devil, gets all the best lines. His writing is on fire here, the dialogue is a joy, the plotting is wholly satisfying, and Self’s additions and amendments flesh out the original and, frankly, improve hugely upon it. If you thought Steven Moffatt’s Jekyll was evidence that modern (re)writers should leave the classics well-the-fuck-alone, then here’s a book to prove there’s gold in them thar old stories.

From his best novel to his best book ever: the novella/short story collection Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, which is, in two words, effing genius. The front cover of the original paperback is as evocative and powerful as any classic album cover (though of course it won’t have survived the recent rejacketing.) The titular novella relates a laugh-out-loud battle of wills between well-established Selfiverse psychoanalyst Zack Busner and newcomer Dr Shiva Mukti, neither of whom can make any progress with a particular patient and so instead keep referring him to each other in an increasingly funny power-struggle. It’s Self’s finest piece of fiction, and his best piece of psychological writing. The other stories are shorter but equally marvellous, one reads like a Chris Morris Blue Jam monologue, while another provides the long-awaited final chapter of Great Apes. If the day comes where, for reasons of space, I’d have to get rid of my collection of Will Self books (and if they ever appear in digital format this won’t be a problem) then this is one book I’d have to keep.

Self’s ‘great’ period really ends here, but I’ll include his next novel, The Book of Dave, in this post rather than the next purely because it is mostly great, or at least touched with occasional brilliance which keeps it firmly out of the third category which we’re moving regretfully towards. It’s a fully immersive work, with two narratives unfolding simultaneously, the nowabouts-set tale of Dave, a taxi-driver, and his mental collapse following the collapse of his marriage, and the tale of a post-apocalyptic society, some five-hundred-years hence after much of the UK has been lost to the rising sea levels, who have somehow managed to inherit a religion based on the teachings and writings of Dave himself, which have (in a somewhat implausible fashion) survived the disaster. There entire way of live is geared around the live of the cabbie, his rantings, sayings, habits and ways. This future section is not un-akin to the similar-sounding chunk of David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas. The risk Self takes is by presenting the two stories all jumbled up, chronologically mixed up and out of synch, and even as I was reading it I was writing a note on the cover (don’t worry, it was a proof copy) to remind myself that next time I pick it up I’ll want to read it in chronological order. God knows what this will do to the overall effect, but I suspect it will actually improve it. Much of this novel is honestly very good, let me assure you, but for me, personally, I’m not sure it’s printed in the most satisfying order.

Here endeth the lesson. Next time I’ll be looking at Self’s most recent books, (which, yes, will involve putting his Butt under the microscope) and giving you an early verdict on September’s new novel Walking To Hollywood.

The Complete History of the Universe, part one: Masterchef

2010-08-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

In the first of what will be very occasional excerpts from Bookface's work-in-progress The Complete History of the Universe, I'm delighted to share with you all one of the key entries, which is tangentially about books as the presenters have probably written a few.

"No-one remembers how or when, but at some point after the year 2000, the BBC reinvented their popular cookery competition Masterchef and relaunched it on an unsuspecting public. Previously, audiences had had to endure Loyd Grossman's enigmatically-accented vocal stylings, but the bespectacled Loyd, clearly yesterday's idiot, was out. No longer would “our judges” nip off to “cogitate, masticate and deliberate”. Now we have two new, and even less plausible presenters, who get to hector and bully three members of the public into cooking them their dinner.

After meeting the three contestants - usually an ugly bloke who works for the Council, a normallish bloke who is already a professional chef, and a chunky red-haired mother of nine from Dublin - we see them put to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant before having to apply what they've learnt in the high-pressure environment of the overlit studio kitchen. When all three serve up their dishes for judging, the hosts stagger into action, chanting “cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this,” down the camera at regular intervals.

The bald and shouty Gregg Wallace - (the bastard offspring Grant Mitchell and Harry Hill) entertains himself by tasting the food, then says something glaringly obvious about it. He'll take a mouthful of beef cooked by contestant 2 - let's call him Toby - swallow it, then bellow into the camera "For me, it's hot, it's chewy... it's some beef!". Then everyone else in the studio will nod sagely as if they've just received the ancient wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi. Then the second host, Jon Tirade, whose gimmick is that he always looks unbelievably pissed, will blink a few times, try a bit of the same beef, and say "For me, beef doesn’t get any tougher than that. Where was the spice? Where was that something extra? You just don't have what it takes to cook beef at this level." Then he'll blink a bit more and look around, all panicky, as if he's so drunk he can't remember where he is, what he's doing, or who's just pissed all down his trousers.

Often, Walllace will deliver his pronouncements in threes, his manner highly rhetorical, and ever so stylised. “For me, it was bloody, it was beefy, it was beautiful.” Imagine him at the breakfast table. “For me, you’ve got the snap, you’ve got the crackle, you’ve got the pop.”

When all three contestants have had their food assessed by these two highly unreliable judges, the hosts retreat into a different room where they bellow at each other in an astonishingly pointless series of recaps, as if those of us watching are incapable of remembering that, three minutes ago, these two guys ate Toby's beef.

"Judging doesn’t come any harder than this. What did you think of Toby's beef?" the drunk one says, leaning against the wall and slurring. "For me? I thought it was EXCELLENT BEEF," Wallace will roar, perhaps slamming a fist into the wall for emphasis and looking more and more like the Fantastic Four's The Thing as the show goes on. Tirade will invariably adopt a contrary position, either because he’s contractually required to act as the bad cop to Greggg’s good cop, or because he’s just one of those drunks who always picks fights.

"But did his meat taste good enough for the final?" John will ask, an open bottle of Merlot in his hand, with a straw sticking out the top. “For me?” Asks Greggg. There will then be a pause of twenty seconds as the audience is made to wait, on tenterhooks, to find out if Toby is indeed chef enough to progress into the next round. Except, of course, we all know he isn't, because throughout the preceeding 30 minutes of the show, Toby's tiniest actions, and those of the other contestants, have been psychoanalysed to death in a running commentary from Tirade and Wallace, who point out weaknesses such as "He fell apart when we asked him to make meringues", and "For me, in a professional kitchen, he'd be absolutely fucked." Then, contestant #3, the thick-wristed Irish Colleen will win, because her dish was ultimately more ambitious, and because both hosts are optimistic of their chances with her in the green room afterwards.

But imagine if the winning contestant really did have to get off with these two as an unspoken condition of being allowed to win. Wallace, trousers round his ankles, would turn to the camera and bellow "For me there were fingers, there was tugging, there was jizz. THAT WAS A HANDJOB!" while Torode will be rebuckling his trousers, staring her coldly in the eye and hissing “I don’t come any harder than that,” or “You just don't have what it takes to screw a pair of bastards at this level."

Overrated authors

2010-08-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've just read a great, angry, jealous and almost bitter rant about the mediocrity of America's leading authors, (and was delighted to see Jonathan Safran Foer named among the author's fifteen most-overrated authors.) Here, why don't you read it too? http://huff.to/cIxVO4

The world painted by Anis Shivani (no, don't snigger) is of a literary scene where critics are dead, and broadsheet review is left to peers of the author and would-be novelists who know never to rock the boat, so the scathing review of a bad book just doesn't happen anymore. He also rails against the proliferation of creative writing courses and safe, artless fiction being shat out, dumped front-of-store and sold as the latest masterpiece. It's a world remarkably similar to the UK scene, in fact.

To parry with a list of UK authors who are equally overrated and merit-free would be churlish and unhelpful, so here goes.

Monica Ali

For all the fuss about Brick Lane you'd have been forgiven for having thought that Ali had in some way reinvented the novel, or possibly found a cure for cancer. All she had done was to have written a fairly dull novel albeit with one or two quite funny scenes involving Chanu, a comically bad husband. Her second and third books have, as far as I can establish, sunk without trace. I feel bad pointing this out, because I really fancy her in her author photo.

Ian McEwan

The Emperor is naked and he has a really tiny cock. There, I've said it. it's not McEwan's fault that the publicity dept of Random House went around marketing his recent novel Solar as a "comedy" (probably because, if we're being honest, the young blonde mopsy who had to read it just palpably didn't understand it) but it wasn't the sort of considered rumination on Earth-death you'd expect from a literary giant, it was a contrived, humour-free farce with an eco theme such as you'd find in a novel by Ben Elton. There's even a bit where he nicks an anecdote from a Douglas Adams novel, then admits he's nicked the anecdote from a Douglas Adams novel. I've never been dazzled by any of his books - Atonement was implausible to anyone with a functioning mind, while Saturday was a study in underachievement. Still, what do I know, I've never won a literary award. I'm just a reader, like you. I just give these authors money for this stuff.

Scarlett Thomas

Now, The End of Mr Y wasn't too bad, I grant you, although some of her ideas didn't work and she needed a wise editor. But it's her new novel that convinces me that she's just not all that. Our Tragic Universe is clever, postmodern, effective and enjoyable, apart from the artless thunking of her prose and the embarrassingly bad dialogue, which is just extraordinary. There's a page where four consecutive lines of dialogue begin with a character saying "Oh-". I bet, if you were one of her creative writing students, she'd mark you down for that.

Sadie Jones

Is it just me, or is The Outcast just the most implausible carnival of arse? I was bellowing "Oh, for fuck's sake" at frustratingly regular intervals. Had it been retooled as a comic novel entitled "Mental Lewis Keeps Fucking Up" it would have been fantastic. But it wasn't. And now the industry seems to think she's some kind of talent.

Zadie Smith

I hate Zadie Smith's writing. And I hate anyone who honestly thinks it is any good. And so should you. Full stop. They only gave her the Orange Prize so she'd stop whining to the press about never winning it.

I could go on (hello, Adam Thirlwell! Hi, Kazuo Ishiguro, salut, Nick Hornby) but lists of this kind are just mean-spirited and indicative of the author's intense jealousy and sense of personal underacheivement.

And I've got it out of my system now.

Will Self, part one

2010-08-04T02:07:00.000-07:00

Ahead of this Autumn’s publication of the new Will Self novel Walking To Hollywood, I've been reassessing my relationship to his writing, and thinking about the by now quite large backlist he has amassed.

His first published book was the short-story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity. A lively and inventive collection of tales, notable for the introduction of Dr Zack Busner (a psychologist destined to pop up in many, many Selfish fictions over the years) and for the tale “The North London Book of the Dead” which would later be expanded into the novel How the Dead Live. It’s utterly typical of early Will Self in that we are presented with thought-exercises and showboating prose which dazzle the reader into overlooking the fact that these aren’t really stories, for the most part, more like elaborate sketches or ruminations.

Cock and Bull is a pair of novellas (or a double A-side, if you will) in which a woman grows a penis, and a man grows a vagina. There’s a lot of play in these two mirroring tales, a lot of life and difference in approach, which makes them well worth a look. From memory (I’ve not read this for seventeen years, it was pressed on me by a very impressed dad-of-my-then-girlfriend who raved about it, and marked my introduction to the author) I believe “Bull” was more entertaining and clever than “Cock”. But possibly not by much.

His first novel was My Idea of Fun, which I found hard to love but great as an intellectual badge of honour. I used to own a copy of this, but it was ‘borrowed’ by my schoolfriend Daniel Allington who absconded to Poland for the best part of a decade, got married, and recently crept back into the UK as a lecturer based in Edinburgh. All this, I’m forced to conclude, just to keep my book rather than buy his own copy. The tightarse.

Have you let a friend borrow a book with disastrous results? Write in!

The book details the mental breakdown and ‘education’ of Ian Wharton by the sinister, nay repellent, Mr Broadhurst, also known as ‘The Fat Controller’, who leads our narrator through some hallucinatory travels. Again, as a story the novel was less than watertight, but as an example of inventive writing, to an impressionable 18 year old, I was taken with Self’s expansive vocabulary, though part of me reacted against his occasionally OTT choice of words. You can use words like "shibboleth" and "gallimaufry" too often, you know. I wasn’t scared of a writer who was cleverer than me, (though I would be now) but rather deterred by one who seemed to be putting word-selection above rhythm and feel. But the book, with passages of violence and sex, had much to offer the eminently warpable young mind of this reader.

1997’s Great Apes, Self’s second novel, was in many ways just a vast thought-experiment, in which the dissolute contemporary artist Simon Dykes wakes up one morning to discover that everyone is a chimp. And so is he. And we always have been. What follows is his journey towards acceptance of this truth, with many pant-hoots, and fur-grooming along the way. Once again the writing is excellent and the satire is on good form, (though Self's not afraid to show his working with lots and lots of detail and biology gleaned from some monkey books thrown in) but at the end of the book I was quite frustrated at the lack of a satisfying ending in which humanity was restored. I suspect this is largely because I missed the point, but as a nascent writer myself by that point, I almost physically craved a conclusion that fit the hole I thought I could see. Had the book ended in the way I expected it to, I’d have loved the novel a lot more than I do, and what’s especially galling is that Self finally wrote just such an ending to the novel years later in a short-story collection. So either he’d felt the same way as me, or he was, by this point, playing mind-games with me in some sort of Broadhurstian way.

The following year Self produced Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, a short-story collection featuring more of his trademark concept fictions, where a story-arc is less important than the idea and its remorseless mining and exploration. A few of the stories a wholly forgettable, but one, "Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual", was to my mind his greatest, funniest and most satisfying piece of fiction to date. The story of a psychologist (there are always psychologists in Self’s fiction) embarking on a faintly mediocre affair, it is both structurally elegant and comedically rich. After enjoying Self reading the story at an author event, I actually asked him why there are so many psychologists in his fiction, even when, as in this story, it has no bearing on the story whatsoever. He blinked at me and launched into a lengthy explanation that to him, the modern novel and modern psychology were increasingly intertwined and, to a degree, he didn’t see that there was anything else to write about.

This, to me, marks the end of his early period, and the beginning of his era of greatness. So, my advice to you, if you’ve not read anything by Will Self, is to start with the short story "Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual". It’s not representative of what the general perception of Self’s fiction is, all druggy, free-form and suffused with sesquipedalian circumlocution, but if you want a bit of that then pick up My Idea of Fun or Cock and Bull. If you enjoy any of this, great, if not, don’t be deterred. Self’s next run of books was very different, and even if you can’t stick his early work, you will love some of his later fictions.

Next time I’ll look at his middle (or “great”) period.

Booker Placiphue

2010-07-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

Usually I get awfully worked up about the Booker Prize, but this year’s longlist leaves me with a strong sense of not-feeling-anything-when-I-should be-feeling-something-really-quite-intensely, an emotional state which probably has a proper name but since I don’t know it, I’m going to name ‘Placiphue’.

I was miffed, but not surprised to see Martin Amis omitted from the Booker Dozen. The Pregnant Widow contains the best prose I’ve read this year, but the final quarter of the novel is a car crash of endings and epilogues, which really don’t form any sort of conclusion or climax. I’m glad McEwan doesn’t figure, because Solar was, as I’ve said before, just a Ben Elton novel, with (sadly) about as many funny lines. About two, I dimly recall.

David Mitchell, obviously, is on it, which is just as well since he’s clearly going to win the prize in October. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet really is a lovely read.Peter Carey? Never read him, (shocking admission) but a title like Parrot and Olivier in America just doesn’t grab my interest on any level, even if the two characters are indeed “born on different sides of history” as the publishers somewhat preposterously claim. This isn't Doctor Who, you know. Neither have I read any Howard Jacobson or Alan Warner. Room, by Emma Donoghue, looks like a great idea, and might be worth a read, as does The Slap, although I have two concerns there, firstly that the publishers describe it as “unflinching”, which is never a good sign, and the plot precis reminds me of Will Self’s The Butt, a novel which, at the time, I was underwhelmed by.

I’m surprised Rose Tremain is on the list, as Trespass was quite silly, and while I enjoyed The Long Song by Andrea Levy, I did feel as if I’d read it many, many times before. All I know about Tom McCarthy’s ‘C’ is that he’s nicked the title from a book by John Diamond. It doesn’t look particularly tempting, though, whereas Skippy Dies by Paul Murray does, in a kind of A Confederacy of Dunces type way.

There’s no-one on the list I’m furious to see nominated, no-one I’m evangelical about (Mitchell’s assured victory is such a fait accompli that, the Booker Prize being what it is, it will quite possibly, and perversely, end up going elsewhere.) There’s quite a tired feel to this list, and to the media response to it. A lot of the names are overly familiar to us all, the four-or-so debutantes seem suitably safe (one or two may even make the shortlist) and on the whole it’s a ho-hum of a list.

It’s been that sort of a year, though, to be fair, so my campaign for Adam Mars-Jones’s Cedilla to win the 2011 prize begins here...

The Booker Longlist

2010-07-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

A hastily-scribbled list left abandoned in a London black cab by a Prize judge this morning reveals the deep and lengthy thought process which lay behind the Booker Prize longlist selection...

Martin Amis, because it’ll really upset him when he doesn’t make the shortlist.
Ian McEwan, because we obviously haven’t read it.
Dan Rhodes, because you have to pick someone whom nobody has ever read.
Rose Tremain, because a few people bought it.
Peter Carey, previous winner but YAWNY YAWN.
Andrea Levy, dull but worthy.
Nicola Barker, because she should have won in 2007 and a further longlisting is a (small) step towards reparations.
John McGregor, because we quite liked the special cover.
David Mitchell, because it’s obviously going to win.

Rigorous, innit?

How to get published (part one)

2010-07-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

These days it is increasingly tough to get a book published. Fewer publishers than ever will consider unsolicited manuscripts, and agents aren’t taking on any new clients unless you are already famous or of such exotic personal history that you seem irresistible as a brand before you’ve even sold so much as a pamphlet.

Fortunately there are some steps you can take to aid your efforts to get your book in print. The first and foremost step, is to make sure your project is sufficiently commercial. Behold an insider’s list of types of book you could write which will have, at least, a fighting chance of appealing to a publisher...

A)The smug 30-something female journalists’ tell-it-like-it-really-is “hilarious” diary of being pregnant and having a fricking baby as if it’s somehow a personal achievement and not an innate biological reaction to receiving some semen.

B) Biography of a footballer artfully expanding a dismal school career, followed by a few years of playing football for far too much money, while humping d-list slappers, into 65,000 words of blatantly ghostwritten prose.

C) A novel (n.b. this option only available to former Oxford students, failed or faded celebs, UEA Creative-writing MA graduates or spouses of media figures. Normal people, by definition, simply don’t have the right genes to write fiction.) Set it during a war, too, that always helps.

D) A book about something stupid that you did – as popularised by such writers as Tony Hawks, Danny Wallace. (n.b. You still have to be a celebrity or no-one will give a toss about your life-changing, epochal undertaking. Imagine if Round Ireland With A Fridge had been written by someone employed by the Co-op. No publisher worth their salt would have gone near it.)

E) A serious biography about highly obscure Royals or members of the aristocracy, although a) only if you went to Oxford and b) you will have to do shitloads of research, which takes all the fun out of writing a book.

F) A Sex Blog book (n.b. people will only want to read about your bedroom exploits if you’re a 30-something female professional from London who clearly shouldn’t be doing naughty things and trying to have a career, because that’s just unthinkable. If you’re just a fat bloke who works for B&Q and has six internet-fuelled wanks per day, nobody is going to want to read about it, even if you call yourself Bill De Jour.)

G) A book about something so dull or obscure (yet potentially trendy) that nobody else will have bothered writing it, yet common enough for some fucking publishing assistant airhead bimbo to think it’s a good idea to commission. Books about lamp-posts, or vintage buses, or 1001 Ways with Bulgar Wheat.

H) Gory-as-all-hell crime fiction. But the stakes have been raised so high of late that you practically need to start chapter one with a scene so eye-wateringly disgusting and upsetting that by the end of page four you’ll feel so dirty and depraved that you delete your manuscript and arrange some counselling.

For next time, could all students please select a genre to work in, and come to the second seminar prepared to begin writing....

Simon Cresswell
Creative Writing Course Director
(Recently released from the) University of East Anglia.

James Bond - Stretching the Brand

2010-07-07T00:43:00.000-07:00

On hearing the news that Jeffery Deaver is to pick up where Sebastian Faulks left off and write another original James Bond novel, curiosity got the better of me. Who else was in the running?

Armed with just a small handgun I infiltrated Penguin’s offices on the Strand and located a secret file. Bursting onto the terrace I leapt down into the Thames where my glamorous female assistant, Tarka Dahl, pulled me into a powerboat and off we sped, pursued by Penguin security agents armed with machine-guns.

The file, which I need to return to the MI6 office, details the attempts of many other authors to add to the Bond canon, and makes for sensational reading...

Excerpt from My James Bond Book by Karl Pilkington
Ermm. So there’s James Bond, sipping a Martini. Me mam used to drink them. He’s somewhere glamorous, like Monaco, on his holidays. Then his phone rings, and it’s M, his boss, going “Ooh, James, while you’re there, we want you to spy on this dodgy bloke in the same hotel. He’s, like, a diamond smuggler or a terrorist or something quite bad like that.” So Bond puts his drink down and then BANG! The glass is shattered by a bullet, and James Bond has to fling himself off his balcony, falls thirty storeys and lands in the swimming pool. He climbs out, says something funny about being wet or something, and squelches off to get changed. That’d be my prologue, then chapter one would kick off.

Excerpt from Tomorrow Never Dies Another Golden Day by Martin Amis
Bond impended himself above the enamel swoosh and ting of the sink, and emitted a low, febrile groan. He ran a furred tongue – more sock than organ – across the desert mortuary of his hungover mouth, and cursed the bravado which had seen him sit drinking until three o’clock in the morning in the attempt to seduce the Contessa. He coughed, a little-death-rattle, and reassured himself that if he felt this shit, then Ivanova, who had matched him shot for shot, was probably hunched beside her bathtub, right now, hurling up her own pelvis-bone. He smiled to himself, weakly, then his stomach emptied itself uproariously, spectacularly. It even came out of his nostrils. As Bond silently sobbed, his internal monologue was valedictory. I knew I was right, he thought, about the importance of dying before reaching forty.

Excerpt from Under Cover With Darkness by Will Self
The Aston purred like a salubrious feline as a conversely chelonian Bond powered his way along the Riviera, hungover gone now, his mind flitting between a gallimaufry of potentials and likelihoods. The Contessa was dead, but her two cronies, Gansch and Villedelprat still retained the microfilm, a shibboleth which could yet topple the British Government. Idly, Bond lit a cigarette, and watched his furry digits on the wheel of the car. With a pant-hoot he signalled his displeasure at events, and scratched at the vulva growing behind his knee. Time for some Smack.

Excerpt from From Russia With Blood by Stephanie Meyer
“No, 007, we mustn’t. I love you – you know I love you, with your dark, brooding, saturnine good looks, but we mustn’t take things any further. You know we can’t.”
“Screw this for a poor man’s Buffy,” Bond muttered.

Excerpt from 1967 by David Peace
Blood, pounding. I can feel the sweat on my brow, between my shoulder blades, cold and slick. In my hand, the microfilm.
Mustn’t look.
Not my job.
Just destroy it. Destroy.
I am the bringer of death.
The door bursts open. Two men. Fat Oleg Gansch. His henchman, Villedelprat.
Two men the Crown want dead. Two men I’m licensed to kill.
To shoot. A single bullet. To the temple. A single bullet.
Here, here in Yorkshire. Red Yorkshire. Bloody Yorkshire. 1967.

Excerpt from The Goldfinger Delusion by Richard Dawkins
James Bond does not exist.

(A slightly shorter, but probably better-written, version of this rather thin gag first appeared around two years ago on the Waterstone's fiction microsite, so apologies to anyone who's now had to sit through me doing this twice. I've just remembered that one of the authors I "heelariously" lampooned on that occasion was the lovely Alexander McCall Smith.)

The Joy of Free Books

2010-06-30T07:49:00.001-07:00

After two months in the wilderness I'm back at work, and once again in an environment full of unlimited proof, early-reading and advance copies of books. It's been hell, since leaving Magrudy's in April, having to actually pay for books. (I don't think I've had to purchase a book since 2002.)

I've limited myself to only buying essentials (the last two Stieg Larssons and Wolf Hall) so I've been desperate to get near the proof shelf at Waterstone's head office and see a) what glorious treats are emerging in the second half of 2010, and b) how many of them I can nab for free. I'd even planned a blog post to be called "The Ten Bestest Books Due This Year".

However, this ain't that post, guys, because right now I have liberated (okay, looted) a paltry five books from the hundreds of free titles piled up in the Commercial department. And one of them doesn't count because it's a reference book which may be of slight use to my wife. If we are to judge a season by its proofs, then Autumn 2010 looks like a bit of a barren time for fiction.

So what exactly have I fished out of the pile?

1) Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco.
Hopes were high for this title at Magrudy's, as Dubai has a high Filipino population and it's about time they had a breakout literary classic. I have no idea if they managed to sell any, (unlikely given the general lack of customers in most of their stores) but I earmarked a copy whilst in Dubai which I had to leave behind. Now I can finally give it a whirl. Hurrah. In the UK it's already been published in paperback, so if Macmillan have done their job properly it should be available in a shop near you right now.

2) The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
I've not read anything by Udall, but the cover is an eye-catcher, plus it's published by Jonathan Cape, who are a safe pair of hands and generally only publish good stuff. I was finally sold on it by the quote on the back describing the book as a "beautifully written comic masterpiece", and I'm a sucker for those. Let's hope it lives up to that compelling dollop of publisher's hype-spaff.

3) Lights Out in Wonderland by DBC Pierre
Dirty-But-Clean Pierre is a hit-and-miss author, his debut (which I personally couldn't face) was a hit (Vernon God Little won the Booker, you may recall) but follow-up Ludmilla's Broken English (which I have read) was anything but. This third novel has the full weight of an enthusiastic Faber behind it, a stunning cover, and the advantage of arriving in a very slow season for new literary fiction. Back to the top for Pierre?

4) Walking to Hollywood by Will Self
I used to absolutely love Will Self, but his two most recent books have been huge disappointments (for me). This needs to be a huge return to form or I personally might just steer clear of his output henceforth, as it has felt tired, artless and forced. This is pitched as a riotous jumble of themes, with cameos from old characters (Zach Busner returneth!) and new tropes: film, walking, um...well, that'll do. It looks like being something existing between fiction and non-fiction. I really hope this sees Self back at his best.

I'll also let you know if, and when, anything else catches my eye that I can give you a heads-up about. Proofs arrive every day, you know...

On England's World Cup campaign...

2010-06-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

.........................No, really, what did you expect?

Which cult fictional character are YOU?

2010-06-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

In an effort to get as many readers as Heat magazine, I've prepared one of their inane and soul-curdling questionnaires, but this one is about literary characters, not WAGs or the gurning cockheads off of Big Brother...

So, dear reader: Which of the following literary characters are YOU?

A) You can't believe how vulgar and appalling the modern world is, or how little you want to do with it, but circumstances have forced you to take up gainful employment, which won't end well... You are Ignatius C. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. (Although it also sounds a bit like me.)

B) You're smooth, classy, effortlessly graceful and an absolute alpha-male in the boardroom. Then you get home and slaughter tramps... You are Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. (If only...)

C) Some woman, whose name you cannot recall, is giving you 'shit', so you lock her out of your crappy apartment and have another quart of liquor... You are Hank Chinaski from virtually any book by Charles Bukowski.

D) You're tired, you're fat, you badly need a rug-rethink, a handjob and some bourbon, and you should never be portrayed by Nick Frost... You are John Self from Martin Amis's Money.

E) You have a nagging sense that 'im indoors wants shot of you, and will stop at literally nothing to make it so... You are Katherine of Aragon from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

F) Having spent the whole morning lying immobile on your back, considering the intricate beauty of the minutiae of life, you feel like trying the afternoon on your left side...You are John Cromer from Adam Mars-Jones' Pilcrow. (Or me, making the absolute most out of being unemployed.)

G) You are gullible, stupid, and bloody irritating... You are Miriam from D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

H) You look absolutely nothing like Nicholas Cage and you sound nothing like Nicholas Cage... You are Captain Antonio Corelli from the book Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis deBernieres and not the film. Never the film. Aargh.

I) You've done nothing for about eighteen years then suddenly you're off travelling again, but acting in an ill-conceived, second rate way at the behest of an Irishman... You are Arthur Dent from Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing.

J) You are bland, clever, you smoke, you run, and no-one really cares about you, but everyone puts up with your scenes because they're inexplicably in love with your sidekick... You are Mikael Blomkvist from Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (Actually, that sounds like me too.)

K) You are prone to speaking really poor dialogue, given to protracted and tedious attempts to sound profound and philosophical, and have a crap boyfriend...You are the heroine of Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas.

L) You have a "pleasant open face", or "a shock of unruly white hair", or you are "a hobo in an astrakhan hat", or you have "a bohemian look under thick brown curls", or you have "a mercurial, feline smile and sandy hair": You are one of the Doctors Who, from a Terrance Dicks novelisation.

Voodoo Histories

2010-06-09T02:41:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting indoors to avoid the rain (for I am in the UK) reading David Aaronvitch's brilliant Voodoo Histories (Vintage, £8.99) in which journalist and broadcaster Aaronvitch takes up Occam's Razor and sets about slicing and dicing the big-boys of conspiracy theory (Diana's "murder", The "Whole Dan-Brown-Bloodline-of-Christ-Bollocks", the "Plot to kill Kennedy", and so on, reducing them to a quivering pile of foolish offal which only the most demented, buck-toothed, lives-with-Mum weirdos and internet-addicted shut-ins could possibly believe in, because only they alone possess enough naked credulity to buy into this paranoid guff.

His main weapon, relentless comon-sense and logic is best exemplified when he observes, (I'm paraphrasing) of the 40% of Americans who believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration to lead them into war with Iraq for oil, "do these people really believe in a cabal powerful enough to employ thousands of operatives to demolish the Twin Towers, hide passenger planes and replace them with missiles, plant DNA evidence at the Pentagon so that 180 passengers are falsely accounted for, yet at the same time one which lacks the wherewithal to bury a few tins of chemical weapons in the vastness of the Iraqi desert to satisfy the dodgy-dossier doubters?" It's refreshing reading, and maybe with the David Kelly suicide receding from memory, it may even usher in a new age of reason, though Aaronovitch stops short of explicity suggesting that the main reason conspiracy theories have become so powerful in the last twenty years is because U.S. and British societies have just got much, much thicker.

As a bookseller, perhaps the most pleasurable section of the book is the charlatan-debunking chapter which exposes as arses such luminaries of the New Age Gump section as Graham Hancock, Erich Von Daniken and of course Baigent and Leigh, who emerge looking very, very foolish indeed. Yet these liars, truth-benders and dupes have sold many millions of copies of their works, so what does that say about our society? Yup. Thicker.

However, the book raises more questions than it answers. Firstly, who financed and published this book, and for what purpose? To keep us blind, to keep us chewing the cud like the sheep we are! It was the Jewish Space-Lizards, who secretely rule the Earth, from a laboratory under the Mojave Desert, who created the persona of "David Aaronvitch", who doesn't even really exist. I asked his younger brother Ben Aaronvitch if his big brother David existed, and he never even replied to my email. Rudeness? Or was he silenced by the CIA?

The Truth is Out There.

- Fox Mulder.

Christmas is going to suck.

2010-06-04T02:46:00.001-07:00

It's going to be a very depressing Christmas for booksellers, as this year's 'bestsellers' look even less enticing than last year's collection of tat.

"September's publications include a string of sequels to successful celebrity memoirs with Chris Evans, Russell Brand and Jo Brand releasing books on the 30th. Paul O'Grady's follow-up to last year's At My Mother's Knee is released on the 16th, the same day as Stephen Fry's long-awaited sequel to his memoir Moab is my Washpot. In fiction, thrillers by the likes of James Patterson, Lee Child and Chris Ryan are published. Maeve Binchy and Sophie Kinsella are among the big-hitting female authors that are released in September."

I mean, I might one day read the Stephen Fry. In paperback. But that's about it. God help our bookshops this Autumn.

Mayor of Casterbridge - FAIL

2010-05-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Thomas,

Apologies for taking so long to get back to you: as you know, the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing MA is hopelessly oversubscribed and I'm marking two full-length manuscripts per day all through the summer. But enough of my woes, lets look at yours.

I'm going to have to FAIL your manuscript, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I had high hopes for it, as you impressed me throughout the course as a gifted and insightful writer and student of humanity (although some of those mourning-poems got a bit much after a while, dude!) but this novel just doesn't meet the course targets, and that's the difference between being publishable or not in this highly competitive era.

We discussed plotting in one of the very first modules, in detail, for two three-hour periods, so I'm somewhat perplexed by what went wrong in Casterbridge. The first chapter is a disaster. WHY IS IT THERE? The sale of his wife and daughter by Henchard is a great plot point, so why throw it away in chapter one? This should be your "final-act reveal", carefully built-up and alluded to throughout the story, slowly revealing Henchard to be a bastard, rather than starting the story at the very beginning, which is hopelessly naive. (Remember that Tarantino film we deconstructed?)

The plotting is, in fact, all over the place. You have woven in an impressive collection of coincidences, twists and revelations, but you choose to use these in a seemingly random, haphazard way rather than at regularly-spaced intervals which act as the "coat-hangers" for your narrative (which we covered in the third week of the course, so you've no excuse!) and there's no satisfactory final showdown/twist, which is just amateurish.

Lastly I find no evidence that you've adequately researched your demographic - a key aspect of creative writing to which we devoted an entire week's worth of seminars back in January. Obviously, and quite rightly, your book is aimed at 'women of a certain age', with all the yawny nature-stuff, the quaint historical setting (which I concede you pull off rather well) and the classic soap-opera style plot. But to make the lead character of the book a man merely alienates the readership, and to make him three-dimensional and unpredicatable is a cardinal sin. Remember we discussed the idea of the "one-sentence" character? If you can't outline a character's nature in one sentence they aren't "real" or likely to convince. Also, there's no sex in the manscript, and I think readers investing in an historical romance have the right to expect a quick ravishing on the hay-bales! I'd suggest Henchard's daughter Elizabeth-Jane could put out to Donald Farfrae, ideally in the middle third to maintain the reader's interest. But not too graphic - this isn't a book for men, after all.

So while your writing shows potential, The Mayor of Casterbridge just isn't good enough for publication. Read Diana Evans' 26a as a marvellous example of the sort of quality we're striving for on this course. Don't take rejection too personally, as none of your class-mates approached this level of quality. Charles produced some great story-telling, but I found his prose overlong and indulgent, while Wilkie's crime thriller didn't actually work (he'd buggered up the dates around the period of the crime, which is unforgiveable.) Emily's gothic romance was better, though frankly I thought her sex scene was a bit too ambiguous.

Chin up, though, and please have another go - you may or may not ultimately hit the required standards, but we certainly need your course fees!

Yours,
Simon Cresswell,
Lecturer in Creative Writing
University of East Anglia
(Publication Pending)

Guns N' Pumpkins

2010-05-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

I'm going off-topic again, but only because my reading has taken a dive into the backlist and I have nothing to say about new books at the moment. Yesterday I discovered that Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) features a very early use of the expression 'toss-pot', but it's hard to imagine anyone else caring too much about this.

So I'm going to talk about my two favourite bands, and the astonishing similarities between the two. It took me a long time to realise that the story of these two bands is becoming identical, so let's look at the irrefutable similarities between Guns N' Roses and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Perhaps the first and most obvious point to make about each band is that they are fronted by charismatic, mercurial, and very talented singers who purely coincidentally happen to be as mad as batshit. Pumpkin-in-Chief Billy Corgan, much taken by new-age philosophy is currently giving away a 44-song masterpiece for free (free!) over on the band's website. In the past he was worn big dresses, or dressed like Nosferatu, and enjoyed a threesome with Courtney Love. Axl Rose, meanwhile, burst from the 80's like a red-haired tasmanian devil and has only got madder with the passage of time. Stories of drunken violence, legendary lateness, rudeness and incredible hostility have given way to rumours of how he was hiding in his Hollywood mansion for seventeen years, bit a dutchman's leg on the 2006 tour, and has developed his own language which looks like English but clearly isn't. Examine his response to the question "wouldn't you make more money touring with the old line-up?"

If the music was there, meaning new music, I can't say for sure right now - and there have been market surveys, and various promoters have put together different projections and analysis that in areas where there could be more, it's not enough to sell your soul and live in hell the rest of your life for, that's definitely certain. But that's the catch, right, the music? If I believed in that as a reality which, no offense meant to anyone, I haven't seen anything in all these years to convince me or we'd be doing this interview under different circumstances of some sort, to say the least.It's not some place I want to be or have any interest in being. If I believed in it in regard to the music, not in direction so much but in how it feels and to what degree, then maybe it'd be another story. I'm in no way trying to be offensive to anyone here, and I'm allowed to have my own feelings in regard to what inspires me, not someone else. Other than a one-off or something, I don't really do songs because someone else likes them.
- Axl Rose

Well, quite. The batshit element makes its way onto the records, powering and inspiring some of the biggest, maddest rock riffs and epic songs of the last twenty years. Look at the demented glory of 'Coma', 'Estranged' or 'There Was A Time', or the anger and fury of 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings', 'Tarantula' or 'The Everlasting Gaze'. You don't get well-balanced, sensible rock 'professionals' writing music like that, which is why Bon Jovi haven't made a good album since 1995.

The next point is that, as far as I'm concerned, both bands are potentially making their best music right now. I'm seemingly an army of one when it comes to loving Chinese Democracy, and I'm used to that, but the live shows, with sober, technically amazing bandmembers, are pretty amazing right now. Catch them in Europe this summer. Rumour has it that there are enough songs for another new GNR album soon (soon meaning anytime before 2020) Since the reformation of the Pumpkins, they too have been awesome. Zeitgeist rocked. Subsequent EPs and singles have been nothing but beautiful. Teargarden By Kaleidyscope, which is being given away at a rate of roughly one song every other month, is just amazing. Go and download the first four songs, and weep at the calibre of these songs.

In both cases, the frontman is now the only original member still with the band, and there's a revolving-door policy in the ranks. The Pumpkins have just unveiled their fourth bassist, while the cast-list of Guns N' Roses reads like something out of a Neil Gaiman novel: Slash, Duff, Izzy, Brain, Robin Finck, Buckethead, Bumblefoot, Richard Fortus, DJ Ashba... This sort of thing can be a disaster (as Hole fans will be conceding after the release of the hitless Nobody's Daughter album) but both Axl and Billy are making it work for them.

In the 1990's, both bands were huge, sold vast quantities, and regularly turned up on film soundtrack albums. The Pumpkins wrote the best song for a Batman movie, 'The End is the Beginning is the End', sadly attached to the worst Batman movie ever made. (That's not their fault.) Guns N' Roses donated the karaoke-proof 'You Could Be Mine' to the greatest Arnie film, Terminator 2, and a band-splitting cover of 'Sympathy For the Devil' for Interview With the Vampire.

Both groups have recently returned from a lengthy hiatus. The Pumpkins broke up in 2000 and a reformed version of the band with two new members returned in 2007 with the awesome Zeitgeist album. Guns N' Roses took inactivity to new heights, however, after the less-than-
excellent (there, I've said it) covers album The Spaghetti Incident slipped out in 1993. The 'Sympathy' cover-version (Jan 1995) was the end of the road for the old line-up, and by the end of the decade, only one further song had emerged, the aggressive and marvellous 'Oh My God' from the soundtrack to End of Days. The band (whoever they were) were regularly said to be working on the new album, the working title of which changed from 2000 Intentions to Chinese Democracy around this time. A live appearance at the House of Blues on 01/01/01 led to a world tour in 2002, then four long years of silence before another global jaunt in 2006, and in the autumn of that year, speculation that the album was imminent reached fever pitch. The band's manager was fired for suggesting they might just release the album with no fanfare, press interviews, a video or anything. Axl confirmed he was putting the finishing touches to the record, and sure enough, in November 2008, Chinese Democracy was released, with no fanfare, press interviews, a video, or anything. There wasn't even a physical single, FFS. Ex-manager Merck Mercuriadis must be seething that the band fired him but followed his marketing strategy to the letter.

Both bands have obsessive fans who simply can't cope with line-up changes, and constantly bitch on the internet that without so-and-so guitarist, "it just ain't their band". GNR message boards still attract numerous arseheads whining on about the fact Slash isn't involved, and how this apparently invalidates any effort the band make. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, there are still some Pumpkins fans sitting in the dark, holding their breath, awaiting the return of James Iha. You have to feel sorry for the current line-ups of both bands - who are producing great music, that the legacy of the old bandmembers, and the innate mentality of a small percentage of their fanbase is dragging them down. It's also interesting to note that both former lead guitarists, Slash and Iha, left their bands because of drug addiction issues. Shpooky! The old-guard fans are of course still obsessed with the early work of both bands. As far as your average, thick-as-fuck, mullet-sporting GNR fan is concerned, the band haven't made a good album since Appetite For Destruction. Similarly the Pumpkins' recent efforts are sniffily dismissed as 'not as good as Siamese Dream'.

Finally both bands are operating in markedly reduced circumstances these days. Chinese Democracy has sold a modest two or three million copies (but that's what happens when you do zero promotion for a record after 17 year hiatus) while the Pumpkins have taken the ominous route of giving their new songs away for free. Both bands are touring this summer, GNR playing arenas, festivals and theatres rather than football stadia, and the Pumpkins world-tour currently consists of a two-date jaunt to Japan.

Both bands, however, will be brilliant.

Pratchett Slams Doctor Who

2010-05-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sir Terry Pratchett (TM) (C) has criticised the science in Doctor Who, calling it flimsy and weak. "It shouldn't even weally be classified as science fiction, to my mind," Pwatchett wrote in SFX magazine.

Hard-science purist Pratchett is the author of the bestselling Discworld series in which a bunch of Wizards live on a flat planet carried through space on the back of a giant turtle.

He complained specifically about an episode where a hospital was transported to the moon. "It was very lazy to say 'there's a force-field awound it'," Tewwy said. "In my shed, I conducted wigorous tests using an abandoned hospital and the lunar surface, and I found that, if you weally teleport a hospital to the moon, all the windows would shatter." In the episode of Doctor Who, broadcast in 2007, no shattering occurred.

The BBC received no complaints about the inaccurate science in the episode.

Sir Tewence has admitted he's still a massive fan of the show, which will come as a huge relief to the BBC, because had Pratchett stopped watching the show, the average viewing figures would have been slashed down to a paltry ten million, four hundred thousand, eight-hundred and sixty four in the UK alone.

The Top Hat is back!

2010-04-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Let me lay my cards out on the table: I love Guns N' Roses, but I'm not the sort of backwards-facing 'now'-scoffer who derides the current line-up. Indeed, I think Chinese Democracy is a great album, and while I've enjoyed the (apparently stalled) career of Velvet Revolver, I did feel that their lead guitarist - perhaps the most revered axe-man of his day - wasn't really pulling his weight. So when the news about Slash's solo album began to appear, I wasn't that interested. I didn't even think I'd bother with it. But I had some time on my hands, got bored, iTunes nudged me towards it and one moment of weakness later I'd 'accidentally' downloaded it.

What emerges, after a few cautious, hiding-behind-the-sofa-in-case-it's-a-stinker listens, is the sort of balls-out, bourboned-up, rock-and-roll thunderclap which evokes the full early 90's glory of Slash at his peak. You have to wonder why he didn't make this record five years ago. Or ten years ago. Or twenty years ago...

Kicking off with 'Ghosts' (vocals supplied by Ian Astbury, who sounds more like Bono every day) the album doesn't muck the listender about: from the start, you know you're in for some proper, old-fashioned hair-rock. 'Crucify the Dead' features a credible (not to say great) turn from the grand old pantomime dame of rock, Ozwald Osborne. Then Fergie out of The Black Eyed Peas turns up on 'Beautiful Danger', and you find yourself marvelling at her rock 'chops', and also at just how much she sounds like Sporty Spice in the chorus.

Some slowish, boozy ballads follow, with Mr Slash doing what he does best on the electric guitar while the likes of Chris Cornell and Adam Levine take up the vacant singer spot. Levine's song, 'Gotten', feels curiously familiar (largely because it's almost exactly the same song as Sebastian Bach's 'By Your Side') but even this fairly mawkish balled soon haunts you until it's firmly lodged in your head.

Then Slash exhumes another panto figure, in the grizzled, warty old form of Lemmy Kilmister, eight hundred years old and still only upon this earth to rock. This song, 'Doctor Alibi', is perhaps the album's most preposterous offering, but you can't help but enjoy it, even if the idea of Lemmy still living the drink-and-drugs dream at his time of life does strike you as being very silly indeed.

The silliness continues: Kid Rock arrives and stuns the listener by not being shit, and Sir Igforth of Pop leaps around like another mad old grandad, threatening to 'whip it out and pee on the ground'. It's like Charles Bukowski just came back from heaven to rock the stunned joint.

The stand-out, sensible and beautiful highlight of the record is 'Saint Is A Sinner', featuring Rocco DeLuca, which is every bit as credible and mature as the rest of the album is gloriously silly Dad-rock.

On each song, Slash unleashes the beast he's kept in check since leaving GNR back in 1996. His guitar can thump, squeal, threaten, terrify and seduce by turn. The riffmaster with the blues licks is in his element on this record, which might just live up to the promise of the artist, long past the point where anyone thought he had any bullets left in his gun.

There's nothing new here, no cutting-edge musical experimentation or emo-coaxing darkness, just the sound of old men, who should all know better, rocking their nuts off for one last, glorious time. They don't make them like this any more, so we should cherish our proper rock stars while we still have some.

Who says rock and roll can't be fun?

Minutes of the first meeting of the 2010 Booker Prize committee

2010-04-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

9.30 The Chairman greets the committee, everyone says a few hellos. Chairman reads a little poem he's specially written. (It's not very good).

9.33 Chairman invites the floor to suggest titles suitable for nomination to the longlist.

9.42 "Yes, but there must be others," insists the chairman. "The longlist is supposed to have twelve or thirteen titles!"

9.43 "The Amis was pretty good..."

9.47 "The Andrea Levy was OK, I suppose."

10.04 "Oooooh, I've got one, I've got one! What about Rose Tremain? She wrote a book, didn't she?"

10.17 "I don't care how much of a one-horse race this is, I'm not nominating Ian bloody McEwan and there's an end of it! Zip it! Zip! Zzzz!"

10.28 "For the last time, we can't nominate Wolf Hall because Wolf Hall won it last year!"

10.42 "It was indeed quite well received, no-one's arguing with that. I'm just a little bit concerned that Darren Shan is generally regarded as a children's author."

10.45 Coffee and Biscuits

11.04 "So let me sum up. It's unavoidably, obviously and inescapably got to be David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet which wins the prize in 2010, but we can't really think of twelve other decent books to pad out the longlist?"

11.07 "We're really going to struggle to spin this out until October, Mr Chairman..."

The Confessions of a Justified Singer

2010-04-23T01:55:00.000-07:00

To anyone considering a trip to Meydan racecourse to see Rod Stewart in concert next month, I say only this: save your money! It’s an imposter!

The real Rod Stewart was killed by a nymphomaniac Voodoo priestess back in his teens.

And I can prove it through the medium of textual analysis. Examine, if you will, exhibit 'a', the song Maggie May by Rod Stewart...

Maggie May

Maggie “May”? Oh, come on, Rod, don’t be so coy. Maggie “Almost Certainly Would, The Dirty Cow” might be a better title for a song about this kind of woman.

Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you
Its late September and I really should be back at school

(Stewart reveals himself to be a very poor student here: any young lad worth their salt currently in the education system knows full well that the Autumn term begins very early in September, and the sort of kid who drags his disaffected arse back to the local comp at the fag-end of the month has already missed vital schooling, will be disastrously far behind academically and will have missed vital administrative activity too. Teenagers being what they are, he’ll also have missed two lunchtime stabbings, bypassed two short-lived but erotically charged romances with precocious fourth-form girls (or “Year Ten” or whatever the fudge they call them these days) and will have precious little time to organise his three weeks of ‘Work Experience’ due in November.)

I know I keep you amused

(That explains it. It’s always the “amusing ones”, the jokers, the class clowns, who muck about and truant at the expense of their schooling. More fool them. Actually, that’s pure hypocrisy on my part. I did feck-all at school. And I did OK in my GCSEs. But it’s irresponsible to propagate such things when adolescents may be reading. School is important.)

but I feel I’m being used

(No teenage boy should be complaining about that.)

Oh Maggie I couldn’t have tried any more

(We’ve all made that claim, too, when fatigue sets in or your knees give out.)

You lured me away from home

(Now, for the first time, serious questions begin to pop and wink in the mind of the reader. Is Maggie May what we would now classify as a "predatory paedophile"?)

just to save you from being alone

(...or just a lonely old tart?)

You stole my heart and that’s what really hurt

(...Or a high priestess of Haitian voodoun? You’d have to hope she at least used an anaesthetic before cutting through the ribcage to remove the heart. Either way, he’ll be dead in moments. Poor Rodney.)

The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age

(My god. You can tell he’s young and inexperienced with women. You should never say something like that to a lady. It makes them ever so cross. No wonder she’s ripped his heart out. Even someone mild-mannered and serene like Kristen Scott-Thomas would chin you for suggesting she was developing crow's feet.)

But that don’t worry me none in my eyes you’re everything
I laughed at all of your jokes

(Not a sentiment Russell Howard will ever hear)

my love you didn’t need to coax
Oh, Maggie I couldn’t have tried any more

(You have to wonder how much ‘more’ she wanted. A 15-yr-old boy would be good for six or seven "goes" per night, I reckon, so if she’s still not satisfied she must have some kind of scary morbid sexual addiction, as opposed to the more mundane ‘sex addiction’ claimed by David Duchovny which was, apparently, just an attempt to medically legitimise a ferocious internet porn-habit.)

You lured me away from home
just to save you from being alone
You stole my soul and that’s a pain I can do without

(He’s being disingenuous, methinks. When some mud-smeared voodoo fruitcake tries to remove your soul using old bones, some blood and hair and a rusty knife, you’re going to react a tad stronger than tutting about it being “a pain you could do without.” That’s the sort of epithet best used when someone asks your opinion of listening to Colin Murray.)

All I needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand

(I’m not even going to touch that. Unlike Maggie.)

But you turned into a lover and
Mother what a lover,

(Textbook Oedipal complex.)

You wore me out

(But he’s 15. She must have more stamina than Paula Radcliffe, for heaven’s sake.)

All you did was wreck my bed
And in the morning kick me in the head

(WTF?)

Oh Maggie I couldn’t have tried anymore
You lured me away from home
cause you didn’t want to be alone
You stole my heart I couldn’t leave you if I tried

(Largely, you have to conclude, because she’s locked all the doors and trapped him in an oubliette in the cellar.)

I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school
or steal my daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool

(The naiveté of youth. It’s very hard to make a living out of cue-sports, which is why Alli Carter is training as an airline pilot and even Jimmy White had to go on I’m A Celeb to make ends meet.)

Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helping hand

(Well, that would be easier than the pool option. Florence needs someone to service her Machine, The Red Hot Chili Peppers could use a competent lyricist, Velvet Revolver need a new singer, and so do Queen now they’ve sacked Paul Rodgers for being insufficiently flamboyant and refusing to grow a moustache.)

Oh Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face

(Probably because, if she's so wizened, lined and aged, first thing in the morning without any slap on she must have looked like Margaret Beckett)

You made a first-class fool out of me

(Which neatly explains away the tight hotpink spandex, eh, Rod?)

But I’m as blind as a fool can be

(Don’t be too hard on yourself. Even though Maggie turned out to be a deranged psychopath, many other men have made worse romantic decisions. Paul McCartney and Peter Andre, to name but two.)

You stole my heart but I love you anyway

He’s in that calming, numb white corridor which precedes brain death. Put his heart back, Maggie, you mad old cow!

Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face

(But Special Branch would presumably dearly love to...)

I’ll get on back home one of these days

I nearly forgot to tell you about this masterpiece...

2010-04-20T05:06:00.000-07:00

I, Bookface, was nineteen when I first discovered Martin Amis – in a 1995 TV interview ahead of publication of his novel The Information. The following day I bought one of his early novels, Dead Babies, and a love-affair was begun. Within a few weeks The Information was published, and I bought my hardback copy within around five seconds of it being placed on the bookshop shelf. It remains my favourite novel of all time.

I couldn’t tell you why, really, it is a tale of jealousy, failure and success, between two forty-something authors, with long meanderings through their undergraduate days at Oxford, a quick jaunt around America, their involvement with a London hard-man up to no good, and lots of metaphysical meditations in between. Not the sort of thing you usually connect with, as a teenager, I would imagine.

Since then, I have read almost all of the Amis backlist (but not all, there’s no rush, and this is after all a relationship for a lifetime) and snapped up each new book eagerly – although his last couple have been so short I’ve found myself getting withdrawal symptoms.

Thank heavens, then, for the arrival of The Pregnant Widow, his latest novel, and his longest novel since The Information. Traditionally your longer Amis is better because, afforded room to recur, his jokes become immense, his characters broaden into widescreen grotesques, and his fiction acquires a gloriously detailed depth.

The Pregnant Widow brings Amis’ fiction almost full-circle: the 60-year-old enfant terrible of British fiction addresses in this latest novel the sexual scheming of the twenty-year-old male, which was the subject of the author’s debut novel The Rachel Papers which was published in 1973.

The action is framed in the now, as Keith Nearing, in his fifties and onto his third marriage, reminisces about the summer of 1970 ('the' summer, Amis contends, of the sexual revolution) which he feels derailed him emotionally and sexually. Each of the book’s five parts is set during that summer in Italy as Keith and his girlfriend Lily (who are as a couple almost finished) holiday with Lily’s friend Scheherazade (with whom Keith is becoming obsessed) her determined suitor Adriano, and a supporting cast of friends and visitors who variously slow, impede, facilitate or inspire Keith in his ill-conceived plots to bed Scheherazade.

As is often the way with Martin Amis, it’s a man’s book, although at time’s you’d qualify that by suggesting it’s a boy’s book. The author deftly sidesteps the need to write about sexual acts (never easy, often attacked) and thus frees himself up to have his characters talk about and have sex every few pages. But the pervading atmosphere of sorrow and regret, that what is unfolding is fundamentally morally wrong for any social or sexual revolution, ultimately marks this as an adult’s book – moreover, a father’s book, a husband’s book.

There is also the story of Keith’s little sister, herself caught up in the uncertain quest for sexual equality, although her story unfolds over the course of decades rather than one summer, and mirrors the life of Amis’s sister in a way which personalises the story and lends it a necessary emotional counterweight – for without this aspect you’d be left with a novel about unlikeable privileged twenty-year-olds having a lot of sex and spouting increasingly funny nonsense about the English Novel – at which point, you suppose, Amis could just as well have turned in another volume of autobiography.

In a curious belch in the book’s closing section, Amis suddenly starts dropping fairly heavy references to his other novels, as if to tie his canon into a cohesive whole. Look, here’s Lizzyboo from London Fields (which also brought us Amis’ other great Keith – Keith Talent. Are we invited to compare his diametrically opposed Keiths? Why else christen Keith Nearing “Keith"?) and here’s a mention for The Little Magazine from The Information. Doubtless there are many more of these touches, but I consciously started trying not to spot them in case I start to resemble some kind of Amis-nerd.

While the prose is as pin-sharp, not to say incandescent as ever, and his asides and operating theories about masculinity and emotional development hold as eerily accurate as ever for me, this novel does feel slightly more sober and considered than many of his previous works. It is less self-consciously funny: while there are amusing moments, we aren’t given comic grotesques which are then milked dry for every available giggle (as we were with Keith Talent, say, Clint Smoker, or Marmaduke Clinch in earlier books) but presented with characters who are seemingly as close to real as you’ll get from Amis.

Nevertheless, you are left with a masterclass in erudite writing, and at this point in the career of a writer, you must always salute such a manifest effort to develop, progress, and evolve the style and tone of writing.

The Pregnant Widow is one of the great novels of the year – beyond that it is too early to judge how important it will be in the greater scheme of things – but it is a worthy and hugely entertaining addition to the Amis oeuvre.

"I cosmically order you to review Our Tragic Universe!"

2010-04-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

"Hello, Bookface speaking...?"

"Bookface? I have a task for you."

"I recognise your voice from somewhere, don't I?"

"No."

"Oh get away with you, that's the voice of saturnine-faced, goatee-bearded megalomaniac Noel Edmonds, isn't it?"

"...I prefer to be known as the Master."

"How are you Noel, how can I help?"

"I am incandescent with rage. I am consumed by the desire for vengeance. I am quaking with restrained aggression."

"It could be the shivers. Pop one of your nice woolly-pullies on, Noel."

"At home I dress in a long black velvet frock-coat, black gloves and black trousers. I am sufficiently warm."

"So what's got you in such a grumpy mood?"

"Have you read the new Scarlett Thomas novel, Our Tragic Universe?"

"Yes, but I don't - oh. I see."

"How dare she make fun of the Cosmic Ordering Service, a new-age self-help franchise I championed and endorsed in the middle of the last decade?"

"Well, she's only - "

"And how dare she dismiss it as a nonsense for the foolish and needy?"

"How indeed?"

"And how dare she slip in a veiled reference to me as "a washed-up game-show host from the eighties" ?? I, who commanded huge television audiences for Noel's House Party right through to the late 1990's in actual fact?"

"To be fair, you're nitpicking, I mean the book isn't actually about you, or the Cosmic Ordering service."

"I don't care. I want her destroyed."

"You do realise I'm only a book reveiwer, and not an assassin?"

"A bad review will help ensure the book fails to find a readership. I will be the architect of her destruction myself. It shall be...painful and protracted."

"Why don't you just order the Cosmos to run her over with an out-of-control bus?"

"Because it's just new-age bullsh*t, of course. I was desperate. I hadn't been on television for almost a decade. I had to believe in something, find some tiny sliver of hope in the darkness...and it worked, didn't it? I got the job on Deal or No Deal!"

"Right."

"So you'll do it? You'll write a dreadful review?"

"Well, I'm not sure. It wasn't a great novel, but I'm not sure I disliked it enough to give it too much of a drubbing."

"But you could say the plot was rubbish!"

"But it's a very careful design, that plot, depending on how you choose to read the book, it might be a slice of ultramundane real-life, but it might be a magical fantasy, depending on the reader's preference. It's very clever, really."

"Could you say her characters are paper-thin cyphers?"

"I could probably slip that criticism in without harming my conscience, as it goes. The narrator, as with The End of Mr Y, is a female character 'not a million miles away' from Scarlett Thomas, and I am getting tired of hearing her talk about herself."

"Excellent. What else? The clumsy insertion of huge chunks of expositional essays which are presented as people just reading bits out of books to each other all the damn time?"

"That is, as you observe, quite annoying and clumsy, yes."

"And the constant sniping about genre fiction! Mention the constant sniping!"

"She's not having a go at genre fiction, Noel, she's just talking about the different demands of teenage horror fiction to those of adult literary fiction."

"What would she know of literary fiction?! And don't call me Noel!"

"Sorry, sorry: Master."

"And mention all that interminable waffle about Dartmouth! Now, I ask you, Bookface, who cares about Dartmouth??"

"I don't know...there were some quite evocative parts..."

"Never forget, I have the power to destroy you too, Bookface. Now, I want your full attention on slating Our Tragic Universe! Do it now! Find some angle to traduce, or by heaven I'll eliminate you too!"

"Righto. Um. Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas is a carefully assembled philosophical novel where the experience will vary according to the narrative expectations of the reader. The traditional 3-act story with a beginning, a middle and an end is there if you want it. The supernatural world is there and at large, if you wish to see it. There is a monster, if you like, and it gets defeated with magic if you enjoy that sort of thing. If you don't, then don't worry because there isn't, and it doesn't. If you're much less drawn to fancy and like cold, philosophical enquiry and rationalism, then this is a post-modern meta-fiction, indeed a fictionless metafiction, where nothing happens save for the everyday, the universal, the mundane, the incomplete and the unresolved. But I'll tell you this much: the characters are paper-thin cyphers, and Scarlett Thomas can't write convincing dialogue to save her life."

"That should do it. Excellent. You have served me well, Bookface. I shall call on you again, should I have need of you. Mwah hah hah hah hah!"

Jon Bon Jovi is a witch

2010-04-18T05:42:00.000-07:00

Never known as being a lyricist of insight or perception (but rather as one of quite shocking dreadfulness) Jon Bon Jovi’s song Dry County has suddenly become of great interest to scholars and cynics alike, because it seems that the Keep the Faith album track, written in 1992, is in fact an accurate prophesy of my life, right here, right now, in Dubai!

Across the border they turn water into wine
(A veiled reference to a well-known off-licence across the border who sell alcohol in this dry, or “Muslim” country, with no questions asked)
Some say it's the devil's blood they're squeezing from the vine
(But then with lager, everyone’s a critic)
Some say it's a saviour in these hard and desperate times
(me, for one.)
For me it helps me to forget that we're just born to die
(and helps me celebrate when Jenson Button wins a Grand Prix.)
I came here like so many did to find the better life
(This is where it really gets going. I did indeed come out here for a better life. Specifically one with some sunshine in it, and the chance to escape the clutches of grasping Tax-hoover Gordon Brown.)
To find my piece of easy street to finally be alive
(and to have my own heated outdoor pool.)
And i know nothing good comes easy and all good things take some time
(Such as downloading the Slash album from iTunes which seemed to take days rather than minutes.)
I made my bed
(That’s not true, my apartment is fully serviced, and you get fresh towels every day.)
i'll lie in it, to die in it's the crime
(Everything’s a crime out here, if you believe the moaning ex-pats)
You can't help but prosper where the streets are paved with gold
(I quite agree, I was on very good money.)
They say the oil wells ran deeper here than anybody's known
(I think he means the UAE rather than Dubai specifically, which is not known for huge oil reserves, but makes its money chiefly through tourism and commerce, as exemplified by the Mall of the Emirates which has an indoor ski-slope, and Dubai Mall, which is roughly the size of Guildford.)
I packed up on my wife and kid and left them back at home
(Yup, there were tears at Heathrow. And who knows, there might even be a kid by now.)
Now there's nothing in this paydirt, the ghosts are all i know
(At least I think it’s a ghost in my bathroom making that unearthly wailing every night. It might just be a problem with the plumbing.)
Now the oil's gone and the money's gone and the jobs are gone
(Well, my job certainly is)
Still we're hangin' on
Down in dry county
They're swimming in the sand
(Again, spooky. There’s tons of sand out here. Tons.)
Praying for some holy water
(Though any will do, especially after five minutes out in the sun)
To wash the sins from off our hand
(I haven’t sinned out here. I’m morally far too upstanding, and too worried that the aforementioned hand might get chopped off.)
Here in dry county
The promise has run dry
Where nobody cries
And no one's getting out of here alive
(Judging by the bloodthirsty look on the faces of staff at Emigration at Terminal One.)
In the blessed name of jesus
I heard a preacher say
That we are god's children
And he'd be back someday
(Even God would have to make a mandatory 30-day visa run to Bahrain, probably.)
And i hoped that he knew
Something as he drank his cup of wine
(The wine’s not up to much out here, it doesn’t travel well. There’s no bitter, either, just lager.)
I didn't have too good of a feeling
As i head out to the night
(But I’m not one to let amoebic dysentery slow me down.)
I cursed the sky to open
I begged the clouds for rain
(Jon’s first mis-step as a clairvoyant. I would never beg the clouds for rain, because I’m British and I’ve had 30-odd years of solid rain.)
I prayed to god for water
For this burning in my veins
(For “burning in my veins”, read “churning in my bumgut”. My wife blames the Rajasthani food I keep having, but I get quite ill even if I just have fruit and yoghurt. It could be something in the water.)
It was like my soul's on fire
And i had to watch the flames
All my dreams went up in ashes
And my future blew away
(Lucy, at least, has a job lined up for September, but Lord knows what I’m going to do.)
Now the oil's gone
And the money's gone
(I’ve got about 500 Dhs left, which on the bright side will buy me 125 shawarmas.)
And the jobs are gone
Still we're hangin' on
Down in dry county
They're swimming in the sand
Praying for some holy water
To wash the sins from off our hand
Here in dry county
The promise has run dry
Where nobody cries
And no one's getting out of here alive
Men spend their whole lives
Waiting praying for their big reward
(Too true. I spent fifteen years waiting for Chinese Democracy to be released.)
But it seems sometimes
The payoff leaves you feeling
Like a dirty whore
(I did feel quite naughty for liking it as much as I did)
If i could choose the way i'll die
Make it by the gun or knife
'cause the other way
( - being smashed up in one of the RTA taxis which are driven by men who’ve obviously learnt all they know about driving from watching Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof - )
there's too much pain
Night after night after night

Down in dry county
They're swimming in the sand
Praying for some holy water
To wash the sins from off our hand
Here in dry county
The promise has run dry
Where nobody cries
And no one's getting out of here alive

See what I mean? He’s a witch. Burn him.

A Good Education

2010-04-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Bookface hasn't read Lynn Barber's An Education, but I did go and watch the film yesterday, after it finally found its way over here to Dubai. Since the size of the crowd was inversely proportional to how good the film was, I thought I'd mention it in my blog.

Seriously, readers, if you've not seen it then you really should. The early 60's London is full of detail: period cars, rain and a sense of claustrophobic pointlessness. Schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan, who is outstanding) meets an older man (Peter Sarsgaard, one of those "Oh-what-else-have-I-seen-him-in" types who, when you realise you haven't, will drive you nuts until you realise his soft-spoken, slightly camp delivery was merely reminding you of John Malkovitch.) and this is the key for Jenny to begin to question the path chosen for her by her father (Alfred Molina, who is excellent.) Along the way there are laughs, tears, and a staggeringly good comic turn from, of all people, Rosamund Pike (a Bond girl back in Die Another Day) who is a revelation in her role.

The screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, to whom Bookface has been less than generous in the past, but the script Hornby delivered is note-perfect; the best thing he's written since High Fidelity. Obviously, in and of itself, that sounds like the damnation of faint praise (his last few novels were almost unbearably wretched) but I mean it sincerely: this is a great screenplay, with great performances, and I urge more of you to get out and see this great film while it's playing over here.

Peering up the Brass Eye...

2010-04-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Publisher: So tell me, Lucian Randall, about this idea for a book you've had?

Randall: Well, you know that the most dangerous TV/Radio comic of the 90's, Chris Morris, is about to release a film? I thought the time was ripe for a biography of the man and his work.

Publisher: Marvellous. So you'd be doing lots of interviews with Morris and his colleagues?

Randall: Well. Pfffft. A few, I guess. If anyone's up for it. Morris himself almost certainly won't be.

Publisher: Oh. So the bulk of the book would be a critique of his work, his legacy, the way he changed both the medium of TV newsgramming and comedy shows too? Not to mention the way his words and phrasing permeated society? I'm thinking of expressions like "modern drugs party", "depravativity", "steeplejacked by triplesod, jessop jessop jessop"and so on?

Randall: I don't want to get too bogged down in all that stuff. I was thinking I could really just get a biggish advance and just re-watch The Day Today and Brass Eye on DVD for research. Then just quote lots of old interviews and articles.

Publisher: I see. And you'd cover his whole career, from BBC Radio Bristol to the present day?

Randall: Um. Well, yeah, up to the TV show Jam.

Publisher: But what about everything Morris has done in the last decade?

Randall: I thought I'd gloss over all that, coz I don't really know what he's been up to since 2001, and can't really be bothered to check.

Publisher: But there'd be lots about his debut film Four Lions? Which comes out in cinemas right now?

Randall: Nah, sod that. I've got an old essay about Brass Eye, I thought I could just reuse it and bulk it up a bit.

Publisher: Oh. Well. It doesn't sound like the best book about Chris Morris one could wish to read.

Randall: It'll do the job, though.

Publisher: S'pose so. Here's a big bunch of cash then.

Randall: Ta. I'll turn it in when it's done.

Publisher: Thanks, Lucian Randall.

Run away from this gilded cage!

2010-04-17T01:09:00.000-07:00

Syed Ali (presumably not the same Syed Ali who menaced L.A. with a nuclear bomb in season two of 24, but you never know) has just written a book - Dubai: Gilded Cage.

I read it during the course of a lunch-hour (it's never a good sign if a serious academic work takes less time to read than Time Out Dubai's restaurant special.) Despite being written by an academic, published by Yale, and despite having a reassuringly expensive cover-price, let me warn you, gentle reader, that this is book is very disappointing.

Ali concedes early on that his research for the book involved visiting friends in Dubai for a couple of weeks one summer and chatting to anyone willing to speak to him about life in the Emirate. However, when he tries to extrapolate his meagre research and reach incisive conclusions, he falls flat on his 'arris.

This is a pretty thin bit of work, where some bleedin' obvious conclusions are reached after minimal assessment of evidence, and entire sections of Dubai society like the Keralan construction workers or the sex-workers are summed up in brief, generalised and vague chapters based on the flimsiest of evidence, or none at all. Ali tried to talk to a whole one prostitute about her experiences in Dubai, but since she wasn't chatting for free and he "wasn't paying for it" he swiftly abandoned even this nominal research.

What you get is a potted history of how Dubai has evolved over the last ten years, and some ill-pursued observations about the many inequalities, evils and injustices at work in the city today. Ali does find a couple of relatively newer topics to add to the mix, but to be honest there's nothing in this book that a visitor to Dubai won't pick up for themselves within a week of arriving at DBX.

Now, Bookface is no qualified sociologist or anthropologist, as you know, but I could have written a better book about Dubai than this lightweight effort. Many people could.

Why don't you have a go?

Staring at the sun

2010-04-17T01:03:00.000-07:00

The latest novel from Ian McEwan, Solar uses the background of science, specifically physics, to bring us a morality tale about an aging Nobel Prize-winner. This genius, Dr Michael Beard, took his prize twenty-odd years ago for the Einstein-Beard Conflation, a formula which greatly advanced the application of quantum theory.

Dr Beard worries his career has stalled. He worries his wife has a lover. He worries about his younger rivals who might one day produce work that could overshadow his own. When these worries are hideously borne out, Beard makes two immoral decisions which could either destroy his life, or save the planet.

Over the course of the decade, we follow the self-serving Beard, a man dispassionately prepared to do whatever it takes to protect his mundane life, and the unfolding portrait examines our notions of greatness, and of genius. From London to Lordsberg, via an eye-watering excursion to the North Pole, we uncover diverse facets of flawed masculinity: cowardice, extreme denial, pathological infidelity, ultimately even sheer psychopathy.

While we can never hope to have the fundamental secrets of the universe unfold in our minds, we can see the obvious good sense in choices like going to the doctor, in not confronting large and violent men, in not embarking on affairs through mere muscle-memory rather than desire. As I swiftly progressed through the novel I found myself getting progressively angrier with the Nobel-winning physicist who emerges, ultimately, as a towering idiot.

The ultimate dichotomy is that a brain that can wrestle with Einstein can’t spot the overwhelmingly obvious: an increasing array of Damoclesian swords, swinging ominously, mere millimetres above his head, ever-nearing the inevitable moment when they must surely drop...
There are brief attempts to psychoanalyze Beard’s behaviours, but really we aren’t meant to wonder too much about why he is such as he is. Men will read the book with a smirk and a tut, women will probably find it a wholly different, baffling experience lacking any sort of explanation or emotional insight.

McEwan’s prose remains as accomplished as ever: by the end of page three I was genuinely miserable out of empathy for Beard’s emotional predicament. Other pages made me laugh, shudder, cringe, roll my eyes, shout out, shake my head, and curl my toes.

The novel presents a man, in full, a man whose ultimate destiny seems unavoidable. You will either long to see Beard cheat his fate, or you will itch to see him come undone.

Saving the planet using solar energy and photovoltaic technology to split water into hydrogen and oxygen thus providing humanity with cheap, ethical energy with no detrimental environmental impact is ultimately an achievable goal which humanity looks to have pushed beyond its own reach in a climax which will – and I mean this a nicely as possible – remind you of the early, environmentally-themed Ben Elton novels where big businesses with big lawyers were able to protect the oil-guzzling, planet-killing status quo.

Bookface has often said that McEwan is at his best when he concentrates on contemporary life, and this is yet another example of that. Solar will sit alongside Saturday as a dark look at the first decade of the twenty-first century: when, given so many choices and chances, we seemingly avoided taking any positive action at all....

A lost weekend with Tony and Gordon

2010-04-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

You’ll have to forgive Bookface for not being quite ready for the start of the working week. One minute, it’s Thursday evening, and I’m curiously picking up a copy of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, and the next minute it’s Sunday morning and I’m late for work. I’ve lost a whole weekend to this hefty tome, and I’m not even halfway through it!

It’s a brilliant account of Britain’s government, ostensibly focusing on the period from 2001, but with enough back-story to present a full account of the New Labour government from their sweep to power in 1997.

What Rawnsley has done, aided in part by the passage of time, is to distil and conflate the daily drip of events into a gripping narrative, and with such unparalleled access to those at the very top of government (Rawnsley is one of the UK’s most pre-eminent political journalists) we’re presented with a behind-the-scenes look into the workings of government, of unprecedented honesty and insight.

As I lay by the pool, the events of September 11 unfolded once again, and then I was steaming through the accounts of Baghdad falling, Alastair Campbell’s monstrous battle with the BBC over the “dodgy dossier”, and the underhand secret war between 10 Downing Street and...11 Downing Street.

Tony Blair is presented as a driven man, who was wont to run the country single-handedly on the issues he believed in, at times a genius, at others an hubristic victim of his own self-belief. But the truly riveting character in the book is Blair’s brooding, control-freak Chancellor, and now the current British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

Brown begins the story as an active problem for Blair, determined to hurry Blair’s retirement and assume the premiership himself, and as the years pass, the animosity between them only grows deeper and more damaging, actively impeding the function of government. It is a foul-tempered and bitter story which, as Bookface can personally vouch, will totally obsess you while you read it.

I wouldn’t have mentioned the book in my blog, for even though it’s an explosive book to emerge in an election year, this is Dubai not Westminster after all, and I didn’t think too many of our customers and readers would be too interested. Yet today I see the book has shot into the top 5 of the Magrudy’s sales chart for its non-fiction category: which means that there are clearly some very interested people out there in Dubai! To all of you, whatever your level of interest in British politics, whatever your political leanings, I say this: if you like to read fresh perspectives and insights on recent history, this book is worth buying purely for the narrative. The tale it has to tell is amazing, appalling, astonishing and addictive.

From page to stage...

2010-04-17T00:55:00.001-07:00

You’ll have to excuse me if my blog this week takes a bit of a scattergun approach. Unlike previous weeks, where I’ve reported on various events from the literary world, or reviewed particular books, this week I have no such clear agenda. Instead of a single meal, I bring you a finger-buffet of a blog, a platter of literary hors d’oeuvres, if you will. You will? Excellent.
Don’t worry, Bookface has not been idle! I have read a couple of books which I shall review on the radio in the weeks to come: tune in to Siobhan Live (on Mondays) and Talking of Books (Saturdays) on Dubai Eye 103.8

I have also made a start on one of the most eagerly awaited novels of 2010: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, but I mustn’t breathe a word until I’ve finished it and have thus formed a rounded, valid opinion. Not one word shall I say about it yet, since I’m only on page 152. Okay, one word, perhaps. “Amazing”. Or “Stunning.” Or how about “evocative and very satisfying”? That’s six words already. But no more, until I have finished it! No more! You’ll have to wait.

I’ve also been out to dinner with some very nice people from one of the UK’s finest and most established publishing houses, who told me some exciting news regarding an unexpected and excellent third novel from a relatively recent winner of the Booker Prize: but in order to provide some sense of drama and intrigue I won’t yet spill the beans on who it is we’re talking about, but all will be made clear in the weeks and months to come.

In other book news, Ian McEwan (whose new novel Solar will be the Magrudy’s fiction Book of the Month in April) has just revealed plans to turn his war novel Atonement into an opera. Quite how that's going to work is a mystery. Atonement is a novel of tiny moments, of silent observations and unspoken secrets which fester and on which turns the plot. Whereas, opera is an art form involving big, overblown emotional exchanges, fat ladies singing, and viking helmets - at least in every opera I've ever seen.

The mind boggles at this potential opening of the floodgates. Could we see other novelists reworking their magnum opuses for the stage? Surely Louis de Bernieres could do something with the much-beloved Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – could that be adapted into a musical? Or how about The Time-Traveler’s Wife (could anyone find a rhyme or two for “chrono-displacement disorder”?) Don’t forget, they really honestly did make a musical of Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick, and it sank without trace.

Maybe they need to go back to the bosom of the classics. Oliver! proved you can turn a novel into a musical: Wuthering Heights On Ice, anyone? How about Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s jolly reimagining of Jude! (perhaps subtitled “Love Never Dies, But Don’t Get Too Attached to the Kids”?)

You couldn’t do a literary adaptation with pantomime, though. Dracula would never be able to claim any victims with two hundred people yelling “Behind you!” every time he gets his fangs out.

I think I might have crossed a boundary, there, from “commenting on the world of books” to “wittering inanely”, so without any further ado I shall withdraw back to Bookface Towers and prepare a more sensible blog for next week.

Do excuse me...

It's Orange time again...

2010-04-17T00:48:00.000-07:00

The longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction – the fifteenth annual award for the best English language novel by a female author – has been announced.

Predictably, Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winner Wolf Hall makes the cut, as does Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. Barbara Kingsolver and Andrea Levy feature too, alongside seven writers nominated for their debut efforts.

Bookface is delighted to see M.J. Hyland’s unsettling and claustrophobic book This Is How on the list: I absolutely loved this tale, I loved the writing, I felt like I was involved in the tale, almost like I was spying on the characters as their story unfolded. If there’s any justice this will survive onto the shortlist, alongside (no doubt) Waters and Mantel, Lorrie Moore, The Help by Kathryn Stockett and - rounding out my guesses – Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising.

Given the huge critical and popular plaudits heaped upon Wolf Hall, it’s hard to imagine another novel beating it on sheer merit: although Booker success is no form guide for the Orange Prize. But if the panel do decide to honour Orange tradition by avoiding the Booker-winner, I’d love to see This Is How win the prize.

Sadly though, my endorsement is generally the kiss of death in literary prizes. My tip never wins the Booker, although I’ve backed the Orange Prize winner in 2005 (Lionel Shriver for the muscular yet emotional We Need To Talk About Kevin) and 1998 (Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party.) Luckily I feel absolutely no pressure on me to be proven right, and I can just go on quietly backing the books I genuinely enjoyed most.

If Hyland doesn’t even make the shortlist, therefore, she can blame me entirely.

Nadia Sawalha's Hardier Shawarmas

2010-04-17T00:40:00.000-07:00

Since Bookface arrived in Dubai, pallid and cold after thirty-odd years in the UK, I’ve tried many new cuisines. One of my favourite dishes, predictably enough, is the humble shawarma: a thing of rare epicurean delight and great flavour. If only, I thought to myself, one of the celebrity chefs had thought to cover Middle East recipes, I could have been onto these beauties years ago!

Thank heavens, then, for Stuffed Vine Leaves Saved My Life, the new cookery title from Celebrity Masterchef winner, and sometime EastEnder, Nadia Sawalha. The book fell open at her recipe for shawarma, and I knew the only fair way to review the whole book would be to try out this recipe in my own kitchen, and let Nadia’s entire (gorgeously photographed) labour of love live or die on the results...

Sourcing the more outré ingredients proved a vexing challenge - by which I mean that Spinney’s were out of Cardamom so I had to stop by Choithram on the way home.

Preparing the marinade was the only tricky part: and this was fairly simple, a bit of oil, some cider vinegar, lemon juice and spices. Grating the onion proved perilous, although not as hazardous as grating the tomatoes, which almost cost me a knuckle. The best advice I can give here is please, please pay attention while you’re doing this. I was trying to concentrate on an episode of The Sopranos, but once I’d grated my hand there was far more blood and bad language in my kitchen than in the New Jersey criminal underworld.

With the marinade prepared closely but not exactly to Nadia’s recipe (I have no idea what “mastic” is but it sounds like an adhesive I might have used at primary school so I erred on the side of caution and left it out of the recipe) I poured it all over the meat (alongside the lamb the recipe calls for I also prepared enough marinade to attempt a chicken version too) and left it to marinade for twenty-four hours, while I stood around watching the clock, reading more of Nadia’s book, and wondering if my social life could be slightly lacking.

24 hours later, having drained the meat, then grilled it, (ideally you’d barbecue it) smothered it in tahini and rolled it up in a wrap, I was delighted at the results. I could perhaps have used more honey (which I used in place of mastic) but these shawarma were big, satisfying, full of flavour and utterly delicious.

Returning a few days later (and a few pounds heavier) to Nadia’s book I felt I was ready for a healthier recipe. Flicking through the pages, I alighted on recipes for Tabbouleh and Shish Taouk on adjacent pages and decided to give them a go. With friends visiting for lunch in a couple of hours I needed something quick that would not be too off-putting to a fussy ten year old, and I was half right (he liked the chicken). Both recipes are, again, simply described and feature common ingredients. A quick trip to the supermarket and all was in hand.

I love Nadia’s nods to practicality – she recommends a long marinade for the Shish Taouk but admits she rarely leaves in for more than 15 minutes which left me feeling less guilty about doing the same.

Preparation this time was simple and also less dangerous. The Shish marinade was a work of moments with only the stinging lemon juice to cause any pain – and if you can’t handle lemon juice you’ve no place in the theatre of war we men call ‘the kitchen’. The Tabbouleh took longer but again was straightforward and even I was left fully fingered after chopping the mint, parsley, cucumber and tomatoes.

It was the bulgur wheat that was a revelation. Left to stand in boiling water for thirty minutes it prepared itself beautifully whilst I listened to Tammy Wynette on the radio. Once plump I was advised by Nadia to get it dry by squeezing it through a tea towel. Who knew this could be such fun? Creamy jets of water spurted between my fingers leaving light fluffy grains to be added to the salad. After grilling the marinaded chicken and piling it on top of the freshly mixed salad I was left with a hearty, healthy lunch.

Friends arrived and we all devoured it, leaving me smug and satisfied in equal measure.
Therefore I can say, with complete honesty, that this is a great cookery book for anyone new to the region looking to recreate local dishes in their domestic kitchens, by a writer whose voluble enthusiasm and passion leaps from every page.

- Bookface is available to attend tasting sessions, if anyone in the Dubai area who buys this book feels like inviting him along to sample their results. He’s even got his own tupperware container for leftovers.

Trespass

2010-04-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

It hardly feels like two years since Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her previous novel The Road Home, but here already is her next novel, Trespass.

(Or "Tresspass" if you produce the Book of the Month posters for Magrudy's...!)

Many authors struggle with the tricky, post-award novel, but Tremain’s Orange success came at a late stage in her career when plaudits were unlikely to derail her or significantly alter her approach to the novelist’s craft.

Trespass sees her writing about France and the French once again, a country and a people she knows well and has written about many times in the past. Set among the hills and winding roads of the Cevennes in Southern France, Trespass is an elegantly plotted and thrilling tale of sibling love, of second chances, of our abiding love for our childhood home and the lengths we will go to in order to defend what we hold most precious.

When antiques dealer, aesthete and snob Anthony Verey arrives in the south of France to visit his sister and look for a fresh start in life, he unwittingly sets in motion a series of events which will have shocking repercussions, not just for himself, sister Veronica or her lover Kitty, but also for another pair of siblings: Audrun and Aramon Lunel: who are already at war over the uncertain future of their home in the Mountains. All the characters here are very solidly drawn from familiar archetypes, which allows you to get a good grasp on the key players from the offset.

Tremain treads a cautious path between delicious black comedy (indeed Verey’s effete-aesthete personality and migrant situation evoke James Hamilton-Paterson’s sublime comedy Cooking With Fernet Branca) and the dreadful depths of human suffering and abuse, with a few excursions into the land of murderous fantasies too. While not a comfortable read, at times, it is never less than highly enjoyable and you’ll aim to finish it in one utterly captivated sitting!

Seen the film? The book was better...

2010-04-17T00:29:00.000-07:00

Last year was a vintage year for cinematic adaptations of great novels.
Revolutionary Road. The Reader. The Damned United. The Lovely Bones. The Road. Frost/Nixon. Need I go on?

All this paper-to-celluloid activity added hugely to the huge, tottering “to read” pile at chez Bookface in 2009, because I always feel a terrible obligation to read a book before watching the film version. The film is, inevitably, just a filleted interpretation of the book’s plot, which is a far lesser experience than actually reading a novel. Wholly submerged in the author’s universe, slowly adapting to their rhythms, structure and cadence...well, you only need to read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, then watch the movie, and you can make your own mind up about which experience is “best”!

It is of course a debate which has been running for over a hundred years now, with film buffs adamant that their medium is the ultimate art form. In a recent post on Amazon, under a thread about the death of J.D. Salinger, someone went so far as to ask: “If Catcher in the Rye is such an important book, how come they never made it into a film?”

If you’re reading this, chump, the answer is “because the author vociferously and famously vetoed this consistently for almost sixty years.” It’s striking that this gump feels that only by being filmed does a novel attain some kind of stamp of approval and become “important”. This wouldn’t bode well for any books which don’t readily lend themselves to the medium of film: James Joyce’s Ulysses is fairly unfilmable, (although it has been tried) but you couldn’t deny it’s a classic. Conversely, Jodi Picoult and Nicholas Sparks have had novels turned into movies, but no-one would claim they are producing “important” works of high literature. (And at the rate their books sell, they’d be mad to tinker with winning formats now...)

There were also television films of David Peace’s Red Riding series, which meant I had to read 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 before I could allow myself to watch the TV versions. I’m glad I did, and faintly embarrassed not to have got around to reading them sooner, because they are devastatingly great novels. Not for nothing is Peace often called “the British Ellroy.”

Which brings us on to 2010. This year the BBC are adapting the classic Martin Amis novel Money, and Hollywood is bringing us some Robert Harris. Luckily, I’ve read those two, but I’m not ready for the imminent cinema release of the Norwegian film production of Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In my defence I did grab a free, promotional copy from the UK publisher back in 2007...I just never got round to reading it.

I can feel the urge to read this phenomenally popular title gnawing away at me, and the imminent arrival of a movie only adds to that compulsion.

Because you have to read the book first. The film will never be as good.

What the heck, I’m going to nip out and buy a copy right now.

Cosy Crime From Burley Cross

2010-04-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

Bookface is a huge fan of Nicola Barker’s 2007 novel Darkmans – my personal favourite novel of the previous decade. I am yet to have an opportunity to read her previous titles but jumped at the chance to get my hands on an advance copy of her forthcoming new novel Burley Cross Postbox Theft.

Essentially this novel is actually is a series of letters by various residents of the titular English village, all having been stolen from a vandalised post box on the night of December 21st 2006, and all subsequently discovered and handed in to the police, who are tasked with the job of sifting through each letter looking for clues as to who might have vandalised the post-box, and why.

They comprise, of course, exactly the sort of letters you’d expect from across a small community: full of local scandal and gossip, bitching, petty squabbles blowing up into small but bitter wars, but also we uncover unrequited love, ancient and well-tested tips on black magic, buried secrets and much fury regarding a small yet rather jolly Muscovy duck.

There are many laughs along the way, but when the letters are finished, you realise that somehow poor PC Roger Topping has got his work cut out: not only must he solve the crime, but he must also do anything in his power to defuse the myriad hostilities festering around town.

And here is where the book really triumphs: after a bitty run of what are effectively short stories, the last thing you expect is a sublime tying-together of threads into an ending which will have you almost cheering, yet this is exactly what Barker accomplishes.

Find out for yourselves when the book is published in the Spring!

Everything You Know Is Wrong

2010-04-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

Nobody wants to hear those words, especially in relation to something as important, intuitive and fraught as parenting. But this book challenges the everyday assumptions which inform how we go about raising our children and uncovers some worrying facts.

It's not often that Bookface veers out of the fiction section to read something factual, and if anything is going to attract my attention it's a nice volume of applied psychology. However, it doesn't matter if you're totally unfamiliar with psychology as a science, as this book is written very much for the mass-market, and the findings and indeed the experiments alluded to within are presented in clear, straightforward terms which make perfect sense to the reader.

The ten chapters within (I'd call them essays but I don't want you to start thinking this is an academic textbook!) each tackle a separate subject. The first has to do with children's responses to praise, and demonstrates that children praised for making an effort will outperform children who are praised for being naturally clever. The urge to receive praise regularly gives children in the first category a strong work ethic, while children who are naturally gifted are shown to shy away from new subjects or situations where they feel their natural gifts won't help them, limiting their options and ultimately narrowing their choices in life.

Another chapter deals with the subject of sleep, and demonstrates just how important it is that children - and teenagers - get as much sleep as possible. This is far more than common sense: the brain is not fully formed until the child reaches 21, and the critical structuring and memory formation occurs during sleep. If these formative years are typified by poor sleeping patterns, the final brain just won't be as effective! Bronson also examines how moving the start-time of High School back by one hour created some astonishing academic improvements in the pupils, and explores a hitherto untapped link between poor sleep and childhood obesity.

I won't tell you about each chapter, but they are all fascinating, and will make you question your instincts and assumptions. Each claim is backed up by rigorous scientific evidence, setting this apart from a good many parenting books on the market - but this isn't a parenting book so much as an unputdownable classic of developmental psychology.