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Gang film audiences to be frisked at 1Day
SECURITY guards have been brought in this weekend to frisk cinemagoers wanting to watch a film about Britains inner city gangs.
SECURITY guards have been brought in this weekend to frisk cinemagoers wanting to watch a film about Britains inner city gangs.
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Gang film audiences to be frisked at 1Day
Atheist Damien Hirst to display oil paintings in St Paul's
DAMIEN HIRST has already portrayed cows being crucified. Now he is to take a more conventional approach to religious art, emulating the old masters by painting two 20ft-high religious works for display in St Pauls Cathedral.
DAMIEN HIRST has already portrayed cows being crucified. Now he is to take a more conventional approach to religious art, emulating the old masters by painting two 20ft-high religious works for display in St Pauls Cathedral.
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Atheist Damien Hirst to display oil paintings in St Paul's
Kate Winslet's wow factor is worth ?60m to the British economy
THE Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet is a ?60m national treasure, according to an analysis of her value to Britain by economists funded by the government.
THE Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet is a ?60m national treasure, according to an analysis of her value to Britain by economists funded by the government.
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Kate Winslet's wow factor is worth ?60m to the British economy
More songs, more dance ... more love
It started with a young couple searching for a project they could embrace together. A single song grew into an hour-long play, and then into a surprise sell-out hit at this year's Toronto Fringe Festival.
It started with a young couple searching for a project they could embrace together. A single song grew into an hour-long play, and then into a surprise sell-out hit at this year's Toronto Fringe Festival.
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More songs, more dance ... more love
Short Cuts
The life of Robert Altman, told in interviews with nearly 200 of his friends, colleagues and family members.
The life of Robert Altman, told in interviews with nearly 200 of his friends, colleagues and family members.
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Short Cuts
She Did Go Home Again
A wonderfully intelligent and frank memoir about the Mennonite upbringing Rhoda Janzen returned to after an emotional and physical crisis.
A wonderfully intelligent and frank memoir about the Mennonite upbringing Rhoda Janzen returned to after an emotional and physical crisis.
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She Did Go Home Again
Blake Gopnik's Q& A with Washington digital printmaker David Adamson
Over the coming days, as art lovers take in the hundreds of images mounted around town at FotoWeek D.C., most of them will probably look a fair amount like photos always have. The technology used to produce them, however, will almost certainly be new....
They will have been shot and printed digitally.
Over the coming days, as art lovers take in the hundreds of images mounted around town at FotoWeek D.C., most of them will probably look a fair amount like photos always have. The technology used to produce them, however, will almost certainly be new....
Related articles:
Blake Gopnik's Q& A with Washington digital printmaker David Adamson
Master of Disaster
John Irvings new novel follows a father and son through 50 years in a world of accidents.
John Irvings new novel follows a father and son through 50 years in a world of accidents.
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Master of Disaster
Viz Comic takes over the Guardian
On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz strips This month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine...
that's not as funny as it used to be". Viz, Chris Donald's foul-mouthed comic, evolved from a 12-page fanzine hawked around Newcastle's pubs into one of the country's highest-selling titles, shifting over a million copies an issue with celebrity fans ranging from David Bowie to Simon Bates. Since that 1990 peak, sales have declined to around the 100,000 mark; however, the comic which first posed the then-unanswered question "Morrissey; pop genius or twat?" is still going strong as it enters its fourth decade. Viz's influence on British comedy has been profound. Its squalid brand of anarchy and self-referential surrealism is present in everything from Mitchell and Webb and The League Of Gentlemen to Little Britain and The Daily Mash. And while its writers resist serious analysis, Viz's most overlooked quality has always been a furious intelligence. As its numerous, pathetic imitators (Smut, Zit, Brain Damage etc) proved, a comic cannot survive on profanity alone and Viz strips like Biffa Bacon, Sid The Sexist and The Fat Slags tell you more about the national character than many literary heavyweights. In a tongue-in-cheek documentary, Auberon Waugh suggested that "if the future generations look back on the literature of the age, they'll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents". His favourite strip was The Bottom Inspectors, by the way. The classic premise of situation comedy has always been that of a man trapped in his surroundings; and this is the case in Viz's finest strips, the characters poignantly locked in a doomed cycle by their giant testicles, religious fervour, undiagnosed autism, painful haemorrhoids, and terminal stupidity. Writer Graham Dury claims a core readership of "the well educated, the unemployed and people in prison" and Viz speaks to the parts of Britain that have a simmering and instinctive dislike of the rich, the show-offs, the moronic and the vain. Viz has been entirely prescient about where our culture is going. Once, its obsession with third-rate celebrities, Roger Mellie's endless ideas for cheap television ("I've got an idea, Tom Celebrity Shit Bucket!"), dishonest overselling, and ludicrously hyperbolic real-life stories seemed like flights of fancy. Now, they look like the vast majority of the modern media. "We pride ourselves on the fact you're no cleverer when you've read Viz," says Dury. "You might have had a few laughs, but you've not learnt anything." If that really is the case, then the fault lies with the reader, not the comic. Viz Comics Justin Quirk guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz strips This month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine...
Related articles:
Viz Comic takes over the Guardian
Viz takes over the Guardian
On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz strips This month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine...
that's not as funny as it used to be". Viz, Chris Donald's foul-mouthed comic, evolved from a 12-page fanzine hawked around Newcastle's pubs into one of the country's highest-selling titles, shifting over a million copies an issue with celebrity fans ranging from David Bowie to Simon Bates. Since that 1990 peak, sales have declined to around the 100,000 mark; however, the comic which first posed the then-unanswered question "Morrissey; pop genius or twat?" is still going strong as it enters its fourth decade. Viz's influence on British comedy has been profound. Its squalid brand of anarchy and self-referential surrealism is present in everything from Mitchell and Webb and The League Of Gentlemen to Little Britain and The Daily Mash. And while its writers resist serious analysis, Viz's most overlooked quality has always been a furious intelligence. As its numerous, pathetic imitators (Smut, Zit, Brain Damage etc) proved, a comic cannot survive on profanity alone and Viz strips like Biffa Bacon, Sid The Sexist and The Fat Slags tell you more about the national character than many literary heavyweights. In a tongue-in-cheek documentary, Auberon Waugh suggested that "if the future generations look back on the literature of the age, they'll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents". His favourite strip was The Bottom Inspectors, by the way. The classic premise of situation comedy has always been that of a man trapped in his surroundings; and this is the case in Viz's finest strips, the characters poignantly locked in a doomed cycle by their giant testicles, religious fervour, undiagnosed autism, painful haemorrhoids, and terminal stupidity. Writer Graham Dury claims a core readership of "the well educated, the unemployed and people in prison" and Viz speaks to the parts of Britain that have a simmering and instinctive dislike of the rich, the show-offs, the moronic and the vain. Viz has been entirely prescient about where our culture is going. Once, its obsession with third-rate celebrities, Roger Mellie's endless ideas for cheap television ("I've got an idea, Tom Celebrity Shit Bucket!"), dishonest overselling, and ludicrously hyperbolic real-life stories seemed like flights of fancy. Now, they look like the vast majority of the modern media. "We pride ourselves on the fact you're no cleverer when you've read Viz," says Dury. "You might have had a few laughs, but you've not learnt anything." If that really is the case, then the fault lies with the reader, not the comic. Viz Comics Justin Quirk guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz strips This month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine...
Related articles:
Viz takes over the Guardian
Grindie money
The simple four-digit solution to making a lacklustre collaboration One of the most "hotly anticipated" tracks of last year was Lost, the collaboration between indie giants Coldplay and rap megastar Jay Z. Another "hotly anticipated" album of this year...
was Straight No Chaser, the collaboration between not-very-good alternative vocalist Mr Hudson and rap megastar Kanye West. Another is the Black Roc project by the Black Keys, which rather shows our bedwetty types how to do this rock-rap crossover thing by roping in the likes of Ludacris, Raekwon, the RZA, Mos Def, Jim Jones and Pharoahe Monch and actually being rather good. But they're American, so they don't count. Looking ahead, some of the least hotly anticipated material of 2010 is sure to be the mooted collaboration between really-not-very-good alternative pop rockers Keane, and Canadian rap megastar K'Naan. Truly, when it comes to collaborations between desperate-for-a-shot-of-cred English alternative rockers, and rap stars who really could be doing better for themselves, these are golden times. So, who will be next to take the plunge? Let us tell you with our Random Indie Rock Hip-Hop Collaboration Generator! That's right, it's ANOTHER one of them! Simply generate a four-figure number between 0000 and 9999 and then check the relevant entries in our four pools. So if, for example, you choose 8713, you've got a highly unlikely hook-up between the Maccabees and chunky porno-hop lunatic RA The Rugged Man, forged as a result of taking drugs at the MTV Awards, which is then salvaged by a Mark Ronson remix. Hey, we'd pay 79p for that on iTunes! Happy generating! Indie rock act (0) Keane (1) Snow Patrol (2) Scouting For Girls (3) The Cribs (4) White Lies (5) Florence And The Machine (6) Mumford And Sons (7) Editors (8) The Maccabees (9) James Morrison + Hip-hop act (0) Drake (1) Glasses Malone (2) Necro (3) The entire Wu-Tang Clan (4) Tupac (5) The Game (6) The really fat one from D12 (7) RA The Rugged Man (8) Eggsy from Goldie Lookin' Chain (9) Wale + How did it come about? (0) Rapper has designs on lead singer's wife (1) Met while nosing-up in adjacent cubicles at MTV Awards ceremony (2) Record label insists that it has to happen (3) Indie band's manager went to Eton with rapper's manager (4) Rapper found them in magazine article about "the next Coldplay" (5) Heavy drug use on the part of the rapper (6) Rapper fancies a bit of that Wyclef money (7) Nobody is sure: a lot of Maker's Mark was being drunk and, when they woke up, contracts were signed (8) Elaborate practical joke (9) New industry law stating that all indie artists must collaborate with at least one rap act to keep trading = Is it any good? (0) It's as good as anything Keane have ever done (1) It's the worst record that has ever been created (2) Yes, on account of them getting Mark Ronson in at the last minute to remix the indie band out of it (3) It's not bad until the indie singer starts trying to human beatbox (4) Makes Coldplay and Jay-Z's Lost sound like Rebel Without A Pause (5) The first record to ever be slagged off on Blue Peter (6) Edith Bowman likes it (7) Almost immediately used as "goals of the week" accompaniment music on Soccer AM (8) A muted critical response from Zane Lowe, who gives it his lowest-ever rating of 3.5 out of 5 (9) Shit sandwich, hold the bread Coldplay Jay-Z Pete Cashmore guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The simple four-digit solution to making a lacklustre collaboration One of the most "hotly anticipated" tracks of last year was Lost, the collaboration between indie giants Coldplay and rap megastar Jay Z. Another "hotly anticipated" album of this year...
Related articles:
Grindie money
Coming home
Harry Brown sees Caine back on his old stomping ground. Will Connery and co follow his lead? The Old Crowd is showing its age these days. When you see Michael Caine ridding his working-class estate of nasty little asbo 'orrors in Harry Brown, shuffling...
around in his granddad shoes and his woolly pully, always short of puff after delivering a dose of Bronsonian vengeance to some lairy teenage git, and generally looking fairly ancient and doddery throughout, you can't help inwardly flashing back down through aeons of postwar English movie history to the bright young gamecock of Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie. Harry Brown seems like a bit of a comedown in contrast, what with its Daily Mail paranoia and its Winnerish proximity to other recent nasty avengers' tragicomedies such as Paparazzi and Death Sentence. For all that, though, Caine does something here that I wish other superstar actors of his vintage would try more often: he comes home, right back to his roots. Caine has done this before, perhaps because his East End origins form the central pillar of his personal mythos (and must never be disavowed), and because his travels away from those origins have made him an emblematic figure of his generation, of his decade, and of his class, which itself has collectively seen some fair old turn-arounds over the same period. Caine came back to his roots, and back to his own father, with his sublime performance in Last Orders, for example, and one of the great pleasures of that small, wise ensemble drama was its cast of actors from the 1960s: Caine, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings. Caine we know well because we all lived through his just-play-anything down-years, his Oscar noms, his tax-exile and return, and his current respectability. We remember all his glasses, every change of outfit, and every new restaurant he invested in. Courtenay and Hemmings, 1960s icons in a more precise and localised sense as Billy Liar and the snapper from Blow-Up respectively, and ill-remembered for much else disappeared from prominence, if not from all sight, for years at a time, giving us a less sure grip on their screen personae, but guaranteeing pleasure with their increasingly rare appearances (Gladiator for Hemmings, Let Him Have It for Courtenay). The one person I'd love to see return to his roots is Sean Connery. There must be a million grizzled Scottish patriarchs and scary auld Jocks Sir Sean could play if he came home. Imagine him making some radical break with his past, like a James Kelman adaptation, or playing the grandfather in Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers. And he could really let rip with the full-strength Scottish accent for a change. Coming home worked for Richard Harris in The Field, for Terence Stamp in both The Hit and The Limey, and works for Caine whenever he tries it. So Sir Sean, git yersel' on hame, son, we miss ye. Michael Caine John Patterson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Harry Brown sees Caine back on his old stomping ground. Will Connery and co follow his lead? The Old Crowd is showing its age these days. When you see Michael Caine ridding his working-class estate of nasty little asbo 'orrors in Harry Brown, shuffling...
Related articles:
Coming home
Will Chris Brown's assault on Rihanna harm his record sales?
After a less-than-apologetic appearance on Larry King Live, and support from hip-hop pals, it looks like business as usual "I'm just like
'wow!'" said a flummoxed looking Chris Brown as talkshow host Larry King asked him about the Rihanna "incident"....
His noncommittal response was perhaps not the teary confessional that was expected after the Grammy-night altercation which changed everything for the then crown prince of R&B. Brown was the best of the bunch of the "new Ushers". Mixing unflinchingly futuristic sounds with fluid choreography and a bell-clear voice, there was something effortless about him. Little wonder he was the only male artist to go straight to the top of the Billboard charts with his first single and, in 2006, win five Kids' Choice awards, beating off the likes of Justin Timberlake. Flash-forward three years, and he was pleading guilty to felony assault on ex-girlfriend Rihanna. But as Chris Brown prepares to release new album, Graffiti, is it possible that his charge of domestic abuse won't dent his record sales at all? There's not been a case like it before. The rumblings of R Kelly's liaisons with underage girls which have dogged him for the last decade have never really affected his status; indeed, just this year, he penned the title track of Whitney Houston's comeback album. And Ike Turner was far from at his peak when Tina finally decided enough was enough. Partly because there's been no precedent, Brown's team have blindly attempted to continue as before. After the shots of Rihanna's disfigured face leaked online, pictures of Brown on a jetski looking less than contrite (and more like he was in a P Diddy video) were floated on the internet. A few months later, intimate snaps of the former couple were leaked, the timing of which suggested some sleazy attempt to discredit Rihanna's assault claims. And then came Brown's bizarrely dead-eyed Larry King appearance. And now here's the video for Brown's new single, I Can Transform Ya, featuring Brown dressed as a neon samurai, re-enacting various martial arts moves and throwing nunchucks around. The context of which seems tasteless, given some of the claims of physical violence levelled against Brown. Meanwhile, there's been a distinct lack of outcry from the music industry. The likes of Mary J Blige, Usher and Kanye West seem more concerned with being politically correct than speaking out about against the attack, while TI, Ne-Yo and Bow Wow all issued statements saying what a nice guy Chris Brown is, with TI stating how he's "only human". But perhaps more worrying is the fact that his legion of teenage girl fans have forgiven his actions, posting comments like "I don't care what anyone says, I still love you Chris Brown" on fan forums. A nostalgic Brown has been tweeting about his former paramour, but will this late show of guilt work come Graffiti's December's release date? Chris Brown Rihanna Urban music Priya Elan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
After a less-than-apologetic appearance on Larry King Live, and support from hip-hop pals, it looks like business as usual "I'm just like
'wow!'" said a flummoxed looking Chris Brown as talkshow host Larry King asked him about the Rihanna "incident"....
Related articles:
Will Chris Brown's assault on Rihanna harm his record sales?
This week's events previews
Witchfest International, Croydon You might have expected "the largest gathering of witches in the world" to meet somewhere spooky, like Salem, Transylvania, or even Whitby. But no, this annual celebration of the otherworldly and occultish takes place...
in wait for it! Croydon. Modern-day Morgan Le Fays can enjoy talks by Wiccan history expert Ron Hutton and Most Haunted's David Wells, plus there'll be workshops in wand-making, "astro dating" and even morris dancing. Pick up a potion at the "esoteric market" and shake your pentagrams to music from goth favourites Inkubus Sukkubus (pictured). Thankfully, England's last witch execution was way back in 1684, so there's no risk of being burned at Croydon power station. Fairfield Halls, Sat Colette Bernhardt As If It Were The First Time, London, Bristol & Liverpool Bringing a mischievously artistic edge to the idea of the flashmob, this participatory sound and performance piece from Duncan Speakman invites couples to congregate at secret locations in London, Bristol and Liverpool on consecutive evenings, where they will be immersed in a filmic altered reality. With headphones donned, the crowd will work at the behest of an MP3 file and the voices that come to them, which will be subtly different for various groups within the larger mass. Working with Sadie Anderson of Chrome Hoof, Speakman has created what should make for a disorienting night's entertainment for those who are game enough to sign up online and take part. Secret locations, London, Thu, 6pm; Bristol, Fri, 5pm; Liverpool, 14 Nov, 4pm Iain Aitch Crunch 09: The Art Festival At Hay, Hay-on-Wye Subtitled Art In An Ephemeral Age, but far from a throwaway programme, taking in art, music, spoken word and heavyweight panel discussions. It all kicks off with The Paper Cinema, a beautiful, magical and surreal blend of film and hand-drawn puppets. The debate strand takes in artist Richard Wentworth and historian Marcus Quint, but look out for a live outing from oddball art-punk hero Richard Strange (pictured), whose latterday acting career has seen him veer wildly between working with Martins Scorsese and Clunes. Various venues, Fri to 15 Nov Stuart Goodwin OUT AND ABOUT Saturday to 14 Nov, Folkestone Book Festival Vic Reeves, Brian Keenan and er Susie Dent from Countdown's dictionary corner in a week of talks, readings and workshops. Various venues, call 01303-858500 Saturday, Sunday; Thursday to 15 Nov, London, Birmingham MPH/Top Gear Live New and classic cars, plus Clarkson, Hammond and May salivating over fast, shiny things and calling clunkier, less shiny things rude names. Earls Court, SW7, Sat, Sun; NEC, Birmingham, Thu to 15 Nov, call 0871-230 5588 Saturday, Sunday, Maidstone Leeds Castle Firework Spectacular Seriously impressive pyrotechnics in a seriously beautiful setting. Leeds Castle, ?16, age 4-15 ?10, under 4s free, call 01622-880008 Friday to 15 Nov, London MasterChef Live Cook-offs hosted by John Torode and Gregg Wallace, plus the chance to sample signature dishes from the likes of Launceston Place, and Boxwood Cafe. Olympia, W14, call 0844-579 3183 Iain Aitch guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Witchfest International, Croydon You might have expected "the largest gathering of witches in the world" to meet somewhere spooky, like Salem, Transylvania, or even Whitby. But no, this annual celebration of the otherworldly and occultish takes place...
Related articles:
This week's events previews
This week's clubs previews
Jukebox Jam, London Formerly a resident of east London, Jukebox Jam has recently upped its boogaloo-friendly sticks and is now happily hanging out amid the none-more-fitting surrounds of Tin Pan Alley. Featuring a playlist dedicated to 1950s and early-60s...
rhythm'n'blues as well as doo-wop, grind and lowdown and unwholesome rock'n'roll, it's the kind of night where knocking back endless shots of whisky and getting on with some seriously dirty dancing isn't frowned upon but actively encouraged. Live music is provided tonight by Big Boy Bloater while guest DJ action comes in the shape of The Preacher and Lucky La Rocca. The Jukebox Jam residents Liam Large and Michael Jemmeson will be holding the fort, mixing up the vintage medicine and doing their best to bring an authentic jive joint sound to the party, throwing in ska, blues and Latin numbers as and when they darn well please. Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club, Denmark Street, WC2, Fri Leonie Cooper Downtown Sounds, Dublin Ever sat in a club with that I-hate-this-type-of music look on your face? DownTownSounds' regular parties around Dublin guarantee to turn that frown upside down with a mixed-up, motley playlist. So, for every sonic stinker, there's an upcoming dancefloor delight waiting to please even the most curmudgeonly clubber. It's a good measure of their solid reputation that Supafast at Kennedy's Basement are handing complete control of their weekly club night over to DTS, who this week host Chicago's DJ Rahaan, back after lifting the roof off Ri-Ra on his last visit to Dublin. Pablo and Nic Keane warm up with a strong selection of party starters. Kennedy's Of Westland Row, Fri Patric Baird Antics, Leeds Quite what Leeds pop band the Sunshine Underground have been playing at in recent years is anyone's guess. We're assured that next year will see the release of their second album, almost half a decade since material from their first started to emerge; you could imagine fellow locals Cud managing four LPs in that time. Older songs have been flogged to death, particularly on the festival circuit, although a collaboration with FC Kahuna (remember them?), a great, if sanitised take on Aphex Twin's Windowlicker has served as a great stopgap. Judging from next year's large-venue tour plans they've lost no confidence, but for hometown fans who can't wait, the band debut their own club night, Antics, tonight. Run in conjunction with Bad Sneakers, it sees the Pigeon Detectives and the Old Romantic Killer Band join the band in sharing deck duties, promising rock, pop, blues, hip-hop and classic guitar sounds. The Faversham, Springfield Mount, Sat Marc Rowlands Rabid Winter Music Festival, London If techno and electronica are your bag, then the Rabid Winter Music Festival is pretty much your 12-hour long interactive AGM or, if you prefer, and early all-star Christmas bash. With five different rooms all hosted by various party masters and promoting whizzes, it's set to be a night where quantity grabs quality in a fuzzy, friendly headlock and refuses to let go until 8am on Sunday morning. WetYourSelf, Lost Souls, Ketoloco, Trailer Trash and DJ Magazine are the reliable quintet of promoters in question, each plying their hectic trades throughout the night. The list of ace folk DJing is as long as a very tall person's arm and is plucked from across the world, but highlights include Umek, Andrι Kraml, Silversurfer, D.I.M, and Hannah Holland and Mikki Most. There'll also be live sets from Deepgroove and Paul Ritch. Thorough ain't the half of it. SeOne, Weston Street, SE1, Sat Leonie Cooper Bordello, Bristol Buzzing skate park by day, Motion packs away the ramps come night-time to become the south-west's unlikeliest (but arguably best) party venue. Tucked away on an industrial estate, with no neighbours to annoy, and with a mix of open arenas and cosy hideaways, promoters have the perfect canvas to create their required environment. Tonight's hosts are the flamboyant free party stalwarts Ninja Hippies and Psychedelic Circus, who promise to transform the space into a wild west bordello packed with a worldwide selection of sumptuous eye candy. Expect burlesque cabaret from the likes of Venus Noir and Red Hot Frilly Knickers, plus a stack of psy-trance DJs like Gypsie Misfit, Moon, Psykia and Aumadelic with Anti-World's E303 and Vagrant Misfit playing in the outdoor Garden of Evil with gothic sideshow Fabulous Freaky Vampire Circus. Motion Skate Park, Avon Street, Sat John Mitchell Clubbing John Mitchell Marc Rowlands Leonie Cooper Patric Baird guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Jukebox Jam, London Formerly a resident of east London, Jukebox Jam has recently upped its boogaloo-friendly sticks and is now happily hanging out amid the none-more-fitting surrounds of Tin Pan Alley. Featuring a playlist dedicated to 1950s and early-60s...
Related articles:
This week's clubs previews
Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review
Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his best Children's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic...
than most. By the end of chapter two, nine-year-old Will has lost both parents: his soldier father has been killed in Iraq, and his mother, on a holiday to Indonesia intended to help herself and Will to recover from their loss, drowns in the Boxing Day tsunami. Morpurgo uses, to great effect, the reported story of a boy who survived the great wave when the elephant he was riding sensed imminent danger and ran away in terror. Will finds himself clinging to a stampeding elephant, then alone in the rainforest with no one to depend on but his new companion Oona. The ensuing tale sees Will learning to survive by becoming an "elephant's child", finding food and shelter under Oona's guidance, and later taking the role of surrogate parent to a group of infant orang-utans whose mothers have been shot out of the trees by hunters. Parallels with The Jungle Book are clear, but in the 21st century humans are more threatening than the "weakest and most defenceless of all living things" described in Kipling's classic. Bigger even than the tragedies of the opening chapters is the destruction of the forest environment and its wildlife, and the greatest dangers Will faces come from human interference. Separated from Oona, he's captured by a hunter-dealer who has tigers shot for their body parts and baby orang-utans captured for sale. In the manner of a Bond villain, Mister Anthony outlines his traffickings and values to Will while considering whether to have him killed; but Morpurgo uses this episode to remind us that rainforest depletion is driven by global demand for palm oil "to put in their toothpaste, their lipstick, their margarine, cooking oil, peanut butter . . . All I do, Monkey Boy, is provide what the world wants." The story is told in the first person, and readers who notice that Will has an improbable degree of self-awareness for a nine-year-old ("From now on I would remember only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving") and precocious powers of expression ("Whatever it was had transformed her from a ponderous creature of supreme gentleness and serenity, into a wild beast, maddened by terror") will find an explanation in the short postscript. Will's survival from day to day provides ample excitement and adventure, but behind lies the question of whether and how he will return to England and his grandparents. This is, in a way, a love story; Will's relationships with Oona and the orang-utans are too significant to be left behind. After more than a year in the jungle, Will comes across Doctor Geraldine, a lone scientist who has devoted her life to the saving and rehabilitation of the threatened orang-utans, a small, heroic activity set against the slow obliteration of the species. It's through her that Will's future seems about to be decided, until he takes matters into his own hands. The former children's laureate has the happy knack of speaking to both child and adult readers, and of his vast body of work some of the most successful novels (Kensuke's Kingdom, War Horse, The Butterfly Lion) are those exploring bonds between humans and animals. With its emphasis on animal instincts and social behaviour, Running Wild, part epic adventure, part plea for threatened habitats, will surely rank alongside his best-loved books. Linda Newbery's The Sandfather is published by Orion. Michael Morpurgo Linda Newbery guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his best Children's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic...
Related articles:
Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review
Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review
Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his best Children's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic...
than most. By the end of chapter two, nine-year-old Will has lost both parents: his soldier father has been killed in Iraq, and his mother, on a holiday to Indonesia intended to help herself and Will to recover from their loss, drowns in the Boxing Day tsunami. Morpurgo uses, to great effect, the reported story of a boy who survived the great wave when the elephant he was riding sensed imminent danger and ran away in terror. Will finds himself clinging to a stampeding elephant, then alone in the rainforest with no one to depend on but his new companion Oona. The ensuing tale sees Will learning to survive by becoming an "elephant's child", finding food and shelter under Oona's guidance, and later taking the role of surrogate parent to a group of infant orang-utans whose mothers have been shot out of the trees by hunters. Parallels with The Jungle Book are clear, but in the 21st century humans are more threatening than the "weakest and most defenceless of all living things" described in Kipling's classic. Bigger even than the tragedies of the opening chapters is the destruction of the forest environment and its wildlife, and the greatest dangers Will faces come from human interference. Separated from Oona, he's captured by a hunter-dealer who has tigers shot for their body parts and baby orang-utans captured for sale. In the manner of a Bond villain, Mister Anthony outlines his traffickings and values to Will while considering whether to have him killed; but Morpurgo uses this episode to remind us that rainforest depletion is driven by global demand for palm oil "to put in their toothpaste, their lipstick, their margarine, cooking oil, peanut butter . . . All I do, Monkey Boy, is provide what the world wants." The story is told in the first person, and readers who notice that Will has an improbable degree of self-awareness for a nine-year-old ("From now on I would remember only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving") and precocious powers of expression ("Whatever it was had transformed her from a ponderous creature of supreme gentleness and serenity, into a wild beast, maddened by terror") will find an explanation in the short postscript. Will's survival from day to day provides ample excitement and adventure, but behind lies the question of whether and how he will return to England and his grandparents. This is, in a way, a love story; Will's relationships with Oona and the orang-utans are too significant to be left behind. After more than a year in the jungle, Will comes across Doctor Geraldine, a lone scientist who has devoted her life to the saving and rehabilitation of the threatened orang-utans, a small, heroic activity set against the slow obliteration of the species. It's through her that Will's future seems about to be decided, until he takes matters into his own hands. The former children's laureate has the happy knack of speaking to both child and adult readers, and of his vast body of work some of the most successful novels (Kensuke's Kingdom, War Horse, The Butterfly Lion) are those exploring bonds between humans and animals. With its emphasis on animal instincts and social behaviour, Running Wild, part epic adventure, part plea for threatened habitats, will surely rank alongside his best-loved books. Linda Newbery's The Sandfather is published by Orion. Michael Morpurgo Linda Newbery guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Michael Morpurgo's tale of a wild child ranks among his best Children's fiction often finds ingenious ways of getting rid of adults, forcing its protagonists to depend on their own resources and initiative. Michael Morpurgo's method here is more drastic...
Related articles:
Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo | Book review
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker
Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Marιchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer...
for Dover. Three months earlier David Railton, a frontline padre, had sent his idea for what Peter Parker calls "this representative of all the dead" to the Dean of Westminster, who had put it to George V. The king didn't like it, but the prime minister, Lloyd George, did, and having claimed the scheme as his own, got it through Cabinet that October. On 7 November, four unidentified bodies were exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and one randomly selected for a state funeral, at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November, 1920. Thus was a caravan set in motion that rolls to this day. The Unknown Warrior provided a chance for the Church of England to reassert itself, writes Parker in his meditation on 90 years of British remembrance and commemoration of the first world war. The focus of grief at the 1919 anniversary of the armistice had been Sir Edwin Lutyens's temporary plaster Cenotaph in Whitehall, the permanent stone version of which was unveiled by the king, en route to the Abbey. The Cenotaph had seemed, writes Parker, "distressingly pagan" for the Anglican hierarchy but it remains a place where dead Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Zoroastrians, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and other children of the empire, heretics all, can at home, for ever. The Imperial War Graves Commission was already providing permanent resting places for a few of the 1,104,890 imperial dead when the ceremony took place. Yet it was the Unknown Warrior who initiated one tradition, which has now surely ended with the death, after 111 years, on 25 July 2009, of 29295 Private HJ Patch, poor bloody (Duke of Cornwall's Light) infantryman, plumber, sometime amateur geologist and pig-keeper, and hater of war. After his funeral at Wells Cathedral, Patch received a private burial in Monkton Coombe, in his home county of Somerset. The Unknown Warrior's views are known only to God. The views of Harry Patch on such ceremonials were brisk at least until near the end, when public acclaim for sticking around tempered his opinion. Patch had dismissed 11 November ceremonials as "show business", eschewed membership of the British Legion until, says Parker, his last year, when he was "bribed with a bottle of whisky" and never talked about his war during the more than half a century of his first marriage. Patch's life, and those of other veterans who made it to the 21st century, punctuate Parker's narrative. "Most of them," the author writes, "were perfectly ordinary people." Yes, but then "ordinariness", as Parker demonstrates, evaporates under close scrutiny. The gregarious Royal Naval Air Service veteran Henry Allingham was at his death, a week before Patch, the world's oldest living man, and perhaps better copy, but Patch, splendidly oblivious, confounded stereotypes. He did not do his bit in 1914. He continued plumbing, until conscription in October 1916. On 16 August 1917, he joined the third battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, setting out with his C company for the German lines, just under a mile away. En route the sight of a Tommy "ripped open from his shoulder to waist by shrapnel . . . lying in a pool of blood" begging to be shot seared itself, he wrote nine decades later, into his mind. Thirty-seven days after that incident, a shell exploded over his head, injuring him and killing, as he found out in hospital, the rest of his gun crew. Thus did 22 September become, for ever, Patch's private remembrance day. It was HMS Verdun (surely the only RN ship named after a French victory) which bore the Unknown Warrior across the Channel. The destroyer emerged, writes Parker, from heavy fog as it approached Dover. My perceptions most people's, maybe of that war are rooted in mist, fog and, of course, mud. But Parker sketches out how attitudes have changed, from the interwar years, through the dismissive 1960s, and into today. I remember autumnal visits to another of Lutyens's cenotaphs, in Watts Park, Southampton in the 50s. Beyond the trees, in a mist, lay a dark world, still exerting gravitational pull on our family, on families across the globe. The book bears witness to hurried completion. The ILP was the Independent rather than the International Labour party, the author's account of the British nuclear deterrent is spectacularly mangled, the awesome role of women on the western front is largely ignored, and no proper explanation is forthcoming of how, after the 60s, remembrance or Patch's "show business" came back into fashion. New wars helped. But The Last Veteran also illuminates; it is full of fascinating detail, replete with ironies. It had never occurred to me how Alan Clark, diarist, minister, quasi-fascist and author of The Donkeys (1961), his wildly popular (and critically demolished) denunciation of the 1915 British high command, helped lead the left off to embrace the facile certainties of everything from Oh! What a Lovely War (1963 and still reviving) to Blackadder Goes Forth (1989 and still repeating). I picked up a 1921 book by one General Huguet, late chief of the French mission to the British Army, about this country. "There is not a country in the world," he wrote, "where the dead are so quickly forgotten. Funerals take place without ceremony, pomp or oration." History, once again, would prove a general wrong. Nigel Fountain's World War II: The People's Story is published by Michael O'Mara/Readers Digest. History Nigel Fountain guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Marιchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer...
Related articles:
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker
The Last Veteran Harry Patch by Peter Parker | Book review
Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Marιchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer...
for Dover. Three months earlier David Railton, a frontline padre, had sent his idea for what Peter Parker calls "this representative of all the dead" to the Dean of Westminster, who had put it to George V. The king didn't like it, but the prime minister, Lloyd George, did, and having claimed the scheme as his own, got it through Cabinet that October. On 7 November, four unidentified bodies were exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and one randomly selected for a state funeral, at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November, 1920. Thus was a caravan set in motion that rolls to this day. The Unknown Warrior provided a chance for the Church of England to reassert itself, writes Parker in his meditation on 90 years of British remembrance and commemoration of the first world war. The focus of grief at the 1919 anniversary of the armistice had been Sir Edwin Lutyens's temporary plaster Cenotaph in Whitehall, the permanent stone version of which was unveiled by the king, en route to the Abbey. The Cenotaph had seemed, writes Parker, "distressingly pagan" for the Anglican hierarchy but it remains a place where dead Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Zoroastrians, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and other children of the empire, heretics all, can at home, for ever. The Imperial War Graves Commission was already providing permanent resting places for a few of the 1,104,890 imperial dead when the ceremony took place. Yet it was the Unknown Warrior who initiated one tradition, which has now surely ended with the death, after 111 years, on 25 July 2009, of 29295 Private HJ Patch, poor bloody (Duke of Cornwall's Light) infantryman, plumber, sometime amateur geologist and pig-keeper, and hater of war. After his funeral at Wells Cathedral, Patch received a private burial in Monkton Coombe, in his home county of Somerset. The Unknown Warrior's views are known only to God. The views of Harry Patch on such ceremonials were brisk at least until near the end, when public acclaim for sticking around tempered his opinion. Patch had dismissed 11 November ceremonials as "show business", eschewed membership of the British Legion until, says Parker, his last year, when he was "bribed with a bottle of whisky" and never talked about his war during the more than half a century of his first marriage. Patch's life, and those of other veterans who made it to the 21st century, punctuate Parker's narrative. "Most of them," the author writes, "were perfectly ordinary people." Yes, but then "ordinariness", as Parker demonstrates, evaporates under close scrutiny. The gregarious Royal Naval Air Service veteran Henry Allingham was at his death, a week before Patch, the world's oldest living man, and perhaps better copy, but Patch, splendidly oblivious, confounded stereotypes. He did not do his bit in 1914. He continued plumbing, until conscription in October 1916. On 16 August 1917, he joined the third battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, setting out with his C company for the German lines, just under a mile away. En route the sight of a Tommy "ripped open from his shoulder to waist by shrapnel . . . lying in a pool of blood" begging to be shot seared itself, he wrote nine decades later, into his mind. Thirty-seven days after that incident, a shell exploded over his head, injuring him and killing, as he found out in hospital, the rest of his gun crew. Thus did 22 September become, for ever, Patch's private remembrance day. It was HMS Verdun (surely the only RN ship named after a French victory) which bore the Unknown Warrior across the Channel. The destroyer emerged, writes Parker, from heavy fog as it approached Dover. My perceptions most people's, maybe of that war are rooted in mist, fog and, of course, mud. But Parker sketches out how attitudes have changed, from the interwar years, through the dismissive 1960s, and into today. I remember autumnal visits to another of Lutyens's cenotaphs, in Watts Park, Southampton in the 50s. Beyond the trees, in a mist, lay a dark world, still exerting gravitational pull on our family, on families across the globe. The book bears witness to hurried completion. The ILP was the Independent rather than the International Labour party, the author's account of the British nuclear deterrent is spectacularly mangled, the awesome role of women on the western front is largely ignored, and no proper explanation is forthcoming of how, after the 60s, remembrance or Patch's "show business" came back into fashion. New wars helped. But The Last Veteran also illuminates; it is full of fascinating detail, replete with ironies. It had never occurred to me how Alan Clark, diarist, minister, quasi-fascist and author of The Donkeys (1961), his wildly popular (and critically demolished) denunciation of the 1915 British high command, helped lead the left off to embrace the facile certainties of everything from Oh! What a Lovely War (1963 and still reviving) to Blackadder Goes Forth (1989 and still repeating). I picked up a 1921 book by one General Huguet, late chief of the French mission to the British Army, about this country. "There is not a country in the world," he wrote, "where the dead are so quickly forgotten. Funerals take place without ceremony, pomp or oration." History, once again, would prove a general wrong. Nigel Fountain's World War II: The People's Story is published by Michael O'Mara/Readers Digest. History Nigel Fountain guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Marιchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer...
Related articles:
The Last Veteran Harry Patch by Peter Parker | Book review
A winter's tale
Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasure In 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children...
called "The Spring Tune", featuring Snufkin, the peripatetic musician of the Moomin stories. "'It's the right evening for a tune,' Snufkin thought. 'A new tune, one part expectation, two parts sadness and, for the rest, just the great delight of walking alone and liking it.'" As he settles down to compose, he is disturbed by a small creature, a "creep", which rustles out of the undergrowth, declares its admiration for the famous Snufkin, asks him a lot of questions, and demands attention and comfort. Meanwhile, the tune, which until then had been forming itself out of the noises of forest and brook and the slow revelations of the season, disappears. Snufkin has to wait for it to come back. Never underestimate Jansson, who never ever underestimates her reader. This story for eight-year-olds is a sharply pertinent discourse on the relationships between art, nature, fame and identity, a discussion of the place and role of the artist and of the mysterious sources of creativity. It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature. Tove Jansson was born an artistic child of bohemian Finnish artists. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten, was one of Finland's best-known artists, designers and book illustrators; her father, Viktor Jansson, was a celebrated sculptor. Jansson herself became well known in her 30s for her Moomin tales and illustrations, which eventually made her world-famous. Because she was and is so recognised for her children's literature, her adult fiction, which she began writing in her early 50s (she died in 2001, aged 86) has tended to be overlooked, but in her last three decades the 11 books she wrote were all for adults. The UK republication of The Summer Book (1972) in 2003, followed by a selection of her short stories, The Winter Book, in 2006, and the first publication in English of her final novel, Fair Play, in 2007, has been revelatory for her English-speaking readership. That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal (who was also the original English translator of The Summer Book in the 1970s). The True Deceiver is another fortunate first, and it is an unassuming, unexpected, powerful piece of work. If the Moomins are Jansson's most celebrated legacy a community of inventive, big-nosed, good-natured beings who survive, again and again, the storms and existentialism of a dark Scandinavian winter through simply being mild, kind, inclusive and philosophical what will happen when a real community is put in its place? What will the outcome be when Jansson tackles, naturalistically, the life of a tiny hamlet in a dark, wintry landscape and in a book so close to real local life that the original Swedish publication carried a disclaimer saying it was in no way based on any real place, nor its characters on anybody living? A novel about truth, deception, self-deception and the honest uses of fiction, The True Deceiver is almost deadpan in its clarity and seeming simplicity, and is at heart one of her most mysterious and subtle works. First published in 1982, it was her third novel specifically for adults. Her biographer, Boel Westin, records that she had great difficulty with it. "Its unsparing view of life," Westin comments, "is, in fact, one of the characteristics of her adult books." Jansson herself commented on how "stubbornly, labororiously" she had worked on it. There's no doubting the oppressiveness of the conditions under which her characters have to live and work. "The winds had risen. It pressed snow against the windows with a powerful whispering that had followed the people of the village for a long, long time. Between squalls there was silence." It begins with the disarming simplicity that characterises the whole novel. "It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light." It's a book about a dark place, where snow creates a kind of claustrophobia, where "paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out", and where "people woke up late because there was no longer any morning". By paragraph two the censoriousness of small community life has set in. "It's still snowing and there she goes again," the unnamed narrator comments about Katri. Katri and her brother, Mats, are clearly not liked in the village. He's too "simple" and her eyes are the wrong colour. Worse, they aren't properly "local". The novel's voice is flat and exact, a kind of reportage, which shifts, seamlessly and suddenly, into Katri's own voice, making it unclear who the first narrator is and unsettling all notions of objectivity. By the end of the chapter, we know that this book, concerned with locality, money, winter, wildness, social unacceptability and power, will also be about whether there's such a thing as objectivity. Objectivity and truth are Katri's obsessions. Her refusal of social niceties, her honesty, her silences and her bluntness have made the villagers uncomfortable and deeply hostile towards her, but made her peculiarly trusted and given her a great deal of power in the community. Is this also going to be a book about class and hierarchy? Within five short pages, Katri is standing looking at the local big house, which surreally resembles a giant rabbit's face, and is owned by an artist, Anna Aemelin, who lives there "all by herself, alone with her money". Her motives are clear: she and Mats are going to move into that house. The book begins on the projected standoff, dog versus rabbit, "the real story of Anna and Katri" in other words, the standoff of "real" versus "story". At its heart is a battle that promises to be savage. Katri wants an obliterating purity "I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean" she is a personification of wintriness. Her opponent, Anna Aemelin, has no foothold on winter and is a being particularly associated with spring. "It was winter, and she never worked until the first bare earth began to show." Her art is dependent on the spring, and it almost feels, sometimes, as though the spring may be dependent upon her art. She's also a person practically disconnected from the village, an ageing child living in a veritable museum to her parents, and a famous artist, who draws forest floor pictures known the world over for their authenticity, then takes these "implacably naturalistic" pictures and adds lots of very unnaturalistic flowery rabbits, for which she is equally world-renowned, especially among small children. Who is the true deceiver here? And how does deception relate to truth? The novel, with its village full of mundane cheats and charlatans, is a philosophical confrontation between Katri's cynicism and Anna's aesthetic sensibility. Is there such a thing as kindness? Or is there only "the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want, maybe an advantage or not even that, mostly just because it's the way it's done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook"? What are flowery rabbits (or, it might be added, Moomins) actually for? Or is it Anna who's right, that the paying of attention to people's needs, though "a pretty rare thing," is a natural and uncynical part of being human? She knows what is expected of her, and she acts on it, just as she knows her own lie and finds it tiresome. But "Things are not always that simple." Katri, on the other hand, knows exactly what "simple" means. She has seen and destroyed the snow figures the village children have made in spiteful likeness of her and her "simple" brother. Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound. "Rarely do books give as clear an impression as yours that they have simply matured to the point of inevitability," Jansson's editor at Bonnier, her Swedish publisher, wrote to her when she was struggling with difficult work; in many ways, The True Deceiver is a book about artistic maturation as well as human coming of age. Is this an autobiographical portrait? Jansson herself commented, at the time of The True Deceiver's first publication in Swedish: "Every serious book is a kind of self-portrait." This overexcited reviewers, who decided to see the book, a subtle and calibrated work, in the simplified and reductive terms which "autobiographical" almost always means. But the hopelessly innocent Anna Aemelin, totally at a loss with the commercial spinoffs from her flowery rabbits, is laughably far from the sharp-eyed Jansson, who could write so acridly and merrily (as she did in her short story "Messages") about the flurry of requests that came in from companies and individuals concerning her "product". Jansson knew the responsibility and surreality of her position, which could result in a request like the one from a company that wanted to use her tiny anarchist figure, little My, on "a discreet new mini sanitary towel" (she said a discreet no) directly alongside one from a reader asking for a drawing of Snufkin "that I can have tattooed on my arm as a symbol of freedom". One of its most haunting moments is when Anna, looking through reams of her parents' old correspondence, trying to find a portrait of herself as a girl, discovers that she was hardly there. She realises that she became "a painter of the ground" only after both her parents were dead and buried in it. It is a deeply poetic work, and such images, like that of the dog that finally runs mad, or the pile of rubbish left on the surface of the frozen lake all the piled-up ephemera of Anna Aemelin's life, which will sink when the spring comes and the ice melts are pervasive. On the surface, this is very much a book about how to survive, as well as how to deal with what surfaces in lives, over time. The True Deceiver is the opposite of charming and deliberately so. But this novel's presentation of itself as a tough and unresolving work is a kind of deception in itself. "There are no real answers to what is right and what is wrong," Boel Westin concludes. That's one possible reading of the novel. But look at its deep understanding of human surreality and sadness, and at Jansson's vision of the epic qualities inherent in all small things. Though meticulous in its rejection of sentimentality, it demonstrates, alongside all the cruelty, a wealth of small, real acts of kindness. By the end, its two fixed protagonists, Anna and Katri the two opposite poles of its "real story" have learned to shift position. This change doesn't come without fracture ice will break in the melt. All the same, at the end of this mysterious novel, both women have changed their old tunes for new. It is one of Jansson's most deceptively quiet, most astonishing compositions. Fiction Ali Smith guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasure In 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children...
Related articles:
A winter's tale
Ali Smith on The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasure In 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children...
called "The Spring Tune", featuring Snufkin, the peripatetic musician of the Moomin stories. "'It's the right evening for a tune,' Snufkin thought. 'A new tune, one part expectation, two parts sadness and, for the rest, just the great delight of walking alone and liking it.'" As he settles down to compose, he is disturbed by a small creature, a "creep", which rustles out of the undergrowth, declares its admiration for the famous Snufkin, asks him a lot of questions, and demands attention and comfort. Meanwhile, the tune, which until then had been forming itself out of the noises of forest and brook and the slow revelations of the season, disappears. Snufkin has to wait for it to come back. Never underestimate Jansson, who never ever underestimates her reader. This story for eight-year-olds is a sharply pertinent discourse on the relationships between art, nature, fame and identity, a discussion of the place and role of the artist and of the mysterious sources of creativity. It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature. Tove Jansson was born an artistic child of bohemian Finnish artists. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten, was one of Finland's best-known artists, designers and book illustrators; her father, Viktor Jansson, was a celebrated sculptor. Jansson herself became well known in her 30s for her Moomin tales and illustrations, which eventually made her world-famous. Because she was and is so recognised for her children's literature, her adult fiction, which she began writing in her early 50s (she died in 2001, aged 86) has tended to be overlooked, but in her last three decades the 11 books she wrote were all for adults. The UK republication of The Summer Book (1972) in 2003, followed by a selection of her short stories, The Winter Book, in 2006, and the first publication in English of her final novel, Fair Play, in 2007, has been revelatory for her English-speaking readership. That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal (who was also the original English translator of The Summer Book in the 1970s). The True Deceiver is another fortunate first, and it is an unassuming, unexpected, powerful piece of work. If the Moomins are Jansson's most celebrated legacy a community of inventive, big-nosed, good-natured beings who survive, again and again, the storms and existentialism of a dark Scandinavian winter through simply being mild, kind, inclusive and philosophical what will happen when a real community is put in its place? What will the outcome be when Jansson tackles, naturalistically, the life of a tiny hamlet in a dark, wintry landscape and in a book so close to real local life that the original Swedish publication carried a disclaimer saying it was in no way based on any real place, nor its characters on anybody living? A novel about truth, deception, self-deception and the honest uses of fiction, The True Deceiver is almost deadpan in its clarity and seeming simplicity, and is at heart one of her most mysterious and subtle works. First published in 1982, it was her third novel specifically for adults. Her biographer, Boel Westin, records that she had great difficulty with it. "Its unsparing view of life," Westin comments, "is, in fact, one of the characteristics of her adult books." Jansson herself commented on how "stubbornly, labororiously" she had worked on it. There's no doubting the oppressiveness of the conditions under which her characters have to live and work. "The winds had risen. It pressed snow against the windows with a powerful whispering that had followed the people of the village for a long, long time. Between squalls there was silence." It begins with the disarming simplicity that characterises the whole novel. "It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light." It's a book about a dark place, where snow creates a kind of claustrophobia, where "paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out", and where "people woke up late because there was no longer any morning". By paragraph two the censoriousness of small community life has set in. "It's still snowing and there she goes again," the unnamed narrator comments about Katri. Katri and her brother, Mats, are clearly not liked in the village. He's too "simple" and her eyes are the wrong colour. Worse, they aren't properly "local". The novel's voice is flat and exact, a kind of reportage, which shifts, seamlessly and suddenly, into Katri's own voice, making it unclear who the first narrator is and unsettling all notions of objectivity. By the end of the chapter, we know that this book, concerned with locality, money, winter, wildness, social unacceptability and power, will also be about whether there's such a thing as objectivity. Objectivity and truth are Katri's obsessions. Her refusal of social niceties, her honesty, her silences and her bluntness have made the villagers uncomfortable and deeply hostile towards her, but made her peculiarly trusted and given her a great deal of power in the community. Is this also going to be a book about class and hierarchy? Within five short pages, Katri is standing looking at the local big house, which surreally resembles a giant rabbit's face, and is owned by an artist, Anna Aemelin, who lives there "all by herself, alone with her money". Her motives are clear: she and Mats are going to move into that house. The book begins on the projected standoff, dog versus rabbit, "the real story of Anna and Katri" in other words, the standoff of "real" versus "story". At its heart is a battle that promises to be savage. Katri wants an obliterating purity "I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean" she is a personification of wintriness. Her opponent, Anna Aemelin, has no foothold on winter and is a being particularly associated with spring. "It was winter, and she never worked until the first bare earth began to show." Her art is dependent on the spring, and it almost feels, sometimes, as though the spring may be dependent upon her art. She's also a person practically disconnected from the village, an ageing child living in a veritable museum to her parents, and a famous artist, who draws forest floor pictures known the world over for their authenticity, then takes these "implacably naturalistic" pictures and adds lots of very unnaturalistic flowery rabbits, for which she is equally world-renowned, especially among small children. Who is the true deceiver here? And how does deception relate to truth? The novel, with its village full of mundane cheats and charlatans, is a philosophical confrontation between Katri's cynicism and Anna's aesthetic sensibility. Is there such a thing as kindness? Or is there only "the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want, maybe an advantage or not even that, mostly just because it's the way it's done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook"? What are flowery rabbits (or, it might be added, Moomins) actually for? Or is it Anna who's right, that the paying of attention to people's needs, though "a pretty rare thing," is a natural and uncynical part of being human? She knows what is expected of her, and she acts on it, just as she knows her own lie and finds it tiresome. But "Things are not always that simple." Katri, on the other hand, knows exactly what "simple" means. She has seen and destroyed the snow figures the village children have made in spiteful likeness of her and her "simple" brother. Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound. "Rarely do books give as clear an impression as yours that they have simply matured to the point of inevitability," Jansson's editor at Bonnier, her Swedish publisher, wrote to her when she was struggling with difficult work; in many ways, The True Deceiver is a book about artistic maturation as well as human coming of age. Is this an autobiographical portrait? Jansson herself commented, at the time of The True Deceiver's first publication in Swedish: "Every serious book is a kind of self-portrait." This overexcited reviewers, who decided to see the book, a subtle and calibrated work, in the simplified and reductive terms which "autobiographical" almost always means. But the hopelessly innocent Anna Aemelin, totally at a loss with the commercial spinoffs from her flowery rabbits, is laughably far from the sharp-eyed Jansson, who could write so acridly and merrily (as she did in her short story "Messages") about the flurry of requests that came in from companies and individuals concerning her "product". Jansson knew the responsibility and surreality of her position, which could result in a request like the one from a company that wanted to use her tiny anarchist figure, little My, on "a discreet new mini sanitary towel" (she said a discreet no) directly alongside one from a reader asking for a drawing of Snufkin "that I can have tattooed on my arm as a symbol of freedom". One of its most haunting moments is when Anna, looking through reams of her parents' old correspondence, trying to find a portrait of herself as a girl, discovers that she was hardly there. She realises that she became "a painter of the ground" only after both her parents were dead and buried in it. It is a deeply poetic work, and such images, like that of the dog that finally runs mad, or the pile of rubbish left on the surface of the frozen lake all the piled-up ephemera of Anna Aemelin's life, which will sink when the spring comes and the ice melts are pervasive. On the surface, this is very much a book about how to survive, as well as how to deal with what surfaces in lives, over time. The True Deceiver is the opposite of charming and deliberately so. But this novel's presentation of itself as a tough and unresolving work is a kind of deception in itself. "There are no real answers to what is right and what is wrong," Boel Westin concludes. That's one possible reading of the novel. But look at its deep understanding of human surreality and sadness, and at Jansson's vision of the epic qualities inherent in all small things. Though meticulous in its rejection of sentimentality, it demonstrates, alongside all the cruelty, a wealth of small, real acts of kindness. By the end, its two fixed protagonists, Anna and Katri the two opposite poles of its "real story" have learned to shift position. This change doesn't come without fracture ice will break in the melt. All the same, at the end of this mysterious novel, both women have changed their old tunes for new. It is one of Jansson's most deceptively quiet, most astonishing compositions. Fiction Ali Smith guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasure In 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children...
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Ali Smith on The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss
Week two: The importance of food There seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits but it is attached to the small details of life. Over...
and over again its characters find solace or disappointment, a sense of cultural identity or of cultural contradiction, through what they eat. Rarely has there been a novel that reminds characters so often of their stomachs. When political violence erupts in the very first chapter, as a group of armed Nepalese nationalists invade the hilltop home of a retired judge, it is teatime. The judge, a brooding old man who worked for a lifetime in the British-run Indian Civil Service, is crossly demanding "a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws", while "the boys" creep across his lawn. "Something sweet and something salty." The judge, who has "worked at being English with the passion of hatred", has tastes inescapably formed by his colonial training. In the local Gymkhana dining hall he demands "roast mutton with mint sauce" and almost begs for tomato soup. When he first employs his cook, he tells him to learn a brown sauce and a white sauce: "shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton". His most important companion is his dog, for whom the cook must concoct elaborate recipes when political unrest ends the supply of meat. "It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this". Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Biju, the son of his cook, is working illegally in the kitchens of cheap New York restaurants. His letters to his father tell of their bewildering variety. "He worked at Don Pollo or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba's Fried Chicken?" He knows only that if his son is cooking "English food" he must have "a higher position than if he were cooking Indian food". The sheer ethnic confusion of New York food is beyond his ken: Biju moves from one advertised cuisine (French, Italian, Chinese, "authentic colonial") to another, though the kitchens are "Mexican, Indian, Pakistani", or "Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian". Even when he encounters supposedly Indian food it is fitted to some "fusion trend": "the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita". What would feature in newspaper guides as a delightful, multi-cultural variety is, for Biju, a kind of gastronomic cacophony. His fellow exile Saeed cheers himself up with a reminder of East Africa: "cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper . . . and plantains in sugar and coconut milk". "This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others". It is appropriate that the judge lives with "the cook" (he does not get a name). Though disappointed to be working for a fellow Indian ("his father had served white men only") he has qualified with an unstoppable list of all the English puddings he can produce. ". . . applecharlotteapplebettybreadandbutterjamtartcaramelcustardtipsypud- dingrumtumpuddingjamrolypolygingersteamdatepuddinglemonpancake- eggcustardorangecustard . . ." The judge's orphaned teenage grand-daughter Sai joins the household and begins a surreptitious romance with her tutor, Gyan. When Gyan and the judge speak to each other it is with the awkwardness that only a mealtime (with the eaters stuck in their places) can dramatise. The young Nepalese teacher, with his disdain for all colonial allegiances, has to join in a repast of lamb chops with peas, potatoes and gravy. We see the occasion through the judge's eyes, as he quizzes Gyan about his literary tastes and aggressively spears and chews his favoured grub. It is an exercise in crumbling authority. "He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner". Food travels strangely. The judge (his name is Jemubhai, but this is only ever used of his younger self) recalls how, as a student in chilly Cambridge, he read about the British in India, with their mock turtle soup and Yarmouth herrings shipped thousands of miles to reassure them. A century later, as winter closes in in the hills, Lola and Noni, the two beleaguered Anglophile sisters, take refuge in food. "Oh, beautiful soup in the copper Gyako pot . . . mutton steam in their hair, rollicking shimmer of golden fat, dried mushrooms growing so slippery they'd slither down scalding before you could chomp open their muscle". Comfort is gastric. As the Nepalese independence movement grows in strength, and the ethnic fissures in Kalimpong become clear, Lola and Noni proud connoisseurs of Trollope and Agatha Christie and afternoon tea become awkwardly aware of their tastes. "It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country." Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week Kiran Desai explains how she came to write The Inheritance of Loss. John Mullan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Week two: The importance of food There seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits but it is attached to the small details of life. Over...
Related articles:
John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss
John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss
Week two: The importance of food There seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits but it is attached to the small details of life. Over...
and over again its characters find solace or disappointment, a sense of cultural identity or of cultural contradiction, through what they eat. Rarely has there been a novel that reminds characters so often of their stomachs. When political violence erupts in the very first chapter, as a group of armed Nepalese nationalists invade the hilltop home of a retired judge, it is teatime. The judge, a brooding old man who worked for a lifetime in the British-run Indian Civil Service, is crossly demanding "a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws", while "the boys" creep across his lawn. "Something sweet and something salty." The judge, who has "worked at being English with the passion of hatred", has tastes inescapably formed by his colonial training. In the local Gymkhana dining hall he demands "roast mutton with mint sauce" and almost begs for tomato soup. When he first employs his cook, he tells him to learn a brown sauce and a white sauce: "shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton". His most important companion is his dog, for whom the cook must concoct elaborate recipes when political unrest ends the supply of meat. "It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this". Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Biju, the son of his cook, is working illegally in the kitchens of cheap New York restaurants. His letters to his father tell of their bewildering variety. "He worked at Don Pollo or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba's Fried Chicken?" He knows only that if his son is cooking "English food" he must have "a higher position than if he were cooking Indian food". The sheer ethnic confusion of New York food is beyond his ken: Biju moves from one advertised cuisine (French, Italian, Chinese, "authentic colonial") to another, though the kitchens are "Mexican, Indian, Pakistani", or "Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian". Even when he encounters supposedly Indian food it is fitted to some "fusion trend": "the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita". What would feature in newspaper guides as a delightful, multi-cultural variety is, for Biju, a kind of gastronomic cacophony. His fellow exile Saeed cheers himself up with a reminder of East Africa: "cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper . . . and plantains in sugar and coconut milk". "This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others". It is appropriate that the judge lives with "the cook" (he does not get a name). Though disappointed to be working for a fellow Indian ("his father had served white men only") he has qualified with an unstoppable list of all the English puddings he can produce. ". . . applecharlotteapplebettybreadandbutterjamtartcaramelcustardtipsypud- dingrumtumpuddingjamrolypolygingersteamdatepuddinglemonpancake- eggcustardorangecustard . . ." The judge's orphaned teenage grand-daughter Sai joins the household and begins a surreptitious romance with her tutor, Gyan. When Gyan and the judge speak to each other it is with the awkwardness that only a mealtime (with the eaters stuck in their places) can dramatise. The young Nepalese teacher, with his disdain for all colonial allegiances, has to join in a repast of lamb chops with peas, potatoes and gravy. We see the occasion through the judge's eyes, as he quizzes Gyan about his literary tastes and aggressively spears and chews his favoured grub. It is an exercise in crumbling authority. "He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner". Food travels strangely. The judge (his name is Jemubhai, but this is only ever used of his younger self) recalls how, as a student in chilly Cambridge, he read about the British in India, with their mock turtle soup and Yarmouth herrings shipped thousands of miles to reassure them. A century later, as winter closes in in the hills, Lola and Noni, the two beleaguered Anglophile sisters, take refuge in food. "Oh, beautiful soup in the copper Gyako pot . . . mutton steam in their hair, rollicking shimmer of golden fat, dried mushrooms growing so slippery they'd slither down scalding before you could chomp open their muscle". Comfort is gastric. As the Nepalese independence movement grows in strength, and the ethnic fissures in Kalimpong become clear, Lola and Noni proud connoisseurs of Trollope and Agatha Christie and afternoon tea become awkwardly aware of their tastes. "It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country." Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week Kiran Desai explains how she came to write The Inheritance of Loss. John Mullan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Week two: The importance of food There seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits but it is attached to the small details of life. Over...
Related articles:
John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss
My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes
I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major. He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the...
son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three boys in the war. He enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909, and transferred to the regular 1st Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, later that year, becoming a lance-corporal in 1910, a corporal in 1913 and a sergeant in 1914. The fact that he was at home on recruiting duties probably saved his life, for 1st Dorsets suffered cruelly: in October the battalion lost 399 men, 148 killed, in a single action. Sergeant Shephard joined 1st Dorsets in January 1915, and began to keep a diary. There is horror, such as his first experience of gas: "Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground . . ." There is a serious interest in food: "We made a grand stew in a washing bucket . . ." And there is an abundance of that comradeship that made war tolerable. When Company Sergeant Major Shapton was killed, Shephard wrote: "In Sam I have lost my dearest chum. We were always together whenever possible. He was an Army Reserve man when war broke out, and came from Canada to rejoin. I shall never forget the afternoon C Company was cut up . . . When I got to his trench I found him crying. He had been working like a demon, digging his men out and attending to the wounded . . ." Commissioned in November 1916, Shephard died in January 1917, commanding a company of 5th Dorsets. His last recorded act was characteristically professional. When he knew his position was hopeless, he warned the supporting company to fall back, so as not to be overwhelmed too. Ernest Shephard is buried on the Somme, in the AIF Burial Ground at Grass Lane, Flers, and I go to see him as often as I can. First world war guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major. He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the...
Related articles:
My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes
My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes
I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major. He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the...
son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three boys in the war. He enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909, and transferred to the regular 1st Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, later that year, becoming a lance-corporal in 1910, a corporal in 1913 and a sergeant in 1914. The fact that he was at home on recruiting duties probably saved his life, for 1st Dorsets suffered cruelly: in October the battalion lost 399 men, 148 killed, in a single action. Sergeant Shephard joined 1st Dorsets in January 1915, and began to keep a diary. There is horror, such as his first experience of gas: "Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground . . ." There is a serious interest in food: "We made a grand stew in a washing bucket . . ." And there is an abundance of that comradeship that made war tolerable. When Company Sergeant Major Shapton was killed, Shephard wrote: "In Sam I have lost my dearest chum. We were always together whenever possible. He was an Army Reserve man when war broke out, and came from Canada to rejoin. I shall never forget the afternoon C Company was cut up . . . When I got to his trench I found him crying. He had been working like a demon, digging his men out and attending to the wounded . . ." Commissioned in November 1916, Shephard died in January 1917, commanding a company of 5th Dorsets. His last recorded act was characteristically professional. When he knew his position was hopeless, he warned the supporting company to fall back, so as not to be overwhelmed too. Ernest Shephard is buried on the Somme, in the AIF Burial Ground at Grass Lane, Flers, and I go to see him as often as I can. First world war guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major. He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the...
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My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes
Crime novels roundup | Book reviews
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber, ?12.99) Irish writer Glynn's second novel is a heavyweight, grown-up thriller set in Dublin against a background of dirty politics and even dirtier business dealings. As the landscape is reinvented as a glittering monument...
to capitalism, morality is sacrificed to profit. When two men with the same name and from the same family die on the same night, one murdered and one in what seems to be a straightforward case of drunk driving, Gina Rafferty, aunt to one and sister to the other, starts to ask questions. When she comes upon an account of another fatal car accident, 25 years before, a pattern begins to emerge. Emotionally truthful, with a plausible cast, and told in wonderfully fluent prose, Winterland is a gripping tale of a world of greed and secrets, where public image is all that matters. The Cemetery of Secrets: A Venetian Mystery, by David Hewson (Pan, ?6.99) Originally published as Lucifer's Shadow, this novel deals with a different sort of greed the desire to possess beauty, whether in the form of artefacts, musical talent, or people. Two narratives, one contemporary and one set in 1733, show how the past impacts on the present, as long-buried musical treasures are discovered and fought over by collectors. The scene-setting is excellent one can almost smell the foetid 18th-century canals and the large cast is handled with aplomb. The pace is fairly sedate, but it's none the worse for that. Thorough research and a strong narrative make The Cemetery of Secrets a rich and surprisingly romantic tour de force. And oh, joy! there's a map of the city. Bad Penny Blues, by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent's Tail, ?7.99) Cathi Unsworth's third novel is another tour de force a panoramic story set in London between 1959 and 1965, with a strong element of roman-a-clef. The plot centres on the real-life unsolved crimes of a killer of prostitutes dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press, but there are also portraits of record producer Joe Meek, Screaming Lord Sutch, artist Pauline Boty, the over-zealous policeman Harold Challenor, and many more. However, Unsworth's ability to create the feel of the period is such that background knowledge is immaterial. Two appealing narrators young designer and psychic Stella Reade, and copper Pete Bradley, who finds the first body try, in their own way, to make sense not only of the mystery, but also of their rapidly changing world. Authentically atmospheric and very evocative, the book's song-title chapter headings supply an inbuilt soundtrack. Hypothermia, by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker, ?11.99) Most things in award-winning Icelandic author Indridason's latest novel are cold, if not actually frozen, including his emotionally numb detective, Erlendur. This time, he's embarking on an unofficial investigation into the apparent suicide by hanging of a young woman with a history of depression. There's a lot of weather here, and a lot of ghosts in the landscape, not only in the form of a tape of a sιance attended by the dead woman, but also two young people who went missing 30 years previously, not to mention Erlendur's own quest to discover the body of his brother, who perished in a blizzard when he was a boy. There's also the ghost of the detective's disastrous marriage, which, despite the pleas of his drug-addict daughter, he is unwilling to confront. Although Erlendur can be an infuriating character one wishes the man would thaw enough to feel something the narrative grips, the writing, excellently translated by Cribb, is resonant and lyrical, and the atmosphere is chillingly creepy. Brrr. Laura Wilson's An Empty Death is published by Orion. Crime books Fiction Laura Wilson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber, ?12.99) Irish writer Glynn's second novel is a heavyweight, grown-up thriller set in Dublin against a background of dirty politics and even dirtier business dealings. As the landscape is reinvented as a glittering monument...
Related articles:
Crime novels roundup | Book reviews
Crime novels roundup | Book reviews
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber, ?12.99) Irish writer Glynn's second novel is a heavyweight, grown-up thriller set in Dublin against a background of dirty politics and even dirtier business dealings. As the landscape is reinvented as a glittering monument...
to capitalism, morality is sacrificed to profit. When two men with the same name and from the same family die on the same night, one murdered and one in what seems to be a straightforward case of drunk driving, Gina Rafferty, aunt to one and sister to the other, starts to ask questions. When she comes upon an account of another fatal car accident, 25 years before, a pattern begins to emerge. Emotionally truthful, with a plausible cast, and told in wonderfully fluent prose, Winterland is a gripping tale of a world of greed and secrets, where public image is all that matters. The Cemetery of Secrets: A Venetian Mystery, by David Hewson (Pan, ?6.99) Originally published as Lucifer's Shadow, this novel deals with a different sort of greed the desire to possess beauty, whether in the form of artefacts, musical talent, or people. Two narratives, one contemporary and one set in 1733, show how the past impacts on the present, as long-buried musical treasures are discovered and fought over by collectors. The scene-setting is excellent one can almost smell the foetid 18th-century canals and the large cast is handled with aplomb. The pace is fairly sedate, but it's none the worse for that. Thorough research and a strong narrative make The Cemetery of Secrets a rich and surprisingly romantic tour de force. And oh, joy! there's a map of the city. Bad Penny Blues, by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent's Tail, ?7.99) Cathi Unsworth's third novel is another tour de force a panoramic story set in London between 1959 and 1965, with a strong element of roman-a-clef. The plot centres on the real-life unsolved crimes of a killer of prostitutes dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press, but there are also portraits of record producer Joe Meek, Screaming Lord Sutch, artist Pauline Boty, the over-zealous policeman Harold Challenor, and many more. However, Unsworth's ability to create the feel of the period is such that background knowledge is immaterial. Two appealing narrators young designer and psychic Stella Reade, and copper Pete Bradley, who finds the first body try, in their own way, to make sense not only of the mystery, but also of their rapidly changing world. Authentically atmospheric and very evocative, the book's song-title chapter headings supply an inbuilt soundtrack. Hypothermia, by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker, ?11.99) Most things in award-winning Icelandic author Indridason's latest novel are cold, if not actually frozen, including his emotionally numb detective, Erlendur. This time, he's embarking on an unofficial investigation into the apparent suicide by hanging of a young woman with a history of depression. There's a lot of weather here, and a lot of ghosts in the landscape, not only in the form of a tape of a sιance attended by the dead woman, but also two young people who went missing 30 years previously, not to mention Erlendur's own quest to discover the body of his brother, who perished in a blizzard when he was a boy. There's also the ghost of the detective's disastrous marriage, which, despite the pleas of his drug-addict daughter, he is unwilling to confront. Although Erlendur can be an infuriating character one wishes the man would thaw enough to feel something the narrative grips, the writing, excellently translated by Cribb, is resonant and lyrical, and the atmosphere is chillingly creepy. Brrr. Laura Wilson's An Empty Death is published by Orion. Crime books Fiction Laura Wilson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber, ?12.99) Irish writer Glynn's second novel is a heavyweight, grown-up thriller set in Dublin against a background of dirty politics and even dirtier business dealings. As the landscape is reinvented as a glittering monument...
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Crime novels roundup | Book reviews
The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview
M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical stories The inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued....
Obsessed by bearings, directions, instructions, they read their way towards things. In "Witness", Grete and Sam follow someone else's map through a vast, abandoned opencast mine in Germany, a place "filled with silence, the silence of afterwards, of what continues and must be contemplated after the thing is done"; after his death, the ageing students of "Memorial" remember their way back to their favourite tutor the way a pet animal finds its way home after some lengthy, unplanned journey. The couple in "The Shieling", meanwhile, aren't just making their way somewhere they're making the destination itself, inventing it as they go. It's a fraught task, which perhaps mimics the author's own. The reward, though, is always a quiet and perfect instant of humanity. There's not a cheap note here. People are viewed directly, but not clinically; neither are they, despite the wry humour, made fun of. The events presented are often everyday in themselves births, deaths, meetings, partings but they locate, just for a moment, the flicker of the ecstatic in landscapes both psychic and geographical. Each location seems enchanted in "Living On", there's even a wood named Broceliande and the exchanges that take place there sometimes have a mythological, though entirely unmannered, feel about them. Waters, springs, moorland pools, blessing and cursing wells, all become sites of both mystery and ordinariness. The ecstatic isn't always beautiful "Regrets" and "The Blind Home" are outright horror stories, although you don't realise that until it's too late but it is always dangerous. In "Beginning" a boy meets a girl on the number 42 bus in central Manchester. He never knows her name, but she gives him a book Wilfred Owen's poems and the moment he opens it his life seems to change. He sees his first dead body, a man pulled out of the Irwell in a stream of dirty water, to hang and twirl, "his clothes undoing around his midriff"; but he never sees the girl again. Constantine's prose is generally quiet, a little inturned, as matter-of-fact as the events depicted, but when necessary, for a fraction of a second, or a fraction of a sentence, it will take on completely different qualities. "I remember her eyes," says the narrator of "Beginning", "the soul staring out of them, eager and scared . . ." Suddenly you're not on a bus any more. Your way of seeing the boy and his life has been changed. This is not to say that Constantine is a writer of motive or psychology in the accepted sense. "Who knows why people do things?" one character says to another. "I'm more interested in what they look like while they're doing them . . ." Dialogue is presented without quote marks; indirect speech is sometimes attributed rather too indirectly. As a result, it can be hard to know who's speaking, or even which character is which. There are descriptions of places which don't quite produce a picture, and actions which, described only by their emotional component, never quite come into focus as actions. The effect is sometimes powerful, in that it gives the feeling of people struggling to manage a vagueness in their lives, especially in their expectations; struggling, too, with the attempt to communicate it. At other times as in "Words to Say It", a curiously male psychodrama of sexual dissociation and the inability to speak it makes the narrative unnecessarily hard to navigate. You aren't sure whether you're following a subtle emotional contour or simply misreading the map. It's possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it's the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it's something in the characters you don't want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can't stop reading. You've embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you. Perhaps the most beautiful and striking piece here is "The Cave". Lou pursues Owen, a writer who lives, self-possessed and needing nobody, in a house by the moors. Lou's sister thinks she should move on; she thinks that "if he doesn't love you he shouldn't keep doing things with you that make you love him more". But Lou persists without knowing why, and one day Owen takes her to the eponymous cave in the limestone hills, to listen to the sound of a stream bursting out of the rock, a "churning, milling, steady mechanical cold breathing", a "pulse of inhuman life in total darkness". It's an appalling sound, and it seeps right into you. He tried to sleep there as a boy, he tells her, but the sound drove him away. "Then we'll stay," says Lou; and they do. The mythology and psychology of this are obvious. But as much as the sound of the water is a metaphor, it's also perfectly literal: the sound of geology, of the universe, of the simple, implacable, forgotten matrix of things. If it's possible to be a romantic existentialist, David Constantine is. Lou and Owen must pitch every word they say to one another against the noise in the cave. We are all we have. But beware: this understanding, and Constantine's way with it, can leave some other kinds of contemporary fiction feeling brittle and empty. M John Harrison's Nova Swing is published by Gollancz. Fiction guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical stories The inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued....
Related articles:
The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview
The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview
M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical stories The inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued....
Obsessed by bearings, directions, instructions, they read their way towards things. In "Witness", Grete and Sam follow someone else's map through a vast, abandoned opencast mine in Germany, a place "filled with silence, the silence of afterwards, of what continues and must be contemplated after the thing is done"; after his death, the ageing students of "Memorial" remember their way back to their favourite tutor the way a pet animal finds its way home after some lengthy, unplanned journey. The couple in "The Shieling", meanwhile, aren't just making their way somewhere they're making the destination itself, inventing it as they go. It's a fraught task, which perhaps mimics the author's own. The reward, though, is always a quiet and perfect instant of humanity. There's not a cheap note here. People are viewed directly, but not clinically; neither are they, despite the wry humour, made fun of. The events presented are often everyday in themselves births, deaths, meetings, partings but they locate, just for a moment, the flicker of the ecstatic in landscapes both psychic and geographical. Each location seems enchanted in "Living On", there's even a wood named Broceliande and the exchanges that take place there sometimes have a mythological, though entirely unmannered, feel about them. Waters, springs, moorland pools, blessing and cursing wells, all become sites of both mystery and ordinariness. The ecstatic isn't always beautiful "Regrets" and "The Blind Home" are outright horror stories, although you don't realise that until it's too late but it is always dangerous. In "Beginning" a boy meets a girl on the number 42 bus in central Manchester. He never knows her name, but she gives him a book Wilfred Owen's poems and the moment he opens it his life seems to change. He sees his first dead body, a man pulled out of the Irwell in a stream of dirty water, to hang and twirl, "his clothes undoing around his midriff"; but he never sees the girl again. Constantine's prose is generally quiet, a little inturned, as matter-of-fact as the events depicted, but when necessary, for a fraction of a second, or a fraction of a sentence, it will take on completely different qualities. "I remember her eyes," says the narrator of "Beginning", "the soul staring out of them, eager and scared . . ." Suddenly you're not on a bus any more. Your way of seeing the boy and his life has been changed. This is not to say that Constantine is a writer of motive or psychology in the accepted sense. "Who knows why people do things?" one character says to another. "I'm more interested in what they look like while they're doing them . . ." Dialogue is presented without quote marks; indirect speech is sometimes attributed rather too indirectly. As a result, it can be hard to know who's speaking, or even which character is which. There are descriptions of places which don't quite produce a picture, and actions which, described only by their emotional component, never quite come into focus as actions. The effect is sometimes powerful, in that it gives the feeling of people struggling to manage a vagueness in their lives, especially in their expectations; struggling, too, with the attempt to communicate it. At other times as in "Words to Say It", a curiously male psychodrama of sexual dissociation and the inability to speak it makes the narrative unnecessarily hard to navigate. You aren't sure whether you're following a subtle emotional contour or simply misreading the map. It's possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it's the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it's something in the characters you don't want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can't stop reading. You've embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you. Perhaps the most beautiful and striking piece here is "The Cave". Lou pursues Owen, a writer who lives, self-possessed and needing nobody, in a house by the moors. Lou's sister thinks she should move on; she thinks that "if he doesn't love you he shouldn't keep doing things with you that make you love him more". But Lou persists without knowing why, and one day Owen takes her to the eponymous cave in the limestone hills, to listen to the sound of a stream bursting out of the rock, a "churning, milling, steady mechanical cold breathing", a "pulse of inhuman life in total darkness". It's an appalling sound, and it seeps right into you. He tried to sleep there as a boy, he tells her, but the sound drove him away. "Then we'll stay," says Lou; and they do. The mythology and psychology of this are obvious. But as much as the sound of the water is a metaphor, it's also perfectly literal: the sound of geology, of the universe, of the simple, implacable, forgotten matrix of things. If it's possible to be a romantic existentialist, David Constantine is. Lou and Owen must pitch every word they say to one another against the noise in the cave. We are all we have. But beware: this understanding, and Constantine's way with it, can leave some other kinds of contemporary fiction feeling brittle and empty. M John Harrison's Nova Swing is published by Gollancz. Fiction guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical stories The inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued....
Related articles:
The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview
An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem
In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock...
thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me. An Equal Voice "We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences." from A War of Nerves, by Ben Shephard War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports, blueprints one day and the next with the help of a broken-down motor car and a few gallons of petrol marching men with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes, horses straining and plunging at the guns, little clay-pits opening beneath each step, and piles of bloody clothes and leggings outside the canvas door of a field hospital. At the end of the week there is no telling whether you spent Tuesday going over the specifications for a possible laundry or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile. * There were some cases of nervous collapse as the whistle blew on the first day of battle. In general, however, it is perfectly astonishing and terrifying how bravely the men fight. From my position on rising ground I watched one entire brigade advancing in line after line, dressed as smartly as if they were on parade, and not a single man shirked going through the barrage, or facing the rapid machine-gun and rifle-fire that finally wiped them all out. I saw with my own eyes the lines advancing in such admirable order quickly melt away. Yet not a man wavered, or broke the ranks, or made any attempt to turn back again. * A soft siffle, high in the air like a distant lark, or the note of a penny whistle, faint and falling. But then, with a spiral, pulsing flutter, it grew to a hissing whirr, landing with ferocious blasts, with tremendous thumps and then their echoes, followed by the whine of fragments which cut into the trees, driving white scars in their trunks and filling the air with torn shreds of foliage. The detonation, the flash, the heat of explosion. And all the while fear, crawling into my heart. It literally crawled into me. I had set my teeth steadying myself, but with no success. I clutched the earth, pressing against it. There was no one to help me then. O how one loves mother earth. * One or two friends stood like granite rocks round which the seas raged, but very many other men broke in pieces. Everyone called it shell-shock, meaning concussion, but shell- shock is rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk due to the collapse of the helm of our self-control. You understand what you see but you cannot think. Your head is in agony and you want relief for that. The more you struggle, the more madness creeps over you. The brain cannot think of anything at all. I don't ask you what you feel like but I tell you, because I have been like you. I have been ill as you and got better. I will teach you, you will get better. Try and keep on trying what I tell you and you will. * The place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid, titubating shell-shockers with their bizarre paralyses and stares, their stammers and tremors, their nightmares and hallucinations, their unstoppable fits and shakings. Each was back in his doomed shelter, when the panic and stampede was re-enacted among long-dead faces, or still caught in the open and under fire. This officer was quietly feasting with imaginary knives and forks; that group roamed around clutching Teddy Bears; one man stripped to his underclothes and proclaimed himself to be Mahatma Gandhi; another sat cramped in a corner clutching a champagne cork; one chanted, with his hands over an imaginary basket of eggs, Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. * I could feel the bullets hit my body. I could feel myself being hit by gun fire and this is what made me sit up and scream. What I saw round me were others walking with the bent and contorted spines of old age, or moving without their lifting their legs, by vibrating limbs on the ground. All equally unfortunate, filled with sadness. Dead friends gazed at them. Rats emerged from the cavities of bodies. Then came trembling and losing control of legs: you never dreamt of such gaits. One fellow cannot hold his head still or even stand except with incessant jerking. Instantly the man across the aisle follows suit. In this way the infection spreads in widening circles until the whole ward is jerking and twitching, all in their hospital blues, their limbs shaking and flapping like the tails of dogs. * Naturally it can save a good deal of time if men, before battle, have pictures from the Hate Room hung in their minds of things the enemy has already done, waiting to be remembered. Starving people for instance and sick people, and dead people in ones and in heaps. If that proves ineffective, then treatment is post facto. Compulsory mourning is no longer recommended whereby the hospital confines a man for three days alone in a darkened room and orders him to grieve for dead comrades. But other cures must be attempted, and in some cases men wish to return to do their duty. See, your eyes are already heavier. Heavier and heavier. You are going into a deep, deep sleep. A deep, far sleep. You are far asleep. You are fast sleep. You have no fear. * I am quiet and healthy but cannot bear being away from England. I have been away too long and seen too many things. My best friend was killed beside me. I have a wife and two children and I have done enough. I thought my nerves were better but they are worse. The first fight, the fight with my own self, has ended. I may be ready to fight again but I am not willing. I am in urgent need of outdoor work and would be glad to accept a position as a gardener at a nominal salary. My best friend walked back into my room this morning, shimmering white and transparent. I saw him clearly. He stood at the foot of my bed and looked right at me. I asked him, What do you want? What do you want? Eventually I woke up and of course I was by myself. Poetry First world war Second world war War reporting Andrew Motion Andrew Motion guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock...
Related articles:
An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem
An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem
In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock...
thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me. An Equal Voice "We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences." from A War of Nerves, by Ben Shephard War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports, blueprints one day and the next with the help of a broken-down motor car and a few gallons of petrol marching men with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes, horses straining and plunging at the guns, little clay-pits opening beneath each step, and piles of bloody clothes and leggings outside the canvas door of a field hospital. At the end of the week there is no telling whether you spent Tuesday going over the specifications for a possible laundry or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile. * There were some cases of nervous collapse as the whistle blew on the first day of battle. In general, however, it is perfectly astonishing and terrifying how bravely the men fight. From my position on rising ground I watched one entire brigade advancing in line after line, dressed as smartly as if they were on parade, and not a single man shirked going through the barrage, or facing the rapid machine-gun and rifle-fire that finally wiped them all out. I saw with my own eyes the lines advancing in such admirable order quickly melt away. Yet not a man wavered, or broke the ranks, or made any attempt to turn back again. * A soft siffle, high in the air like a distant lark, or the note of a penny whistle, faint and falling. But then, with a spiral, pulsing flutter, it grew to a hissing whirr, landing with ferocious blasts, with tremendous thumps and then their echoes, followed by the whine of fragments which cut into the trees, driving white scars in their trunks and filling the air with torn shreds of foliage. The detonation, the flash, the heat of explosion. And all the while fear, crawling into my heart. It literally crawled into me. I had set my teeth steadying myself, but with no success. I clutched the earth, pressing against it. There was no one to help me then. O how one loves mother earth. * One or two friends stood like granite rocks round which the seas raged, but very many other men broke in pieces. Everyone called it shell-shock, meaning concussion, but shell- shock is rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk due to the collapse of the helm of our self-control. You understand what you see but you cannot think. Your head is in agony and you want relief for that. The more you struggle, the more madness creeps over you. The brain cannot think of anything at all. I don't ask you what you feel like but I tell you, because I have been like you. I have been ill as you and got better. I will teach you, you will get better. Try and keep on trying what I tell you and you will. * The place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid, titubating shell-shockers with their bizarre paralyses and stares, their stammers and tremors, their nightmares and hallucinations, their unstoppable fits and shakings. Each was back in his doomed shelter, when the panic and stampede was re-enacted among long-dead faces, or still caught in the open and under fire. This officer was quietly feasting with imaginary knives and forks; that group roamed around clutching Teddy Bears; one man stripped to his underclothes and proclaimed himself to be Mahatma Gandhi; another sat cramped in a corner clutching a champagne cork; one chanted, with his hands over an imaginary basket of eggs, Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. * I could feel the bullets hit my body. I could feel myself being hit by gun fire and this is what made me sit up and scream. What I saw round me were others walking with the bent and contorted spines of old age, or moving without their lifting their legs, by vibrating limbs on the ground. All equally unfortunate, filled with sadness. Dead friends gazed at them. Rats emerged from the cavities of bodies. Then came trembling and losing control of legs: you never dreamt of such gaits. One fellow cannot hold his head still or even stand except with incessant jerking. Instantly the man across the aisle follows suit. In this way the infection spreads in widening circles until the whole ward is jerking and twitching, all in their hospital blues, their limbs shaking and flapping like the tails of dogs. * Naturally it can save a good deal of time if men, before battle, have pictures from the Hate Room hung in their minds of things the enemy has already done, waiting to be remembered. Starving people for instance and sick people, and dead people in ones and in heaps. If that proves ineffective, then treatment is post facto. Compulsory mourning is no longer recommended whereby the hospital confines a man for three days alone in a darkened room and orders him to grieve for dead comrades. But other cures must be attempted, and in some cases men wish to return to do their duty. See, your eyes are already heavier. Heavier and heavier. You are going into a deep, deep sleep. A deep, far sleep. You are far asleep. You are fast sleep. You have no fear. * I am quiet and healthy but cannot bear being away from England. I have been away too long and seen too many things. My best friend was killed beside me. I have a wife and two children and I have done enough. I thought my nerves were better but they are worse. The first fight, the fight with my own self, has ended. I may be ready to fight again but I am not willing. I am in urgent need of outdoor work and would be glad to accept a position as a gardener at a nominal salary. My best friend walked back into my room this morning, shimmering white and transparent. I saw him clearly. He stood at the foot of my bed and looked right at me. I asked him, What do you want? What do you want? Eventually I woke up and of course I was by myself. Poetry First world war Second world war War reporting Andrew Motion Andrew Motion guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock...
Related articles:
An Equal Voice: Andrew Motion's Remembrance Day poem
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century | Book review
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichιs In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in...
which he expressed his belief that the postwar English literary scene had become insular and moribund, its poetry calcifying into the "academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgable, efficient" typified by the Movement poets of the 1950s. His anthology, conceived to counter this process, championed younger poets whom he believed capable of "open[ing] poetry up to new areas of experience"; almost half a century on, his lineup, which included Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and (in the 1966 reprint) Sylvia Plath, has stood the test of time. No surprise, then, that James Byrne and Clare Pollard, editors of Bloodaxe's zeitgeist-chasing Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, cite Alvarez as inspiration. Their anthology, they tell us, is intended to showcase the work of poets who "address the particularity of being alive now". The undeniable value of the enterprise makes their introduction, jammed as it is with the same tired clichιs that are wheeled out every time anyone wants to publicise a new poetry venture, doubly disappointing. "For many years the poetry world has belonged to older writers. Few young poets were published and fewer were nominated for major prizes. An invitation to a poetry reading conjured thoughts of warm white wine in a pokey bookshop," claim the editors. Really? What about Simon Armitage, who published his first collection at 26, Owen Sheers (ditto), or Kathleen Jamie (aged 20)? What about Carol Ann Duffy, whose first collection came out when she was in her teens? Or Pollard and Byrne themselves, who brought out their debuts at 20 and 26 respectively? Such baggy generalisations are irritating; worse, alas, is to come. "As the credit crunch exposes the superficiality of many of the last decade's bloated, corporate values," they continue, "there is a young generation who seem to be hungering for the authentic and DIY . . . new poet-promoters are setting up their own nights . . . and magazines . . ." Goodness. While the editors do flag up several genuinely innovative schemes Faber's new pamphlet series, for example the suggestion that the upcoming generation invented poetry evenings and magazines would be frustrating even without the heavy-handed appropriation of the credit crunch. Rather than being bolstered by their editors' introduction, then, the poems are left to fight their way free of it. And at this point, thankfully, things take a happier turn. The poems themselves are a mixed bag, as you'd expect from an anthology of largely untried poets, but the handful of poorly conceived or executed verses are quickly forgotten in the broader sweep of natural, vital poems that come together within these pages. The poets themselves are presented alphabetically a decision which, while impeccably democratic, has the effect of making the anthology feel a little jittery, with no deference paid to the idea that some might sit together more comfortably than others. Occasionally, however, this happens by chance, and at such moments the whole edifice takes flight. Just before the halfway point there's a lovely glissando through three very good female poets (Miriam Gamble, Sarah Jackson and Annie Katchinska) whose styles and subjects bleed easily and usefully into one another. We slide from Gamble's sticky mix of re-evaluated mythology and contemporary knowingness (her strongest poem, "On Fancying American Film Stars", combines voguish in-jokes with the lush imagery of "one small cloud which loiters . . . / putty grey, shedding rain like tiny lead balloons") into Jackson's close-up universe of parents and children, in which the powerful, almost threatening intimacy of poems such as "Leftovers", where a babysitter enters her charge's room and "sit[s] on stripped pine floors, / pretending it's all mine", offsets and complements Gamble's wider world-view. From there, it's a fluent segue into Katchinska's examinations of everyday minutiae, similarly small-scale but oblique, approached with an emigrant's slantwise sensibility. The sense of being caught up in an impromptu narrative is satisfying. Away from this central arc, there are many flashes of brilliance: 18-year-old Amy Blakemore (the youngest poet here) offers a woozily glamorous description of a high-school graduation party at which "fallen silver streamers glitter in corners like smashed braces"; Joe Dunthorne's lubricious, inebriated "Cave Dive", in which the gorgeous concluding image of air bubbles as marbles ("From his lips / he scatters balls of glass") gleams on the page like a jewel; Toby Martinez de las Rivas's "Poem, Three Weeks After Conception", which reads like an updated version of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" perfectly timeless, but (with its address to "you / for whom the best wine in the world will be pressed in Kent. / Who will live to see supermarkets dictating military policy to governments") perfectly now. Of the 21 poets, however, three, finally, stand out. Adam O'Riordan brings an understated music to poems of birth, death and love, proving that novelty needn't be ostentatious. His poem on "The Leverets", "Clawed from its nest into the cold world / sudden and bright and, in an instant, over", stopped me in my tracks. Heather Phillipson writes with brittle beauty on the obsessiveness of love. And Jack Underwood (who, along with De las Rivas and Phillipson, features in the new Faber pamphlet series) deals out oddball meditations on animals ("So, Weasel, it has come to this; / to your thighs like tall glasses of milk, / your biscuit hair") that are striking and bewitching. It's possible, of course, that in half a century's time, their names unlike those of Alvarez's poets will have disappeared without a ripple. For now, though, they deserve to be read. Poetry Sarah Crown guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichιs In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in...
Related articles:
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century | Book review
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century | Book review
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichιs In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in...
which he expressed his belief that the postwar English literary scene had become insular and moribund, its poetry calcifying into the "academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgable, efficient" typified by the Movement poets of the 1950s. His anthology, conceived to counter this process, championed younger poets whom he believed capable of "open[ing] poetry up to new areas of experience"; almost half a century on, his lineup, which included Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and (in the 1966 reprint) Sylvia Plath, has stood the test of time. No surprise, then, that James Byrne and Clare Pollard, editors of Bloodaxe's zeitgeist-chasing Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, cite Alvarez as inspiration. Their anthology, they tell us, is intended to showcase the work of poets who "address the particularity of being alive now". The undeniable value of the enterprise makes their introduction, jammed as it is with the same tired clichιs that are wheeled out every time anyone wants to publicise a new poetry venture, doubly disappointing. "For many years the poetry world has belonged to older writers. Few young poets were published and fewer were nominated for major prizes. An invitation to a poetry reading conjured thoughts of warm white wine in a pokey bookshop," claim the editors. Really? What about Simon Armitage, who published his first collection at 26, Owen Sheers (ditto), or Kathleen Jamie (aged 20)? What about Carol Ann Duffy, whose first collection came out when she was in her teens? Or Pollard and Byrne themselves, who brought out their debuts at 20 and 26 respectively? Such baggy generalisations are irritating; worse, alas, is to come. "As the credit crunch exposes the superficiality of many of the last decade's bloated, corporate values," they continue, "there is a young generation who seem to be hungering for the authentic and DIY . . . new poet-promoters are setting up their own nights . . . and magazines . . ." Goodness. While the editors do flag up several genuinely innovative schemes Faber's new pamphlet series, for example the suggestion that the upcoming generation invented poetry evenings and magazines would be frustrating even without the heavy-handed appropriation of the credit crunch. Rather than being bolstered by their editors' introduction, then, the poems are left to fight their way free of it. And at this point, thankfully, things take a happier turn. The poems themselves are a mixed bag, as you'd expect from an anthology of largely untried poets, but the handful of poorly conceived or executed verses are quickly forgotten in the broader sweep of natural, vital poems that come together within these pages. The poets themselves are presented alphabetically a decision which, while impeccably democratic, has the effect of making the anthology feel a little jittery, with no deference paid to the idea that some might sit together more comfortably than others. Occasionally, however, this happens by chance, and at such moments the whole edifice takes flight. Just before the halfway point there's a lovely glissando through three very good female poets (Miriam Gamble, Sarah Jackson and Annie Katchinska) whose styles and subjects bleed easily and usefully into one another. We slide from Gamble's sticky mix of re-evaluated mythology and contemporary knowingness (her strongest poem, "On Fancying American Film Stars", combines voguish in-jokes with the lush imagery of "one small cloud which loiters . . . / putty grey, shedding rain like tiny lead balloons") into Jackson's close-up universe of parents and children, in which the powerful, almost threatening intimacy of poems such as "Leftovers", where a babysitter enters her charge's room and "sit[s] on stripped pine floors, / pretending it's all mine", offsets and complements Gamble's wider world-view. From there, it's a fluent segue into Katchinska's examinations of everyday minutiae, similarly small-scale but oblique, approached with an emigrant's slantwise sensibility. The sense of being caught up in an impromptu narrative is satisfying. Away from this central arc, there are many flashes of brilliance: 18-year-old Amy Blakemore (the youngest poet here) offers a woozily glamorous description of a high-school graduation party at which "fallen silver streamers glitter in corners like smashed braces"; Joe Dunthorne's lubricious, inebriated "Cave Dive", in which the gorgeous concluding image of air bubbles as marbles ("From his lips / he scatters balls of glass") gleams on the page like a jewel; Toby Martinez de las Rivas's "Poem, Three Weeks After Conception", which reads like an updated version of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" perfectly timeless, but (with its address to "you / for whom the best wine in the world will be pressed in Kent. / Who will live to see supermarkets dictating military policy to governments") perfectly now. Of the 21 poets, however, three, finally, stand out. Adam O'Riordan brings an understated music to poems of birth, death and love, proving that novelty needn't be ostentatious. His poem on "The Leverets", "Clawed from its nest into the cold world / sudden and bright and, in an instant, over", stopped me in my tracks. Heather Phillipson writes with brittle beauty on the obsessiveness of love. And Jack Underwood (who, along with De las Rivas and Phillipson, features in the new Faber pamphlet series) deals out oddball meditations on animals ("So, Weasel, it has come to this; / to your thighs like tall glasses of milk, / your biscuit hair") that are striking and bewitching. It's possible, of course, that in half a century's time, their names unlike those of Alvarez's poets will have disappeared without a ripple. For now, though, they deserve to be read. Poetry Sarah Crown guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichιs In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry. Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in...
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Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century | Book review
The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin | Book review
First, to declare an interest: Hugo Young was a political columnist for this paper, and there is a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, the editor. But I'd choose this book even if Young wrote for the Daily Mail and the foreword were by Conrad Black. It would...
be irresponsible not to. (Not that, I think, he would ever have written for that paper unless with a heavy heart. As he put it in February 1997: "The prospect of a Labour government in thrall to the Daily Mail is a pretty appalling thing to contemplate.") If anyone told truth to power, it was Young. But not in a belligerent or sarcastic way; he was cool, fluent, elegant, almost gentle, as I recall, in the way he administered the stiletto and all the more powerful for it. Politicians listened to what he said. They might not have changed their behaviour because of it but they still listened. His collection of political writing "From Thatcher to Blair" was called Supping with Devils, and here, essentially, are the notes from those meals although they actually begin with Douglas Hurd in 1969, when he was Ted Heath's private secretary. Of course there are masses of papers which have not made it into this book, but you still get the sense that Young was more far-sighted than many of his interviewees, if latching early on to Hurd is a kind of foresight. He certainly had more than Hurd, who in 1995 was cautiously predicting a Major victory at the next election. Young, typically, would have a meeting with some influential political figure (not necessarily well known to the public, and not necessarily a politician; it could be another columnist), over, say, a nice lunch, would write nothing down at the time, but as soon as he got back home would spend 10 frenzied minutes at a typewriter before the details would start slipping away. Then he'd write a column often skewering the person he'd just broken bread with. There is an overwhelming consensus that his memory was excellent although I do recall this paper getting a legal hammering when he quoted Norman Tebbit as saying "no one with a conscience votes Conservative", a rare lapse that may be down to his having trusted an unreliable source. This method of composition immediate, unmediated has produced excellent results, and reads well even in raw form. I do not consider myself a politics junkie but I was surprised by how entertaining I found his notes, and how vividly they brought back my own fading memories of politicians gone and not gone by. I liked the "quite a pause" between his asking David Owen what the differences were between the SDP and the Tories; and Chris Patten saying, in 1987, that "we should be quietly selling Lawsons in the market" (Patten thought Lawson was past his peak and, as it turned out, he was right). The effect on the style was to make it punchy. Often the opening sentences are superbly arresting. "I was struck by the unreflective frenzy of his discourse" Gordon Brown in 1993. "Major is very much a ladies' man, in what is probably an innocent sense." (Also in 1993, which was before his affair with Edwina Currie entered the public domain.) Getting this close helps us see what makes them tick, and also what goes on behind the scenes. Robin Cook saying with "amazing relief" that Mandelson hasn't got it in for him at the moment; Tony Blair being given an hour-long bollocking by Clinton "so virulent that the minutes were not passed round Whitehall" this is not just gossip, although it's often as much fun as gossip; this is invaluable. Young has done us a great service. The politicians who have allowed notionally off-the-record notes to be published here are to be credited. The big absence is Blair, and if we are being generous we can suppose that this is because he's saving them up for his own memoirs; and if we are not being generous, and we really have no reason to be, we can suppose he is being counter-productively protective of his own image, or, as Margaret Thatcher would have put it more succinctly, frit. Politics Nicholas Lezard Hugo Young Edwina Currie Douglas Hurd Chris Patten guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
First, to declare an interest: Hugo Young was a political columnist for this paper, and there is a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, the editor. But I'd choose this book even if Young wrote for the Daily Mail and the foreword were by Conrad Black. It would...
Related articles:
The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin | Book review
The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin | Book review
First, to declare an interest: Hugo Young was a political columnist for this paper, and there is a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, the editor. But I'd choose this book even if Young wrote for the Daily Mail and the foreword were by Conrad Black. It would...
be irresponsible not to. (Not that, I think, he would ever have written for that paper unless with a heavy heart. As he put it in February 1997: "The prospect of a Labour government in thrall to the Daily Mail is a pretty appalling thing to contemplate.") If anyone told truth to power, it was Young. But not in a belligerent or sarcastic way; he was cool, fluent, elegant, almost gentle, as I recall, in the way he administered the stiletto and all the more powerful for it. Politicians listened to what he said. They might not have changed their behaviour because of it but they still listened. His collection of political writing "From Thatcher to Blair" was called Supping with Devils, and here, essentially, are the notes from those meals although they actually begin with Douglas Hurd in 1969, when he was Ted Heath's private secretary. Of course there are masses of papers which have not made it into this book, but you still get the sense that Young was more far-sighted than many of his interviewees, if latching early on to Hurd is a kind of foresight. He certainly had more than Hurd, who in 1995 was cautiously predicting a Major victory at the next election. Young, typically, would have a meeting with some influential political figure (not necessarily well known to the public, and not necessarily a politician; it could be another columnist), over, say, a nice lunch, would write nothing down at the time, but as soon as he got back home would spend 10 frenzied minutes at a typewriter before the details would start slipping away. Then he'd write a column often skewering the person he'd just broken bread with. There is an overwhelming consensus that his memory was excellent although I do recall this paper getting a legal hammering when he quoted Norman Tebbit as saying "no one with a conscience votes Conservative", a rare lapse that may be down to his having trusted an unreliable source. This method of composition immediate, unmediated has produced excellent results, and reads well even in raw form. I do not consider myself a politics junkie but I was surprised by how entertaining I found his notes, and how vividly they brought back my own fading memories of politicians gone and not gone by. I liked the "quite a pause" between his asking David Owen what the differences were between the SDP and the Tories; and Chris Patten saying, in 1987, that "we should be quietly selling Lawsons in the market" (Patten thought Lawson was past his peak and, as it turned out, he was right). The effect on the style was to make it punchy. Often the opening sentences are superbly arresting. "I was struck by the unreflective frenzy of his discourse" Gordon Brown in 1993. "Major is very much a ladies' man, in what is probably an innocent sense." (Also in 1993, which was before his affair with Edwina Currie entered the public domain.) Getting this close helps us see what makes them tick, and also what goes on behind the scenes. Robin Cook saying with "amazing relief" that Mandelson hasn't got it in for him at the moment; Tony Blair being given an hour-long bollocking by Clinton "so virulent that the minutes were not passed round Whitehall" this is not just gossip, although it's often as much fun as gossip; this is invaluable. Young has done us a great service. The politicians who have allowed notionally off-the-record notes to be published here are to be credited. The big absence is Blair, and if we are being generous we can suppose that this is because he's saving them up for his own memoirs; and if we are not being generous, and we really have no reason to be, we can suppose he is being counter-productively protective of his own image, or, as Margaret Thatcher would have put it more succinctly, frit. Politics Nicholas Lezard Hugo Young Edwina Currie Douglas Hurd Chris Patten guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
First, to declare an interest: Hugo Young was a political columnist for this paper, and there is a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, the editor. But I'd choose this book even if Young wrote for the Daily Mail and the foreword were by Conrad Black. It would...
Related articles:
The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin | Book review
Meltdown by Ben Elton
Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffs Topical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened...
after the dust had settled. With notable exceptions such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Neuromancer both books which ended up shaping the eras they represented most successful "contemporary" books arrive several years after the events they depict. What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's brilliant satire on Thatcher's 80s, was released in 1994; Phillip Hensher's A Northern Clemency, which recreated the taste of the 70s, was a Booker shortlist choice in 2008; and David Nicholls's fantastic Labour boom-years comedy One Day only came out this summer. Martin Amis's promised novella State of England may disprove this view (as Sebastian Faulks's One Week in December did not), although advance word of its Jordan-bashing, a tired red dwarf in the dying throes of its celebrity, suggests possibly not. Ben Elton's new novel is as topical as it is possible to be; in fact, too much so. Elton, so brilliant in so many ways, always retains an element of being the wee smartypants of his class, unable to understand why the other kids don't like him for shooting up his hand and shouting out the answer before anyone else. His recent contemporary novels, such as Dead Famous (satirising Big Brother) and Chart Throb (riffing on X-Factor), worked well as closed-system, small-scale slices of UK culture. But in Meltdown he scattershots bankers, New Labour, London lifestyles, cash for honours, Notting Hill nannies, private schooling, immigration and the G8 concert of 2005, and struggles to involve us with any of it. This is the London of the Evening Standard's ES magazine, as hackneyed as someone making jokes about people with knives outside their big house in Hackney, which this book also does. It follows four unpleasant chums from university: Henry, a Labour MP who gets done for expenses; a rude rightwing fake toff called Rupert (who sounds very like Jilly Cooper's timeless Campbell-Black, but devoid of the charm) who buys a peerage and gets pilloried for retiring with a huge payoff after running a large bank into the ground; Lizzie, a gorgeous lifestyle goddess; and Jimmy, a merchant banker who aims too high and ends up penniless in his five-storey Notting Hill mansion (though apparently not penniless enough to consider renting out any of its 30 rooms). It's hard to see who we're meant to sympathise with. The most evil character, Rupert, is the only one who speaks any sense ("we're all bloody hypocrites: having condemned half the planet to living in abject misery to support what we see as a basic lifestyle, we then expect to be able to strut about in Hyde Park boasting about how caring and generous we are at the same time", he says of Live 8). Or is it not- that-bright insider-trader Jimmy and his saintly wife Monica, who say things like "charity is the new rock'n'roll" and donate ?1m to asylum seekers when they can't afford to buy their own children shoes? Any other novelist who stopped the narrative every two chapters to hold an inane discussion on whether to send your child to a public school or to digress on overpriced crisps would be unbearable. But because it's Elton you somehow don't mind; he's got to get in his little bit of politics, and the funny lines make it enjoyable, even as the characters themselves steadfastly refuse to be anything other than mouthpieces. The problems of writing a novel-length work to a newspaper deadline become more apparent, however, when the platitudes just aren't fresh enough. There are observations on parenting which feel recycled from Blessed, the short-lived parenting sitcom; the villain has an altercation over how he puts his food in the fridge, echoing Elton's famous sausage routine. But eventually, the greatest problem turns out to be the risk of just plain getting it wrong. The book is up to the minute with its echoes of Fred Goodwin and the Commons expenses scandal. But it went to press before it became clear that the banks, shorn of competitors such as Lehmans, would come roaring back like tigers; and that it's business as usual these days in the Bollinger bars of EC2. If Jimmy had just hung on for a couple more weeks, none of the confusing arson plot shenanigans would have been necessary. The book, though quite funny and extremely readable, is not at heart a novel at all but a collection of stand-up material, dinner party arguments and anecdotes strung together by having "he said" typed on the end of every sentence. Newcomers to Elton's novels should start with the very funny and sharp Popcorn; those looking to know what went on in the crash should stick to the papers or Robert Peston; and we true state-of-the-nation novel fans should probably just hang on in there till about 2018. Jenny Colgan's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend is published by Sphere. Fiction Jenny Colgan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffs Topical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened...
Related articles:
Meltdown by Ben Elton
Meltdown by Ben Elton | Book review
Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffs Topical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened...
after the dust had settled. With notable exceptions such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Neuromancer both books which ended up shaping the eras they represented most successful "contemporary" books arrive several years after the events they depict. What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's brilliant satire on Thatcher's 80s, was released in 1994; Phillip Hensher's A Northern Clemency, which recreated the taste of the 70s, was a Booker shortlist choice in 2008; and David Nicholls's fantastic Labour boom-years comedy One Day only came out this summer. Martin Amis's promised novella State of England may disprove this view (as Sebastian Faulks's One Week in December did not), although advance word of its Jordan-bashing, a tired red dwarf in the dying throes of its celebrity, suggests possibly not. Ben Elton's new novel is as topical as it is possible to be; in fact, too much so. Elton, so brilliant in so many ways, always retains an element of being the wee smartypants of his class, unable to understand why the other kids don't like him for shooting up his hand and shouting out the answer before anyone else. His recent contemporary novels, such as Dead Famous (satirising Big Brother) and Chart Throb (riffing on X-Factor), worked well as closed-system, small-scale slices of UK culture. But in Meltdown he scattershots bankers, New Labour, London lifestyles, cash for honours, Notting Hill nannies, private schooling, immigration and the G8 concert of 2005, and struggles to involve us with any of it. This is the London of the Evening Standard's ES magazine, as hackneyed as someone making jokes about people with knives outside their big house in Hackney, which this book also does. It follows four unpleasant chums from university: Henry, a Labour MP who gets done for expenses; a rude rightwing fake toff called Rupert (who sounds very like Jilly Cooper's timeless Campbell-Black, but devoid of the charm) who buys a peerage and gets pilloried for retiring with a huge payoff after running a large bank into the ground; Lizzie, a gorgeous lifestyle goddess; and Jimmy, a merchant banker who aims too high and ends up penniless in his five-storey Notting Hill mansion (though apparently not penniless enough to consider renting out any of its 30 rooms). It's hard to see who we're meant to sympathise with. The most evil character, Rupert, is the only one who speaks any sense ("we're all bloody hypocrites: having condemned half the planet to living in abject misery to support what we see as a basic lifestyle, we then expect to be able to strut about in Hyde Park boasting about how caring and generous we are at the same time", he says of Live 8). Or is it not- that-bright insider-trader Jimmy and his saintly wife Monica, who say things like "charity is the new rock'n'roll" and donate ?1m to asylum seekers when they can't afford to buy their own children shoes? Any other novelist who stopped the narrative every two chapters to hold an inane discussion on whether to send your child to a public school or to digress on overpriced crisps would be unbearable. But because it's Elton you somehow don't mind; he's got to get in his little bit of politics, and the funny lines make it enjoyable, even as the characters themselves steadfastly refuse to be anything other than mouthpieces. The problems of writing a novel-length work to a newspaper deadline become more apparent, however, when the platitudes just aren't fresh enough. There are observations on parenting which feel recycled from Blessed, the short-lived parenting sitcom; the villain has an altercation over how he puts his food in the fridge, echoing Elton's famous sausage routine. But eventually, the greatest problem turns out to be the risk of just plain getting it wrong. The book is up to the minute with its echoes of Fred Goodwin and the Commons expenses scandal. But it went to press before it became clear that the banks, shorn of competitors such as Lehmans, would come roaring back like tigers; and that it's business as usual these days in the Bollinger bars of EC2. If Jimmy had just hung on for a couple more weeks, none of the confusing arson plot shenanigans would have been necessary. The book, though quite funny and extremely readable, is not at heart a novel at all but a collection of stand-up material, dinner party arguments and anecdotes strung together by having "he said" typed on the end of every sentence. Newcomers to Elton's novels should start with the very funny and sharp Popcorn; those looking to know what went on in the crash should stick to the papers or Robert Peston; and we true state-of-the-nation novel fans should probably just hang on in there till about 2018. Jenny Colgan's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend is published by Sphere. Fiction Jenny Colgan guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffs Topical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened...
Related articles:
Meltdown by Ben Elton | Book review
This week's film events previews
French Film Festival, Nationwide Another cross-channel package of established talents and rising stars, including this year's hot tip A Prophet, fresh from its Best Film triumph at the London Film Festival. Other recent features include Versailles, (with...
a heartrending performance from the late Guillaume Dιpardieu), outsider artist biopic Sιraphine, Agatha Christie sleuth caper Crime Is Our Business and Sylvie Testud as Franηoise Sagan. Also unmissable are tributes to Jacques Tati and Nouvelle Vague firebrand Jean Eustache. Various venues, Sun to 20 Dec Andrea Hubert Bath Film Festival, Bath With such a hugely diverse programme of features, documentaries and more, the only theme that unites this year's Bath Film Festival is pure excellence. Previews include a host of brilliant directors' new work Soderbergh's highly anticipated The Informant!, starring Matt Damon as a reckless whistleblower, Jim Jarmusch's The Limits Of Control, a noirish crime thriller starring the usual Jarmusch suspects, and the Coens' A Serious Man. Other treats include Stephen Poliakoff's wartime drama Glorious 39 and Mamoru "Ghost In The Shell" Oshii's latest, The Sky Crawlers, while documentary subjects include the history of B-boy culture in Turn It Loose and a Kolkata family street carnival in King Of India. And Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor, will be in attendance at a screening of the magically restored version of The Red Shoes (made by her late husband Michael Powell). Various venues, Thu to 21 Nov Andrea Hubert Leeds International Film Festival, Leeds Has the recession hit the film industry? Looking at the lineup here there don't seem to be many big-budget releases. The Coen brothers, hardly huge spenders at the best of times, have no star names in A Serious Man, Bunny And The Bull offers some cheapo Gondry-style DIY surrealism, and Ridley Scott has gone for the unusual approach of breeding a new director; his daughter Jordan Scott delivers her debut feature, Cracks. Of course, without money film-makers can deliver something unusual to stand out, such as the grisly The Human Centipede, the two-for-one deal of Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl, or the catchily titled Doctor S Battles The Sex Crazed Reefer Zombies: The Movie. Various venues, to 22 Nov Phelim O'Neill Bradford Animation Festival, Bradford The great thing about animation is that new styles and techniques never obliterate the old ones. You can see it in this year's selection, with the 3-D CGI of Pixar's Up and a focus on computer games nestled alongside the charming rough-and-ready stop motion of Fantastic Mr Fox and the proper old-school animation of Jirν Trnka's masterful 1959 telling of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The rest of the bill is a dizzying array of compiled programmes of short films, adverts, music videos, workshops, etc, with a few interesting twists such as the brilliant Speed Date An Animator event where amateurs are given five brisk minutes to present their work to a seasoned professional. National Media Museum, Tue to 14 Nov Phelim O'Neill Phelim O'Neill Andrea Hubert guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
French Film Festival, Nationwide Another cross-channel package of established talents and rising stars, including this year's hot tip A Prophet, fresh from its Best Film triumph at the London Film Festival. Other recent features include Versailles, (with...
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This week's film events previews
'Love's a little boy'
Alan Bennett's new play imagines a meeting between Britten and Auden 25 years after they fell out irrevocably. But why did their creative relationship go wrong? This is a sample of the writing Benjamin Britten set to music in his first opera, Paul Bunyan:...
"Let the dog who's the most sentimental of all / Throw a languishing glance at the hat in the hall / Struggle wildly to speak all the tongues that he hears / And to rise to the realm of Platonic ideas." And here is a fair sample of the writing he commissioned, set and seems to have thought adequate in his last opera, Death in Venice, 34 years later: "Mysterious gondola / a different world surrounds you / a timeless, legendary world / of dark lawless errands / in the watery night. / How black a gondola is / black, coffin-black, / a vision of death itself / and the last silent voyage." Britten is always said to have been a sophisticated admirer of poetry, and to have exercised a connoisseur's pleasure in setting it. The claim seems plausible, apart from one thing. His first opera's libretto was written by WH Auden, who now clearly seems the greatest poet in English since Tennyson. After Paul Bunyan, Britten chose as his librettists Montagu Slater, Eric Crozier and, no fewer than three times, Myfanwy Piper, the author of the hopeless fourth-form effusions of the Death in Venice libretto. When a more distinguished writer such as William Plomer was engaged for Gloriana and the three church parables his work was not permitted to display its usual mordant originality. Auden's relationship with Britten the subject of a new play by Alan Bennett was at its most creative and fervent for the five years after 1936 or so, resulting in half a dozen major works and a substantial body of songs. It occurred, however, at the very beginning of Britten's career, and at a brilliant-prodigy stage of Auden's. After 1947, they hardly even spoke, and Auden was accustomed to say that Britten was the only friend he had ever had with whom he had subsequently irrevocably quarrelled. (Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art, imagines a meeting between the two some 25 years later.) For Britten, on the other hand, it was a different matter; he made quite a career out of casting those who had committed some blunder into the outer darkness. Their collaboration in the late 1930s was fiery and produced some thrilling objects. Yet Britten used different, and lesser, writers to create his best operas; Auden rose to the challenge and worked with a much more important composer than Britten Stravinsky to write one of the two or three greatest operas of the century, The Rake's Progress. Britten and Auden were brought together in 1935 by a very 1930s organisation, the General Post Office Film Unit, which was devoted to producing documentary films about modern-day life. Both at the time had a mild sort of devotion to communist causes. Britten wrote in his diary that summer about a performance of Elgar's first symphony: "I swear that only in imperialistic England could such a work be tolerated." Auden was coming to the end of what might be termed his Pylon Period, the style which would see him praise industrial landscapes in "Letter to Lord Byron". Auden's Oxford tutor, Nevill Coghill, had observed that "Auden is in the imperative", meaning the human being rather than the poet. In 1935 he was a commanding presence across the English-speaking world. Britten was a mere boy, though one of evident enormous gifts. Auden was to observe that he had never seen such "extraordinary musical sensitivity in relation to the English language" as in Britten. The GPO unit set them to work together, Britten setting the beautiful Auden lyric "O lurcher-loving collier, black as night" for a documentary, Coal Face, writing music for other GPO Auden-scripted films, such as Negroes ("Chorus: Beside the long Niger they lost their freedom . . ."), The Way to the Sea and the great Night Mail, still unsurpassed as a marriage of film, music and poetry ("This is the Night Mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order . . ."). Britten was so inexperienced with that last one that he forgot to leave a pause for the rhythmic speaker, Stuart Legg, to breathe, and the recording had to be manipulated as far as the rudimentary technology allowed. Clearly, from Auden's point of view, Britten's fascination was not just that of a marvellous musical prodigy. As Peter Parker has demonstrated in his life of Christopher Isherwood, Auden occupied the place of plain best friend in that relationship, always having to settle for the boys Isherwood wasn't interested in. Without conventional good looks, he had always relied on his amazing conversation to get his way. Whether startling the mothers of his college friends when staying with them ("Mrs Carritt, this tea tastes of tepid piss") or, no doubt, explaining to new chums why homosexuality was the only rational choice to take, he had always won others over through his powers of speech. For a while, Britten formed a kind of project for Auden and his entire group. Isherwood took Britten in 1937 to the notorious Jermyn Street Turkish Baths. "Well," the film director Basil Wright asked Isherwood afterwards, "have we convinced Ben he's queer, or haven't we?" A glance at Britten's diary, had it been available, would have demonstrated what the problem was. "Very pleasant sensation," Britten wrote of the visit. "Completely sensuous, but very healthy. It is extraordinary to find one's resistance to anything gradually weakening." Britten's unswerving attachment to the "healthy" comes out in his private reflections. He wrote of an old schoolboy acquaintance, David Layton, that "he is a very good sort clean, healthy living and balanced". More experienced boys knew exactly how to write to Britten to get a result. Wulff Scherchen, whom Britten met at 14 and pursued more seriously at 18, was to inspire Young Apollo and the most frankly erotic of the Les Illuminations song cycle of 1939. Replying to Britten's speculative letter, he gets straight to the point. Yes, he remembers Britten from four years ago, he writes: "I was in shorts and sandals (as I am now) and it started to rain. I got thoroughly wet . . ." Whether by luck or calculation, or just by calling up in the composer's mind the image of a wet 14 year old, Scherchen could effortlessly hit the note to get a response from Britten. Auden's approaches, on the other hand, reflected his highly didactic personality. They were almost comically unlikely to get results, and not just because Auden was seven years older than Britten, then in his early 20s. But his obsession with leading Britten into bed did result in a series of poetic masterpieces. The lyric "Underneath the abject willow", from March 1936, is addressed to Britten: "Walk then, come / No longer numb / Into your satisfaction." Britten wrote in his diary only of a "bad inferiority complex in company of brains like Basil Wright, Wystan Auden and William Coldstream". In May, another poem seems to relate to a rejection by Britten of Auden "You love your life and I love you / So I must lie alone." At this period, it is sometimes hard to distinguish, in Auden's writing on music, whether the subject is the art of music or specifically Britten. "There is no creature / Whom I belong to, / Whom I could wrong . . . I shall never be / Different. Love me," Music says in Auden's Hymn to St Cecilia, wonderfully set by Britten in 1942 as their friendship was coming to its end. His sonnet "The Composer", one of a series of speculations on particular or generic artistic figures, suggests he had recently spent a certain amount of time mooning over one composer; the lines "Only your notes are pure contraption / Only your song is an absolute gift" are ironic, considering how very literary a composer Britten turned out to be. There may even be a small dig, in one of the charming cabaret songs, at Britten's taste for what Auden called, in a fateful letter, "thin-as-a-board juveniles"; Britten set it to music, and it was performed at a riotous party to bid farewell to Auden and Isherwood, on their way to the Sino-Japanese war in 1938. Britten may not have noticed that the comic song began with the line "Some say that love's a little boy . . ." In 1939, Auden and Isherwood performed their famous bunk to America, and shortly afterwards Britten and his new friend, soon to be his lover and lifetime partner, Peter Pears, followed them. It was not the same. By the time of Britten and Pears's arrival, Auden had met his lifetime partner, Chester Kallman. They all lived together for a time in a celebratedly bohemian household at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn, along with Paul and Jane Bowles, two or three of the Mann children (Auden dashingly married Erika at one point), Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. Sheryl Tippins wrote an enjoyable book about the bizarre mιnage, capturing the highly tiresome tone of the public exchanges between Auden and Kallman: "'I am not your father, I'm your mother!' 'You're not my mother! I'm your mother! . . . You're my father!'" Auden, too, was a notoriously slapdash housekeeper. Years later, Vera Stravinsky found a bowl of brown water abandoned on the floor of the bathroom during an Auden-Kallman dinner party, and flushed it away; she later discovered she had thrown away the pudding for the evening. Could it possibly have been the state of the house in Middagh Street that led to unmeltable frostiness between first Pears and Auden, and subsequently Britten and Auden too? Certainly, in later life, a question about Middagh Street to Pears could always set off a fit of eye-rolling. Paul Bunyan, Britten and Auden's largest collaboration, is one of those works that one wants to be a masterpiece, and has a lot to be said for it; the poetry represents Auden at his two extremes, the brilliantly clever merchant of paradoxes and rhyming games, and the author of exquisitely framed conversational simplicities. The music is deft and often memorable; the idea of the little opera, of an unseen giant Paul Bunyan and the founding of a community at America's birth, ought to work perfectly well. But the American critics poured scorn on it at its premiere in May 1941, perhaps irritated by two chic English draft-dodgers taking on a heroic American national myth. Britten never sought to have it performed again in his lifetime. Shortly afterwards, Auden dealt the relationship a fatal blow by yielding to his didactic urge, and writing the sort of letter which no one should write to a friend, putting him straight about a number of defects in his character: "I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health . . . you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you and praise everything you do . . . you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, ie to build yourself a warm nest of love . . . by playing the loveable talented little boy." After that letter of January 1942, the relationship was more or less over. Auden tried to persuade Britten to set one last thing, his great "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio". But as any reader could have told him, this long poem does all the music itself. It was in no need of an orchestra and chorus to add to the splendid effects of the verse. There are a surprising number of scores in the Auden-Britten catalogue Clive James once said the results of the encounter were meagre, but Donald Mitchell, in a book on the subject, thought it might, in the end, amount to more than the Brecht-Weill collaborations. Many of them are brilliantly clever the cabaret songs are irresistibly good; the allegorical treatment of prewar international politics, Our Hunting Fathers, still startles with its brief flash of terror as the medieval catalogue of hawks' names comes down at the end to just two "German. Jew." Paul Bunyan will always be revived as an occasional curiosity. Edward Mendelson observed that in the 1930s King Arthur the 1691 opera by Purcell and Dryden "was the first and still the only libretto written by a major English poet for a major English composer. Paul Bunyan would be the second." In the end, Britten's subsequent career showed that he worked best with people not quite up to his level. Auden's career as a librettist displayed, in the magnificent Rake's Progress, that he needed an artist on the scale of a Stravinsky to deal with his invention. For a few years the two came together; they were never truly compatible, artistically or as people, and their joint products are tantalising rather than fulfilled. But they were exceptional creative figures, and if they went wrong, they did so in a lastingly interesting way. The Habit of Art is at the Lyttelton Theatre, London, until March. Box office: 020 7452 3000. Alan Bennett WH Auden Philip Hensher guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Alan Bennett's new play imagines a meeting between Britten and Auden 25 years after they fell out irrevocably. But why did their creative relationship go wrong? This is a sample of the writing Benjamin Britten set to music in his first opera, Paul Bunyan:...
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'Love's a little boy'
This week's exhibition previews
Channel, Southampton While the Millais Gallery at Southampton Solent University searches for new premises (its existing site having been given over to lecture rooms due to swelling student numbers), the gallery staff continue to provide cutting-edge projects...
in unexpected locations. The new exhibition focuses on the Channel, that notorious stretch of water between the city and France that has been an inspiration to cultural aesthetes over the ages. Contemporary artists including Andrew Cross, Susan Collins, Peter Collis and Rosie Maguire join forces to provide an idiosyncratic vision of this watery throroughfare, ruminating on the poetry, paintings and songs it has inspired over the years. Sir James Matthew Building, to 30 Jan Jessica Lack The House Of Fairy Tales, Walsall Founded by artists Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis, The House Of Fairy Tales is a community arts group that wears its extraordinariness on its florid sleeve. With an agenda of conjuring "child-centred art for all ages" the project traces its cultural heritage back to the Mexican Day Of The Dead as much as to surrealism. Its showy list of collaborators includes Dexter Dalwood, Sir Peter Blake, Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller, Fiona Banner, Adam Dant and Cornelia Parker as well as the less obviously arty Dead Victorians, Visitors From Another Dimension, Madame de La Cartomancer, Lonesome Cowboys From Hell, and the Snake Lady. Here the Fairy Tale hosts come to haunt the Garman Ryan Collection. New Art Gallery, to 16 Oct 2010 Robert Clark RCA Secret 2009, London Bargain hunters get the opportunity to make a killing this week as the Royal College Of Art's Secret comes around again. This annual show invites illustrious ex-alumni and other artist well-wishers to paint on postcards, which are then sold in aid of the RCA Fine Art Student Award Fund. There is, of course, a catch. Each artwork is signed on the back, and buyers are kept in the dark about who has made the work until they've shelled out. But at ?40 a pop, it's worth the risk, and those lucky enough to nab a YBA should be very pleased with themselves; a Peter Doig postcard was recently sold at Sotheby's for ?42,000. Just don't forget your sleeping bag if you want to be first in line. Royal College Of Art, SW7, exhibition Fri to 20 Nov, sale 21 Nov Jessica Lack Ghosts Of Winter Hill, Manchester This exhibition will mark the momentous media occasion of the switchover of the Granada region's Winter Hill transmitter from analogue to digital TV. Subtitled Manchester, Television And The City, Ghosts Of Winter Hill celebrates the city's claim to having a historical UK TV profile second only to the capital's. While it might be argued that the more innovative and influential cultural identity of dear old Madchester was created in downtown counter-cultural haunts such as the sadly defunct Haηienda, this display focuses on what the mums and dads were watching on the box back home: Coronation Street, The Comedians and Top Of The Pops. Urbis, to 30 Apr Robert Clark Goh Ideta, Newcastle upon Tyne The Japanese artist Goh Ideta creates seductive sculptural contraptions into which visitors are invited to enter, interact with or "bat about" in, as Ideta himself puts it. For this show, presented as part of the Wunderbar festival of performance and interactive art, Ideta promises to transform the gallery into a glimmering 3-D mosaic of mirrored lights. As in any Ideta installation, it is the visitor's own movements that complete the work's captivating aesthetic, as light rays are activated by mirrored tiles set into the cushioned gallery floor. Tactics of fairground amusement are elevated at the service of artistic enchantment. Vane, to 28 Nov Robert Clark Robert Crumb Uncovered, London Robert Crumb was once considered to be a creepy comics casualty slavered over by nerds, but now thanks to several high-profile exhibitions in "established" museums and the anointing of art historian Robert Hughes (who described him as "the Bruegel of our time", yes really) Crumb has become one of the foremost commentators on the inherent weirdness of America. What he offers up through his work is a pretty rancid vision of the American dream, a catalogue of bizarre sexual fantasies with a flair so am-dram we could be watching some aged magician and his somewhat cruddy assistant sawing a large-bottomed woman in half. Roll up Fritz the Cat, Flakey Foont and Mr Natural, the artist who put the oath in self-loathing is back, bringing with him a cast of freakish aberrations personifying our basest emotions and the craziness of humanity. Scream Gallery, W1, Thu to 12 Dec Jessica Lack J Lawrence Isherwood, Leigh The north-west of England seems to have produced a host of oddball painters during the dreary post-second world war years; one thinks first and foremost of Salford's LS Lowry, a painter best known for his depictions of matchstick men in industrial districts, but whose less familiar late seascapes and almost perverse girlie fantasies are now recognised as far from provincial. Wigan's JL Isherwood, who died in 1989, never quite achieved Lowry's degree of stubborn, eccentric confidence, but his painterly array of terraced and cobbled backstreets and gurning old blokes, all embodied in a distinctive style of dark and dank impressionism, is utterly persuasive, as this reassessment will hopefully amply demonstrate. Turnpike Gallery, to 2 Jan Robert Clark Bob & Roberts Smith, London Over the past year Bob & Roberta Smith (AKA art maverick Patrick Brill) has been in residence at Beaconsfield, the lofty south London gallery known for its cutting-edge agenda. As Smith's tenure comes to a close, the space will be given over to a retrospective of his signature bold paintings, featuring odd, seemingly arbitrary sentences in a lo-fi, blocky typeface. All the work exhibited in the three gallery spaces will have been made over the past year, and the pi?ce de rιsistance will be Smith's 11-metre long painting called This Artist Is Deeply Dangerous, based on an article written by the Guardian's sports correspondent Steve Bierley about an exhibition he saw of the art of Louise Bourgeois. Beaconsfield, SE11, Sat to 21 Feb Jessica Lack Art Exhibitions Jessica Lack Robert Clark guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Channel, Southampton While the Millais Gallery at Southampton Solent University searches for new premises (its existing site having been given over to lecture rooms due to swelling student numbers), the gallery staff continue to provide cutting-edge projects...
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This week's exhibition previews
This week's new cinema previews
The Men Who Stare At Goats (12A) (Grant Heslov, 2009, US) George Clooney, Ewan McGregor. 94 mins. A fiction less strange than the truth, this takes the juicy bits from Jon Ronson's startling book on the outer limits of US military research but doesn't...
quite know what to do with them. The result is an uneven Iraq war escapade with journalist McGregor and unhinged undercover op Clooney, peppered with wacky flashbacks. With Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey on board as well, laughs are guaranteed, but any difficult truths about war are blithely glossed over in an effort to preserve the jaunty tone. Jennifer's Body (15) (Karyn Kusama, 2009, US) Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried. 102 mins Writer Diablo Cody's follow-up to Juno won't impress horror fans at all, but admirers of her over-hip dialogue and general feel for modern teen life won't be disappointed, and Fox is surprisingly good as a hormonal high-school succubus on the rampage. It's silly but not dumb. Bright Star (PG) (Jane Campion, 2009, UK/Aus/Fra) Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, Kerry Fox. 119 mins A film about romantic poet John Keats that's, yes, romantic and poetic. Dreamy cinematography, intense performances and Keats's own verse elevate what could have been a TV-standard costume drama. A Christmas Carol (PG) (Robert Zemeckis, 2009, US) Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins. 96 mins Zemeckis takes another step forward with his not-quite-lifelike computer animation technique, updating Dickens for the IMAX generation with the help of rollercoaster action and multiple Jim Carreys. Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (15) (Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea, 2009, Fra) 100 mins Fascinating documentary on the unsung director's unfinished masterpiece a hallucinogenic tale of male jealousy. What remains of the film, and the story behind it, will be more than enough for cinephiles. Paper Heart (PG) (Nicholas Jasenovec, 2009, US) Charlyne Yi. 88 mins Warning: if twee, whimsical indie movies make your blood boil, this could send you over the edge. It's a faux-documentary in which Yi wants to know what love is, and finds out when romance supposedly blossoms with weedy indie titan Cera who happens to be her real-life boyfriend. 1 Day (15) (Penny Woolcock, 2009, UK) Dylan Duffus, Ohran Whyte. 102 mins Cast off the street with local rappers and musicians, this Birmingham musical combines abrasive hip-hop with a routine story of gangs, guns, drugs and debts. It's certainly brave but not really convincing. Welcome (15) (Philippe Lioret, 2009, Fra) Vincent Lindon, Firat Ayverdi. 110 mins A solid, socially conscious French drama that's a bit of a tough sell, as a Calais swimming instructor helps a teenage Kurdish illegal immigrant train to swim across the Channel. Animal House (15) (John Landis, 1978, US) John Belushi, Tim Matheson. 109 mins The daddy of college/gross-out movies returns to make a generation of indebted students jealous as hell. OUT FROM FRIDAY Taking Woodstock Ang Lee recreates those flower power vibes. 2012 A disaster movie to end all disaster movies? The White Ribbon Typically incisive German drama from Michael Haneke. Harry Brown Michael Caine turns vigilante. We Live In Public Tragic tale of an internet casualty. Cold Souls Kaufmanesque metaphysical comedy. Amelia Hilary Swank plays the heroic aviatrix. Tulpan Comedy set on the steppes of Kazhakstan. Love The Beast Eric Bana shows you his hot rod. The Magic Hour Short films by disabled directors. Lala Pipo Hip Japanese comedy-melodrama. Heer Ranjha New version of the Punjabi romance. COMING SOON In two weeks
The Coens return to their 60s roots with A Serious Man
Re-enter the Twilight zone with New Moon
Matt Damon podges up for The Informant!
In three weeks
No-budget horror smash Paranormal Activity
Boosh-like British comedy Bunny And The Bull
In a month
Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly's The Box
Eva Green in girls' school saga Cracks
Steve Rose guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Men Who Stare At Goats (12A) (Grant Heslov, 2009, US) George Clooney, Ewan McGregor. 94 mins. A fiction less strange than the truth, this takes the juicy bits from Jon Ronson's startling book on the outer limits of US military research but doesn't...
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This week's new cinema previews
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher Tayler James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars...
are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history from 1958 to 1972 with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred. When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit". Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy. American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time". As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults. Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation. Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.) Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups. Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. At first, Crutch whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline. This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic. There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption. Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how." In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one. These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots"). The upheavals of the 60s Ellroy's ostensible subject are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be. In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself. James Ellroy Fiction Christopher Tayler guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher Tayler James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars...
Related articles:
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy | Book review
Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher Tayler James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars...
are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history from 1958 to 1972 with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred. When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit". Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy. American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time". As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults. Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation. Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.) Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups. Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. At first, Crutch whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline. This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic. There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption. Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how." In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one. These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots"). The upheavals of the 60s Ellroy's ostensible subject are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be. In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself. James Ellroy Fiction Christopher Tayler guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher Tayler James Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars...
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Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy | Book review
Men at arms
Linda Colley on the neglected 18th-century landscape painter, Paul Sandby One of the last watercolours on show in this exhibition is of Mr Whatman's Turkey Paper Mills in Kent. Painted by Paul Sandby in 1794, 15 years before his death, it offers a view...
of the Len valley, near Maidstone, that is at once tranquil and replete with industry, traditional and in flux. A milkmaid is driving her cows down a road, while a stagecoach hurtles along another. There are gentle hills, fertile, enclosed fields, hop gardens and well-established oaks. But in the background are the buildings, machinery and drying lofts of what was then Britain's biggest, most advanced paper mill, depicted "with an almost hallucinatory, microscopic exactness". This description by John Bonehill, curator of the exhibition, suggests both the immediate appeal of Sandby's art and why it has sometimes met with neglect and condescension. His images can appear wonderfully "realistic" and "true to life". Consequently, they remain highly accessible, and in his own time they were admired, not just in their original form, but also as reproductions in a wide variety of illustrated books and maps, as decorations on ceramics, and even as designs on wallpaper. In the past, however, this very accessibility and busy versatility have led to Sandby being viewed as little more than a worthy, humdrum forerunner to later, more ambitious and less seemingly literal British landscape artists. If one wanted "real Views from Nature in this Country", declared Thomas Gainsborough in 1764, there was no better artist than Sandby, who frequently "employ'd his pencil that way"; but he himself had other, bigger ideas drawn from the likes of Claude Lorrain. Half a century later, George III employed faint praise no less damningly. Sandby was "never idle", approved the elderly monarch, but could turn his "hand to anything, like a fox" (and it is suggestive perhaps that the comparison was with an animal the king would have viewed as vermin). One of the achievements of this exhibition and its outstanding accompanying catalogue is that they go a considerable way towards rescuing Sandby from this reputation as mere, easily comprehended jobbing artist. As George III's remark illustrates, this view of him has always been coloured by varieties of snobbery. To this extent, the portrait of Sandby by Francis Cotes, showing him leaning out of a country house window, sketchbook in hand, can be seen as a calculated puff by a close friend. It accurately conveys Sandby's good looks and pleasant temperament. But the portrait gives a flatteringly deceptive impression of a man as much at ease in polite and leisured interiors as he is with nature. In reality, Sandby's family background was considerably more humble than that of Gainsborough or John Constable. Unlike his fellow academician Joshua Reynolds, Sandby was never a fashionable, expensive portrait painter. Nor was he a practitioner of academically prestigious history painting. And, crucially, unlike JMW Turner or Thomas Girtin, Sandby was not a metropolitan. The son of a framework knitter, he was baptised in Nottingham in 1731; and this exhibition is very much a Nottingham achievement, where it was first displayed. The show, opening today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in March, was conceived by Stephen Daniels of Nottingham University. It is exactly the sort of deeply researched and ambitious regional art exhibition that is likely to be rendered increasingly impracticable because of government, municipal and corporate spending cuts. The constraints on Sandby's own economic circumstances shaped the form and content of his work. There were no "shifts" available to him, he wrote, that could make him "independent"; and, for all his success, his financial situation became increasingly difficult as he aged. So attempting art that was too obviously dissident or uncompromisingly experimental was never an option for him. Instead, Sandby relied for much of his career on a salary from the rulers and agencies of the British state, and he painted accordingly. His first break came in 1747, when he was appointed chief draughtsman to the "compleat and accurate survey of Scotland", which was being carried out by the British army's board of ordnance in the wake of the failed Jacobite rising of 1745-46. For four years, he prepared designs for new bridges and fortifications in the Scottish Highlands, accompanied survey teams over terrain that had recently been a war zone, and drew relief maps of mountains and coastlines, carefully marking out the new "king's roads" in red, the colour of a British soldier's uniform coat. Like the wonderful images made by the artists who sailed on James Cook's naval expeditions to the Pacific, Sandby's work was thus in part a byproduct of an increasingly assertive and powerful 18th-century British state. His early exposure to things military proved decisive for his artistic development in several respects. Dealing with army men and methods familiarised him with certain techniques of close topographical observation and surveillance: with how to scrutinise and represent the physical distances and relationships between buildings, groups of people and places. His time in Scotland also won him powerful patrons. He probably owed his appointment there to the efforts of his brother and fellow artist Thomas Sandby, who was employed by the Duke of Cumberland, favourite son of George II, and victor or butcher of the battle of Culloden. Certainly, Paul Sandby was able thereafter to enjoy an intermittent connection with members of the royal family, a degree of official recognition confirmed by his appointment in 1768 as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, a position he retained for almost 30 years. Soldiers and sailors also populate Sandby's paintings and drawings to an unusual degree, and they are almost always represented sympathetically. Sometimes they feature as guardians of the realm and its internal order. This is the case in his 1778 painting of a military encampment on Warley Common, assembled to repel a possible French invasion; or in his depiction in 1780 of some of the mounted army officers who had helped to crush London's Gordon rioters, and thus Sandby implies in this image to safeguard the sort of respectable women and children whom he includes in the foreground. More often, though, he represented men at arms as being thoroughly integrated and at ease with their civilian counterparts, as decent, ordinary chaps who just happen to have taken the king's shilling. In this regard, Sandby's work documents the shift away from an earlier, widespread suspicion of standing armies towards a more enthusiastic celebration of the nation's armed forces. Thus in a 1770 watercolour of the Henry VIII gateway to Windsor Castle (one of more than 500 images by the Sandby brothers in the royal collection) a redcoat is shown lounging against the castle's ancient walls, chatting easily to two disreputable townsfolk, while the gate itself stands wide open to the street. The artist's intention may have been to suggest that Britain's monarchy was now so securely entrenched as not to require impregnable fortifications or spartanly efficient guards. Even in his sketches of what was in effect an army of occupation and bloody revenge in northern Scotland in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Sandby makes some effort to humanise and legitimise his British military subjects. Individual redcoats are shown cheerfully involving Highlanders in their pastimes; while in a brilliant, impressionistic sketch of the hanging in Edinburgh of John Young, a soldier turned forger, Sandby represents the British army as a force that is willing to discipline its own deviants and not just Jacobite rebels. Sandby's vision then is substantially (not entirely) loyalist and conventionally patriotic, and this may be another reason why his work is sometimes passed over. Morning, an extraordinary painting of a massive, venerable beech tree set firm in a Shropshire landscape, is, for instance, a powerfully loyalist testament. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, five years after the fall of the Bastille and in the midst of war, the painting would have been understood as an allusion to contemporary conservative celebrations of an ancient, organic British constitution as against the recent republican outgrowths of revolutionary France. As the exhibition catalogue argues, Sandby's vision was also increasingly a Britannic one. Like Turner, Sandby made repeated tours throughout Wales and Scotland, representing not just their scenic and cultural differences, but also the ways in which these countries were undergoing change and becoming in some respects far more closely linked with England. Sandby made his first recorded visit to Wales in 1770, surveying scenes in the north of that country the following year, and then touring south Wales in 1773 in the company of Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist, amateur scientist and entrepreneurial explorer. The result of these journeys was the publication of XII Views in South Wales in 1775, and the issuing of a further 12 Welsh views the year after. Banks had been a privileged member of Constantine Phipps's expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766, as well as accompanying Cook on his great Endeavour voyage of 1768-71. His enthusiastic involvement in Sandby's artistic tours underlines the degree to which leisure travel in Wales remained in the early 1770s something of an adventure, and the extent to which the country might still be viewed by English spectators as a distant, quaint, picturesque "other". Sandby, however, was concerned not just to represent Welsh "difference", but also the degree to which it was receding. He depicted "romantic" landscapes and an abundance of castles. But his views also show "agricultural and commercial activity" and "the circulation of people and goods" between various Welsh sites and other locations, like the movement of river traffic along the Wye at Chepstow. Many of his Scottish landscapes also document and endorse change. In his 1751 sketch of the execution of John Young in Edinburgh, most of the female spectators appear with tartan shawls over their heads (thereby giving the lie to those historians who argue tartan was a later invented tradition). But in his wonderful painting of the ruins of Roslin Castle, Midlothian (c1780), women appear quite differently. Not just Lady Frances Scott and Lady Elliott, who are shown sketching, using the best technical aids, but also the servant and labouring women present are painted in styles of dress that would have been familiar in contemporary London, or Dublin, or any other "polite" and "modern" setting. It is possible to interpret Sandby's close attention to economic and social change as another manifestation of his loyalism. His eagerness to seek out and commit to paper scenes of "progress" in post-Culloden Scotland, lead mining and pleasure gardens and the like, may for instance point to a belief on his part that a more united Britain will bring forth economic advance and a rise in civility and manners. Yet, in his early career at least, Sandby's attitudes may have been more complex and divided than this exhibition suggests. He was, after all, the son of a provincial artisan. Moreover, for most of his career, he had connections with members of the British armed forces, and the impact of this may not have been straightforward. Protracted exposure to the military, along with his own background, may have worked to sharpen Sandby's gaze. He certainly reacted with anger to the sight of ordinary soldiers and sailors being cast aside by an ungrateful state. One of his drawings of Windsor shows a plump, haughty cleric pushing aside a demobilised soldier. Another, unpublished, drawing features a onetime Royal Navy sailor down on his luck and forced to sell stockings. The man still looks fit, and has retained what passed in the 1750s for an ordinary seaman's uniform, loose, knee-length trousers and a jerkin. But his face, which gazes directly out from this drawing, is furious with disgust; and, in the background, majesty is being made fun of, as a poor man scrambles on top of an equestrian statue of Charles I. Like another drawing in this same series, of an attractive, cheerfully entrepreneurial and manifestly unashamed female forger, this image bears witness to the diversity and occasional ambivalence of Sandby's vision. So, possibly, does one of his paintings: View of Windsor on a Rejoicing Night, 1768. The castle rises in the background, one of its towers is backlit by the flames of an enormous bonfire, and some drunken revellers are returning home. This canvas may very well be a depiction of a celebration of a royal anniversary. But the year 1768 also witnessed widespread bonfires in support of the election to Parliament of John Wilkes, the radical activist who was seen by his supporters as championing the rights and liberties of ordinary folk against the king. Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain is at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (0131 624 6200), until 7 February 2010. Exhibitions JMW Turner Linda Colley guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Linda Colley on the neglected 18th-century landscape painter, Paul Sandby One of the last watercolours on show in this exhibition is of Mr Whatman's Turkey Paper Mills in Kent. Painted by Paul Sandby in 1794, 15 years before his death, it offers a view...
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Men at arms
Author, author: Michael Holroyd
The past, after all, is not a foreign country: they do things much the same there. When my first book was published almost 50 years ago, I was sent something that might more accurately have been described as a retreat than an advance: and so it is again...
for many of us following the credit crisis. In 1960 I was busy writing about an unknown author who, after the appearance of my book, stubbornly remained unknown to the extent that I can bring myself to mention his name (Hugh Kingsmill) only in parenthesis. My biography of him has recently been added to the Faber Finds a virtual publication that changes into reality on demand. I do not like to speculate how he will he rise to this challenge. In a fashion things have certainly changed since 1960. We have replaced blood snobbery with fame snobbery. But I find myself in a similar predicament to the 60s. I am writing about a clutch of women, all mysteriously connected, who in the early 20th century enjoyed romantic illusions of family privilege but are far from being modern celebrities today. Has anyone heard of Eve Fairfax except perhaps on a list of Rodin's favourite sitters? Another of my subjects is Violet Trefusis, the illegitimate daughter of the man to whom Fairfax was engaged, but never married. Trefusis did have her moment of notoriety with Vita Sackville-West, but the scandal of their love affair has eclipsed her reputation as a novelist of genuine talent. The question is: can I rescue her from neglect with any more success than I rescued (Kingsmill)? He at least has a place in the new The Oxford Companion to English Literature; she has not. Looking back it seems to me I was extremely fortunate to be writing biographies during what has been described as a golden age for the genre. It began with George Painter's Life of Proust and Richard Ellmann's James Joyce at the end of the 50s. They gained for literary biography in particular a measure of intellectual respectability, if not a secure academic status. Joyce's monstrous and much-feared "biografiend" seemed largely to retreat from view and the trade winds of fashion carried us along very agreeably. Why are the British so focused on the individual life in portraiture as well as in literature? I like to believe it is because we live on an island and, not being attached to the mainland of Europe, do not view the past so readily in collective terms. But a dozen years or more ago things did begin to change and biography gave way to history as popular non-fiction reading. This change was partly due to television, which gives wider scope for picturesque and dramatic historical narrative. There are more group biographies these days led by Richard Holmes. His collective biography of a generation of scientists, The Age of Wonder, making their lives relevant to their work and their work accessible to the common reader through the imaginative power of narrative, breaks new ground for him and for modern biography. First we learnt from novelists how to tell a story; now we are learning from historians how to frame it. My hope is that when the Large Hadron Collider is activated again at Cern, Holmes will be dispatched to write about it and give us understanding of its romantic mysteries. While biography is merging with history in the general market place, in academe it is being reinvented as "life writing" and subsumed into sociology. The very word biography strikes some academics as "elitist", as does its focus in the past on single remarkable or merely fashionably well-known people. Life writing has a different agenda and concentrates principally on people who belong to and represent categories or classes of people who have been victimised in the past. It offers retrospective justice. That, at any rate, is what I understand it to be. But I shall know more next year when I attend an international auto/biographical conference at the University of Sussex. I have been going through a bewilderingly pleasant time recently. People have been assisting me on to platforms, patting me on the back, handing me envelopes, citations and parcels. I must be careful. "Woe unto me when all men praise me". Of course it hasn't come to that. But when I began writing I was considered controversial. Perhaps I can rely on Trefusis to help me recapture that spirit of controversy. People have often introduced me at festivals as "the award-winning writer" and I would hurry back home to find out what award I had won. It took me quite a long time to understand that this was a well-meaning phrase used by people who had never read my books and were at a loss what to say. It was as if we lived, all of us, in an Alice in Wonderland world where "all shall have prizes". But say this about someone frequently enough and it becomes true. The most memorable prizegiving ceremony I went to this year was the James Tait Black event at the Edinburgh festival. It was held at a large tent sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland. I wasn't sure what omen this might suggest. A fierce storm preceded the ceremony, the lights suddenly went out and the microphones died. Then we went in. For 20 minutes the audience waited in the dark. Finally, to stifle the rising murmur of frustration, I was named the biography winner and summoned to give a reading with the aid of a small torch supplied by Ian Rankin. It was a heroic, not to say poignant performance. Once or twice I made a dramatic gesture at which the thin beam of torchlight left the page altogether and disappeared. I could sense my voice dying away a couple of yards from my mouth. I breathed deeply and gave it all I had. At one moment I read the words "she whispered" yelling it out at top blast and feeling that some of the subtlety was leaking away into the night. Sebastian Barry, who won the fiction prize, did rather better, dancing a precarious duet with Rankin who held the torch over his shoulder. Among my awards over these last years is a brave assortment of fountain pens. There is a black one from the Biographers' Club and a golden one from English PEN both with my name on them; also a silver one from Italy and a couple of Dupont ones from Paris. I keep them in their splendid cases on my desk and often look at them affectionately. But a disturbing thought has begun to creep into my mind. What are pens without ink? Are they a collective metaphor, a symbol of my future? Biography Marcel Proust James Joyce guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The past, after all, is not a foreign country: they do things much the same there. When my first book was published almost 50 years ago, I was sent something that might more accurately have been described as a retreat than an advance: and so it is again...
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Author, author: Michael Holroyd
How to make a post-Charlie Kaufman US arthouse movie
The Guidelines: Random notes from pop culture Sophie Barthes's engaging new comedy Cold Souls is the latest of a new breed of films that can be called "Kaufmanesque", with deference to the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman. In Kaufman's work, reality falls...
prey to meta-textual and metaphysical influences, usually with bittersweet, hilarious results. His shadow falls on Barthes's film, in which Paul Giamatti has his soul removed to enable him to function properly in an off-Broadway show that's sapping his creativity. So how might one go Kaufman? Here's how ... Get an actor to play himself Just as John Malkovich played John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, so Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti in Cold Souls. But if you're going to do this, remember to take liberties with the truth! In real life, John Malkovich is not best friends with Charlie Sheen, who does not call him "Malkatraz". Likewise, Paul Giamatti is not married to Emily Watson, just as there is no real-life soul storage facility in New York. Remember: A-list stars love this stuff! Although Charlie Kaufman does not have a dead twin brother named Donald, to whose memory the film is dedicated, this did not stop Nicolas Cage from wrestling the dual role as both in Adaptation from the hands of Tom Hanks. Meryl Streep leaped in to co-star as Susan Orlean, the non-fiction writer whose book leads to sex, orchid drugs and violence. Have them do something weird, just for the hell of it Perhaps your leading man goes to work on the 13?th floor (Being John Malkovich), or one of your supporting players might live in a burning house (Synecdoche, New York). Perhaps, following Jack Black's example in Be Kind, Rewind, your leading man might even develop strange magnetic powers after an electrical accident. Mix high culture with low But keep it in the background! In Cold Souls, Giamatti is taking part in a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, just as John Cusack's puppetmaster is staging a version of Alexander Pope's poem Eloisa To Abelard. Pretend the nebulous is tactile In Cold Souls, the soul physically exists and can be removed, just as specific memories in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind can be identified and deleted. In Stranger Than Fiction, your future can even be rewritten if you get to its author in time. Do something charming with time The upcoming Bunny And The Bull relays a road trip from the vantage point of a lone hermit recalling his travels with a friend. Eternal Sunshine takes place largely inside one character's memories of real events, while The Science Of Sleep has fun with the absurdities of dream logic. End on a slight downer They haven't paid to see Year One! Leave them a bit puzzled, feeling slightly cleverer than when they came in, but still not sure what that bit with the egg whisk and the man bra was all about. Charlie Kaufman Damon Wise guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Guidelines: Random notes from pop culture Sophie Barthes's engaging new comedy Cold Souls is the latest of a new breed of films that can be called "Kaufmanesque", with deference to the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman. In Kaufman's work, reality falls...
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How to make a post-Charlie Kaufman US arthouse movie
Letters: Shakespeare is still relevant in schools
While it's not our place to say what exams people take, we do believe a meaningful introduction to Shakespeare should be part of every student's cultural life (State schools are barred from offering elite International GCSE, 5 November). There is a reason...
why Shakespeare is the only compulsory writer on the secondary English curriculum. While we can understandably be accused of bias in this area, we know (because teachers and students tell us and evaluators document it) that when students engage actively with the plays, when they are up on their feet saying the words and making choices about character motivation and setting, they are also exploring living dilemmas about democracy, leadership, family loyalty, love and power. They increase their confidence, self-esteem and communication skills in the process. In a culture of teaching and learning that is driven by exam results, our recent KS3 experiences have shown that if there isn't a test on it, it's less likely to get taught. And pupils are less likely to see the relevance of it. Until we rethink the curriculum and the relationship that examinations and tests have to the range of learning experiences we know young people need, there is a danger in saying OK to optional Shakespeare. It may mean a generation of young people leaving school with at best a vague memory of one or two plays and at worst no connection with Shakespeare at all. Young people don't have to like Shakespeare, but they do need to be given the chance to make an informed decision about his work. Jacqui O'Hanlon Director of education, Royal Shakespeare Company William Shakespeare Royal Shakespeare Company GCSEs guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
While it's not our place to say what exams people take, we do believe a meaningful introduction to Shakespeare should be part of every student's cultural life (State schools are barred from offering elite International GCSE, 5 November). There is a reason...
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Letters: Shakespeare is still relevant in schools
'I didn't know what Adrian Mole looked like well, not until I saw John Major on the telly'
Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a...
poignant little diary entry from Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, which covers the period from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Adrian, nearing 40, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer (the misspelling in the book's title is deliberate, and people's inability to get it right is a source of much irritation to Adrian) and living in a converted pigsty with his dangerously dissatisfied wife, Daisy, is in need of cheering up. "For some reason," he writes, "I always feel comforted when I am in Woolworths. When I was a child, I spent my first pocket money there. I was five years old and forked out twenty pence on flying saucers. It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there." Adrian made his first print appearance in 1982, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13?, which followed a play broadcast on Radio 4 earlier that year. He had hitherto been part of what Townsend calls her "secret writing" the manuscripts that piled up under the stairs, added to by night but spoken of to nobody. "He came into my head when my eldest son said 'Why don't we go to safari parks like other families do?' That's the only real line of dialogue from my family that's in any of the Mole books. It's in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that 'surely these are not my parents.' I heard him first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn't see his face, didn't know what he looked like well, not until I saw John Major on the telly." By way of qualification, she adds that John Major has a lovely face when he takes his glasses off, and Adrian has become steadily more attractive over the years, the more plausibly, perhaps, to stoke a future relationship with Pandora Braithwaite, his childhood sweetheart, now a polished and rampagingly on-message New Labour MP. Pandora makes suitably dramatic appearances in The Prostrate Years, as do Adrian's parents, Pauline (now writing an entirely fabricated misery memoir entitled A Girl Called Shit) and George, his best friend Nigel ("an unpleasant blind person!" laughs Townsend, who was herself registered blind in 2001), and the Chinese restaurateur Wayne Wong, to whose premises Adrian repairs to sit near the fish-tank and eat beef in black bean sauce, one of his few indulgences in life. The ninth volume of Adrian's diaries following updates that have taken us from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole to The Wilderness Years, The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is, like its predecessors, an ensemble piece smuggled into a monologue. But, aside from much of the topical humour that fuels the book's jaunty pace and often throwaway comedy the smoking ban, flooding, Northern Rock and The Jeremy Kyle Show all pop up there is an undertow that makes it a far darker and at times angrier work than Townsend's readers might expect. For a start, Adrian is ill, quite possibly terminally; and, second, he writes his diary as the New Labour project shows ever more serious signs of strain. On Tony Blair's last day in office, Adrian summons up all his hauteur to write: "I expect he will have a full day trying to repair his reputation." Townsend is unequivocal about the extent to which she feels betrayed by the Labour party and how completely her views were changed by the Iraq war. "I am a passionate socialist," she says, "but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers . . . I could still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children'. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How would he have explained it to his children? They were old enough to understand politics easily. What would he have said? I suppose that stupid line about the weapons of mass destruction. But I think he's been punished." Nor is her disillusion confined to British foreign policy. In 1997, asked to write a pre-election dispatch for the Observer, she travelled to the Gipton estate in Leeds, deliberately distancing herself from her native Leicester, where she has lived all her life. There, she found grinding poverty and very little hope, concluding: "The vermin, as Aneurin Bevan described the Tory party, will shortly be crawling back behind the skirting-board and New Labour will be dancing a victory jig on the floor. And I hope that over the coming years a socialist Labour party will gather strength. Somebody has to care for the poor." Revisiting Leeds in 2005, Townsend was able to report significant improvements for the inhabitants of the city's estates. But she also described the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, each of them surrounded by iron spikes "uncannily like a crown of thorns"; she inveighed against the government's attitude towards the sick, revealing how a fascination with Bevan had turned her into a childhood socialist and writing: "I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor." Everything about Townsend's life is informed by her sense of where she has come from. Her house, a former vicarage that sits at the top of a broad, leafy avenue, is within walking distance of Leicester city centre but clearly in one of its more well-to-do suburbs. It is beautiful but not flashy. In her writing room, where we sit and talk, the walls are covered with framed publicity posters and jackets from her plays and books, but they only arrived there after a good deal of soul-searching that ended when she saw a television programme in which her friend and sometime mentor, the late John Mortimer, had decorated his study similarly. "They used to be all up in the attic," she explains, "because I was almost ashamed of it I couldn't bear any evidence that I was a professional writer. Then I saw a documentary about him, and he had all of his posters, thousands more than I've got, and I thought, if he can do it, I will." The eldest daughter of a postman, she was born in 1946 and brought up in a happily close-knit family who lived on the edge of the countryside, four miles from Leicester. "We were probably the last generation to be truly free to play," she says, remembering days spent stalking through the grand rooms of an abandoned mansion, foraging for berries and soft grass, building rope swings and rafts. Somewhere along the way, she also discovered reading, fuelled by the affordability of Penguin Classics, an acquaintanceship with a second-hand bookseller and a passion for the great Russian novelists, and later the Americans. At the age of 14, the secret writing began. "Nobody ever knew. I learned to hide it. It was stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations." At the same time, Townsend's life was developing along another track. She was married at 18, and had three children by the time she was 22. The secret writing continued at night, when the children were in bed: "I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards. Television was boring in those days." But it wasn't until her first marriage had ended and she had met Colin Broadway, who became her second husband and is the father of her fourth child, that she considered that her writing could be anything other than a nocturnal activity. Even when she "confessed" to Colin, she didn't allow him to read what she'd written or tell anyone else about it. It was only when he saw an advertisement in the local paper for a writer's group that things began to happen. In 1979, her first of many plays, Womberang, was produced, later winning her a Thames Television bursary (John Mortimer was on the panel), and the box under the stairs was opened for good. It was something of a jolt to those around her: "I was married to my first husband for seven years, and he didn't know. It was a massive surprise to him when he saw a poster in town to do with the play I'd written. Last time he sees me I'm surrounded by kids and wearing an apron, and then I've written this play, and there's an article in the local paper: "Local Mother Moves Into Theatre World". Local mother! I was a novelty, but then it was the 70s. Women had made a good stab at getting equality, but you were still fighting. Still skirmishing." Adrian Mole went on to make her a bestselling novelist throughout the 1980s and beyond, and one of the country's foremost humorous writers. I tell her that I am almost exactly the same age as Adrian and was, as a young teenager, utterly addicted to him: his premature world-weariness, his combination of self-importance and neurotic lack of confidence and his romantic agonies struck a chord with me, as they did with teenagers (not to mention their teachers and parents) everywhere. The illustration on the front of my dog-eared copy of The Secret Diary hints at the reason, with its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other; the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail. Now Adrian is at another of life's staging posts: on the brink of middle age, he is a man whose life still feels as provisional, bewildering and unsteady to him as it did 27 years ago. But this time, he is forced to confront a crisis that can't be wished away or played down. "I wanted him to face death," says Townsend. After his diagnosis, his thoughts are a characteristic blend of melodrama and mundanity: "I can't die yet. I've got responsibilities and a family and I have to look after my parents; they're completely irresponsible and couldn't survive without my help. And there are so many places I haven't visited yet: the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the new John Lewis department store they're building in Leicester." Throughout the novel, Adrian goes through radiotherapy and chemotherapy but, although he ponders much on the fraught love-life of his hospital nurse, he is reticent when it comes to his own suffering. "I imagine he doesn't have the words for the fear he feels," Townsend says. "He knows it's a feeling, but he doesn't want to express it because that would make it real. That's what quite a lot of people do. I'm really good at detachment myself. It's been a handy trick over the last three months or so." One feels that Townsend has had to do what she calls her "detachment trick" for longer than the last three months. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her 30s, having previously been fit, healthy and active. "I did go overly dramatic," she says, although everything about her suggests that this was not the case. "I did lie on the couch and employ a cleaner." Through the decades, her condition deteriorated significantly; she lost her eyesight and, over the course of five years or so, her kidneys failed. Eight weeks before we met, she had a kidney transplant, using an organ donated by her son; she had endured years of dialysis. She is still a frequent visitor to the hospital, and will remain on medication for the rest of her life. But if illness is one of novel's most fruitful themes Adrian's initial attempts to secure a doctor's appointment will chime with most people it doesn't prevent Townsend addressing other concerns. Issues of paternity and family run through the Mole books (Adrian himself has three children by three different mothers), and in the wake of the latest crisis who is his sister Rosie's real father? Townsend dispatches the interested parties to that great arbiter of contemporary ethics, The Jeremy Kyle Show. But what you don't get is any de haut en bas satire on reality television. "I love those people," she says firmly. "I've worked with them, and I know them intimately. They're completely manipulated by the show, but . . . I think it's validating their life; being on the television is success, it doesn't matter what the context is. You haven't been able to make much of yourself because nobody's expected anything of you; first your parents, second your schoolteachers, certainly not your peer group they're more comfortable with the lowest common denominator, because we're all in this together, so . . . I am overly sentimental, probably, about people like that." As a child, Townsend used to sit on the bus into Leicester city centre, fascinated by the thought that the workers from the Fox's Glacier Mints factory would buy the bread made at the bakery up the road, following the chain of production and consumption as far as she could. She is convinced that the lives of the working class had more compensations than we now realise: Leicester itself had 15 working men's clubs, and most factories had several sports teams. Latterly, one of Townsend's contributions to community life has been to buy two pubs that would have otherwise disappeared, knowing that "if you gave people really good clean lavatories, not the 60-year-old urine smell, and you treated people well and were friendly, you could fill the place". She is committed to the idea that the vast majority of people are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their best selves, and that this is being thwarted by the depredations and excesses of government a belief that surfaces not only in the Mole books, but also in more overtly political novels such as Number Ten and Queen Camilla. Her anxiety that we are increasingly wary of one another leads her to believe that "we're on the cusp of something significant, because if it goes on that way what kind of a world are we going to be living in? We're going to be paranoid, fearful, isolated." Townsend's novels are little hymns to the power of family and community to make life bearable. It seems horribly obvious to ask her whether she keeps a diary, but rather remiss not to. She laughs and assumes a mock-dramatic voice: "I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave . . . and beyond!" Children and teenagers Fiction Alex Clark guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a...
Interview: Sue Townsend
Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a...
poignant little diary entry from Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, which covers the period from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Adrian, nearing 40, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer (the misspelling in the book's title is deliberate, and people's inability to get it right is a source of much irritation to Adrian) and living in a converted pigsty with his dangerously dissatisfied wife, Daisy, is in need of cheering up. "For some reason," he writes, "I always feel comforted when I am in Woolworths. When I was a child, I spent my first pocket money there. I was five years old and forked out twenty pence on flying saucers. It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there." Adrian made his first print appearance in 1982, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13?, which followed a play broadcast on Radio 4 earlier that year. He had hitherto been part of what Townsend calls her "secret writing" the manuscripts that piled up under the stairs, added to by night but spoken of to nobody. "He came into my head when my eldest son said 'Why don't we go to safari parks like other families do?' That's the only real line of dialogue from my family that's in any of the Mole books. It's in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that 'surely these are not my parents.' I heard him first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn't see his face, didn't know what he looked like well, not until I saw John Major on the telly." By way of qualification, she adds that John Major has a lovely face when he takes his glasses off, and Adrian has become steadily more attractive over the years, the more plausibly, perhaps, to stoke a future relationship with Pandora Braithwaite, his childhood sweetheart, now a polished and rampagingly on-message New Labour MP. Pandora makes suitably dramatic appearances in The Prostrate Years, as do Adrian's parents, Pauline (now writing an entirely fabricated misery memoir entitled A Girl Called Shit) and George, his best friend Nigel ("an unpleasant blind person!" laughs Townsend, who was herself registered blind in 2001), and the Chinese restaurateur Wayne Wong, to whose premises Adrian repairs to sit near the fish-tank and eat beef in black bean sauce, one of his few indulgences in life. The ninth volume of Adrian's diaries following updates that have taken us from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole to The Wilderness Years, The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is, like its predecessors, an ensemble piece smuggled into a monologue. But, aside from much of the topical humour that fuels the book's jaunty pace and often throwaway comedy the smoking ban, flooding, Northern Rock and The Jeremy Kyle Show all pop up there is an undertow that makes it a far darker and at times angrier work than Townsend's readers might expect. For a start, Adrian is ill, quite possibly terminally; and, second, he writes his diary as the New Labour project shows ever more serious signs of strain. On Tony Blair's last day in office, Adrian summons up all his hauteur to write: "I expect he will have a full day trying to repair his reputation." Townsend is unequivocal about the extent to which she feels betrayed by the Labour party and how completely her views were changed by the Iraq war. "I am a passionate socialist," she says, "but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers . . . I could still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children'. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How would he have explained it to his children? They were old enough to understand politics easily. What would he have said? I suppose that stupid line about the weapons of mass destruction. But I think he's been punished." Nor is her disillusion confined to British foreign policy. In 1997, asked to write a pre-election dispatch for the Observer, she travelled to the Gipton estate in Leeds, deliberately distancing herself from her native Leicester, where she has lived all her life. There, she found grinding poverty and very little hope, concluding: "The vermin, as Aneurin Bevan described the Tory party, will shortly be crawling back behind the skirting-board and New Labour will be dancing a victory jig on the floor. And I hope that over the coming years a socialist Labour party will gather strength. Somebody has to care for the poor." Revisiting Leeds in 2005, Townsend was able to report significant improvements for the inhabitants of the city's estates. But she also described the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, each of them surrounded by iron spikes "uncannily like a crown of thorns"; she inveighed against the government's attitude towards the sick, revealing how a fascination with Bevan had turned her into a childhood socialist and writing: "I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor." Everything about Townsend's life is informed by her sense of where she has come from. Her house, a former vicarage that sits at the top of a broad, leafy avenue, is within walking distance of Leicester city centre but clearly in one of its more well-to-do suburbs. It is beautiful but not flashy. In her writing room, where we sit and talk, the walls are covered with framed publicity posters and jackets from her plays and books, but they only arrived there after a good deal of soul-searching that ended when she saw a television programme in which her friend and sometime mentor, the late John Mortimer, had decorated his study similarly. "They used to be all up in the attic," she explains, "because I was almost ashamed of it I couldn't bear any evidence that I was a professional writer. Then I saw a documentary about him, and he had all of his posters, thousands more than I've got, and I thought, if he can do it, I will." The eldest daughter of a postman, she was born in 1946 and brought up in a happily close-knit family who lived on the edge of the countryside, four miles from Leicester. "We were probably the last generation to be truly free to play," she says, remembering days spent stalking through the grand rooms of an abandoned mansion, foraging for berries and soft grass, building rope swings and rafts. Somewhere along the way, she also discovered reading, fuelled by the affordability of Penguin Classics, an acquaintanceship with a second-hand bookseller and a passion for the great Russian novelists, and later the Americans. At the age of 14, the secret writing began. "Nobody ever knew. I learned to hide it. It was stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations." At the same time, Townsend's life was developing along another track. She was married at 18, and had three children by the time she was 22. The secret writing continued at night, when the children were in bed: "I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards. Television was boring in those days." But it wasn't until her first marriage had ended and she had met Colin Broadway, who became her second husband and is the father of her fourth child, that she considered that her writing could be anything other than a nocturnal activity. Even when she "confessed" to Colin, she didn't allow him to read what she'd written or tell anyone else about it. It was only when he saw an advertisement in the local paper for a writer's group that things began to happen. In 1979, her first of many plays, Womberang, was produced, later winning her a Thames Television bursary (John Mortimer was on the panel), and the box under the stairs was opened for good. It was something of a jolt to those around her: "I was married to my first husband for seven years, and he didn't know. It was a massive surprise to him when he saw a poster in town to do with the play I'd written. Last time he sees me I'm surrounded by kids and wearing an apron, and then I've written this play, and there's an article in the local paper: "Local Mother Moves Into Theatre World". Local mother! I was a novelty, but then it was the 70s. Women had made a good stab at getting equality, but you were still fighting. Still skirmishing." Adrian Mole went on to make her a bestselling novelist throughout the 1980s and beyond, and one of the country's foremost humorous writers. I tell her that I am almost exactly the same age as Adrian and was, as a young teenager, utterly addicted to him: his premature world-weariness, his combination of self-importance and neurotic lack of confidence and his romantic agonies struck a chord with me, as they did with teenagers (not to mention their teachers and parents) everywhere. The illustration on the front of my dog-eared copy of The Secret Diary hints at the reason, with its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other; the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail. Now Adrian is at another of life's staging posts: on the brink of middle age, he is a man whose life still feels as provisional, bewildering and unsteady to him as it did 27 years ago. But this time, he is forced to confront a crisis that can't be wished away or played down. "I wanted him to face death," says Townsend. After his diagnosis, his thoughts are a characteristic blend of melodrama and mundanity: "I can't die yet. I've got responsibilities and a family and I have to look after my parents; they're completely irresponsible and couldn't survive without my help. And there are so many places I haven't visited yet: the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the new John Lewis department store they're building in Leicester." Throughout the novel, Adrian goes through radiotherapy and chemotherapy but, although he ponders much on the fraught love-life of his hospital nurse, he is reticent when it comes to his own suffering. "I imagine he doesn't have the words for the fear he feels," Townsend says. "He knows it's a feeling, but he doesn't want to express it because that would make it real. That's what quite a lot of people do. I'm really good at detachment myself. It's been a handy trick over the last three months or so." One feels that Townsend has had to do what she calls her "detachment trick" for longer than the last three months. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her 30s, having previously been fit, healthy and active. "I did go overly dramatic," she says, although everything about her suggests that this was not the case. "I did lie on the couch and employ a cleaner." Through the decades, her condition deteriorated significantly; she lost her eyesight and, over the course of five years or so, her kidneys failed. Eight weeks before we met, she had a kidney transplant, using an organ donated by her son; she had endured years of dialysis. She is still a frequent visitor to the hospital, and will remain on medication for the rest of her life. But if illness is one of novel's most fruitful themes Adrian's initial attempts to secure a doctor's appointment will chime with most people it doesn't prevent Townsend addressing other concerns. Issues of paternity and family run through the Mole books (Adrian himself has three children by three different mothers), and in the wake of the latest crisis who is his sister Rosie's real father? Townsend dispatches the interested parties to that great arbiter of contemporary ethics, The Jeremy Kyle Show. But what you don't get is any de haut en bas satire on reality television. "I love those people," she says firmly. "I've worked with them, and I know them intimately. They're completely manipulated by the show, but . . . I think it's validating their life; being on the television is success, it doesn't matter what the context is. You haven't been able to make much of yourself because nobody's expected anything of you; first your parents, second your schoolteachers, certainly not your peer group they're more comfortable with the lowest common denominator, because we're all in this together, so . . . I am overly sentimental, probably, about people like that." As a child, Townsend used to sit on the bus into Leicester city centre, fascinated by the thought that the workers from the Fox's Glacier Mints factory would buy the bread made at the bakery up the road, following the chain of production and consumption as far as she could. She is convinced that the lives of the working class had more compensations than we now realise: Leicester itself had 15 working men's clubs, and most factories had several sports teams. Latterly, one of Townsend's contributions to community life has been to buy two pubs that would have otherwise disappeared, knowing that "if you gave people really good clean lavatories, not the 60-year-old urine smell, and you treated people well and were friendly, you could fill the place". She is committed to the idea that the vast majority of people are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their best selves, and that this is being thwarted by the depredations and excesses of government a belief that surfaces not only in the Mole books, but also in more overtly political novels such as Number Ten and Queen Camilla. Her anxiety that we are increasingly wary of one another leads her to believe that "we're on the cusp of something significant, because if it goes on that way what kind of a world are we going to be living in? We're going to be paranoid, fearful, isolated." Townsend's novels are little hymns to the power of family and community to make life bearable. It seems horribly obvious to ask her whether she keeps a diary, but rather remiss not to. She laughs and assumes a mock-dramatic voice: "I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave . . . and beyond!" Children and teenagers Fiction Alex Clark guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Alex Clark interviews Sue Townsend It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a...
Related articles:
Interview: Sue Townsend
Music: Booking now
Bringing glitz and glamour to dancing in your vest and pants, Lady Gaga takes root in the UK early next year for her Monster Ball tour (18 Feb-8 Mar, tour begins Manchester Evening News Arena, seetickets.com). And for a paltry ?270 you can meet her and...
get some special headphones
Better than your average money-raker, the Ministry Of Sound's NYE shindig is shaping up to be one to see, featuring Calvin Harris, deadmau5, Example and a DJ set from Justice (O2 Arena, SE10, 31 Dec, ticketmaster.co.uk)
Or maybe get down to Brixton for Get Loaded In The Dark (31 Dec, O2 Academy Brixton, SW9, ticketweb.co.uk) with Simian Mobile Disco, Hervι, Annie Mac and Golden Silvers
Everybody's favourite not-actually-bisexual-but-pretended-to-be-for-a-bit indie veteran Brett Anderson plays a handful of shows promoting new album Slow Attack (22 Jan, O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire; 8 Feb, Academy 3, Manchester; 9 Feb, King Tut's Glasgow, gigsandtours.com)
Finally, it's a summit meeting of radio-friendly R&B types at 1Xtra Live (Sheffield Arena, 28 Nov, call 0114-256 5656 or visit sheffieldarena.co.uk), taking in Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, JLS, Chipmunk, Jay Sean and Taio Cruz. Entry is free by ticket. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Bringing glitz and glamour to dancing in your vest and pants, Lady Gaga takes root in the UK early next year for her Monster Ball tour (18 Feb-8 Mar, tour begins Manchester Evening News Arena, seetickets.com). And for a paltry ?270 you can meet her and...
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Music: Booking now
Music: This week's releases
PICK OF THE WEEK Emalkay When I Look At You (Dub Police) Lately, dubstep has opened its heart, and for the scene's most progressive producers, juddering sub bass is now just one dark shade to be applied from a vivid colour palette. Birmingham's Emalkay...
is less brash than some, and here strikes a balance between brooding menace, disembodied vocals and snaking melody. Like the best Detroit techno or early hardcore rave tunes, When I Look At You thrums with tension and a sense of fragile humanity adrift in a deeply hostile world. THIS WEEK'S OTHER RELEASES LCD Soundsystem Bye Bye Bayou (DFA) Briefly available as a free download, this cover of an Alan "Suicide" Vega track gets a proper release on Monday. It's a seeper, a creeper, a tightly controlled Kraut-funk teaser, rather than anything that is going to change your life. For that, the Guide recommends another recent DFA release, Shit Robot's extraordinary Simple Things. But, as always, it's good to have Mr Murphy back in play. Hakan Lidbo Let's Rock (We Are Woodville) Clearly, the news hasn't reached Sweden yet that we're all beyond bored with ramped-up Ed Banger electro. And good thing too, as this is unexpectedly brilliant. All biblical drums, shredded metal guitar and a breakdown that consists of some drunk blokes beatboxing into a Dictaphone, it's lithe, punchy and winningly daft. Now, let that be the last word on the matter. Music Go Music Just Me (Mercury) You know how much you hated Abba? Well, imagine how much more you would have hated them had they been a sunny Californian guitar band. Then times it by 30. Animal Collective Brother Sport (Domino) Typically, this sounds like an attempt to create the definitive techno sunrise anthem by channelling the spirit of Brian Wilson, Aphex Twin and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Creatively, there's more going on here than in everything else reviewed here combined. Trouble is, I just don't feel it. Like David Eggers or Wes Anderson, Animal Collective are furiously bright, furiously energetic and ever-so-slightly irritating. But beneath all that smart-arse complexity, Brother Sport sounds curiously empty. Modeselektor Art & Cash (Get Physical) What larks! The lead track, Art, is 111 seconds of a single oscillation pitched-up until it makes your eyes bleed. Thanks for that. Cash, however, is on the, erm, money. Full of detail and texture, the Berliners' trademark "Euro-crunk" a kind of flabby, glutinous, swaggering electro still sounds fresh. Amanda Blank Shame On Me (Downtown) Starts out like New Order, which is good. Turns into Cascada, which isn't. Ends up sounding like DJ Tiesto remixing the Saturdays, which is indictable at The Hague, surely? Pop and rock Tony Naylor guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
PICK OF THE WEEK Emalkay When I Look At You (Dub Police) Lately, dubstep has opened its heart, and for the scene's most progressive producers, juddering sub bass is now just one dark shade to be applied from a vivid colour palette. Birmingham's Emalkay...
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Music: This week's releases
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS Byatt This is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent...
Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales as well as works on the Bluebeard story, Hans Andersen, and sexual murder in Weimar. Enchanted Hunters is not about classic fairytales but about authored children's writing, what children take and need from stories, and how this is not always what parents imagine. Tatar begins with a wry analysis of how stories have the opposite effect from the desired one of making children drowsy and ready for sleep. She is splendidly contemptuous of books such as Disney's three-minute Bedtime Stories, Condensed Fairy Tales and even One-Minute Greek Myths. Good stories excite, delight and frighten. They are, as Tatar puts it, a solitary addiction, not necessarily teaching sociability or virtuous behaviour. Those of us who as children read late into the night under the bedclothes with torches know exactly what she means. Children, she observes, do not "identify" with characters in stories. They inhabit the world of the tale, as lookers-on, learning brilliance and danger and horror in another world. There is a very good chapter on the imagined encounter with death and real danger. Tales such as Struwwelpeter (1845) "revel in images of bodily violence"; Andersen's Little Match Girl is frozen to death; the dancer in "The Red Shoes" dances on bloody stumps. Andersen is frightening as the Grimms are not. I have always thought we know where we are with the Grimms in an unreal world with strict rules of reward and retribution but Andersen is trying to distress his readers. (He didn't like children, as is often the case with children's writers.) One of Tatar's best and most subtle discussions is of EB White's Charlotte's Web, in which Charlotte the spider saves Wilbur the pig from slaughter by weaving words in her lovely web and dies herself, after her success. Tatar shows how the tale is also about the power of words to weave a web of magic, to make both glamour and understanding. She is very observant about the way in which the great storytellers construct what Tolkien and Auden called "secondary worlds" worlds with their own inhabitants and landscapes, seas and shores, caverns and castles. She writes excellently about the inventors of Neverland and Wonderland Barrie and Dodgson, those two childless men who constructed theatres of the imagination in order, as Barrie himself put it, to "hold on" to the attention of the boys he loved, or to entertain Alice Liddell on rowing picnics. Tatar quotes an amazing description by Barrie of the "more or less" island of Neverland with savage and lonely lairs, gnomes, princes but also "first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine . . . and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still". All children, except one, grow up, Barrie observed. Perhaps Tatar's most original contribution to thought about children's stories and what they do to their inhabitants is about how the addicted readers are also learning (most of them) to deal with growing up. The great powers of the mind in the world of children's books are a capacity for wonder, and an insatiable curiosity. The writers feed both with colours never seen on sea or land, with moons and stars and gold and silver and monsters and dangers. But they are also teaching mastery of language which is the stuff of thought and necessary to growing up when the time comes. A particularly telling chapter is called "The Great Humbug". It discusses The Wizard of Oz and what Dorothy learns from discovering that the great magician is in fact only a timid illusionist who makes an emerald city by handing out green spectacles. Dorothy ends the story by saying that she wants to go home to Kansas and Aunt Em thus making herself alive in the real world. In the same way Maurice Sendak's child goes home, empowered in real life by his brush with the Wild Things. Tatar has a particular fondness for Dr Seuss, the inventor of The Cat in the Hat, whose real name was Theodor Geisel. She addresses him in the context of a 1950s discussion of "Why Johnny Can't Read", which ascribed illiteracy and childhood boredom to anodyne reading primers. I didn't know before I read Enchanted Hunters that the publishers Houghton Mifflin had a list of 348 words that should be offered to beginning readers and that Dr Seuss crafted The Cat in the Hat with the use of only 236 and a gripping, anarchic narrative. The net is spread wide. There are shrewd observations on JK Rowling, CS Lewis and Philip Pullman and an excellent section on The Secret Garden. All these are praised for creating and satisfying curiosity with precisely imagined places and objects Quidditch, the wardrobe, Mary's ferocious hunting through room after room in the huge house where she finds herself. There is a good description of Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi, but I should have liked much more about The Jungle Book and Puck of Pook's Hill, both of which I lived in as a child. If I feel a need to inhabit imagined worlds I prefer Tolkien and Terry Pratchett to Lewis they do not, as Lewis does, "have designs on you". This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven't forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn't know. AS Byatt's The Children's Book is published by Chatto & Windus. Children and teenagers Fiction AS Byatt guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS Byatt This is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent...
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Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
Jamie Cullum: Reaching new heights
Jamie Cullum on Clint Eastwood, Spinal Tap and Sophie Dahl. Mmmm, nice Hi, Jamie! You play piano, guitar, bass and drums. Ever wish you were an octopus so you could play everything at once? You don't need more arms. You can use your feet for the drum...
and strap a cymbal on your elbow. If I had more arms I'd look like one of those weird elephants! (1) Is it tricky recording a jazz album without it all turning a bit Jazz Club from The Fast Show? (2) The Fast Show is the bane of all jazz musicians. That's why I'm not Bleeding Gums Cullum, to steer clear of the jazz cliches! Your gigs go on for over two hours. Why not play twice as fast and knock off an hour early? We don't play the songs as they've been recorded. We reinvent them. There's no set list. I don't announce the tunes. The band has to work out what the hell I'm doing. It's all a bit ramshackle! You wrote a song with Clint Eastwood. Was it easy thinking of words to rhyme with Clint? I wasn't writing music for the biopic of Clint Eastwood. I had to find words to rhyme with Gran Torino. That boils down to Filipino and casino, neither of which feature. Clint is sound. I recorded on a piano in his house! You joined Spinal Tap on stage at Glastonbury. Did Michael Eavis cock-up the stage times? Ha! What an honour to play a Hammond organ solo with Spinal Tap. I know Harry Shearer. His wife (3) is a great jazz singer. Derek Smalls introduced my first gig at South By SouthWest (4). I get in all the nooks and crannies! You used to be in bands called the Mystery Machine and Raw Sausage. That bloke from S Club 7 (5) left to rejoin his old school band. Any similar plans? Raw Sausage might do a Take That-style reunion! We did Highway To Hell and Back In Black by AC/DC, and The Show Must Go On by Queen. We had four guitarists and a drummer. I was about eight. Mystery Machine was a year later. That was me and my brother with an upturned bin. We did The Joker by the Steve Miller Band and some Iron Maiden songs. Have Rihanna, Pussycat Dolls, Radiohead and the White Stripes phoned to complain/congratulate you on your cover versions? Rihanna liked Please Don't Stop The Music. Pussy Cats Dolls saw Don't Cha on YouTube and said, "Doesn't he looks cute?" Radiohead's Phil Selway said he's glad someone is playing High And Dry cos they don't. I've never met Jack White. Ten billion people must have covered Seven Nation Army! You're getting married to Sophie Dahl in 2010. I am. Lucky me! Can we come? Our friendship needs to blossom first. We've only just met. We'll be on our best behaviour! Anyway. You famously use a stomp box. Will you be carrying it down the aisle so you can reach when the vicar says, "You may kiss the bride?" (6) It's a beautiful question but the stomp box is purely for making loud noises. It's a bit of wood with a microphone inside. It's not for any vertical improvement. Thanks! You're also rather a natty beatboxer. Go on then. We'll guess. Um. I need my stomp box! [Starts humming and banging some nearby pot plants]. Dum, dum. Dum Dum. DUM DUM. DUMM! Can you guess what it is yet? Michael Jackson's Billie Jean! Yes, brilliant! The Pursuit is out on Monday 1 The hindu god, Ganesha 2 Mmmm, nice 3 Welsh singer-songwriter, Judith Owen 4 Annual music industry shindig in Austin, Texas 5 Paul Cattermole left S Club 7 in 2002 to rejoin nu-metal band Skua 6 Jamie is 5'6". Sophie is 5' 11". Pop and rock Jazz Rich Pelley guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Jamie Cullum on Clint Eastwood, Spinal Tap and Sophie Dahl. Mmmm, nice Hi, Jamie! You play piano, guitar, bass and drums. Ever wish you were an octopus so you could play everything at once? You don't need more arms. You can use your feet for the drum...
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Jamie Cullum: Reaching new heights
Haus proud
When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them? Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand...
new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius's legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today. At least they do in the photographs in Bauhaus Women, a book by Ulrike Muller, a "museum educator" in Weimar, the German town where the Bauhaus opened in 1919, declaring equality between the sexes. Where German women had once received art education at home with tutors, at the Bauhaus they were free to join courses. And yet the photographs of those seemingly liberated women tell, at best, a half truth. Yes, the world's most famous modern art school accepted women. But few became well known. While the men of the Bauhaus Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lαszlσ Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe are celebrated, names like Gunta Stφlzl (a weaver), Benita Otte (another weaver), Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain (ceramicist), Ilse Fehling (sculptor and set designer) or Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (toy maker) mean precious little. If these bright young things came to the Bauhaus as equals, why are the women so obscure? The school's fleeting existence (just 14 years), the rise of the anti-modern National Socialist movement and six years of world war may have been factors, but the uncomfortable truth is that the Bauhaus was never a haven of female emancipation. More women than men applied to the school in 1919, and Gropius insisted that there would be "no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex" those very words betraying his real views. Those of the "strong sex" were, in fact, marked out for painting, carving and, from 1927, the school's new architecture department. The "beautiful sex" had to be content, mostly, with weaving. The school's students produced radical work, but Gropius's vision was, at heart, medieval, if apparently modern, and he was keen to keep women in their place at looms, primarily, weaving modern fabrics for fashion houses and industrial production. He believed women thought in "two dimensions", while men could grapple with three. By the time Mies van der Rohe was appointed director in 1930, the Bauhaus had essentially become an architecture school and, increasingly, there was little place for women to shine. Those who did, like Anni Albers, did so only after they abandoned the Bauhaus. Albers left Germany for the US in 1933, with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, to teach at the new Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and make fabrics for design-led companies like Knoll and Rosenthal. Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, the ceramicist, also became a big success in the US with her Pond Hall pottery. Benita Otte was ousted from her position as head of the weaving department but established her own mill elsewhere in Germany; her fabrics remain in production. Mean while, Gunta Stφlzl, hounded by Nazi sympathisers within the Bauhaus after her marriage to a Jew, left in 1931 and founded her own successful handweaving business in Switzerland. Many other Bauhaus women simply vanished without trace. Sadly, this was all too true of the toy maker Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who was killed in a bombing raid in 1944, and of Otti Berger who, on a trip to see her mother in Yugoslavia in 1939, was unable to get a visa to the US despite an offer of work at Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 2005, newly available Soviet archives revealed that Berger, a Jew, had died at Auschwitz in 1944. Marianne Brandt, a metalworker, was one of the few who made a name for herself while at the Bauhaus. The globe lamps she designed in 1926, and the Kandem bedside light, with adjustable reflector, have long been standard-bearers of Bauhaus design. But if the school's women are largely unsung, their legacy lives on. As Bauhaus architecture becomes a distant vision of the future, so Bauhaus fabrics remain as useful, tactile and special as they were when these women set out to equal their male peers. As Gunta Stφlzl (1897-1983) put it, "We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance, suitable for a new style of life. Huge potential for experimentation lay before us. It was essential to define our imaginary world, to shape our experiences through material, rhythm, proportion, colour and form." Against the odds, they did. Bauhaus Women, by Ulrike Muller, is published by Flammarion at ?24.95. To order a copy for ?22.95, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Women Design Architecture Jonathan Glancey guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them? Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand...
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Haus proud
This week's music previews
The Flaming Lips, On tour If their festival appearances had led you to believe they were just like everyone else, then lately the Flaming Lips have served notice that they are weirder than anyone could have imagined. Last year, there was their Christmas...
On Mars movie, a plotless and bizarre folly that seemed destined to be understood by about a dozen people. This year, there's the band's Embryonic album, also a plotless and bizarre folly, but in a far more thrilling way. Chaos rules: elements of Can, Miles Davis and the Lips' own melodic sense run riot over a double album. Live, however, you can be assured that the band have not entirely relinquished the crowd-pleasing antics that got them to their current exalted position. They may be chaotic. But they're not stupid. Troxy, E1, Tue, Wed; Guildhall, Portsmouth, Fri John Robinson Taverner, Glasgow Peter Maxwell Davies's first opera has not been seen, or even heard publicly in Britain since the 1970s. The Royal Opera, which premiered Taverner in 1972, revived its production once, but since then the neglect of what is one of most significant British operas of the last 50 years has been total. So the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's concert performance, part of Glasgow's celebration of Maxwell Davies's 75th birthday, is a precious chance to get to grips with this challenging yet blazingly theatrical score. Martyn Brabbins conducts this performance, with tenor Daniel Norman as John Taverner himself. City Halls, Sun Andrew Clements John Scofield Piety Street Band, London Guitarist John Scofield's expressive balance of anthemic blues phrasing, vocalised sounds, subtly deployed electronics and interpolations of funk and jazzy swing make a pretty apposite overture to the 10-day 2009 London Jazz Festival. Scofield plays the opening night with his Piety Street Band, the group that recorded his hard-grooving treatment of a selection of gospel classics. He started out playing rock, blues and gospel/R&B before he acquired a Berklee School jazz education, so when he decides to party with hot-licks groups, he always sounds as if he's enjoying himself. For Piety Street, Scofield assembled a band of gospel specialists, but he kept his own variations at the core of the venture. Gospel fans will be fascinated to hear how their music is inventively massaged without being pulled out of shape, even if there might be just too many semaphored turns for some jazzers. Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Fri John Fordham Swanhunter, Leeds With Birmingham Contemporary Music Group set to introduce David Sawer and Richard Jones's retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story less than 24 hours after Opera North unveils Jonathan Dove's new children's work, there's obviously a potential new audience for music theatre currently being cultivated. Dove's opera, Swanhunter, follows on from his 2007 success The Adventures of Pinocchio, and like that work has a libretto by Alistair Middleton. The latest piece is on a far smaller scale with a handful of singers, a six-piece instrumental ensemble and lasts just over an hour. It's based on one of the stories from the Kalevala, the storehouse of Finnish mythology that inspired so many of Sibelius's works. Howard Assembly Room, Fri to 22 Nov Andrew Clements Cymbals Eat Guitars, London 2009 has been a fine year for American indie rock, ancient and modern. It's brought the ecstasies of Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, but it's also provided blasts from the past like a new album from Dinosaur Jr, and news that Pavement are reforming. Hearing their Why There Are Mountains album, it's difficult to see to which might most please Staten Island's Cymbals Eat Guitars. To judge by their fondness for Arcade Fire-like bursts of theatrical noise, you'd think it was the latter. To hear them in the full flight of a Mercury Rev-style epic, or their Steve Malkmus-like vocals, however, you'd definitely suspect the latter. At the moment, there's a slight tendency to quirkiness at the expense of tunes. Ultimately, though, this seems less a problem, more a dedication to the genre's finer details. Rough Trade East, E1, Mon; Troxy, E1, Tue, Wed; The Lexington, N1, Thu John Robinson Lukas Ligeti, Oxford The LA Times has described composer-percussionist Lukas Ligeti as a "musical Superman", and on this UK tour he'll be unveiling his own blend of influences the downtown New York jazz of John Zorn, African rhythmic ideas, contemporary classical music and electronica. He's the son of celebrated Hungarian composer Gyφrgy Ligeti, but his musical development has mostly been in the US since the late-90s, where jazz, improv and experimental music reshaped his early learning and gave him a significant place on the New York scene as a highly creative drummer. Ligeti's compositions have been interpreted by the Kronos Quartet, the London Sinfonietta, Bang On A Can and Ensemble Modern. Here he plays solo percussion on computers, and the electronic marimba lumina, drawing on samples from his African travels and his life in America. Holywell Music Room, Fri John Fordham Classical music Jazz Pop and rock John Robinson John Fordham Andrew Clements guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Flaming Lips, On tour If their festival appearances had led you to believe they were just like everyone else, then lately the Flaming Lips have served notice that they are weirder than anyone could have imagined. Last year, there was their Christmas...
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