Author: David Hebblethwaite

Books On The BBC

25th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

Today, the BBC announced a year of book-related programming, and has a rather extensive website detailing what’s going to be included. Naturally, I’m very pleased to see this, as we really don’t get enough book-related television in this country; and there are some interesting programmes lined up, from Sebastian Faulks on the characters in British fiction to a series on books as artefacts. I’m sure I will find plenty to watch.

And yet… I have a nagging sense that “Books On The BBC” may not be all that it could be. On the basis of the website, it seems to me that there could have been more diversity in terms of the presenters and books covered in the documentaries, and the works chosen for dramatic adaptation.

It also feels that too much of the discussion about new books is being tucked away on the radio, or in late-night television strands like The Review Show, which won’t give it such a high profile. I’m pleased to see there’ll be a Culture Show special on “Britain’s Best New Novelists”, but the most prominent new programme in the schedules is likely to be My Life in Books, essentially a bookish version of Desert Island Discs (hosted by Anne Robinson, who was quoted yesterday as saying that contemporary fiction was not her reading material of choice), a format which will inevitably focus on older books.

Those are my initial reservations, then, though of course I recognise that I’m talking about a season of programmes that hasn’t even begun. I do look forward to that season, and I hope it heralds a prominent place for book-related programming in this country.

Linda Grant, We Had It So Good (2011)

24th January 2011 / / 3 Comments

Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good is the first title selected for the Virago Book Club; it is fair to say that this novel would not be on my radar otherwise, but I am very glad to have read it. We Had It So Good follows three generations of the same family during the second half of the last century and the first years of the current one; the focus is particularly on the baby boomers of the family, but there are themes and patterns that run across the experiences of the different generations.

Stephen Newman is an American who comes to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1960s, but is expelled on the discovery of his drug-manufacturing activities. Not wishing to be drafted to Vietnam, the only way that Stephen can avoid having to return to the US is to marry Andrea, the English girl he met and fell in love with at Oxford. Though this is rather a marriage of convenience, it lasts; the couple move to London, at first living in an ‘urban commune,’ as their friend Ivan puts it (‘Don’t think of it as a squat,’ p. 58), but eventually making successful careers, he as a maker of science programmes for the BBC, she as a psychotherapist. They have children, Max and Marianne, whose lives come to have their own ups and downs – then Stephen finds himself in his fifties, wondering what happened to the kid he still feels he is.

Stephen is the fulcrum of Grant’s novel, though the actual structure is episodic, moving between viewpoint characters without a fixed pattern (there are a couple of confusing points where viewpoint shifts within a scene, but this is a minor issue). The effect is a series of moments building up into a whole – and, happily, We Had It So Good works well at both those levels.

Grant captures some very interesting and effective moments on the page. Sometimes, this is a result of her description; here, for example, is the young Stephen reflecting on his differing perceptions of the US and UK :

Stephen felt that he had come from a country so brand new that if you peeled off the layers of the present you would only find more present. Here, the continuous uncovering of the past, history’s insistence of not getting out of the way, was depressing. It reminded you that soon you would be bones under the ground. One day you might be a fossil unearthed and on display in the Pitt Rivers museum. (p. 13)

At other times, there are striking contrasts within scenes. One example is when Grace (one of Andrea’s and Stephen’s friends from Oxford who embraced fully their friendship group’s 1960s ideals, and has spent her life travelling abroad) visits for Christmas. Young Marianne has built up a mental image of Grace as an exotic, almost fantastical figure, with wonderful stories to tell; it’s quite a shock to her (and us) to then meet Grace and find instead a weathered woman who insults Marianne as soon as looking at her.

Shortly after this, there’s another particularly strong scene where Max performs a magic show for the assembled friends and family, and his parents’ differing reactions really illuminate their characters: he’s absorbed in trying to work out how the tricks are done, whilst she asks herself if Max’s desire to perform means she didn’t give him enough attention when he was younger. I find these and other observations of Grant’s very acute.

At the broader structural level, We had It So Good highlights the turn of the generational wheel, and how life never quite turns out the way one expects. When Stephen looks back on his life and wonders how he got from there to here, from his youthful dreams to a middle-age which is comfortable, but still middle age, we might wonder the same – though each of his and Andrea’s decisions though life make sense at the time, we have experienced them as episodes, and so have the same sense (though for a different reason) of not understanding the complete journey.

In addition to this, the tales of the younger Andrea’s and Stephen’s exploits seem unreal to their children, who can’t reconcile what they hear with the image they have of their parents. Yet the same goes for Stephen’s parents, aspects of whose earlier lives are as unreal to him; and there is a sense that Marianne and Max are living stories that will in turn seem extraordinary to their children. So it goes on. We Had It So Good is fine both as a series of snapshots, and a larger portrait of life. And, in Linda Grant, I have another author whose work I should investigate further.

Further links
Linda Grant’s website
Grant’s video introduction to the novel
Sam Jordison interviews Grant
For Books’ Sake review of We Had It So Good

Richard Hughes, ‘A Night at a Cottage’ (1926)

23rd January 2011 / / 1 Comment

A three-page piece about an escaped prisoner who, on a rainy night, takes refuge in an abandoned cottage, where he meets a mysterious stranger. I don’t think this story has withstood the passing of time very well: its ideas are over-familiar now, and the telling isn’t interesting enough to compensate.

Rating: **½

The book I hated at school

22nd January 2011 / / 12 Comments

Literary Blog Hop

A question from the Literary Blog Hop:

Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university. Why did you dislike it? 

I suspect that many people who studied GCSE English in the north of England (and, for all I know, further afield) had Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave (filmed the year after as Kes by Ken Loach) as one of their set texts. This is the story of Billy Casper, a young lad living in a South Yorkshire mining town. His father has left home, his older brother is a bully, and his mother has no time for Billy, being more occupied with a string of affairs. School is no better: Billy can barely read or write, is often picked on by the other boys, and the teachers (with the exception of one) treat him as a no-hoper. Although he’s about to leave school, Billy has no idea what he’ll do next. But there is one good thing in the boy’s life: Kes, the kestrel Billy has trained himself and is highly adept at handling.

‘Hate’ is perhaps too strong a word for my reaction to the book at the time, but certainly I didn’t get along with it. I think this was because it was so much the opposite of the fantasy I was particularly into reading at the time, and I just didn’t know how to appreciate novels like A Kestrel for a Knave on their own terms. Yes, I could interpret the book well enough to write an essay on it, but I could see nothing beyond that other than a rather miserable story that had nothing to say to me.

I re-read A Kestrel for a Knave a couple of years ago, to see what I could get from it now I was a better reader. There was no dramatic change — I didn’t suddenly fall in love with the novel — but I did find more in it to value. It wasn’t quite as miserable a book as I’d remembered, and I could appreciate it as a study of a character who’s been prevented by circumstances from making the most of (or perhaps even recognising) his talents.

I have a question for anyone reading this: did studying literature at high school help or hinder your love of reading? For myself, I wish I had been as open to different kinds of literature as I am now. Of course, I can remind myself that developing as a reader is an ongoing process, that where I am as a reader is more important than where I was… but, still, it would have been good if I could have seen more back then than just another essay to be written.

Firestation Book Swap, 20th January 2011

21st January 2011 / / 5 Comments

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Firestation Book Swap on Tour at the London Review Bookshop last August, I thought it was about time I checked out the Book Swap on its home turf; so off I went to Windsor last night. The Firestation Arts Centre is a lovely little theatre space in what used to be, yes, Windsor’s fire station (it still has the bright red doors), police station and magistrates’ court. The stage was decked out with chairs for the hosts, sofa for the guests – and, of course, a table full of cake.

Tonight, Scott Pack was joined by a guest co-host, Robbie Hudson, and the two guest authors were Elizabeth Buchan and Emma Townshend. I hadn’t read books by either of the latter, but certainly became interested in doing so after hearing them talk about their work. Of the two, I was instinctively more interested in Townshend’s book, Darwin’s Dogs (which examines the significance that Darwin’s pet dogs had in shaping his work), and it is now definitely on my to-read pile; but Buchan’s Separate Beds (about a couple whose relationship is already under strain who then have to deal with their family moving back in because the financial situation demands it) also sounds worth a read.

The conversation was as varied and entertaining as I remember last time; this is the sort of event where an author may be asked, ‘What’s the difference between Darwin’s genius and Shakespeare’s genius?’ just as she’s about to tuck into a macaroon, or the host may give impromptu tips on how to get five minutes’ silence at a children’s party. You just never know.

Speaking of which: the swapping. I took along my copy of Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, and ended up swapping it for Harry Hill’s Whopping Great Joke Book, which is about as random a swap as I can imagine. Sitting next to me was my fellow-blogger Jackie from Farm Lane Books, who tried unsuccessfully to exchange her copy of David Nicholls’ One Day (the most-swapped book in the history of the event, said Scott), and very kindly gave it to me afterwards – thanks, Jackie!

And so, I returned home with new books to read, and further books to go on the ‘must read that some time’ list. Oh, and the cake was delicious, too.

Jon McGregor, Even the Dogs (2010)

19th January 2011 / / 5 Comments

At the tail end of last year, I read Jon McGregor’s piece in the BBC National Short Story Award anthology, and liked it very much. After that, I was bound to read one of his novels at some point; Even the Dogs is on the current TV Book Club list, so now seems as good a time as any. The distinctive style and facility with language that I found in the story are here again in this novel, yet I don’t find myself quite as enthusiastic this time around.

In the final week of the year, the body of an alcoholic named Robert Radcliffe is found in his flat; he has slipped through the cracks in society, and the authorities try to piece together who he was. However, the book’s narrators (an unspecified chorus of ‘we’, possibly dead, but in any case unseen and anonymous, like Robert) know who he is, and offer us glimpses into both Robert’s life and those of his friends, who struggle with their own issues of homelessness and addiction.

Even the Dogs is a relatively short novel (little over 200 pages), and that is its ideal length; McGregor’s dense and fragmented prose is most effective in such small, intense bursts. It’s a style that enables the novel to reflect at a structural level the lives of its characters. A very striking example is the second chapter, which focuses on Danny, the friend who first found Robert’s body but didn’t go to the police about it. Danny wanders the city trying to find Robert’s daughter, Laura – trying to find anyone he can tell. There are sentence-fragments throughout the novel, but it’s even more noticeable in this chapter, because each section ends in an unfinished sentence. The sense one gains (through this technique, the constant changes of scene, and simply through the events of Danny’s search) is of a life that never settles – that never can settle.

Elsewhere in the novel, McGregor uses juxtaposition to great effect, as in the fourth and fifth chapters, which deal respectively with the autopsy and inquest. The dry formalities of these official procedures are intercut with scenes from other viewpoints, and this creates some powerful contrasts. For example, the narrators note how methodical and in-depth is the autopsy examination of Robert’s body, and reflect ruefully that it’s more attention than Robert and his friends have ever received in life. Then there are the phrases from group therapy sessions (‘Who’s got something they feel they can share’) studded through the narrative, which serve as emblems of the distance between the realities of the characters’ lives and the standard official responses to them (‘You want to start paying more attention pal this stuff’s everywhere’, p. 67).

And yet, for all that I think Even the Dogs is an effective piece of work, I find it easier to admire than to like. There’s something about its very focus that makes it difficult to view the novel truly from the inside, as it were. Still, I’m glad to have read the book, and will be reading McGregor’s work again in the future.

Links
Jon McGregor’s website
Extract from Even the Dogs
Interview with McGregor at TheExcerpt.com
Even the Dogs blogged elsewhere: Dovegreyreader; Asylum; KevinfromCanada; Bookmunch.

Geoffrey Moss, ‘Defeat’ (1923)

18th January 2011 / / 1 Comment

In the years following the First World War, Moss’s narrator travels to Germany to look up Hasso von Koekritz, an old acquaintance now working for the Security Police in the Allied-occupied Rhineland. Koekritz finds himself in a difficult position, caught between the people and the occupying forces; matters come to a head at a procession through the town. I can appreciate this story conceptually as a character study of Koekritz, but the writing just does nothing for me.

Rating: **½

TV Book Club: Room

17th January 2011 / / 4 Comments

It would be understandable enough if anyone who saw the very first episode of The TV Book Club, this time last year, decided not to tune in again; back then, it was a superficial mess of a programme that spent more time talking about its guest’s autobiography than the actual chosen book. However, a new series began last night, and the show seems to have turned a corner – though still flawed, this latest episode was leaps and bounds ahead of what The TV Book Club used to be.

First of all, we were introduced to the new personnel: Dave Spikey and Jo Brand have been joined as regulars by Meera Syal and Adrian Edmondson (Laila Rouass didn’t feature in the studio, but her voice was heard in the compilation introducing the books for this series, so perhaps the presenting team will rotate week by week), both of whom proved very worthwhile additions who were engaged with the discussion. This week’s special guest was Cherie Lunghi, who – hurrah – didn’t have a book of her own to promote; after an interview with her that was noticeably briefer than has been the case in the past, we moved on to the next item.

Every episode of The TV Book Club has had some sort of filmed insert, but these have tended to be frivolous items of little value, which made Kirsten O’Brien’s report on A.A. Milne such a refreshing change – no gimmicks, just a straightforward, informative piece about an author. That’s the sort of thing I want to see from this programme.

After the break, attention turned straightaway to the week’s book choice, Room by Emma Donoghue (great to see the format streamlined in this way, too). Room strikes me as a good choice for a book club, with plenty to discuss; and the panel made a good job of it in the time they had, even suggesting a couple of things that hadn’t occurred to me when I read the book. Lunghi didn’t seem to contribute much to the discussion, but Edmondson and Syal were both insightful, which bodes well for the rest of the series.

In the midst of all this improvement, then, Jo Brand’s continued tendency to undercut discussions with a droll remark is becoming increasingly tiresome. Two instances stood out to me this week: after the A.A. Milne item, Brand asked drily, ‘Are we Pooh fans, then?’ – and, after some thoughtful comments from other panellists, brought the whole discussion crashing to a halt with, ‘Well, I hated him!’

Later, in the Room discussion, Brand said that, even though she thought it was well-written, she found Room hard going because she likes books to be escapist; Meera Syal responded by asking, ‘Shouldn’t books reflect the darker side of life as well, though?’ It was refreshing to see Brand being challenged in this way and made to justify her position (which she did, though not very convincingly: reading with a particular aim in mind is fine, marking a book down just because it has a different aim is a poor way to respond to that book).

Mostly, though, my impression of this episode was of a programme seeking to raise its game, and that makes me optimistic for the rest of the series. The TV Book Club is one of the few places on British television where one can find discussion of books (and possibly the only one that’s reader-focused), so it’s a great pleasure to see it stepping up to the mark.

Leonard Merrick, ‘The Judgement of Paris’ (1918)

14th January 2011 / / 2 Comments

The lovely Suzanne Brouette declares that she will marry whichever of the celebrated comedians Robichon and Quinquart is judged the better actor by the people of Paris. The two performers decide that this can only be settled if they take on serious roles, but where to find them? Merrick’s name was unknown to me before reading this anthology, and I discover that his work has mostly fallen into obscurity; that’s unfortunate, because this story was good fun, and I liked the vigour of the prose. I’ll have to see if I can track down any more of Merrick’s writing.

Rating: ****

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