The Debatable Land

John Mortimer RIP

Ach, Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and leading champagne socialist, has died. Sad. From a piece I wrote about him way back in 2002:

Mortimer belongs, I think, in the vanguard of the supporting cast, a second lieutenant rather than a leader himself. He’s too reticent to play the heroic lead and too aware of life’s absurdities to cast himself as a tragic figure. "I suppose my favourite characters are people like Kent and Horatio - decent, honourable, chaps who don’t make a fuss. I think the stoical person who receives very little praise is still the person you should aspire to emulate. They’re more important than heroes." If you can recognise and respect your limitations, life is likely to be a more comfortable experience...

His greatest regrets are of missed opportunities, but he has perhaps had fewer than many others. The principal problem with old age, he remarks, is that it doesn’t last long enough. But, having confronted and written about his own mortality with a limpid, elegiac elegance, Mortimer has conquered the anxiety that William Dunbar’s poem ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’ with its litany of writers cruelly struck down by the Grim Reaper occasioned in him. Everything, he says, is perfectly fine.

In any case, he half-wheezes, half-chuckles, "Alan Bleasdale tells a story about a novelist friend who was sitting next to a girl who was reading his novel on the tube. He knew that in a few pages there would be a good joke so he sat there all the way to Cockfosters waiting for a laugh which, of course, never came." If he travelled by tube, Sir John would not, it is safe to say, need to wait too long for the laugh to come.

Telegraph obituary here.

Alternative Titles

As mentioned in this post on the best newspaper corrections of the year, the Guardian acknowledged that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude not, as the paper suggested, One Hundred Years of Solicitude. A shame, really, since this latter would seem a more entertaining, lively read. In that spirit, readers are invited to suggest similarly altered titles for novels or movies that would be more amusing, more interesting or simply more suggestive than those chosen by the artists themselves.

Should We Be More Like Bonobos?

I dunno. But perhaps we should try and ignore our warrior-chimp ancestry and learn from the blessed, peaceful bonobos. At least that seems to be the idea behind Sex & War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. Yes, I know what you're thinking: another trendy but implausibly sweeping sub-title. Nonetheless, I heartily* recommend this book and suggest it may make an ideal christmas present for more people than you might think.

Wired interview with the authors and book extract here.

*Have you read the book, Massie? No. So why the recommendation? Because one of the authors, Thomas Hayden, is a friend, silly.

Four Characters in Search of an Author

In his latest Life&Letters column for the Spectator, my father has some fun imagining how different novelists might have treated the Curious Affair of Mandelson, Osbourne, Deripaska and Rothschild. For instance:

Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity.

However as the story unfolded in the newspapers — Osborne’s account of the conversation with Mandelson in the Greek taverna, Rothschild’s letter to the Times, the revelations of Mandelson’s previous dealings with the oligarch — it seemed as if we were reading an episode from Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion series. It had the familiar gamey Raven ingredients: betrayal of confidences, the desire for revenge, unfaithful friends. Money floated in the air, forever just out of reach of the English public-school product eager to get his hands on it. Only a sexual element was lacking, but Raven would have supplied it. Perhaps the Mandelson figure had taken a fancy to the youthful Osborne one as an undergraduate, charmed him, seduced him, and then abruptly dropped him? Something like that. Meanwhile the Rothschild character might himself be a discarded lover of the Tory politician and now besotted with the Labour one. There ought to be a Greek boy somewhere, but I don’t quite see where he is to be fitted in...
 
[Or it could have been written by] Disraeli obviously. The story has all the ingredients of one of his glittering political romances: the idealistic ‘Young England’ Tory, the scion of a great Jewish house, the sinister foreigner whose dark ambitions are never fully disclosed (for any such disclosure would strain the reader’s credulity), and at the heart of the novel the master-intriguer M, motivated less by malignity than by the sheer delight he takes in his ability to lure the innocent O to his doom. The novel would reek of great wealth, subject of fascination to one as habitually and heavily in debt as Disraeli. Almost every page would be enlivened by sparkling epigrams, such as may never fall from the lips of the originals, paradoxes and political maxims, and the denouement would be fantastic.

‘When I want to read a novel, I write one,’ Disraeli said, and it’s a shame he is not still about to write this one. Mandelson certainly is a character who cries out for a novelist with his gifts.

Whole thing here.

Department of Bumper-Stickers

With regard to the previous post, indefatigable commenter NDM has this to say:

John Galt's The Member and The Radical, available in a handy combined edition from Canongate, are also interesting on this topic.

Talking of Galt, I was once driving along one of America's more boring interstates when I saw a bumper sticker with "Ask me, who is John Galt?" I'm thinking why does this car have a bumper sticker about a long-dead and not overly fashionable Scottish novelist. At that time I didn't know about the ever-fashionable Ayn Rand cult.

Readers are invited to supply further examples of bumper-sticker confusion.

A Revengers' Satisfaction

There's something awful about a bad review. By which I mean, one can sometimes feel rather sorry for the poor writer suffering under a prolonged and vicious barrage (one thinks of some of Dale Peck's screeds in the New Republic for instance) that leaves him - and by its end, the reader too - shell-shocked. All that time and effort spent, just so some hack bastard can tear it to pieces for the (undoubted) entertainment of bastard readers who weren't going to buy the bastarding book anyway.

On the other hand, sometimes the author is Alastair Campbell. Fair game, in other words. And, to be honest, Peter Kemp's Sunday Times review is kinder than it might have been. That's to say, other folk will enjoy plunging the knife in deeper than does Kemp. Though he draws plenty of blood himself:

This book is a revelation. Anyone for whom the name Alastair Campbell conjures up the image of a glowering bully professionally adept at manipulating words to suit his purposes will be confounded by it. For the personality emanating from his debut novel, about a psychiatric practice, is that of a swimmy-eyed sentimentalist whose verbal and inventive powers are remarkably meagre.

Slackly put-together sentences meander through thickets of irrelevance. Grammar slips awry (“Each of the morning's patients was challenging in their own very different ways”) and tautology (“knock-on consequences”) distends prose that is painfully prolix. Robotic dialogue (“You have lost your wife, though I am not convinced that cannot be salvaged at a later date”) goes along with an unfortunate propensity for jargon even at moments of would-be intense emotion: as his domestic life implodes, the novel's hero unhappily reflects, “With his family, he got into certain habits early on, and never really changed the skills set.”

Occasionally enlivened by unintended ambiguities (“The worst thing about going to a whorehouse was the moment of entry”), Campbell's writing is for the most part unwaveringly banal. One character lives in “a nice flat provided by the local authority”; another has liked to visit “a nice flat or a nice house with a nice enough prostitute living inside”; a third takes his mistress to “a nice hotel in Ireland”. Perceptions are matchingly trite: “Like people, some papers looked more important than others.”

And so it goes...

Outsourcing the Novel

More jobs Americans won't do: write their own novels. Mind you, I wrote this post, so I'm in no position to carp or quibble. Still, this is ingenious:

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why--the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the Kwik Trip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field below. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

Life in a Green Suit

Visiting friends or family with small children? Stuck for a present (toy drums and trumpets are not, I believe, generally considered thoughtful)? Well, my default gift is a collection of Jean de Brunhoff's wonderful Babar books. You cannot, in my view, and that of most tiny children, go wrong with Babar.

So, amidst all the sturm und drang on Wall St and the hurly-burly of the American presidential campaign, it was a relief to be able to turn to Adam Gopnik's lovely essay on Babar in this week's edition of the New Yorker.

It's a fine, perceptive piece, not just on Babar, but on French culture, colonialism, the bourgeoisie and the differences between British, American and French children's literature. 

He concludes: Far more than an allegory of colonialism, the “Babar” books are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life. “Truly it is not easy to bring up a family,” Babar sighs at one point, and it is true. The city lives on the edge of a desert, and animals wander in and out at will, and then wander out again to make cities of their own. The civilizing principle is energetic but essentially comical, solid-looking on the outside but fragile in its foundations, reducible to rubble by rhinoceroses. Even the elephants, for all their learning and sailor suits, can be turned into slaves through a bad twist of fate. The unruliness of natural life is countered by the beautiful symmetries of classical style and the absurd orderliness of domestic life—but we are kidding ourselves if we imagine that we are ever really safe. Death is a rifle shot and a poisoned mushroom away. The only security, the de Brunhoff books propose, lies in our commitment to those graceful winged elephants that, in Babar’s dream, at the end of “Babar the King,” chase away misfortune. Love and Happiness, who are at the heart of the American vision, are, in Babar’s dream, mere tiny camp followers. The larger winged elephants, which are at the forefront of this French vision of civilized life, are instead Intelligence, Patience, Learning, and Courage. “Let’s work hard and cheerfully and we’ll continue to be happy,” the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add.

Telegramese Charm

All gone, now of course. Bryan Appleyard has more:

 I was once persuaded, against my better judgment, to write to Samuel Beckett in Paris - I knew him slightly - asking him about his hopes and resolutions for the new year. The telegram arrived - 'Hopes colon zero stop resolutions colon zero stop.' Christopher Ricks subsequently used this in his superb book Beckett's Dying Words as an example of Great Sam's mastery of punctuation.

Tales of the Booker

The Guardian, bless it, has a super feature asking a judge from each of the Booker Prize's 40(!) years to recall their experiences as a member of the panel. It's a terrific read and well worth your time. (One surprise, to me at least, the amount of love shown JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur). Anyway, some highlights to encourage you to read the whole thing:

1969, Frank Kermode:
Getting through the 60 was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca [West]. "Miss Murdoch writes good and bad novels in alternate years," she said. "This is a bad year." Muriel Spark: "clever but too playful." And out they went.

1974, Ion Trewin:
We were three judges - AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard and me. At the shortlist meeting, Jane remarked that she thought Ending Up by Kingsley Amis (then her husband) was his best book and should go on the shortlist. I looked first at Antonia, and then at Martyn Goff, the prize's administrator - both remained impassive. We broke for a breather. Martyn said that as chairman it was up to me. Antonia liked the novel (as did I). On literary grounds neither of us had problems about shortlisting it, but what would the press say?

1982, Paul Bailey:
There are many things I regret doing, and being a judge for the Booker prize is one of them. For some years after I was associated with two novels I absolutely loathed and would not have even started reading in other circumstances.

1983, Fay Weldon:
As a fervent feminist (25 years back), and taking time to make up my mind, I made a joke: "I haven't got my husband here to help me decide." But one should never make jokes in the presence of the police, security or at a Booker prize judging, and word got round that I meant it. Then I had to deliver the customary chairperson's speech. After I sat down, the then president of the Publishers Association got to his feet, crossed the room and hit my agent Giles Gordon, second best thing to hitting me. I'd used the speech to reproach the publishers for giving such rotten deals to writers.

1993, Gillian Beer:
Olivier Todd, the French novelist, shrugged his shoulders at our second judges' meeting: no lunches with publishers, no approaches from agents, he complained - what an odd English bubble of propriety we were gathered inside. He was joking, but only just.

1994, James Wood:
But the absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favourite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favourite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides. That is when the horse-trading begins. I remember that one of the judges* phoned me and said, in effect: "I know that you especially like novel X, and you know that I especially like novel Y. It would be good if both those books got on to the shortlist, yes? So if you vote for my novel, I'll vote for yours, OK?"

For obvious reasons I also commend Nicholas Mosley's comments on the 1991 prize.

*I'm pretty sure this judge is now the literary editor for a Sunday newspaper.

Great Unfinished Novels

Via Clive Davis, the Washington Post offers a list of five great unfinished novels. As you might expect The Man Without Qualities and The Last Tycoon are among those who make the cut. One that's missing: the novel that was shaping up to be Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. What other novels should be on the list?

Second question: which unfinished novels were better left that way? That is to say, which, had they been completed, would be the most painful or distressing to read?

One that leaps to mind: Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs. Chandler had only written four chapters when he died and technically, Robert Parker finished it or him. But we should, I think, be glad that Chandler never finished it himself since it's two or three ranks below Playback, itself the weakest of Chandler's novels.

A Wodehouse Reader

A correspondent has a confession and a question: "I have, shamefully, never read Wodehouse and want to read all the Bertie and Jeeves stories. But where does one start?"

There is no shame in this. Indeed there's a sense in which one might (almost) envy the Wodehouse novice; how splendid to be able to cast off the concerns of the modern world and slip into this altogether finer place for the very first time. My friend has a summer of plenty ahead of him. (Mind you, there's something to be said for reading Wodehouse in the depths of hellish winter too. Perhaps this accounts for his enormous popularity in Russia.)

Yet he is wise to proceed cautiously. Any fool can be chucked a Shakespeare anthology with the confidence that it will contain some nifty material and much the same can be said of a Wodehouse syllabus, no matter how clumsily it may be set. Yet while, as with Shakespeare, the lesser works can give pleasure to the aficionado they can have an unfortunate effect upon young, impressionable minds if they are pressed upon readers too soon, or in the wrong order.

Wodehouse published his first book, The Pothunters, in 1902 and did not stop producing "the stuff" as he called it, until Aunt's Aren't Gentlemen appeared in 1974. Even then he wasn't quite done, leaving an unfinished manuscript, appropriately entitled Sunset at Blandings, on his death, on Valentine's Day no less, in 1975. In nearly three-quarters of a century of toil he produced more than 90 books; no wonder newcomers might be unsure where to start.

Even the most devoted Wodehousian must admit that the work is uneven. I am not a completist and can't claim to have read, let alone possess, every Wodehouse book, but I suspect I must have finished about half of them and have read just about everything in the Wooster and Blandings series, as well as the lesser, but still excellent, schools of Psmith, Uncle Fred and the public school and golf stories. My knowledge of Ukridge and Mr Mulliner is more limited but still respectable. Beyond that there remain many gaps in my reading. That all being so, and with all due caveats acknowledged, I recommend this Wodehouse reading list (to which readers may and indeed are encouraged to add their own favourite volumes).

Faced with a banquet of such proportions, it is wise to begin gently...

Whither Bond?

Via Chris Orr and Ross Douthat, I see there's a trailer for the new Bond flick Quantam of Solace. First impressions? Could be good!

Anyway, it has to be better than the latest Bond novel...

The first Bond novel, "Casino Royale, was published in 1953. And yet, dated and hackneyed as some of the novels can seem, they have life in them yet. Just as he does in the movies, Bond refuses to die. And since he is back in cinemas, courtesy of Daniel Craig's muscular interpretation of Britain's foremost killer; it's only fair that he return to book stores too.

To mark the centenary of Fleming's birth, his estate commissioned Sebastian Faulks to write a new bond novel. The best-selling travesty that is "Devil May Care" is with us now, offering a reminder that sometimes the original really is best.

Still Faulks must have seemed a sensible choice, not too literary to be threatening, yet sufficiently well-respected as the author of popular middlebrow novels such as "Birdsong" (which has sold an astonishing three million copies) as to give the exercise some credibility.

Perhaps it also helped that Faulks had written a volume of literary parodies which included a send-up of Fleming himself. But this should have been understood as a warning, not a declaration of promise. After all, other writers have tried to pick up the series where Fleming left off. Kingsley Amis, writing as Robert Markham, was the first, publishing "Colonel Sun" four years after Fleming's death in 1965. It was not a great success.

Returning to Brideshead

Back to Brideshead! Last month I took a fairly relaxed view of the forthcoming Miramax travesty. The only real question would seem to be whether it is enjoyably or enragingly terrible. The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last suspects the latter and seems particularly aggrieved by the treatment Lady Marchmain has received:

Yes, the new Brideshead features a villain--Lady Marchmain. Instead of a pious, if clumsy, near-saint, Lady Marchmain is now ambitious and manipulative. "I hope you didn't let Julia mislead you," she sternly warns Charles. "Her future is not a question of choice."...

The bizarre reimagining of Lady Marchmain seems to be a result of the excision of Catholicism from the new Brideshead. The screenplay reportedly stays away from matters of the church and the trailer makes but one allusion to it, showing a rosary falling from someone's hand. And, if there is none of that fussy Catholic stuff in the new Brideshead story, then the pious Lady Marchmain might reasonably be seen as a heel. As her younger daughter Cordelia observes in the novel, "When people wanted to hate God, they hated Mummy." Take away God, and Lady Marchmain may be little more than a controlling shrew.

Well, there's plenty of "that fussy Catholic stuff" in the novel and I've always seen Lady Marchmain as something of a "heel". Worse than that actually, now that I think of it. Of course, I'm not a Catholic myself so you might say I would say that. Even so, it seems perfectly reasonable to dispute Mr Last's characterisation of Lady Marchmain as "a pious, if clumsy, near-saint" and observe that manipulative might be the exact term one would choose to describe her. And I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that, shrewish or not, she is "controlling". Regardless of their other reasons, indeed whatever their own faults and weaknesses, this is something that both Sebastian and his father seek to escape. And, frankly, I've always been sympathetic to their view.

In passing, I'd add that Cordelia's line, quoted above, is nonsense. If anything it should be the other way round, in as much as many readers may find their tolerance for God limited by their tolerance for Lady Marchmain. Below the fold are two clips from the Granada adaptation that Last rightly praises as a "high water-mark" for television that, I'd suggest, support my interetation more than his. But, of course, one useful definition of good art is that folk can have radically different, but legitimate interpretations each of which is, to their mind, supported by the evidence of the art itself...

Et in Purgatorio ego?

Thanks to Ross Douthat for alerting me to this trailer for the forthcoming movie of Brideshead Revisited:

As Ross says, this may not bear much resemblance to the novel you read. But come on, isn't this just delightfully over-the-top and wonderfully trashy? I doubt it matters that the adaptation - Emma Thomson as Lady Marchmain notwithstanding - seems certain to be utter tripe.

I remember that when Andrew Davies announced that his adaptation would take the view that the book's really about how catholicism ruins everyone's life, there was much umbrage and outrage at this desecration of Waugh's intent. But there's little necessity for an adaptation to be faithful to the original author's intent. And Davies' view is far from untenable even if it ain't how Waugh would have seen his novel.

And in any case, if we're honest, Brideshead is ripe for a Dynasty style makeover. Brideshead is a soap opera after all and, frequently, a contrived, over-written, nonsensical drama to boot. That's part of its charm of course - itself, natch, the novel's fatal flaw...

Matt Zeitlin, on the other hand, suggests one should weep over this trailer. Now there's something to the argument that given the great success - indeed brilliance - of John Mortimer's Granada adaptation there's no need for a new film. But then again, what damage can there really be? Anyone who loves Brideshead - and it's one of those novels that despite its brilliance attracts too many too passionate defenders - has no monopoly or veto on how the book must be interpreted. In fact some of them need winding up... 

In passing Ross makes mention of Waugh's "more serious novels". Does he mean to say that Scoop isn't a serious commentary on journalism? Surely not. Now there's an adaptation that might be fun - provided, of course, that it was played seriously and not milked for laughs...