BBC News - HomeBooks: Top 10s | guardian.co.uk
-
Fred Pearce's top 10 eco-books May 16th 2012 10:14
From the despair of nuclear bombs to the hope of nuclear technology, the environment journalist picks out green books that are both positive and negative about our planet's future
I am not a tree hugger. Nor a people hater. For me, as an environment journalist for 30 years, the story is about people and how they work, live and dream on planet Earth. And how we – seven billion of us, and counting – can keep up the mad dance of civilisation in an ever more crowded and resource-depleted world. Luckily, I am an optimist.
These books contain some stories of potential horrors ahead, like Bill McGuire's Waking the Giant. But we can and do step back from the abyss. John Hershey's Hiroshima, is a receding nightmare.
I have spent the past two years researching the current global frenzy of land-grabbing for my new book The Landgrabbers (Eden Project Books). It was a sobering journey. But I don't doubt that we can – as Lynas proposes – continue to live sanely and successfully into the future. Even so, if Lovelock is right that we are now Gaia's brain, then we have some hard thinking to do.
1. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
Something deep in the ocean has grabbed control of the Earth. Sea levels begin to rise. London floods. Our hero is on a mission to find out what is happening to the planet before it is too late. A tale of climate change? Well, no. Wyndham was writing his sci-fi thriller long before global warming was a gleam in any boffin's eye. But the story of how society collapses under the environmental onslaught is terrifyingly contemporary.
2. The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham
The British landscape is richer and more layered with the remains of human activity than almost any other. This is the classic telling of how a curious amalgam of nature and nurture has moulded moorland and fen, hedgerow and woodland. Much that is ancient persists. Simply country lanes turn out to be sunken "greenways" dating back thousands of years. But vital features such as dewponds, mires, sacred springs and wildwoods are disappearing. Rackham, a Cambridge botanist and landscape antiquarian who lives near Grantchester meadows, opens our eyes with wonderful humanity. They say a squirrel could once have crossed Britain without having to touch ground. Oh, but it's much more interesting than that.
3. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock
This is Lovelock's first, slimmest and best telling of his marvellous thesis that planet Earth is, to all intents and purposes, a living organism that has evolved to manage its environment to suit the living things that comprise it. Planet Homeostasis. Richard Dawkins hates the very idea, but no matter. How could selfish genes be so altruistic? But actually Lovelock proposes nothing more subversive to science than that the planet's organisms can act together as a super-organism, like bees in a hive. He ends with the proposition that Gaia needs a brain, and we may be it. This is environmental science at its best, rigorous but mind-blowing. A work of wonder.
4. The Ultimate Resource by Julian L Simon
To many, this is an anti-eco book. An economist tells why there are no limits to growth, why Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and the rest of the doomsayers simply don't understand the ability of humans to come up with answers. That necessity is the mother of invention. The past may not be an infallible guide to the future, and Simon's addiction to free-market economics may be absurd (markets are an invention of man not a law of nature, and should be cast aside if they fail us). But his optimism about our inventiveness (the ultimate resource of the title) is important. We may need environmental doomsters to point out the planetary perils, but we surely need optimists like Simon to encourage our response. Otherwise we may give up, head for the hills and party to the end.
5. Waking the Giant by Bill McGuire
Just out, and dreadfully alarming. Bill McGuire, a distinguished geologist and brilliant science writer, charts how changing climate may trigger not just wild weather but also volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Perhaps it already is. The last time that ice caps were melting and sea levels were rising, geology was in overdrive. Faults shuddered, magma melted and mayhem followed. As McGuire persuasively shows, it could be kicking off again. This is science so scary that even the climate scientists widely dismissed as alarmists do not dare speak of it.
6. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Most of us live in cities. They are the environment we know best. This classic assault on town planners almost single-handedly destroyed the arrogance of 20th-century modernists who wanted to build homes and cities as "machines for living in". As if we too were machines. Cities don't need zoning and shopping malls and industrial estates; they need back alleys and unplanned corners, where humans can be human and a chaotic jumble can take over. She may have been writing about the US, but she makes you cry afresh for the vandalism inflicted on Britain in the past half century.
7. Bad Land by Jonathan Raban
I went to Montana, to the beautiful badlands on the American prairies, a couple of years ago. It is magnificently empty, dotted with abandoned shacks and haunted by big skies, the sound of wind and freight trains carrying coal west. I met a dentist who had a part-time ranch the size of the Isle of Wight. Raban's extraordinary bitter-sweet romance is about how this forgotten corner of America, once the new frontier for migrants, got this way. This empty. It is a story of broken dreams and recurring nightmares, of a socialist past and a sometimes rabid Republican present. It is about what happens when people and the land don't get along.
8. The God Species by Mark Lynas
This is a brave book by a green who changed his mind. After years writing about our environmental perils, Lynas decided that technology was not our nemesis but our saviour. Many greens feel profoundly betrayed. But Lynas has not renounced his concerns about climate change and the other "planetary boundaries" that he says threaten our life-support systems. He just thinks those concerns are so important we can no longer have the luxury of seeing being green as a lifestyle choice. Whatever we may feel, we cannot rule out GM seeds or nuclear technology. To say otherwise is dilettante foolishness at least as irrational as that of climate sceptics.
9. Hiroshima by John Hersey
I was brought up in the shadow of the bomb. One day, before I went to school, my dad told me what to do if I saw a mushroom cloud in the sky during lunch break. This was during the Cuban missile crisis, when many though that what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen any moment to Maidstone and Maidenhead. Hershey's contemporary report of what actually did happen to Hiroshima and its people – how an entire city was destroyed one bright sunny morning with one piece of munitions – is journalistic brilliance. These days, we are inclined to forget what nuclear weapons can do. This is a chilling reminder. Not even our worst climate-change nightmares can compare.
10. Beyond the Last Village by Alan Rabinowitz
We hacks call him the Indiana Jones of conservation. Alan Rabinowitz goes out and finds undiscovered species in some of the most remote places on Earth. Places we thought the world was too crowded to sustain any longer. His narrative of a journey into the back woods of northern Burma, on the southeastern-most edge of the Himalayas, is beautifully written, sharp-eyed and mysterious. It feels like Conrad's Heart of Darkness in reverse, as he escapes the "civilisation" of a brutal military regime to find peace and light in the farthest lands. A Shangri-la.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Josh Lacey's top 10 pseudonymous books May 11th 2012 11:43
A surprising number of authors choose not to use their real name when they publish their books. Josh Lacey, who has written a series of books under the name Josh Doder, picks his favourite writers with pen names
"When I was wrote my first book, A Dog Called Grk, I was working for this very newspaper, writing and editing reviews for the books pages. I didn't want people to get confused about who I was or what I did, so I thought it would be sensible to have two different names, one for books and the other for journalism. I invented a new name for myself: a pen name, a nom de plume, a pseudonym.
Many other writers have chosen to publish their books under a pseudonym, from canonical novelists such as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad to modern bestsellers such as Lee Child and John le Carré. Writing under another name is liberating; hiding behind a pseudonym allows you to shrug off the restrictions of your gender, your class, your ordinary identity, and become whoever you like.
That's the idea, anyway. But I soon discovered that, for me, writing under a pseudonym wasn't a good idea at all. I got confused. Readers got even more confused. I realised I had made a terrible mistake. What was I going to do? Eventually I managed to wrestle my identity back again, and now my books are published under the name which is truly mine.
In a few other countries (France, for instance, and Turkey) the Grk books are published under my real name, but they remain under my pseudonym in English. I've often asked my publishers to republish them under my real name. They always nod sagely and say, 'We'll think about it.'
While I'm waiting for them to make up their minds, I console myself with remembering some of my favourite children's books that were originally published under a pseudonym."
Josh Lacey is the author of several books for children, including The Island of Thieves, Bearkeeper and the Grk series (published under the name Joshua Doder). His new book, The Dragonsitter, is published in May.
Buy The Dragonsitter at the Guardian bookshop
1. Tintin in Tibet by Hergé
Georges Remi originally signed his drawings with his initials. He then turned them around and used "RG" instead, which soon morphed into "Hergé". (It makes sense if you pronounce the letters in a French accent.) I've always adored the Tintin books and, without realising what I was doing, borrowed from them when I wrote my own Grk books, the stories of a plucky boy and a little dog travelling around the world, combating injustice and solving mysteries.
2. The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Daniel Handler has written several novels under his own name, but none of them have achieved the fame and glory of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The 13-book sequence sags a little in the middle, but the first few books are absolutely brilliant, particularly the first of them all, which is a masterpiece of character and comedy. Handler's greatest creation is his narrator, Lemony Snicket, a sad, lonely and utterly charming character whose melancholy tone pervades the series. Handler originally invented the name to hide behind when he baited neo-Nazis over the internet; his delicious mischievousness jumps off every page.
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens took his pseudonym from the call of sailors on the Mississippi, shouting out "mark twain", the depth of "two fathoms". I was forced to read the story of Huck Finn at school and hated it. I picked it up again as an adult and fell in love. What could be a better spur to a story than this: "The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out." All the best children's adventure stories begin in the same way: I was bored at home, tired of domestic life, so I set out to find some excitement...
4. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The perplexing games, puns and trickery of Alice in Wonderland begin with the author's name. When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was thinking of a new name for himself, he took his first two names and translated them into Latin. That gave him "Carolus Lodovicus". He switched them around and translated them back into English, ending up with Lewis Carroll.
5. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Robinson Crusoe
The first readers of Robinson Crusoe's extraordinary adventures believed that they were reading an autobiography: the title page said Mr Crusoe's book was "written by himself" and there were no hints to suggest any editors or ghostwriters had been involved. After 28 years on an island, he had dragged himself back to London and penned his life story. If it works, this is the best possible way to use a pseudonym: nothing stands between the readers and the truth of the story.
6. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Carlo Lorenzini was a journalist and satirist who thought his own best-known work was "childish twaddle", which may have been why he published it under a pseudonym, taking his new name from the village near Florence where he spent his childhood. He didn't like Pinocchio much, inflicting constant pain and humiliation on his fictional character, and had to be persuaded by his publishers to keep writing. The original story is much more rebellious and antagonistic than Disney's version.
7. The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
I once read a biography of Theodore Seuss Geisel and learnt one snippet of biographical information that I've never forgotten. Whenever a journalist asked where he got his ideas, Dr Seuss would reply that he found them on his annual visit to Über Gletch, a small town in the Austrian Alps, where he went each year to get his cuckoo clock repaired. Here's another nice fact about him: Dr Seuss didn't just invent his own name, he made up the name of an imaginary daughter too, and even dedicated one of his books to her.
8. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart
Frankie Landau-Banks is a girl who finds herself confronted by a tricky problem: how can she be a teenager without being an idiot? She's a pupil at an expensive, exclusive American boarding-school, where the girls are expected to be pretty, polite and dumb, and the smartest boys group themselves into a club which forbids entrance to females. If Frankie wants to be liked - or even loved - does she have to hide her intelligence, suffocate her wit and stifle her own imagination? This is a wonderfully funny and clever novel about a teenage girl refusing to obey the rules. Having read it, I discovered that the mysterious E Lockhart is also Emily Jenkins, the author of some excellent picture books.
9. Animal Farm by George Orwell
Eric Blair apparently borrowed his pseudonym from the river in Suffolk and added George for its solid Englishness. I can't imagine Animal Farm was intended as a children's book, but I read it as a child; like a great fable or fairy tale, it speaks to all readers, whatever their age, allowing each of them to find different pleasures.
10. The Storyteller by Saki
This is the story of three kids on a train, whose aunt tells them a dull moral tale to pass the journey. Seeing how bored they are, another passenger takes over the narrative duties and tells a deliciously subversive story about a little girl who is so good that she's given a chestful of medals. A hungry wolf comes past. The girl hides, but her trembling makes the medals clink and clatter. Alerted by the noise, the wolf finds her and gobbles her up. The aunt is furious: "A most improper story to tell to young children! You have undermined the effect of years of careful teaching." Hector Hugh Munro didn't write "The Storyteller" for children, but it is an example to anyone who does.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Shehan Karunatilaka's top 10 cricket books May 02nd 2012 11:57
From Don Bradman's classic memoir to Imran Khan's musings on Sri Lankan chicanery, 10 first-class literary deliveries
It isn't surprising that a sport that goes on for days, often without result, inspires this much writing. There are as many tomes on cricket as there are dot balls in a Test series.
Some examine the game's history, wallow in its scandals, or bask in its Zen-like aura. Others fetishise stats, turn players into gods or use cricket as a canvas for socio-political philosophiing.
This isn't a list of the greatest cricket tales of all time. Rather, it's a list of the 10 most indispensible books if you're researching a novel about a drunk sportswriter on a madcap quest to find a forgotten Sri Lankan cricket genius – a selection of books that I've loved, studied and stolen from.
1. Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James
"What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?" The great West Indian theorist uses the tools of social science to link nationalism and cricket. And to analyse the game as if it were a Greek tragedy. Reveals that the gentlemen's game isn't really a game, and may not be all that gentlemanly. Worth a reread.
2. Rain Men: the Madness of Cricket, by Marcus Berkmann
Far too much cricket humour isn't actually that funny. This includes jokebooks from the 1980s written by has-beens from the 70s. Rain Men is splurt-out-whatever-you're-drinking hilarious and provides honest and often depressing insights into the amateur game. As Ian Hislop puts it: "A very funny book about some very sad men."
3. Arm-ball to Zooter, by Lawrence Booth
An entry-level guide for the uninitiated and a source of mirth and trivia for the diehards. It'll give you the basics, demystify the slang and shower you with useless but fascinating information. There are entries on Albania, John Travolta and the revelation that the first ever Test match was played between America and Canada in the 1800s. True fact.
4. War Minus the Shooting, by Mike Marqusee
Sri Lanka's finest moment written like the thriller it was. The 1996 World Cup may not have had the controversy or the homicide of subsequent tournaments, but it did deliver the game's most memorable underdog triumph. The literary equivalent of rewatching Ranatunga smash that six off Warne in the final.
5. Essaying Cricket, by Michael Roberts
Charts Sri Lanka's journey from whipping boys to world champions with incisive essays from an all-star cast of cricketing brains. Includes rare photos of Sri Lanka's gentlemanly cricketers of yesteryear – and of Sanath Jayasuriya with a full head of hair.
6. The Art of Cricket, by Don Bradman
Worth it just for the unsolvable puzzle at the end. I believe it involves calculus and complex algebra. Essentially a coaching manual from the great man, it is filled with sage advice, physics-based diagrams of different deliveries, and an innocence of tone and earnestness of purpose that is all but extinct in today's game.
7. The Meaning of Sport, by Simon Barnes
This may be cheating. It's not strictly a cricket book, but then neither was the enchanting Netherland, that was widely acclaimed to be one. If I had my way, Ed Smith's What Sport Tells Us About Life, Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and George Plimpton's The Curious Case of Sid Finch would be cricket books, simply because they allowed me to write one.
Simon Barnes, the poet of British sports writing, suggests sport could be a glimpse into the soul of man, which of course it is. And there's sufficient gushing over the 2005 Ashes win to justify its inclusion. A brilliant read.
8. A Lot of Hard Yakka, by Simon Hughes
Journeyman county player turned champion commentator gives us a peep into the life of a professional cricketer. It also reveals what goes on in the dressing room: mainly pornography, drinking, politics and tedium by the sounds of it. Funny, self-deprecating and filled with anecdotes and quotes. My favourite piece of cricketing analysis comes courtesy of England spinner John Emburey: "The fucking fucker is fucking fucked."
9. By His Own Hand, by David Frith
My favourite treatise on the dark side of the game. Frith ponders why cricket attracts a disproportionate number of suicides and profiles over 80 of them. They include tortured geniuses, alcoholics, hypochondriacs, depressives, and one man suspected of being Jack the Ripper. The introduction was written by Peter Roebuck, who, 22 years later, jumped from the sixth floor of a South African hotel.
10. All Round View, by Imran Khan
There are probably better cricket biographies. Ones that are better written, funnier, more dramatic or more revealing. But who cares? For a kid growing up in Asia in the 80s, cricket heroes didn't come much bigger than the future prime minister of Pakistan. It was also the first cricket book I'd come across that had several chapters dedicated to Sri Lanka. Even though they were all about what big cheats we were.
• Shehan Karunatilaka's novel Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew won the 2012 DSC prize for South Asian Literature and is shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. Published by Vintage, £8.99
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Ewan Morrison's top 10 books about shopping malls Apr 25th 2012 10:40
From fin-de-siecle arcades to 21st-century consumerist temples, the writer fills his shopping basket with books about malls
There are, it turns out, few works of fiction set in shopping malls, or for that matter, about that subject in non-fiction. A disturbing omission in literary history given we live in a world that is being rapidly homogenised by these structures. There only 10 or so books I could find that, in any serious way, dealt with a world that has become "malled".
Please, dear reader, help prove this is not the case and add your mall books to my list. Otherwise, I fear we may be living in denial, while at the same time, those branded buildings, and all they stand for, take over our countries and our lives.
1. What Was Lost by Catherine O' Flynn
A fine novel in which a shopping mall is a character unto itself: a sinister haunted place. It begins with the eccentric, endearing observations of 10-year-old Kate, playing at being a private investigator in her local mall, Green Oaks. Kate disappears one day in 1981, and then the prime suspect in the investigation flees. Twenty years later, the prime suspect's sister, Lisa, and a security guard at Green Oaks discover the ghostly image of a little girl appearing on CCTV tapes and try to discover the truth about the missing girl. The novel cleverly twists the whodunnit genre to ask probing questions about modern alienation. What Was Lost – a child, or our sense of who we are in the era of the globalisation?
2. The Ladies Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames) by Émile Zola
The Ladies Delight was published in 1883 and charts the rise of the modern department store in the late 19th century. (Department stores, still to this day, are the key investors that guarantee the construction of shopping malls). Zola's realist classic charts a time in which the emerging class of bourgeois women became the dominant spenders, while paradoxically an underclass of women had to serve their desires and work like slaves to deliver "delight". Zola describes the horrific working conditions from the employees' perspective: 13-hour workdays, grey unnourishing food and sparce, shared lodgings, and tells the tale of a 20-year-old counter girl seduced by the department store owner, who with his perfumeries, exotic goods, makeup counters, mirrors and the latest foreign fashions aims to overwhelm the senses of his female customers.
3. Dawn of the Dead by George A Romero and Suzanna Sparrow
"When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth" – and when they walk, where do they go? – where else but to the mall? This novelisation of the classic zombie movie was a rare book for more than 20 years until it's republication in 2012. This was the first piece of art in any form to directly state that consumers ARE literally zombies. The story reads as if Romero had been boning up on his Marxism. Who can forget the rooftop scenes in which the survivors look down at the zombies staggering over the vast car park and amassing at the mall doors.
"Why do they come here?"
"Some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."
Hilarious satirical stuff.
4. Mall Maker, Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream by M Jeffrey Harwick
An excellent illustrated biography and analysis of the man who invented the modern mall. Victor Gruen (1903 – 1980) was an Austrian-born architect; a utopian socialist who fled the Nazis in 1938 and emigrated to America "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English". Gruen was disturbed by America's suburban sprawl and conceived of the shopping mall as "a crystalisation point for suburban life". He conceived of malls as vibrant social spaces that would put a stop to the social fragmentation caused by American consumerism. His designs were repeated the world over. In 1968 he returned to Austria, appalled by the "bastardisation" of his ideals.
5. The Arcades Project (Das Passegen Werk) by Walter Benjamin
The shopping arcades of the 19th century were the precursors to the shopping malls of the 20th century. Written between 1927 and 1940, Benjamin's plan was to create a history of the shopping arcades of Paris. His study took in architecture, shopping and layout, advertising, fashion, prostitution, city planning and literature. He invented a method of quotation and montage, mixing historical facts with observations made on walks through the arcades in the style of "the flâneur". Before fleeing the Nazis in 1938 Benjamin entrusted the vast incomplete project to his friend, the surrealist novelist Georges Bataille, then librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Bataille hid the manuscript in a closed archive and as Benjamin had destroyed the only other copy before his suicide, the project was believed to be lost until its rediscovery after the war. The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus was printed in the 80s after years of controversial editorial work. The book is hailed as one of the milestones of 20th-century literary criticism and as a forerunner to postmodernism. It inspired the Situationists and led all the way to Will Self and Iain Sinclair with their "psychogeographic" walks.
6. The Cave by José Saramago
A late work by the Nobel prize-winning Portugese author of Blindness and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. The mall in the story is a vast structure called The Center, in which people live while at the same time it sucks the life from the surrounding countryside and towns. Cipriano Algor, an aged potter, is put out of work by the mall and forced to abandon his livelihood. He discovers mysterious sounds of digging beneath the mall and goes on a secret journey to discover their source. What he finds is an ancient cave, hidden for millennia, with terrifying contents, which threatens to shatter the edifice on which The Center is built. A powerful allegory of the decline in community values and the dignity of human labour, by one of the great imagists of the 20th century.
7. Ten Spiritual Lessons I Learned at the Mall by James F Tyman
What could be more perverse than the meeting point of global capitalism and wooly, chummy Christianity? I bought this as a joke and new-ager Tyman does deliver some corny lines: "Is it possible that the last person you would think of as your teacher – a person serving coffee or mending shoes or cleaning the office – could be the one who brings you the message of enlightenment?"; "They're all angels in here teaching me about God, and truth." But, actually, this book has more to it than new-age cliches. Tyman's question: "Could it be that everyday events occur that we just brush off but which, if properly understood, could help to remove the veil covering our eyes?" is actually not so far from the kind of questions that motivated Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life or Benjamin's Arcades Project.
8. The Mall by SL Grey
In a shopping mall in Johannesburg, a young couple delve into service corridors and hidden basements to discover a surreal parallel universe, the perverse mirror of our own. There is a pharmacy named Medi-Sin and a clothes outlet called Sweat Shop. Then there's the burger bar called McColons – where staff are chained to their counters and shoppers live in fear of failing to consume enough. A wry, tongue-in-cheek horror novel, heavy on the satire, which teeters on the edge of parody.
9. Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City by Anna Minton
An extremely well-researched work of extended reportage on the changing face of urban Britain. Minton tackles town planning and the takeover of formerly public spaces by corporations who are creating "malls without walls". Minton uncovers a wealth of statistics on the turning of city centres and riverside developments into anodyne "clean and safe" areas. An impassioned polemic and a plea to citizens and politicians to fight the growing privatisation and homogenisation of our country.
10. Kingdom Come by JG Ballard
Ballard's final novel before his death in 2009 depicts a dystopia with rioting football mobs, deluded shoppers and fascist youth fighting to the death for the only thing left to believe in – shopping at the Metro-Centre, a cathedral-like super mall off the M25. "Consumerism is running out of road, and it's trying to mutate. It's tried fascism, but even that isn't primitive enough. The only thing left is out-and-out madness." The plot hangs on one man's attempts to solve the murder of his father by a lone gunman. But unlike the great number of pulp novels about lone gunmen in malls, Ballard goes deeper to answer the underlying question – why in the popular subconscious are the pristine, benign spaces of retail associated with violence and death? The middle classes are behind it all, and their desire for conformism is the true founding act of violence. As with all great Ballard, it is how close his fantasy is to contemporary reality that's truly chilling.
• Ewan Morrison is the author of three novels: Swung, Menage and Distance (Jonathan Cape/Vintage) and a collection of short stories. Tales from the Mall, an enhanced ebook/app with video, fuses fictions and facts about shopping malls, and is released on 1 May by Cargo Publishing.
Buy Tales from the Mall from the Guardian bookshop.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Bryan and Mary Talbot's top 10 graphic memoirs Apr 18th 2012 16:04
From Palestine to Persepolis, the comics creators pick the best examples of the medium as a vehicle for autobiography
Bryan Talbot has written and drawn comics and graphic novels for more than 30 years and is currently working on his Grandville series of anthropomorphic steampunk detective thrillers. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes is Mary Talbot's first graphic novel. Among her eight academic books are Language and Gender and Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, their first collaboration recently published by Jonathan Cape, is a combination of personal memoir and biography. It contrasts two girls' coming-of-age narratives: the author's own, as the daughter of eminent Joycean scholar, James Atherton, and that of Lucia, daughter of James Joyce himself.
"The genre of the graphic memoir, either autobiographical or historical or biographical, has been around in one form or another throughout the history of comics. It has considerably expanded over the last 10 years, however, and it's now a substantial and popular presence in the wide spectrum of graphic novels. Like the word to describe the medium – "comics" – the marketing term "graphic novel" for comics-in-book-form is a misnomer, but it seems we're now stuck with it. Graphic novels dealing with a personal story are the subject of this selection. As a genre, these are placed in the nonsensical category "non-fiction graphic novels," which underlines the inadequacy of the term.
The medium is an ideal vehicle for autobiography, with its distinctive utilisation of words and pictures to convey sometimes complex emotions and information in a direct and personal manner. Comics have many superficial similarities to film – the use of long shots, close-up, zooms and pans, for example – but, filtered through the perception and artistry of their authors, they are much closer to prose in the way they transmit a personal vision."
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
First published in 1972, this was the first major graphic memoir in underground comics, the comics of the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, the existence of which led directly to the graphic novel form as we know it today. Highly influential on artists such as Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, Green's book charts a life made surreal by obsessive-compulsive behaviour in an almost hallucinogenic blend of adolescent angst, Catholicism and sexual fantasy. It's a fascinating look into another world, alternately disturbing, nostalgic, dreamlike and sometimes downright hilarious.
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Maus is both the biography of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, and an autobiographical account of Art's troubled relationship with him as he gets the old man to recount his experiences during the second world war in Poland and his harrowing time as a prisoner in Auschwitz. As well as documenting his father's terrifying experiences under the fascist regime, Spiegelman paints a vivid portrait of his holocaust survivor father, an irascible, stingy and, surprisingly, bigoted curmudgeon, sending the clear message "suffering does not ennoble, it merely causes suffering". Maus is a chilling and thought-provoking read and was rightly a bestseller, remaining the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize.
The Spiral Cage by Al Davison
Davison was born in 1960 with spina bifida, his parents continually told by doctors that he had a short time to live and would never walk. At once poignant, shocking, funny and uplifting, the book, the first British autobiographical graphic novel, tells his astonishing life story. It's a work of brutal honesty, laugh-out-loud humour, astounding images, experimental page layouts and single-minded determination as the author battles to forge his own destiny against frightening odds. Since chronicling his life in The Spiral Cage, Davison has worked in the comic industry for more than 20 years, holds black belts in both kung-fu and karate and is an art and storytelling teacher, theatrical choreographer, set designer and film-maker. So much for his doctors' prognoses.
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Sacco was trained as a journalist and singlehandedly created the genre of reportage in graphic novel form. Immersing himself in a situation, his in-depth reports use the medium of comics to its full potential. Like his Safe Area Gorazde or recent Footnotes in Gaza, Palestine follows his experiences as he investigates events and interviews residents, explaining the history, politics and dynamics of the place as he goes along. The palpable sense of place and the feeling that we're in the presence of the people who relate their experiences to him (and therefore to us) is a testament to his storytelling skills, his work being far more intimate than that of a filmed documentary. Sacco is a master of this medium.
Billy, Me and You by Nicola Streeten
The death of a child has to be the worst thing imaginable that could happen to parents. It's an extraordinary subject for a graphic memoir. Streeten kept a diary after the sudden death of her two-year-old son, Billy. She has used it as the basis for her debut graphic novel, so it provides insight into surviving what for most of us hardly even bears thinking about. It is a surprise then to find it provokes laughter as well as tears. The combination of journal format and naïve artwork somehow helps to make reading about grief and loss not only bearable but entertaining.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrape
Originally published in French, this is a candid and compelling tale of growing up in Iran in which Satrape very effectively humanises her homeland for a "western" audience. This first volume of her autobiography spans the turbulent period when the Shah was deposed, when the revolution so long awaited by her Marxist family delivered intensified oppression at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists instead of the liberation they had anticipated. Drawn in simple, stark black and white, her own and her family's experience of the daily reality of public repression is conveyed with telling details of familiar ordinariness; the risk of alcohol in the house, the need to conceal a heavy metal poster, fear of being spotted wearing forbidden trainers.
To the Heart of the Storm by Will Eisner
The term "graphic novel" was coined in the 60s, but only applied as a marketing category for the first time to Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978. To the Heart of the Storm is his autobiographical account of American life in the 30s and 40s. The storm of the title is the war in Europe, to which he is travelling as a drafted soldier at the beginning and end of the book. But the train windows he gazes through frame his memories of childhood and adolescence and the history of his struggling Jewish immigrant family. This is a beautiful book with the vivid characterisation you expect from Eisner.
Ethel and Ernest: A True Story by Raymond Briggs
Briggs's loving tribute to his London working-class parents stretches from their first meeting, as a milkman and a lady's maid, in 1928 to their deaths in 1971. Both moving and funny, Ethel and Ernest is the personal story of a couple in a rapidly changing world that they often struggled to come to grips with. The Great Depression and the second world war were major events impacting on their lives, but so were the arrival in the home of radio, television and the washing machine. Winner of the British Book award's best illustrated book of the year, Briggs's Ethel and Ernest is as beautifully rendered in colour as his children's books such as The Snowman.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel has been known for her comic strip Dykes to Look Out For since the 80s. Fun Home, her first graphic novel, is articulate, rich with literary allusion and encompasses a range of interrelated themes: a daughter trying to understand her father, his repressed homosexuality and sudden death; her own coming-out as a lesbian in rural Pennsylvania; her obsessive-compulsive behaviour as a child. Described in the New York Times as a "slim yet Proustian graphic memoir", Fun Home has a highly rewarding recursive narrative that progresses in repeated retellings of incidents in the light of fresh information. The book has won a clutch of awards, including the Stonewall Book award.
Dragonslippers by Rosalind B Penfold
Subtitled "This is what an abusive relationship looks like", Dragonslippers is a visceral account of domestic violence. For this memoir, Penfold draws on sketch diaries she kept throughout her 10 years of marriage to an abusive husband. Using a naïve drawing style, she recounts the gradual emergence of cruelty, its stifling effect upon her sense of self-worth, and her struggle to escape the stranglehold of a destructive abuser-victim relationship. It's hard to think of a more effective medium for communicating this kind of painful experience. Anyone who's concerned about the prevention of violence against women should read it.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Seán McGrady's top 10 philosophers' novels Apr 11th 2012 16:43
The writer explains how Candide gave birth to Richard Dawkins, and why Alain de Botton is more novelist than philosopher
One fine Belfast day in the utterly crazy year of 1972, young Marius Moonston, The Backslider, decides to take a fiver from his sister's purse. But, more important, he decides to take a stand. He cannot find a foothold in an utterly mad Ulster "evangelical" world, with his mad evangelical family and madder society-at-large smothering his questioning mind. His crime opens up a new way of looking at the world, and of acting in it, so his feet gradually find solidity in another mental milieu that better suits his questioning consciousness. His transformation through an act of "theft", his newfound ability to see what is questionable, is the nature of his backsliding, and it is what constitutes the philosophical nature of my novel.
The philosophical novel is the continuation of philosophical reflection by other means. To do justice to the nature of ontological concepts, Plato required a mythological approach in order to illuminate the distinction between essences and existence, which resisted conceptualisation. To do justice to the totality of human experience, existentialism denied objectifying knowledge. Justice was eminently done in some cases, their place in history of philosophical ideas assured and their literary merit lauded. Others failed to hit their desired target but were nonetheless notable for daring to articulate the philosophical idea in this form, and being popularly successful, if not philosophically original.
The Backslider was born out of lived theological prejudice and unease, then philosophical and personal puzzlement that abstract philosophical reflection alone failed to make intelligible. Young Marius Moonston is suddenly a question unto himself: plunged into religious doubt in a country in an equally sudden state of turmoil. Problematical concepts, "salvation", "sin" and "guilt", "judgment" and "condemnation" are prominent. Marius is edging inescapably toward an ethical and ontological response; to resist a powerful milieu and affirm a new way. Important too is the notion of "virtue", which also resists understanding, but is most certainly a problem for philosophy. The theologico-philosophical framework did not necessitate literary approach, but was, nevertheless, given it.
Buy The Backslider by Seán McGrady
1. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Spinoza wanted to purify philosophical language of all literary artifice in an uncontaminated Latin. By substituting dynamic Life for Spinoza's Substance Nietzsche required all that ordinary and literary language offered. Yet both thinkers are on the same page philosophically. Reading Zarathustra seriously for the first time, despite its literary form, its poetic vision, I treated it as pure philosophy. But nothing will quite prepare you for the deceptions you will experience with this language. "In order to understand Nietzsche properly you will need the opposite of what a first reading of his works might misleadingly suggest." (Karl Jaspers). The Nazis read it once or not at all.
2. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel by George Santayana
"Providence did wonderful things through unworthy instruments." The first novel I read by a philosopher, it was described somewhere as a literary psychology, because of Santayana's attachment to William James's ideas on emotions. For James, the emotions are not the bodily processes but the perception of bodily processes. Eschewing a crude psychologism, Santayana develops this idea of the "observing" self philosophically. This work is also a memoir, and the "spirit" of Santayana hovers over it. It is a reflection upon his own understanding. Interesting is the philosophical distinction of the observing "spirit" of the person and the full person, which involves the self-knowledge in act and understanding. Tragedy awaits the person entirely of the spirit.
3. Intimacy by Jean-Paul Sartre
Ordinary young lives. Lulu, Rirette, Henri and Pierre. What of them? Ordinary language. What of it? Familiar circumstances. No Zoroastrian prophet here. No awareness of a single philosophical idea in these minds. No genteel intellectual discussions. Sartre's phenomenology is at work. The idea of "intimacy" denies everything of the transcendental ego and affirms "intentionality", which a detached ego violates. Intimacy is discovered in reflection and interaction, which necessitates the connection to "others". It involves a sacrifice of freedom through commitment and participation, but it is also where we uncover meaning.
4. Candide by Voltaire
Candide is perversion. Voltaire the perverter. Ill-informed about profound religious ideas, he proceeds with caricature. In the history of ideas, that line of "common sense philosophy" leads straight from Voltaire to the modern preachers and prophets of this perversion. Dawkins is an heir of Voltaire. In the name of enlightenment the Frenchman concocts a literary argument against an enlightened metaphysics. Here literature is cowardly. It is journalistic. The enemy of truth that Plato saw in certain literary forms. Voltaire failed to understand rationalist metaphysics and so gave to the world a distortion. The curse of "common sense".
5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
An entertaining piece, very funny with raving mad characters. Murdoch resisted the suggestion that her novels were works of philosophical fiction. Existentialism, for her, defined the whole genre of the philosophical novel. In general, she thought, philosophy clarifies, whereas literature mystifies. She didn't give herself sufficient credit for producing literary works with a subtle philosophical content. "Philosophy makes no progress," she said. So we find ourselves not only discussing the same profound problems we always have but living the same lives we have always lived. So in literature the writer writes about these "same lives" but great literature reveals meanings. A Severed Head is driven by ethical considerations. And we find this at every turn. The philosopher in Murdoch is so much more forceful than the novelist. Finally, a severed head may or may not refer to a disembodied spirit, the Cartesian seat of the emotions. Just a thought.
6. Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot
One of Blanchot's aims was to break down the boundaries between genres. On the one hand this opens the door to philosophical fiction, but on the other it closes it by denying that it is a distinct class. Fiction is doing more than one thing. It seems that he wrote fiction in full awareness that it was, in part, a philosophical investigation. He described the fiction as ontological where the language of ontology departs from literal expression and resides in an area outside the subject and object divide. Ontology speaks analogously. Thomas the Obscure is not familiar literary ground. How could it be? For, essentially, it is a journey of consciousness, an expression of its several characteristics, the relation between ideas and ideas, ideas and their objects, and the conscious states of self-deception.
Anything familiar – plot, narrative, character – have no place here. Heraclitean paradoxes abound. The boundless Thomas is a man with no history. He wanders in a world without the familiar co-ordinates of ordinary experience. And there is no decisive end to it all. There is a circularity that is also epicyclical. Life is repeated in endless cycles.
7. Thérèse Philosophe by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens
Dostoyevsky referred to it in The Gambler as a "trashy little book". Trashy not in the sense that it was a pornographic paper, a work of light entertainment involving a sexual romp with Catholic clergy confusing sexual with spiritual ecstasy that should never have seen the light of day. Rather, his description points to deep philosophical objections to the intended message, a statement of enlightenment scientific rationalism, especially where it involved the devaluation of transcendent ethical values within a purely mechanistic world-view. De Sade, not a natural ally to Dostoyevsky, saw the very same thing when he says the book "gave us an idea of what an immoral book can do".
8. The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Stranger combines splendidly with Sartre's The Age of Reason. In the latter, Mathieu, a philosophy teacher, is trying to find ways to rid himself of every form of human commitment, hoping that, by doing so, he finds freedom. In doing so, he risks himself, a freedom without a bond is empty and meaningless. It is total subjectivity. He is his own judge and his own victim. On the other hand we have Meursault, in The Stranger, who has no such will to freedom. He is conditioned in every respect. He could not be his own self in his actions "like the mother is in the child" (Nietzsche). Rather than act, he is acted upon, and his world too is empty and meaningless as, in a sense, there is no self.
9. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
In the literary field, Eco was influenced greatly by the work of James Joyce, most notably Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. Eco's novel (like Joyce's) expresses the finite and infinite in themes and meanings, but pinned down by what seems to be a simple and fairly accessible detective story set in a medieval monastery. Beyond that simple form, there are for the reader unlimited mysteries to solve and connections to make, in terms of references and relations inside and outside the text. The medieval Sherlock Holmes, William of Baskerville, in the process of his investigations, opens up a hornets' nest of theological interests bubbling under the ordered medieval surface, which, in turn, leads us into a labyrinth of "senses" for the reader to engage. Boundless communication from boundless diversity. Insofar as the philosopher's task is to make reality intelligible, the philosophical significance here is that reality itself, like a text, has that same openness, "an indefinite reserve of meanings" (Eco, The Open Work).
10. Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
Many readers misunderstood this work. I am not aware of de Botton's response, but mine is that they were off the mark. The complaints were, in the main, twofold. First, frustration that de Botton tells us nothing of what love is, only what it isn't. Second, on the status of this work as a novel, it failed as de Botton had not yet matured as a storyteller. His clever "commentary" is not sufficient compensation.
Both are unfounded. Like complaining that Plato failed in his dialogues to tell us what courage, love, etc. are. Or, in the second case, that Ulysses or Finnegans Wake are failed novels as neither has a story. That the story is weak would recommend it to me. Even more if there was no story. Weaknesses there are, however. Those are philosophical.
• Seán McGrady was raised in Belfast, immersed in the religious and political ideas that defined the Irish Troubles. A former university lecturer in philosophy, he lives in York, England. The Backslider is his first novel.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Michael Crummey's top 10 literary feuds Apr 04th 2012 10:47
From Paradise Lost to Blood Meridian, the Canadian writer picks his favourite tales of bickering and brawl
Everyone knows how futile a feud is, how ridiculous and useless and nearly impossible to resist. A feud is as primal and irrational as falling in love, which is why there's no talking to people involved in one.
In the grip of that idiosyncratic illness, feuders are immune to logic, threats, entreaties, bribes, empathy, and common sense. Like love, a feud creates a parallel universe where normal rules don't apply.
And, like love, it makes for compelling reading – you might as well try to look away from a traffic accident.
1. Paradise Lost by John Milton
The mother of all feuds: God v Satan and his rebel angels who would rather rule in hell then serve in heaven. This is arguably the greatest poem in the English language, though it fails in its stated purpose to "justify the ways of God to man". The bad boy is the star here: eloquent, headstrong, and compelling. Milton's God, by contrast, is legalistic, domineering and dry as dust.
2. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
You can't discuss feuds without a nod to the Montagues and Capulets. The teen romance in Romeo and Juliet is, let's face it, a little hokey. Shakespeare's depiction of two families allowing old grudges to destroy their own children, on the other hand, is visceral. The spat in Milton's Paradise Lost is a bit too highbrow to get worked up about, but this one is a kick to the gut.
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Feuders have more than a whiff of religious fanaticism about them, and Melville's Captain Ahab is one of the fiercest in literature. His pursuit of the whale to avenge the loss of his leg (an injury he's convinced was wilfully inflicted by Moby Dick) becomes an all-consuming madness. And Ahab has the seductive gifts of a fundamentalist preacher, leading even the most level-headed and sane among his crew to adopt the madness as their own. Thar she blows!
4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The real monster in Shelley's novel is the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who believes himself capable of creating and controlling life itself. When his creation turns on the creator, killing family and friends out of loneliness and rage, Frankenstein is forced to seek his own revenge. His trek across the frozen arctic in an attempt to destroy his experiment-gone-wrong reads a little like Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. All feuds have their Dr Frankenstein, someone who plays God at the outset, taking a risky course of action without considering the ramifications. And the consequences are never simple or clean; inevitably, they end up with a monster on their hands.
5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Set on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, McCarthy's novel follows the fortunes of the Glanton gang, a clan of misfits and psychopaths hired to clear the west of its indigenous inhabitants. It's an unrelenting chronicle of violence and degradation that refuses to take sides or moralise. The thin line between victim and perpetrator disappears early in the story, and the Glanton gang descend into a hell of their own making. As in all blood feuds, violence begets violence until it becomes the end itself. McCarthy fashions a perversely lyrical ballet of the carnage.
6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The desire to "get even" is as ancient as it is childish. Scratch the surface of an ongoing feud, and like as not you'll find a youngster with hurt feelings. Emily Brontë's densely-layered narrative is famous for the love story at its centre. But it's driven by acts of tit-for-tat retribution between Heathcliff and various members of the Earnshaw and Linton families that have their genesis in irremediable childhood grievances.
7. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is the story of three generations of preachers in the American midwest from the civil war to the 1950s. The patriarch is a firebrand abolitionist who wore a pistol in the pulpit and lost an eye fighting for the Union cause, his son and grandson are devoted pacifists. The feud is a bloodless conflict of opposing convictions, though the wounds inflicted are real and some are permanent. A book about the infinite possibilities, and the human limitations, of forgiveness.
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
It's only one episode in Mark Twain's picaresque set in the American south, but the feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons that briefly engulfs Huck Finn's story is a classic. Sparked by the elopement of a Grangerford daughter with a Shepherdson son, it reaches a head with a gun battle in which family members on both sides are killed. Gives a totally different twist to the notion of a "shotgun wedding".
9. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
A collage of poetry and short narrative, stream of consciousness, fake archival photos and imagined conversation, Billy the Kid is a hypnotic take on the legendary wild west gunfighter. It is by turns surreal, laconic and bizarrely hilarious. At the heart of the book is the feud between Billy and his nemesis, the hyper-intellectual and ruthless lawman Pat Garrett. Favourite line (from a dying gunfighter being pecked at by a hen in the street): "Get away from me, yer stupid chicken."
10. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The book that spawned the movie that spawned the mafia "whack" genre in American film. Killing is just business for the Corleone family until an attempt on the Godfather's life by the rival Tattaglia clan makes it personal.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Glenn Patterson's top 10 Belfast books Mar 28th 2012 10:50
Glenn Patterson's latest novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, is a tale of 19th-century Belfast. He picks the 10 titles that shaped his understanding of his city
The first "Belfast" book I read was Harry's Game, by Gerald Seymour, who had been an ITN correspondent here for a time in the 1970s. Back then my city seemed to be the preserve of other people's thrillers.
Fortunately, not long afterwards, I heard Frank Ormsby read in the Ulster Museum, across the road from my school, up the road from the school where Frank himself taught: poems that spoke of "the knowledge of the city / At a different angle". It was only when I left school and started work in a city-centre bookshop, however, that I realised how much catching up I had to do, not just the poets, but the critics, the geographers, the historians – social, political, architectural – and, yes, the popular as well as the literary novelists, tourist and indigenous. And, of course, no sooner did I think I had caught up than another lot came along. The team below therefore are picked from a large squad any member of which could, with ease, slot in to the first 10.
1. Call My Brother Back by Michael McLaverty
Last year 15 local writers, interviewed for an app called Literary Belfast, were asked to name a writer now dead whose work had influenced them. (Worryingly, for all concerned, one named Van Morrison.) Michael McLaverty topped the list. Set in the Troubles of the 1920s, Call My Brother Back is in many ways a model for novels of the later Troubles, approaching political violence through the experience of one family, the MacNeills. Amid the police raids and gun battles, the passages that linger are of school life, of kickabouts on waste ground and Sunday walks in the mountains above west Belfast.
2. Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
"All stories are love stories," begins Robert McLiam Wilson's third novel. The narrator is Jake Jackson, whose English girlfriend has gone back to "somewhere where politics meant fiscal arguments, health debates, local taxation", but it is Jake's friend Chucky Lurgan, of No 42 Eureka Street, who steals the show. Chucky, a Protestant, the latest in a long line of Lurgan "starfuckers", has his life transformed by a trip to Dublin to see the pope. His great-grandfather once met Dickens and that author's influence is all over this most affectionate and outraged depiction of the city.
3. Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson
Ciaran Carson is a poet, novelist, and writer of less easily categorised books such as The Star Factory – an associative, at times hallucinatory exploration of the city and its lore – but this collection from 1990 just edges it for me as his best take on Belfast (at least to date) and with its motif of unreliable maps undermines some of the more essentialist readings of (and writings on) the city.
4. Buildings of Belfast, 1700-1914 by Charles Brett
First published in 1966, three years before the annus horribilis that was 1969 (though anni '70 through to '75 were if anything horribiliores), it guides the reader around a Belfast that still retains much of its Georgian and early Victorian character. The revised edition, which is the one I have, published in 1986, has footnotes cataloguing the fate of the buildings: "bombed", "bombed", "demolished …" Come to think of it, I bought my copy of the book – and Jonathan Bardon's equally essential Belfast: An Illustrated History – from a bomb-damage sale.
5. Following Darkness by Forrest Reid
Dedicated to EM Forster, a friend and near anagram, Following Darkness is supposed to have influenced Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, although the novel that it most prefigures is Brideshead Revisited, with "Derryaghy", a County Down big house, introducing young Peter Waring to a world closed to his national schoolmaster father. The novel comes alive, though, in Belfast and the shop on Cromac Street over which Peter lodges with his aunt and uncle, his cousins George (possessor of an early porn stash) and Alice, who is given to putting dead mice in the soup.
6. Monkeyface by Stephen Gilbert
One of the strangest of all Belfast novels, by one of its most overlooked writers, about an ape-boy brought back from a South American jungle to the east Belfast suburbs. Gilbert – a protege of Forrest Reid – also wrote Ratman's Notebooks, filmed as Willard (Gilbert himself wrote the screenplay), thereby completing an unlikely three degrees of separation between Michael Jackson, who sang the theme song, Ben, and the author of Howard's End.
7. The Klondyke Bar by Bill Kirk
A photographic "day in the (1970s) life" of a bar in working-class Sandy Row, populating the kind of building that Charles Brett wrote about. The Klondyke suffered the fate of many of those buildings in being bombed by the IRA, on 30 January 1976. John Smiley, who appears in several photos, died in the blast. He stands for all those killed in the destruction of our "locals" at the hands of gunmen and bombers of all persuasions.
8. The Emperor of Ice Cream by Brian Moore
Moore by almost any measure is Belfast's most successful novelist. He spent his entire writing life in Montreal and California, but returned regularly to his native city in his novels, in this particular novel very close to his own experience as a youthful ARP warden in north Belfast. War for Gavin Burke is "freedom from futures" – an opportunity for licence, or as much licence as the local girls ("nuns in mufti") will afford him. And then the Luftwaffe come.
9. The Belfast Anthology by Patricia Craig
An attempt by one of Belfast's finest critics (and biographer of Brian Moore) to build up a "composite picture of the city, its atmosphere, exigencies and eccentricities". Most of the writers already mentioned feature, including Van Morrison. It's only the fact of his not being dead that ought to have excluded him from the app: Astral Weeks is one of the great Belfast literary works. Also represented are visitors such as Paul Theroux. "It was so awful," he writes in The Kingdom by the Sea, "I wanted to stay."
10. Where They Were Missed by Lucy Caldwell
Maybe it's because we're hemmed in by hills, or maybe it's just that we're never done trying to get the measure of ourselves, but it's remarkable how many Belfast novels include a view across the city. Usually Cave Hill is the vantage point, but this first novel by one of the city's rising stars ends with a homecoming from a different angle, the Craigantlet hills (CS Lewis grew up at the foot of them) and a "sensation of falling, in sudden relief, towards the city's gentle lights". Stick that in your pipe, Paul Theroux.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Jeffrey Archer's top 10 romans-fleuves Mar 14th 2012 11:32
From Hornblower to the Smiley books to the Forsyte Saga, here are 10 examples of good old-fashioned multi-volume storytelling
Roman-fleuve sounds a very French sort of thing. Britannica defines it as "a series of novels, each one complete in itself, that deals with an era of national life, or successive generations of a family". There are of course French examples, but the novels I've chosen are all English, with the kind of solid storytelling and unforgettable characters that inspire me.
And I can't talk about romans-fleuves, without mentioning my own five-book series, The Clifton Chronicles. The first book, Only Time Will Tell, opens in 1920 and takes Harry Clifton, a docker's son from the backstreets of Bristol, through to Oxford University, after he wins a scholarship because of his magnificent singing voice. He meets Emma at the age of nine, and she decides they will be married. And although, years later, they reach the church, the marriage never takes place. Book two, The Sins of the Father (published this week), picks up the Clifton and Barrington family saga and takes Harry and Giles through to the end of the second world war, when they have to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives.
1. The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
The Oxford Companion to English Literature tells me that "Trollope established the novel sequence in English fiction". Many would choose his Barsetshire novels for a survey of this sort, but I've preferred the six Palliser novels because the Palace of Westminster is more to my taste than the cathedral close. A large cast of characters is common to all six novels, but Trollope ensures that each can be enjoyed on its own. Trollope stood unsuccessfully for parliament and did not enjoy the experience – and he uses this first-hand knowledge with great verve.
2. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
The Forsyte Saga was the greatest success of Galsworthy's career, and largely responsible for the exceptional honours he received – among them the Nobel prize for literature in 1932 and the Order of Merit in 1929. Much of the social detail has dated, and the passing of time has made some of his characters' concerns less immediate, but the characters themselves are recognisable and compelling, and Galsworthy still hits his targets – materialism, selfishness, insensitivity, possessiveness – with force and accuracy. And the first mini-series set new standards for television drama.
3. The Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
Recognisably based on some of the author's own experiences in the second world war, this trilogy has at its centre the figure of Guy Crouchback, an upper-class English Catholic in his 30s. The failure of his marriage and a general weariness with life disposes him to see war as a noble thing and a welcome opportunity to do something worthwhile with himself. Over the three novels, Waugh deftly strips him of this illusion in ways that are tragic, touching and savagely funny. Probably the best thing in English literature to be inspired by the second world war.
4. Strangers and Brothers by CP Snow
The 11 novels that make up Strangers and Brothers appeared between 1940 and 1970, and trace the career of Lewis Eliot, a barrister, who progresses from provincial origins to positions of influence in national life; this progression to some extent mirrors Snow's own career. Perhaps the most successful of the novels are The Masters, a well-informed account of the election of a new head of a Cambridge college, and The Affair, about a scientific scandal. The title of one of the novels introduced a useful phrase into the language: "the corridors of power". Together, the sequence presents a vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life. Snow was that rare thing, a scientist and novelist.
5. The Hornblower novels by CS Forester
These 11 magnificent novels trace the naval career of Horatio Hornblower, from teenage beginnings to his appointment as admiral and award of a peerage. Along the way, Forester's mastery of his subject tells us much about British history and society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hornblower's character is plausibly developed, and Forester's handling of the war scenes is skilful and exciting. Like the work of all great storytellers, it transfers well to the screen.
6. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve novels make up A Dance to the Music of Time, probably the most ambitious scheme in postwar English writing. Through the eyes of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, we see the English upper-class and bohemian life as it was lived by a generation growing up in the shadow of the great war and then grappling with the horrors of another conflict and the profound social changes of a postwar world: the years covered range from the 1920s to the 1970s. Powell's characterisation and dialogue are deft, his eye for detail is sharp, and he is often very funny, but in truth I found it quite a struggle.
7. The Swann saga by RF Delderfield
Delderfield was a particularly skilful writer of multi-volume sequences. The three-book A Horseman Riding By was a great success in the 1960s, and he followed it between 1970 and 1973 with the three volumes of the "Swann saga": God Is an Englishman, Theirs Was the Kingdom and Give Us This Day. The story of the Swann family and their haulage business runs from the latter half of the 19th century into the early 20th, and the pace never flags.
8. The Smiley trilogy by John le Carré
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, Le Carré achieves a perfect blend between the novel of manners and the sophisticated spy story. Future generations will be able to learn all they need to know about the attitudes and obsessions of a certain part of British society in the 1960s and 1970s from these novels. At the centre stands the unforgettable character of George Smiley – decent, intelligent, thoughtful, relentless, self-questioning – who uncovers a mole in the secret service, attempts to restore the service's prestige and takes on the great Soviet spymaster Karla. When it comes to spies, Le Carré has no equal.
9. The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott
You could fill a good few shelves with novels concerned with the relationship between Britain and India, but not many would come close to Paul Scott's achievement. Covering a fairly short time-span (the rape that is the key event in the first novel takes place in 1942, and the series ends only five years later, with the partition of India in 1947), Scott nevertheless probes deeply into his story's conflicts of cultures and loyalties. Ronald Merrick, presented by Scott as an epitome of what was wrong with British rule in India, is a memorable villain, but generally Scott's treatment of his characters is insightful and even-handed.
10. The Clayhanger novels by Arnold Bennett
Bennett was a contemporary of Galsworthy, and the four novels that make up his Clayhanger series were published between 1910 and 1918, at the same time as the Forstye Saga was appearing. Bennett's main literary inspiration was the writing of French realists such as Zola and Balzac, but nothing could be more English than the industrial Staffordshire setting of the Clayhanger novels. They are rich in memorable characters but the principal ones are Darius Clayhanger, a domineering self-made man; his son Edwin, whose ambition to become an architect is frustrated by his father; and Hilda Lessways, whom Edwin loves and who becomes the innocent victim of a bigamous marriage. Good old-fashioned storytelling.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Lloyd Shepherd's top 10 weird histories Mar 07th 2012 10:07
Lloyd Shepherd, author of The English Monster, chooses his favourite weird histories, from Never Let Me Go to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I've long been intrigued by the idea of the past as a fantasy world: a place where real things happened but also a place which is essentially beyond knowing; where worlds can be built and events created which play on what we think we know of what went before. My novel The English Monster takes an awful historical event - the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 - and provides a motive for them which is stolen from history, but which is also impossible.
The trick is to do this without being a fraud. Inventing the past from scratch is simply invention. Re-inventing it within the confines of the known facts, as far as they can be known, is a much more creative and fruitful exercise.
My list of books focuses on this central idea - that history is a fantasy which can be reestablished by the author - and takes it in all sorts of directions. An architect who might be a devil-worshipper; a codebreaker and a coder who between them create a new world; an imagined past where cultural artefacts and real events become so entwined that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends - they're all here. I've called them collectively 'weird histories', but would want to remind those reading of the original meaning of weird as (according to the OED) relating to a person "claiming or thought to have the power to foresee and control future events; a witch, a wizard, a soothsayer." In other words, our future is created - culturally as well as politically - in our weird past.
1. Hawksmoor by Peter AckroydFew authors have immersed themselves in the past as fruitfully as Ackroyd, who adds a rich, palpable sense of place to his historical research (in this case, as in so much of his writing, the place is London). In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd connects the activities of brilliant 18th century architect Nicholas Dyer with modern police detective Nicholas Hawksmoor; the joke being, of course, that it was N Hawksmoor who was the 18th century architect, assistant to Wren but also combiner of myths and traditions in strange, brooding buildings which seem to speak to more than they show.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson's playful, fearless novel combines a second world war adventure story with mathematical puzzles and global geopolitics. It places three fictional characters - Lawrence Prichard Waterhouse, his grandson Randy, and American all-action hero Bobby Shaftoe - within a tale that describes how mathematics and cryptography created the digitised world. The novel includes a series of dazzling action sequences and hugely clever jokes; for instance, the sequence where Waterhouse and Alan Turing spend several pages knocking back and forth equations which are used to calculate the probability of the chain coming off Turing's bike. Stephenson repeated the dazzling tricks of Crytonomicon with The Baroque Trilogy, three massive tomes telling the story of the Royal Society, the beginning of science and the formation of the modern world through the creation of financial debt instruments (in these books, it is the invention of debt that allows England to defeat France - I wonder what Stephenson makes of that idea now). But read Cryptonomicon first.
11.22.63 by Stephen King
Even those who don't like him - who consider him the white sliced bread of the modern novel - have to acknowledge King's mastery of longform storytelling, and the appeal of this enormous volume is that of observing a true narrative watchmaker at work. King takes a tired old theme - what if you could go back in time and stop something awful happening? - and then works it through with patience, charisma and hard-won skill. If HG Wells had written The Time Machine in the early 21st century, it would have looked something like this. It counts as a weird history, too, because it takes characters who have become two-dimensional myths - specifically, Lee Harvey Oswald - and makes them breathe again through the context of a modern narrator. Masterful.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore
It's one thing to take a fictional character and place him or her inside a real history; it's quite another to take a set of other people's fictional characters and then place them within a world that combines real history with the cultural artefacts of a civilisation. Alan Moore, the dark clown prince of comics, took Wilhelmina Murray (married name: Mina Harker) from Dracula and hooked her up with Doctor Jekyll, Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man and Orlando (among others) and, in a series of comics which become ever more elaborate and intricate, propels them through worlds of imagination that take their internal logic from the myths and stories of the last 200 years. My personal favourite is The Black Dossier, which finds Harker, Quartermain and Orlando on the run from Bulldog Drummond and James Bond, who themselves work for a sinister organisation which arose from the ashes of Ingsoc and is run by old boys from Billy Bunter's Greyfriars. It's as mad and wonderful as it sounds. Note: any reference to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen must come with a health warning to avoid the film version at all costs.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Not entirely "weird", although plenty of odd stuff happens, but here because it describes a past in such a resolutely modern way that the vanished worlds come alive again, brightly and brilliantly (I could just as easily have chosen Wolf Hall). It is set in 1799 in Nagasaki Harbour, where the island of Dejima is joined by a gate to the mainland and is the only connection between Japan and the outside world. The Dutch East India Company holds the trading rights on the island, and it sends along a new employee, Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk from the Netherlands who falls for the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor. An extraordinary achievement of research and style, this is a book which describes a moment and a place in history that are so surpassingly odd as to be distinctly weird.
SS-GB by Len Deighton
Unsurprisingly, given the binary good vs evil narrative of the second world war, "what if?" stories based on the period are legion. Robert Harris notably mined the seam with Fatherland, but my favourite is SS-GB. Douglas Archer (a name which resounds with both Bader and Agincourt) is a homicide detective working in Nazi-occupied Britain, who uncovers a London murder case which, inevitably, leads to the upper reaches of the Nazi occupation government. I read it as a teenager, and was horrorstruck by it.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Ah, zombies. Zombies, zombies, everywhere. Why exactly? Perhaps because zombie stories lend themselves particularly well to establishing a world which is both real and shockingly different; zombies are like us, of course, only much, much weirder. World War Z is here as a pastiche history of the Zombie War, which (as I'm sure you remember) came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Brooks creates a set of invented interviews and documents to describe the growth of the zombie plague, and the dispassionate documentation works brilliantly as a means of establishing and then slowly ratcheting up horror. Zombies work in comics and movies, in books not so much - apart from this one.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
Powers struck commercial gold with his novel On Stranger Tides, which was used as the source material for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. But he's made his name by writing weird histories, specifically as I've defined them: taking documented historical events and then adding a supernatural twist to them, either to fill a gap or to explain the inexplicable. In The Anubis Gates he goes to town on this idea, his hero a modern Coleridge scholar who finds himself trapped in 1810 battling a cabal of magicians and ancient Egyptian gods against the background of rising British military power in the Middle East.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is the master of small things beautifully described, and in Never Let Me Go he takes a well-established archetype - a boarding school in the English countryside - and slowly subverts it. His characters live in a world which is quintessentially English and yet somehow exquisitely different. The location of this difference gradually becomes apparent, and allows Ishiguro to ask a simple question: what would a world look like in which a major biological breakthrough had happened in the recent past? His world is one reeling from an ethical explosion which works its way out, beautifully and very, very sadly.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln
No weird history is as satisfying as a conspiracy, and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is here as the archetypal expression of perhaps the biggest conspiracy of all, one which connects popes, scientists, presidents, prime ministers, Christ and even Dan Brown in a chain of association ("what if this meant this?") so elaborate and persistent one can only admire the authors' stamina. The core assertion - that Christ did not die on the cross, but sired a line of "children of God" who are protected to this day by a secret society - was taken by Brown as the engine of The Da Vinci Code, featuring a character called Leigh Teabing whose name, of course, is an amalgum of two of the authors of The Holy Bloody and the Holy Grail. Brown was sued by the authors for lifting whole parts of their book for his own; the presiding judge said this could not be plagiarism, as they had presented their book as a history, the facts of which should be available to other authors to use. The irony of this is so exquisite Christ himself would crack a smile.
Lloyd Shepherd was born in 1966. He lives in South London with his wife and two children. His first novel, The English Monster, is published by Simon and Schuster in the UK on March 1 2012, and by Washington Square Press in the US in May. A former journalist, he also built and managed websites for the Guardian, Yahoo, the BBC and Channel 4.Buy The English Monster at the Guardian bookshop
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Shalom Auslander's top 10 comic tragedies Feb 29th 2012 10:43
From Catch-22 to the Book of Job, the author of Hope: A Tragedy picks his favourite books that 'look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger'
Shalom Auslander is the author of a story collection, Beware of God, and the memoir Foreskin's Lament. His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, follows the travails of a man who discovers Anne Frank, still alive in the 21st century and working on the follow-up to her bestseller, living in his attic.
Buy Hope: A Tragedy at the Guardian bookshop
"There is a clothing brand in the United States named 'Life Is Good', a monstrous lie which is emblazoned on all their products. It is an enormously successful brand, and I'll tell you why: because life isn't good. 'They give birth astride of a grave,' wrote Samuel Beckett, 'the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.' He was only half-right; he left out the part about there being banana peels on the ground beside the grave, so that from the moment we are born, we slip, and drop our coffee, and everyone points at us and laughs, and then there's a Holocaust, and then, and only then, is it dark once more. Books that cry at the tragedy are easy and, in my view, lazy; these books look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger. That's much more difficult."
1. The Five Books of Moses
Funniest book ever. We open on a man being told that his future is going to be awesome, if he'll just travel to Egypt. So he goes to Egypt, where his children are enslaved and put to hard labour. For 400 years. The family at last escapes, enters a forbidding desert and gets lost. For 40 years. Finally, five volumes later, they reach the promised home, only to be relentlessly attacked, invaded and chased away. The End. Hilarious. If this really is the writing of God, He and I are going to par-tee.2. Candide by Voltaire
A young couple dreaming of an idyllic future get chased from their home into a dark, forbidding, well, planet: everything sucks, everywhere. They are separated from each other, beaten, robbed, raped. There are wars, conflicts, disasters of every kind, and by the time the once-happy couple reunites at the end, his naive optimism is all but gone, and she is but a haggard, broken shadow of her former self. The End. Hilarious.3. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh is a dark writer, God bless him, and this might be his darkest. Suffice it to say that if I tell you "The kid dies," it doesn't begin to ruin it. In a crumbling old Victorian home, a family crumbles while doing their best to maintain appearances and lie to themselves. There are affairs, shams, deceptions, death, and a version of Hell that involves being forced to read Charles Dickens for eternity. It doesn't get much worse – thus better – than this.4. The Book of Job
For 90% of this book, it is one of the darkest, funniest cris de coeur ever composed. A dick (God) decides to test a good man (Job), destroying all his property, killing his family and covering him with boils. Job loses it and goes off on a fantastic tirade against God, even as his friends tell him to watch his mouth or else. "Or else what?" Job asks. Then, the best part: God comes down and gives Job an ass-kicking, shouting at Job, declaring Himself so wonderful and amazing and awesome that Job will never know, all the while, in His arrogance, confirming every bad thing Job accused him of. It's awesome. Then they focus-grouped it or something, and tacked on an apology from Job and a bullshit happy ending. Publishers! Tear out the last 10 pages, and it rocks.5. Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson
Answering to their better natures, a young Dutch couple decide to hide a poor Jew from the Nazis. They put him upstairs, feel pretty damn good about themselves, and then he drops dead. Up there. Hilarious.6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
If you don't already know this one, you should be reading a Murdoch-owned paper and screaming about socialism (which you also likely don't know anything about). Too long by half, perhaps, this book made it almost impossible to go to war without feeling just the tiniest bit silly. Unless you read Murdoch-owned papers. AWOL as a happy ending. Hilarious. Joseph's Something Happened is even darker, but I figured I'd start you off in the shallow end of the murky Heller pool. But read that one, too.7. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Nothing I've ever read attempting to describe this book has ever come close. Just read it. Trust me. It's so goddamned dark and pained and furious and sad and funny, you almost forgive Louis for having been a Nazi sympathiser.8. Anything by Samuel Beckett
Joyce, Beckett's mentor of sorts, was a dick. He knew everything, and wanted everyone to know he knew everything. Until Sam was 40, he tried to do the same thing. Then, one day, he realised he was the opposite of Joyce: he knew nothing. He didn't know why we are here, what we should do, how to go on, and what to think. Nothing mattered, nothing made sense, and, worst of all, he didn't have enough rope to hang himself. And so Beckett spent the next 40 years writing just that. Despair has, and never will be, any funnier.9. Anything by Flannery O'Connor
Guilt-ridden sons, overbearing religious mothers, serial killers, thieving pastors, one-legged men: Flannery was nuts, in the best possible way. There is darkness in these stories, a heavy palpable darkness, but if you're missing the comedy, you're missing the part Flan liked best: she never did readings, because she couldn't stop laughing.10. Anything by Franz Kafka
Everything Kafka wrote began as a joke, that Franz, in his wisdom, took very seriously, taking it, in the words of Milan Kundera, into the "dark depths of the joke". Singing mice, talking apes, men who turn into bugs, cops who arrest you for no reason. This was Kafka's hilarious idea: life itself is a joke, and a joke we have no choice but to take seriously. That, however, doesn't mean it isn't funny.guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Paul Mason's top 10 books about China Feb 22nd 2012 10:49
From 17th-century pornography to meticulous social history, Newsnight's economics editor writes about the books that inspired his first novel, Rare Earth
Paul Mason is the BBC's Newsnight economics editor. He is the author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2008), Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2010) and, this year, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. His first novel, Rare Earth, has also just been published.
"If you're trying to understand China the language issues are secondary. The real problem is this is a country ruled through the suppression of historical memory. The Communists' legitimacy rests on the claim that only stultifying bureaucracy and patriarchy can keep it together; that it is "not ready" for democracy; indeed that it was never ready.
"But delve into Chinese literature, and history, and a more much more complex picture emerges. After the May Fourth 1919 protests, the intelligentsia embraced modernity and fought for it. The early 20th century produced the Chinese Dickens and a whole legion of Orwells. The late 20th century produced a generation of novelists whose sufferings during the Cultural Revolution pushed them towards everything from magic realism to cyberpunk.
"What follows are 10 books that influenced me in the writing of Rare Earth: five must-read Chinese novels, five western-authored non-fiction books worth reading."
1. The Real Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (translated by Julia Lovell)
Between 1911 and 1927 China had a democratic revolution, then an abortive workers' revolution. In the process came a cultural revolution, of which novelist Lu Xun was the central figure. His fictional character Ah Q entered popular culture of China as a symbol of bureaucratic stupidity, self regard and obsession with hierarchy. Today, China is once again run by men of Ah Q's calibre, and Lu is out of favour.2. Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
This is Mo's masterpiece: China's 20th century told symbolically through the story of one man, from birth to maturity; an adult who cannot wean himself from his mother's milk, assailed by wave upon wave of misfortune, poverty, war, imprisonment and finally release into the grubby capitalism of the 1990s. Mo Yan's China is a world of magic, sexual exploitation, ignorance and senseless violence.3. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
This fictionalised memoir of a journey down the Yangtse River was acclaimed as a landmark in Chinese literature when he won the Nobel prize in 2000. It's a novel of introspection and loneliness. Gao's plays have been banned from performance after the authorities condemned his drama about the Tiananmen Square massacre as "a fabrication" on the grounds that he had not been there at the time.4. The Plum in the Golden Vase (translated by David Tod Roy)
This classical novel has spent much of the time since 1610 on the banned list, as pornographic. For once, the censors may have a point. It's a novel of manners, set amongst noblemen and concubines, which makes Fanny Hill look Presbyterian and the artefacts available in Anne Summers look distinctly unimaginative. You can trace the influence right through to modern Chinese fiction …5. Wang in Love and Bondage by Xiaobo Wang
… for example. Wang, who died in 1997, and was modern China's Genet. Haunted by his suffering during the Cultural Revolution, Wang's fiction is, well, strange: gay sadomasochism, casual satire against the state, surreal sex. When his character Wang, and paramour Chen, write a confession of their secret love affair, Wang admits his lover "looked like a koala bear. She admitted she was very excited that night and really felt like a koala bear." So it goes.6. The Penguin History of Modern China by Jonathan Fenby
Jonathan Fenby's scholarly volume manages to escape the biggest pitfall of contemporary history writing about China, which is anachronism. Too many studies see the modern, stagnant polity and deferential culture as simply the return of normality in China, after an interruption that began on May Fourth 1919 and ended with the death of Mao. Fenby tells it as a story of modernity and democracy - attempted and defeated.7. Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 by Philip Cunningham
This memoir of the 1989 student rebellion captures the senseless beauty of the rebellion from close up: Cunningham was a foreign student freelancing for the BBC, who knew many of the protesters and witnessed the main events. As events spiral out of control, his prose becomes filmic, poetic, disturbed.8. Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour by Hsiao-Hung Pai
Investigative journalist Hsiao-Hung documents the lives of Chinese migrant workers in the UK, prey to a vivid, near surreal panoply of gangsters, traffickers, pimps and middlemen whose defining feature is that they appear to be invisible to the British authorities. She explains the push factor too: writing with brutal honesty about conditions for Chinese workers in the PRC, and the criminal networks all too ready to offer the solution of semi-slavery in Europe.9. Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience by Charles A Laughlin
In the 1930s, China seemed headed for democracy, national liberation and modernity. On the periphery of Chinese communism and liberalism a strong tradition of reportage journalism developed, represented above all by Mao Dun, the Chinese Orwell. By the time Orwell got to Wigan Pier, dozens of Chinese writers had already journeyed to the depths of industrial squalor. Their work is intelligently explained and translated here by Yale professor Charles Laughlin.10. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 by Emily Honig
A sidelong glimpse into the lost world of inter-war Shanghai. While Hollywood stars and jazz legends cavorted on the neon-lit river-front, the largely female factory workforce did something their great grand-daughters are still not able to: formed unions, marched out on strike and, temporarily, seized power. This (1986) study is part of a canon of Chinese social history rediscovered by western scholars.guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Will Eaves's top 10 siblings' stories Feb 15th 2012 11:38
From Sophocles to Shirley Jackson, the novelist chooses the best depictions of the pain and comedy that come with our closest relatives
Will Eaves is the author of three novels, The Oversight (2001), Nothing To Be Afraid Of (2005) and This Is Paradise (2012). His chapbook of poems, Small Hours, appeared in 2006. A full collection, Sound Houses, followed last year. For many years he was the arts editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He now teaches at the University of Warwick.
Buy This Is Paradise at the Guardian bookshop
"The sibling bond is probably the most readily sentimentalised of family relationships. Soaps commonly appeal to the saving intimacy of the blood-tie ('we're family, yeah?'), and the unnameable hubris of the gangster flick is usually the betrayal of one brother by another ('you broke my heart, Fredo!'). But of course good and bad alike are old news to those of us who love, and suffer, our families, because we know that brothers and sisters are competitors as well as relatives. Each childish row ('but she always goes first! I want to go first!') when we're growing up together – and indeed for the rest of our lives – is a dramatisation of two things: the fight for resources (parental love, time, attention, food, inheritance) and the slow, largely unspoken revelation of why co-operation works to our advantage. I think it's also something else, which can't be reduced to Darwinian socio-economics. When there is division between siblings, something painful is being aired from which we may, if we choose, draw a deep lesson: all are not equal, and the world isn't just in its allocation of riches, but rivalry can conceal co-operation. The dearest enemy is often our best teacher. Strangers will become family members, and family members will become strangers. Rejection forces us to look beyond the tribe.
"The early sibling bond is a preparation for other adult relationships, of course – though it's by no means equivalent to them, and corruption or disaster generally befall those who make the mistake of clinging to it as a model of dynastic rule or sexual union (Siegmunde and Sieglinde in Wagner's Ring). Incest taboos are there to prevent corruption of the line; they crop up all the time in revenge tragedies. But the tales about brothers and sisters that appeal to me address something simpler: how there is no such thing as a given intimacy in families, though we often insist on it and feel entitled to our version of a shared past. That sense of entitlement, and the way we use it to dodge the simple fact that we don't always like those to whom we are bound, is a source of endless pain and comedy."
1. The Book of Genesis
Chapter Four: Cain and Abel. Or Birth of the Underdog. Abel gets the livestock, and the pets presumably, and poor Cain has to make do with a bag of seed. The Lord likes Abel's choice-cut offerings, but isn't as impressed by Cain's "fruit of the ground". Cain decides to do in Abel – no one likes a show-off – though it's not clear why and the economy of suggestion is terrific ("And Cain talked with his brother Abel"). The Lord has backed himself into a generative corner, however, and ends up having to protect Cain after the murder, because Adam and Eve haven't yet had Seth, their third child, so the future of the species depends at this point on the gloomy fratricide.
2. Antigone by Sophocles
Antigone has two dead brothers. One is a Theban war hero, the other Polynices, a traitor whose body has been left to rot on the field of battle. When she performs burial rites for the latter in defiance of King Creon, she outrages the rule of law but satisfies the older, chthonic gods, who defend bonds of blood. Or so she claims. Her motivation is ambiguous: I think what she spots, and hates, is the triumphalism of city politics. Antigone may or may not have loved her brother. What she definitely loathes, however, is the state. She wants semi-divine Families back in power.
3. Persuasion by Jane Austen
The conclusion to the delayed romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth is Austen's most satisfying – beautifully plotted and paced, and dependent for its powerful effect on the wonderful distractions throughout the novel of the sibling relationships. We could not feel as we do for Anne, and for her desire to break free, were we not convinced of her plight as the undervalued middle child. Elizabeth, her unmarried older sister, disdains her. Mary, younger and married, is a shrill comic gabbler, though perhaps not as silly as she appears. Her happiness for Anne, in the end, while it springs from vanity, comes as a touching surprise.
4. The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
This is the best of the Little House books, and a good psychological study as well as a terrific depiction of hardship and desolation. In the bitter winter of 1880-81, a South Dakotan community is cut off from food and supplies. Laura is naughtier than Mary, but she is also, for the moment, more useful: Mary, good and beloved, is blind. Laura can help her father twist hay to burn as fuel; she can grind wheat. Her wilfulness is turned to account. Responsibility brings with it authority, a future (she meets Almanzo, her husband-to-be), and compassion.
5. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
All the critical emphasis on the island, colonialism, and the is-it-in-his-head aspect of Prospero's realm, tends to overlook the fact that this is really a story about sibling usurpation and "favourites". Prospero, the Duke of Milan, has been displaced by his brother, Antonio. But the exiled sorcerer has done a fair amount of displacing himself, dumping the brutish Caliban, after he made a confused lunge at the magician's daughter Miranda, in favour of the sprite Ariel. Caliban and Ariel are best seen as pseudo-siblings, treated unequally by a capricious stepfather.
6. Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb
The film (directed by Charles Laughton) of this great slice of mid-century American gothic has long overshadowed the source material, which is a shame. Grubb's novel is hawser-taut. John and Pearl Harper are the young children of the hanged Ben Harper. They know where $10,000 is hidden and the terrifying Preacher (Robert Mitchum in the movie) comes after them to get it. "Hansel and Gretel", I suppose, but lyrically transposed to Depression-era West Virginia.
7. The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca
The last instalment in Lorca's rural dramatic trilogy, Bernarda Alba is the horrible but compelling story of a widow whose diabolical morbidity ruins the lives of her six, sex-starved daughters. Pepe el Romano, a man never seen on stage, is interested in the rich, eldest daughter Angustias, but he's actually having an affair with the youngest, Adela. This isn't a family, it's a repressive regime – and in a regime, where spies are everywhere, even siblings will inform on each other. Emily Mann's new version of the play, currently showing at the Almeida in London, is set in Iran.
8. Washington Square by Henry James
Like Austen's Persusasion, this is another example of a novel in which the main plot – Catherine Sloper's sad love for a handsome but feckless suitor – comes about, in part, because of resentment between siblings. Catherine's father, Dr Sloper, forbids her match; his sister, Mrs Penniman, is a willing pandar to the couple. The egotistical doctor enjoys inspiring terror in his silly sister. He is quite sure he can intimidate his daughter out of her infatuation in the same way. But he can't.
9. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
The Radlett girls, growing up in a windy manse, being hunted by their father on horseback, and dreaming of love and escape, are lightly fictionalised versions of the Mitford sisters, and Nancy's famous 1945 novel is one of the funniest depictions of childhood and young adulthood ever written. It's kind, sharp, and unafraid to look hard at disappointment. Mitford kills herself off at the end. "The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness."
10. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Constance and Merricat Blackwood are sisters and neighbourhood pariahs who live in the shadow of scandal: Constance was once arrested for poisoning the rest of the family. She has been acquitted, however, and seems to have settled down to a quiet life when a money-grabbing cousin knocks on the door. Merricat, whose fidelity to the idea of family unity no one is in a position to question, comes to her aid. Scary, mad and gleeful, Jackson's marvellous thriller is also a clever meditation on sibling protectiveness. And insanity.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Lars Iyer's top 10 literary frenemies Feb 08th 2012 13:41
From Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, the novelist picks out the writers who portray true friendship as an antagonistic business
Lars Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot's Communism and Blanchot's Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and his blog Spurious. He has also written two novels, Spurious and, published by Melville House, Dogma.
Buy Dogma at the Guardian bookshop
"'In your friend you should possess your best enemy', Nietzsche writes. What a remarkable thing to say! This is a concept of friendship radically different from the smugly narcissistic friendship collectives of Facebook. Nietzsche's true friend is someone who challenges you deeply, who badgers, bothers, enrages, and insults you – an antagonist who is not content to leave you be. In the last few years, a bit of slang that describes this relationship has wormed its way into the Oxford English Dictionary: a frenemy.
"My novels, Spurious, Dogma, and the forthcoming Exodus, relate the adventures of two such frenemies, maverick philosophy lecturers W and Lars, who travel through Britain and overseas, bantering and bitching as they go. Of the two characters, it is W who is more obviously cruel, claiming that Lars is lazy, morbidly obese, and has a low IQ, as well as terrible sartorial sense. But Lars, it has been suggested, shows a special cruelty of his own, his frenmity apparent in the deadpan way he narrates the novels, allowing the wildly idealistic, failure-loving W to hoist himself by his own petard. For my part, I find their fren-ship a refreshing alterative to the bland support networks of 'kidults' locked in positive feedback loops of mutual reassurance. True friendships should contain an element of the cruel and cutting. The oddly refreshing antagonism of frenemies is something I look for in life, and in the literature I read."
1. Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
Tall, thin Don Quixote is full of deluded imaginings, believing himself to be a knight-errant riding out to restore the bygone values of the age of chivalry. His comic foil Sancho Panza is short, fat, and ignorant, who, although aware of Quixote's delusions, lets himself be caught up in his companion's pursuit of honour and glory, albeit because he thinks he might get some personal gain from their adventures. Theirs is a sunny kind of frenmity, with Sancho as the comic sidekick, an everyman realist to his master's idealist, spouting what have come to be called sanchismos, a humorous mixture of ironic Spanish proverbs and put-downs.
2. Samuel Beckett's Vladmir and Estragon
Waiting for Godot or, Frenemies: A Love Story. Two bowler-hatted old men wait by a leafless tree, much as they waited the day before, and as they will doubtless wait the next day, too. In Beckett's play, there's all the time in the world to occupy – time for old jokes and pratfalls, for bickering and recriminations, for nostalgia and wistfulness; anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". Vladimir, the more philosophical of the two, tends to muse on abstract matters; Estragon, the more mundane, is more concerned with the whereabouts of his next meal. But they are united in the push and pull of their frenmity, as their waiting threatens to erode all hope.
3. Thomas Bernhard's Glenn Gould and Wertheimer
In The Loser, Bernhard presents his fictionalised Glenn Gould as the very embodiment of the great artist, which makes life very difficult, and, in the end, impossible, for Wertheimer, a fellow piano student at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Wertheimer gives up his studies for good when he overhears Gould's terrifyingly great rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. But it is when Gould casually labels his friend a "loser" that Wertheimer is sent into a vortex of self-loathing, and, eventually, suicide.
4. DH Lawrence's Gerald Crich and Rupert Birking
Lawrence's Women in Love is also a novel about men in love, and, indeed, in love with one another. Rupert Birkin, the central male character, has an evangelical sense that he must reckon with "the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men". His nude wrestling match with Gerald Crich, so memorably staged by Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Ken Russell's film, is a homoerotic tableau of the frenemy, with both men struggling at once for and against one another.
5. JG Ballard's James Ballard and Robert Vaughan
In Crash, when James Ballard is hospitalised after a car accident, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of a sinister former scientist, Robert Vaughan, who is obsessed with re-staging the car crashes of celebrities. Vaughan frightens Ballard even as he fascinates him, and their increasingly uneasy friendship tips over into something macabre. When Vaughan takes his last death drive, Ballard writes his hagiography, paying an ambivalent tribute to this Lucifer of the motorway.
6. Thomas Mann's Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta
Set in a sanatorium in Davos, in the decade leading up to the first world war, The Magic Mountain features a microcosm of the pre-war European intelligentsia, including the frenemies Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, the former embodying the positive, hopeful ideal of the Enlightenment, and the latter, the more chaotic, order-threatening aspects of fascism, anarchism and communism. The two men debate furiously, and end up fighting an improbable duel, foreshadowing the coming clash of ideologies that would tear the continent apart.
7. Gene Wolfe's Badlanders and Dr Talos
Gene Wolfe's epic science fiction series The Book of the New Sun has its share of mysteries. One of them is the strange friendship between Baldanders, the permanently exhausted giant who won't stop growing, and the wily, diminutive Dr Talos who beats, bullies and cajoles his larger companion. Initially, the seemingly slow-witted giant appears to be Talos's charge, but things turn out to be the other way around: Baldanders is actually a scientist allied with sinister alien forces, who built his frenemy Talos for obscurely masochistic purposes of his own.
8. Patricia Highsmith's Bruno and Guy
Patricia Highsmith is a master of the perverse friendship, and her first novel Strangers on a Train was no exception. Hitchcock's film version portrays Bruno as merrily murderous and Guy as morally upstanding, but the novel presents the two men intertwined in a twisted friendship that is more significant than any other in their lives. Guy may be disgusted by the drunken, vicious Bruno, but when Bruno falls overboard at sea, Guy instantly dives into the waves, unable to imagine life alone without his cruel friend.
9. Saul Bellow's Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleisher
In Humboldt's Gift, Charles Citrine makes a fortune from writing a successful Broadway play, based on the life of his older friend, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. Big mistake! Although his manic depression, alcoholism and pill-popping mean that he's never delivered on his early talent, Humboldt still upholds the loftiest ambitions for art – ambitions, which, he claims, Citrine has utterly betrayed. Citrine's success means that the easy friendship this pair enjoyed has gone, with Humboldt wounding his now frenemy with accusations of sell-out and crass commercialism.
10. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Stoppard famously sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the interstices of Hamlet, elevating two supporting characters from Shakespeare's play into leads. His focus is on how the pair occupy themselves when they are offstage in the parent play, which appears to be by aimless banter and mock-philosophical arguments. But there's an existential twist: Stoppard's characters seem to be aware that they are unimportant fictional characters, each casting aspersions on the other's comparative degree of reality, each claiming that the other doesn't really exist. Such acts of frenmity grant them what little sense of reality they have in a world which seems, to them, to be absurd and out-of-control.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
Alex Preston's top 10 literary believers Feb 01st 2012 10:48
From Dostoevsky to Zadie Smith, the novelist picks his favourite portrayals of characters struggling with faith
Alex Preston was born in 1979. He lives in London with his wife and two children. His first novel, This Bleeding City, was published in 2010. His second, The Revelations, is published this month by Faber and Faber. He also writes reviews for the Observer and the New Statesman and a regular panellist on the BBC Review. He tweets as @ahmpreston.
Buy The Revelations at the Guardian bookshop
" Steady, plodding relationships are not the stuff of great literature. As we all know, happiness writes white. Friction, fissures, flaws – love stories take their energy from impediments, they thrive under the heat of conflict. The same goes for belief. Quiet, placid faith fails to stir us. It's the dark night of the soul that we want in our fiction, the adolescent torment of Salinger's Franny or the guilt-ravaged Bendrix coming reluctantly to God in The End of the Affair.
"In previous centuries authors would have presupposed both faith and familiarity with the scriptures in their audience, but now religion has withered in the bright glare of science (at least in Britain), and our churches are increasingly Larkin's 'accoutred frowsty barn[s]'. Yet we still, some of us, feel the God-shaped hole, and courses and cults have sprung up to cater to those looking for meaning disenchanted world.
"I have always been fascinated by the outer reaches of religious experience, by the titanium-plated smiles of the born-again, by the visitations and mass-hysteria of Christian evangelicals. It's not only the secrecy and intrigue of those closed worlds; it's the way their members seem to have found an answer to so many of life's great questions. Frankly I'm envious. So when I read and write about believers, it's partly that I'm trying to find an authentic way into what they've got. So far I've not had much luck. Perhaps this is why it's characters in books who struggle with, rather than revel in, their faith who attract me.
"The four young friends in The Revelations all believe, but their conviction is tested to breaking point by the tragedy that unfolds over the course of a weekend religious retreat. Doubt stalks their every footstep, the charismatic priest who leads them suffers his own crisis of faith; that some of them are still believers at the end of the book is a kind of miracle."
1. Franny in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
Marcus and Abby Glass, two of the heroes of The Revelations, take their surname from Salinger's precocious family. Franny's breakdown in the second story perfectly captures the headrush of adolescent spirituality (and its resultant comedown). I have always been a little bit in love with her which is, I suppose, creepy, now I'm over 30 and she's still at college.
2. Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alyosha is a novitiate Russian Orthodox monk, Jesus-like, compassionate but totally powerless. He clashes with his brother Ivan, a rationalist and an atheist. Alyosha isn't divorced from the real world, though; he is a realist. As Dostoevsky says: "Faith, in the realist, does not spring from the miracle. But the miracle from faith."
3. Samad Iqbal in White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Literary grandees from Updike to DeLillo tried (and mostly failed) to represent the east/west cultural clash in the post-9/11 years. The most nuanced and sympathetic portrait of the experience of British Muslims comes earlier, in the form of Samad Iqbal, a devout believer attempting to fit his faith to his adopted nation. When tempted by his children's music teacher "he felt a cold thing land on his heart and knew it was the fear of his God". A character funny, touching and tragic in equal measure, through Samad Iqbal we understand the burden of the comfort of faith.
4. Sir William Gull in From Hell by Alan Moore
A high-ranking Freemason who suffers an extraordinary theophanic episode when the god Jahbulon is revealed to him in a vision, Sir William Gull uses the prostitutes he kills in the East End of London to satisfy an ancient religious blood rite. The image of the future in which a vast City skyscraper rears up above the crazed royal physician seems strikingly relevant as we survey the wreckage of the post-crash financial system: Gull's mystical cult seeks to perpetuate male dominance of society. Written at the start of the bubble that just burst, testosterone-fuelled derivatives traders were the offspring of Sir William Gull's gruesome satanic rituals.
5. Herr Naphtha in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
A Marxist Jesuit practicing a kind of religious fascism, Naphtha is one half of the dialectic duo that will bring Hans Castorp to his Bildung. The dark mirror of Settembrini's rational humanism, for Naphtha piety and cruelty are inseparable. Naphtha struggles with his inability to achieve the "graveyard peace" which he sees on the faces of his fellow believers. His death, like his life, is shockingly uncompromising.
6. Oscar in Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Brought up by a fundamentalist father from the Plymouth Brethren, Oscar sees "God's hand everywhere about", whether in gambling dens, at the racecourse or in the fate that brings him to Lucinda. "Our whole faith is a wager," he tells her. "We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it."
7. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix in By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
A Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, Lacroix is the narrator of this deathbed novella of religious compromise and hypocrisy. A priest for the ease of lifestyle it offers, Lacroix's real calling is literature. He meets Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger, gives lessons in Marxist theory to General Pinochet, and then, in a brutal final scene, realises that Santiago's principal literary salon has been held above a torture chamber. As he slips towards death, a hesitant truth begins to reveal itself …
8. Esti Kuperman in Disobedience by Naomi Alderman
Esti is the barren, lesbian wife of an Orthodox Jew, Dovid. Although only a foil (and lover) to the ballsy heroine, Ronit, this frail, silent character carries the heart of the novel with her. Esti is trapped with a paunchy, neurotic husband she doesn't love by her devotion to her religious belief. A book about a world that is at once bafflingly alien and surprisingly familiar.
9. Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
While his lover Sarah's faith is stronger, Bendrix's tentative, stumbling epiphany brings the novel to its breathtaking end. Greene pits the jealous lover against a jealous God; there will only ever be one winner. Bendrix's lament of "I hate You as though You exist" finally, reluctantly, becomes a prayer: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever."
10. Margery Kempe in The Book of Margery Kempe
Kempe's autobiography, dictated to an amanuensis, is the occasionally hilarious record of her attempts to relive Jesus's life. Her visions are full of male genitalia and gore, but they are also surprisingly touching (particularly the scene in which she makes a hot drink for the Virgin Mary to comfort her after the crucifixion). We read of Kempe's meeting with that other great medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich. Julian's Revelation of Divine Love is more spiritual and pious; The Book of Margery Kempe is more fun.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds