Suzi Feay

May 21, 2013

The gigantism of Jay Gatsby

By suzi

I went to see The Great Gatsby with some trepidation. I’ve read the book several times, always to fresh surprise; it seems endlessly enigmatic and brilliantly faceted. Was Baz Luhrmann the right director for this beloved classic? We knew he could direct a party sequence: and yes, the sequins shimmer, legs scissor, corks pop, pearls and swimming pools glimmer. But the novel shows up the hollowness, dreariness and pain at the heart of the era and foreshadows the long hangover to come. To fall in love with all the decadence is to miss the moral point.

It took me a while to get used to the 3D; the prettified opening scenes somehow combine flatness and depth like a Pollocks toy theatre. Also, I kept feeling travel sick. No one can mention ‘the light at the end of Daisy’s dock’ without Luhrmann swooping you over the waves at high speed to meet it. There is also the question of what we might call Gatsby’s gigantism. Not only does he live alone in an enormous castle, he’s having a millennium party every single weekend, just to get Daisy’s attention. The financial scale is ridiculous, merely drawing attention to the film’s artifice, rather than to Gatsby’s mystery. This lack of realism fudges the central question: what sort a person is Jay Gatsby? Even Russian oligarchs don’t carry on like that.

Gatsby is great not because of his money, but because of his capacity to love and hope eternally. Does a great love require a great object? As Daisy, Carey Mulligan looks lovely and delivers her iconic lines with aplomb: the awkward, bathetic ‘I certainly am awfully glad to see you again’ on her first sight of Gatsby for five years, and the bitter ‘that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ She’s cute, charming, delicious, but we can’t fathom Gatsby’s adoration because, well, you never can understand such a thing from the outside.

Nick Carraway is one of those unobtrusive narrators who make perfect sense on the page; his are the eyes we look through, his is the moral viewpoint. But in a film we just think, what’s with this dozy, sexless guy and why does he keep hanging around? Tom Buchanan gives him a sleazy raison d’etre I don’t remember from the novel: ‘I know you like to watch…’ Tobey Maguire plays him attractively with an air of depthless puzzlement, which is probably the best you can do.

The framing device of having Carraway write the novel as a memoir at the behest of his psychiatrist is less successful: too many shots of Maguire tapping at an old typewriter. And if the ludicrous excesses of the party scenes can be explained as his exaggerations, then why should we believe any of his story? Not everyone will like the hip hop soundtrack (though I found it unobtrusive enough).

But the main reason to see this version is Leonardo Di Caprio, not an obvious choice for Fitzgerald’s ‘elegant young roughneck’ with the extraordinary smile ‘that you may come across four or five times in life’. The strongest scenes turn out not to be the orgies of Twenties decadence but the painfully tense showdowns as Tom and Gatsby fight over Daisy’s very soul. I was captivated by Di Caprio, long before Gatsby finally takes to the pool in his adorable onesie. Gatsby is the freshest, frankest, most unspoiled character here, which, when you think of how he makes his money, is the book’s central irony (and maybe the reason it still resonates today). Di Caprio with his old-young-baby-man face is wrong in the right sort of way for this part, and makes it entirely his own.

2 comments | tags: Baz Luhrmann, Carey Mulligan, Leonardo Di Caprio, The Great Gatsby, Tobey Maguire | posted in Uncategorized

May 17, 2013

Hotel cats and marzipan roses

By suzi

Mid-afternoon slump. The book was cast aside, the writing abandoned. Low blood sugar or some less tangible malaise? There was only one thing to do. I had to get baking.

Mary Berry At Home had the answer: Anzac crunch biscuits, which would use up the oats and the mysterious half-full bag of desiccated coconut lurking at the back of the cupboard. Some adjustments needed to be made; I didn’t have plain flour so used self-raising and accordingly reduced the bicarb; I was down to my last scrapings of golden syrup, so supplemented with maple syrup. Perhaps these tweaks are the reason why the biscuits didn’t rise and spread as much as Mary said they would. But oh my, they were good! Mug of tea, couple of warm biscuits, depression lifted.

It’s a principle John Whaite understands. The Great British Bake Off winner is frank in his sumptuous new cookbook, John Whaite Bakes (Headline): ‘I am unashamed to admit that I am a moody person,’ he confesses. ‘I have done, and do, battle depression.’ Since the trauma of his parents’ divorce, baking, he relates, ‘has been an inherently comforting process for me, and I turn to it whenever I am feeling particularly blue or when I’m worried about something.’

I was recently asked by Waterstone’s to interview John at the Piccadilly branch. Gigs with cooks aren’t normally my thing – I’m more used to grilling literary novelists or non-fiction writers – but meeting him for a glass of wine in the 5th floor bar beforehand, I was reassured by his easy manner. ‘Ask me anything. I love talking,’ he chirped.

The event was an exhilarating hour, as we talked about food memories and associations, healthy eating and the place of such indulgent fare in the British diet. His book features quite complicated delights like Salted Caramel Rum Babas, a variety of fabulous breads and cakes, some savouries and of course biscuits (must make his caramel shard cookies and cranberry, chocolate and pecan biscotti some time). John is now studying to be a patissier – ‘My marzipan roses are rubbish.’

Cooking is his art form and he’s always on the lookout for new flavour combinations (what I called ‘eating a marmite sandwich in a rose garden’). We solved some mysteries, too – why does Nigella never weigh anything? ‘I think that whole counter of hers is a giant weighing scale,’ said John sagely. And we discovered a shared obsession the programme Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, in which Ina ‘How easy is that!’ Garten, the happiest woman in the world, wafts around her enormous house and garden in The Hamptons, wondering what to cook husband Jeffrey for his Friday night supper.

A few days later I ran into John again at the Headline sales conference at BAFTA. (His marzipan roses were improving, he related.) Earlier I’d sat through a presentation of autumn books, and when Mary Berry herself came on to the screen the backing track was Elvis Costello, smoochily singing ‘She’, which made me giggle. Mary joined our table, looking astonishingly slender (John himself is a mere slip of a boy). Alas, she was too far away to talk to, but at the end of the dinner, my chance came. In the lobby, she heard me burbling about my Aga cookbook, then took both my hands in hers, fixed me with those extraordinary eyes and cooed, ‘Oh, DO promise me you’ll keep enjoying your Aga!’ And she floated away.

A few days later I went off to Kaspars, the newly opened fish restaurant at the Savoy, for a charity lunch with children’s author Michael Morpurgo, who was the writer in residence before the hotel’s closure for its grand Art Deco refurbishment.

While staying there (for three months!), he became fascinated with the story behind the hotel’s famous cat sculpture. Kaspar is always brought to sit at any table of 13 diners to avert bad luck. In gratitude for his three-month stay, Morpurgo wrote Kaspar Prince of Cats (HarperCollins), about an aristocratic cat who forms a bond with a Savoy bellboy. In between courses, there were cat-themed readings, from Carol Hughes, who read the late Poet Laureate’s work ‘Esther’s Tom Cat’ and other poems, a lovely Christmas story, ‘Cat in the Manger’ by Morpurgo’s illustrator Michael Foreman, and Virginia McKenna doing a spellbinding recitation of Blake’s peerless ‘Tyger’. And, of course, a reading from Kaspar Prince of Cats. There was no mid-afternoon slump that day.

Leave a comment | tags: John Whaite, Kaspars, Mary Berry, Michael Morpurgo, Savoy | posted in Uncategorized

April 29, 2013

It’s here… the Best First Novel Award shortlist for 2013

By suzi

Never let anyone tell you that evaluating novels is ‘all subjective’. There is individual taste, true, but in prize judging, it very quickly becomes clear that the same titles are cropping up again and again at the top of people’s lists. During the process, everyone had to sacrifice something or other, but coming up with a longlist was surprisingly easy.

But the more unanimity in a longlist, it seems, the fiercer the fighting will be with the shortlist – over titles which we had already agreed are wonderful books. The clinching question is ‘would we be happy if this book won?’, given that the final choice is made by an external adjudicator. Suddenly, Sicilian-style passions erupted, as the debuts were scrutinised, picked apart and tested to destruction.

So it was a tussle (I tell you, it’s less trouble electing a new Pope), but at long last I can announce the six shortlisted titles for this year’s Author’s Club Best First Novel Award.

They are:

The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber (Sceptre)

Absolution by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic)

Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson (Chatto)

Mountains of the Moon by I J Kay (Cape)

Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard (Hutchinson)

The English Monster by Lloyd Shepherd (Simon & Schuster)

I’d like to thank the members of the the Authors Club, and the prize committee, for all their hard work – and their passion!

There will be a shortlist event at Foyles on 15 May (see their website for details) and the winner will be announced on June 3. The guest adjudicator is the novelist Salley Vickers.

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April 24, 2013

Too many good debuts

By suzi

Yesterday was a hell of a (literary) day. It began for me with an interview with Kate Clanchy for the Independent on Sunday. We met at Blacks club to discuss her excellent debut Meeting the English (Picador), which I’m sure will be a hot contender for next year’s Authors Club Best First Novel Award. But first we have to get this year’s prize out of the way.

I didn’t have to move far for the shortlist lunch – one floor down, in fact. At a meeting the previous week, the committee had chosen 12 longlist titles without too much blood on the carpet. It was one of the strongest longlists we can remember, and as chair of the committee I suspected it wouldn’t be easy to get down to a final six.

I started off by suggesting that three titles that had consistently reaped excellent readers’ reports (the prize is judged by members of the Authors Club) should go straight on to the shortlist, but oh no – ‘I didn’t like that one…’ ‘I wasn’t impressed’ and ‘I preferred…’ came the dissenting voices. About an hour later all three were indeed placed on the shortlist. Sigh. It’s not a process you can rush.

With some sulks, and howls, and outbursts, the shortlist pile began to grow. It reached five…. and there we stuck fast. Three amazing books are contending for the final place. Last year we decided to have a shortlist of only five, but we are determined to get to six this year. So, although time is pressing (there will be an event with the shortlisted authors at Foyles on May 15) we all have over the weekend to come to a final decision.

Therefore, we’ve decided to publicise the longlist in the interim. All the discussions that take place involve the books and only the books, but once we get a list together it’s interesting to crunch the numbers: 10 women, 2 men; a good showing from Random House; and only one small press this year.

So, I bring you:

The Authors Club Best First Novel Award Longlist 2013

The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber (Sceptre)

Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott (Cape)

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (William Heinemann)

Absolution by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic)

Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson (Chatto)

A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson (Bloomsbury)

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)

Mountains of the Moon by I J Kay (Cape)

Alys, Always by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld)

Ramshackle by Elizabeth Reeder (Freight Books)

Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard (Hutchinson)

The English Monster by Lloyd Shepherd (Simon & Schuster)

It’s an incredible list. Next week, the shortlist will be unveiled.

Somewhat battered and bruised, I hand-delivered five of the titles to our guest adjudicator, novelist Salley Vickers, whose job I don’t envy one bit. It will be terribly hard to pick just one.

Finally, my extraordinary literary day ended with a sumptuous Mayfair dinner held by Andrew Kidd to thank the members of the committee who set up the Folio Prize, of which you will hear much, much more in the future. We toasted, we feasted, we laughed, we gossiped. And after all that I didn’t want to think about literary prizes again for quite some time.

Except – dammit – we still have to agree on that final title!

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February 11, 2013

‘I hate women…’

By suzi

Someone at Simon & Schuster has a dark sense of humour. Handsome Brute: The story of a ladykiller (£16.99) by Sean O’Connor is published on Valentine’s Day. O’Connor uses a gruesome case to illuminate a whole era, Mr Whicher-style. In 1946 Neville Heath’s crimes gripped and horrified a nation already somewhat unnerved by the reabsorption of a generation of trained killers after World War Two. No doubt I should have been reading something far more edifying, but horrible Heath drew me in.

Heath commanded public attention and fascination for two things that seemed then to be incompatible: his dashing good looks, and his appalling sadism. The cover image is rather ugly, but there’s a portrait on the back that’s much more striking; fair-haired and pensive, he looks a bit like Leslie Howard.

The portrait of post-war London is utterly compelling, with its relieved, over-stimulated and exhausted populace. O’Connor takes us right in to Heath’s seedy world of drinking dens, smoky clubs and shabby hotels. Pauline Brees had a lucky escape; the man who enticed her into a room in the Strand Palace Hotel, then beat and stripped her, was dissuaded when she screamed and alerted the management. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she had pleaded as the assault began. ‘I hate women,’ he replied. Two other young women were not so fortunate.

Heath is never allowed to overshadow the figures of his victims, Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall. The poignancy of their brief lives and the horror of their deaths is never sacrificed to their killer’s ‘charisma’. Heath, ex RAF, possibly traumatised by the war, remains enigmatic, a compulsive liar who killed two women he had been seen drinking with on the nights of their deaths; he told fanciful stories about his subsequent movements, as though only half-interested in avoiding detection.

Once firmly in the male-dominated criminal justice system he was charm itself, although he declined to explain his crimes. His fond mother convinced herself that the sex-killer wasn’t ‘the real Neville’. There was some disquiet over executing someone seemingly insane. His last letters, reproduced here, are striking in their facile glibness: ‘So now I’ll leave you. Cheerio, my dear, and very many thanks for everything.’

O’Connor quotes an extraordinary, almost homoerotic account of Heath’s execution from Albert Pierrepoint’s memoirs. He treated the corpse with a mawkish respect, draping a shirt modestly round the waist: ‘I received this flesh, leaning helplessly into my arms, with the linen around his loins, gently with the reverence I thought due to the shell of any man who has sinned and suffered.’ All very noble; but spare a thought for the victims, who had not sinned, who suffered considerably more and who were not treated so gently in death. Pierrepoint did congratulate himself, however, on his record timing: seven seconds between Heath entering the execution cell and the lever being pulled.

It is a grim and gripping tale, and it’s the details that linger in the mind: the anguish of Margery Gardner’s grown-up daughter when she finally discovered, years later, the truth of her mother’s death; Doreen Marshall’s sad, neglected grave in Pinner; and poor Mick Heath, the younger brother, who was always being asked: ‘Any relation to Neville?’ As O’Connor demonstrates, the curse of Neville Heath lingered for decades like an exceptionally bad smell. It’s a story worth pondering; not for the sake of one vile individual (O’Connor eschews cheap analysis), but for the stricken society his crimes grew from.

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November 22, 2012

Gulp – I take to the stage!

By suzi

A few months ago I was asked if I could read something at my friend Paul Burston’s excellent Polari night at the South Bank. Someone had dropped out and Paul needed a replacement reader – fast. My printer was broken so the prose piece I had been intending to read the following month wasn’t available. All I had was a red binder full of the poems I’ve occasionally written over the years.

I have a ‘say yes first, work it out later’ philosophy so having committed myself I spent an hour or two going through the file to see if anything would fit Polari’s queer/transgressive/dark/fabulous vibe. I narrowed it down to a poem about the Marquis de Sade and a sequence about the medieval child-murderer Gilles de Rais. (I know, cheery stuff.) As anyone who’s performed will testify, Polari’s audience is wonderful: attentive, open-minded, enthusiastic. Reading there was a emboldening and exhilarating experience.

Shortly afterwards I was asked by Lucy Popescu to read at one of her regular literary evenings. So last night I turned up at the Working Men’s College Library (a gem of a place) in Camden, poems in hand. The theme was debuts, and first up was Sandeep Parmar, who read from her collection The Marble Orchard and also an excellent poem in support of the band Pussy Riot, a cause close to Lucy Popescu’s heart. Ben Masters read a a witty and well-observed passage from his novel Noughties, about the Oxford students of his generation (he’s 25), and Liz Trenow clued us in about the technicalities of silk-weaving in a passage from her novel The Last Telegram. Patrick Flanery looked extremely poised and confident as he read from Absolution, longlisted for both the Desmond Elliott and the Guardian First Book Award.

I was enjoying the readings so much I kept forgetting that I wasn’t actually an audience member and would shortly be called on to perform. I had to force myself not to shuffle my papers while the others were reading. Then it was my turn, and I read out a selection of poems that mostly had never been seen or heard by anyone else; from my bedroom to the stage, as it were. I had no idea which, if any, were going to work. I felt very conscious that my eyes were glued to the page; I can’t do the rat-a-tat off-by-heart performance style that poets go in for these days. Also a little wobble got into my voice when I read ’Automatic Fortune Telling Machine’, formed from a terrible prediction I once received, including the phrases ‘The person you await: he will not come’ and ‘You are opposed by the very person you depend upon’. It still freaks me out, but I’ll obviously have to poet-up in future.

Because I had taken a varied selection, some funny, some serious, the people who came up afterwards tended to like different ones. Quite a few liked ‘Automatic Fortune Telling Machine’. One liked my cod-Romantic ode, ‘In the Non-Catholic Cemetery’, inspired by a recent trip to Rome when I visited Keats’s grave; and Paul Burston, who came along in support, particularly enjoyed ‘The Partition’. ‘You must read that at Polari,’ he laughed. ‘Gays love a bitter break-up poem!’ The nicest thing anyone said was ‘They’re all about something; they felt like they needed to be written.’ And they sort of did.

Leave a comment | tags: Ben Masters, Keats, Liz Trenow, Lucy Popescu, Patrick Flanery, Paul Burston, Sandeep Parmar | posted in Uncategorized

October 24, 2012

Psyche Superheroine

By suzi

By guest blogger, playwright Hope Whitmore

I first came across Eros and Psyche at the flat of my friend Katy, an artist, who owned a tatty hardback book telling the story of the lovers. I was always entranced by Katy’s books, with their strange but gorgeous illustrations. She had books of fairies, nymphs, woodland creatures and old collections of photography with semi-clad women in sepia, their faces reflecting their awareness that their poses were daring for the 19^th century studios where they stood, frozen against theatrical backdrops of forests, beaches, sunsets and hotel suites.

Yet out of all these books, Eros and Psyche interested me the most with its simple black and white illustrations. The unreality of the pictures seemed to separate the story from now and place it into a realm outside time, dreamy, intangible, yet there in front of us.

I guess it was on the second reading that I suddenly saw something different, something which separated this story from other Greek and Roman myths. There are many tales of heroism, of obstacles overcome – Theseus and Heracles both venture into the realms of Hades on seemingly impossible tasks – yet Psyche is the only heroine who goes voluntarily into the realm of the dead, growing as she does so from an innocent young girl to woman.

She’s a mortal girl who is raised up to the status of Goddess in rags-to-riches style; however, unlike Cinderella, she doesn’t earn her good fortune with meekness and humility, the stereotypical virtues allotted to women in myth and fairytale. Rather, she is assertive: she fights, she stands up to Aphrodite, demanding to see her wounded husband. She treads the path between heaven and earth seeking advice from Pan, from Juno, from Hera, and she takes on the terrible tasks set for her by Aphrodite, seeking golden wool from monstrous sheep, taking water from the fiercest waterfall, and venturing into Hades to seek a beauty serum from Persephone.

What is fascinating about this story is not the love element. Eros, other than being immortal, has very little to recommend him; he is selfish, petulant, possibly violent, afraid of his Mother and without moral compass. He has his beloved kidnapped and then doesn’t allow her even to look at him, expelling her from the ‘paradise’ he has created, when she puts a lamp close to his face. What is remarkable is how hard Psyche fights, and how tough this girl of only seventeen proves to be.

In my stage adaptation, Psyche is introduced washing her bed sheets in a stream before putting them through a mangle. She wonders about the nature of love and expresses her fears about her impending visit to the oracle. There is something very fragile about her, intensified by her wonder and uncertainty, yet she is also an ordinary young girl who wishes for sensual love, while also not wanting to be separated from her family. Psyche’s normality, alongside her dreamy nature, instantly appeals. When reading the Apuleius version of the myth I pictured the story cinematically, soft-focused and dreamy, yet with elements of the day-to-day, the prosaic bought into relief and somehow made more beautiful in combination with the fairytale nature of the piece. I see it as almost similar to The Virgin Suicides, for the way in which light and darkness are mixed, each intensifying the other.

The darkest element of the tale definitely comes when Psyche walks through Hades, and is forced to close her heart to a drowning man on the river Styx, pet a snarling, three-headed hound and walk past the river of despair, where the dead float by. The fact that Psyche completes the challenge earns her the status of Goddess; however she has changed forever.

No longer is she the girl who put her bed sheets through the mangle and swam in the stream, counting the colours of the pebbles, and as she hears the oars of Charon moving away, she glances down into the river to see that she too has lost something. She has seen things which will weather her, age her and make her develop greater understanding, while taking away some of the softness which Aphrodite envied. You could therefore argue that Eros and Psyche is a coming-of-age story, a story where a young girl goes on her own odyssey and earns the title of heroine with her bravery.

It may seem like a love story set in hot, Mediterranean climes; however, it more a story of heroism, disguised as one of love.

Thanks, Hope!

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October 18, 2012

What would Paddy do?

By suzi

Eyebrows were raised in Curzon Street last night as a motley crew gathered around the door of Heywood Hill bookshop, all wearing curious blue devices round their necks with attached ear-pieces. Colin Thubron, actress Cherie Lunghi, Robert Macfarlane, Sara Wheeler, Jim Naughtie accompanied by his sound-woman, publisher Roland Philipps, the Spectator’s Mark Amory and many more milled around in the street, laughing, chattering and having their photos taken.

Artemis Cooper was leading a walk around Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mayfair to celebrate the launch of her new biography. (There is a rather splendid window display at Heywood Hill, featuring the book with its striking cover portrait of a handsome, thoughtful PLF.)

The first stop was 28 Shepherd Market, now a newsagent, but in 1933 the rooming house where a young Paddy hatched his famous plan to walk across Europe to Constantinople (as he called it). Berkeley Square was a good (albeit noisy) spot to discuss Paddy’s love of song, music and poetry, and not far away is Davies Street, where Paddy sold stockings from a base at the Running Horse pub.

In Stratton Street we were told about the trunks of notebooks, letters and diaries left in the Mayfair home of the Baroness d’Erlanger (rather sweet on Paddy). They were the contemporary records of the epic voyage, but alas, the Baroness sold her home during the war and sent the trunks to the Harrods Depository, who disposed of them. The loss, said Paddy, ached ‘like an old wound in wet weather’, but as Cooper explained, it also set him free. Certainly his writings about his great journey would be entirely different, and no better, had he had the notes to hand. (But ah, the loss to the biographer…!)

The next stop was 50 Albemarle Street, home of John Murray, PLF’s publishers (also, back in the day, of Byron, Darwin and Walter Scott). ‘Jock’ Murray VI’s relationship with PLF seems to have borne similarities to his predecessor’s with Byron, albeit less deferential; Jock went way beyond the call of duty for his errant but beguiling author. A brief stop by the Ritz conjured up the image of wartime Paddy in uniform, strolling in at the Arlington Street entrance. The nearby Cavendish hotel, now much altered, was where Paddy came under the wing of the legendary owner, Rosa Lewis, whom he used to accompany to Fortnums. ‘Young Fermoy’ [sic] charmed her, unlike another author of the day, Evelyn Waugh. Much offended by her portrayal in Vile Bodies, she vowed to ‘cut ‘is winkle orf’. It was at the Cavendish that Paddy met the tail end of the Bright Young Things, and indeed lost his virginity to one of its leading party girls, Elizabeth Pelly. (D J Taylor’s book, Bright Young People, is a stimulating account of the era.)

We lingered by the London Library, from which Paddy borrowed books on long-term lends, leaving Jock Murray to replace any lost volumes, then ended up at the Traveller’s Club in Pall Mall. He was a member for 66 years, and his bust looks benignly down from its plinth in the hall; he was always thrilled, said Cooper, that the staircase had been installed by Castlereagh for Talleyrand. It was the perfect venue for the official launch party. Cooper invited us all to raise our glasses to ‘Paddy and Joan’ (his wife).

At one point on the walk I had posed the jokey question ‘what would Paddy do?’ and got the answer, ‘He’d have had two martinis before even starting out.’ We promptly made up for lost time. Joining the throng were Cooper’s husband Antony Beevor, her agent Felicity Bryan, Ian Hislop, John Murray VII and the explorer Benedict Allen, who once interviewed Paddy, charming and gentlemanly to the last. Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure is a wonderful book about an extraordinary person; as its author says, ‘one of the kindest, funniest and most interesting people on earth’.

Leave a comment | tags: A Time of Gifts, Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper, Benedict Allen, Colin Thubron, Ian Hislop, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Robert Macfarlane, Sara Wheeler | posted in Uncategorized

September 29, 2012

J K Rowling’s harsh vision

By suzi

Well now we know she hasn’t spent the last five years bathing in champagne and rubbing caviare on her face. The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown £20), J K Rowling’s first adult novel, is a startlingly gritty read, without a trace of enchantment and not much in the way of humour either.

The opening line, ‘Barry Fairbrother did not want to go out to dinner’, is not exactly Tolstoy or Jane Austen, and the story takes a while to get going. Council official Barry – decent, kindly, a ‘fair brother’ indeed – drops dead within three pages, leaving the ‘casual vacancy’ of the title. He’s barely gone under the sod before the good citizens of Pagford start to draw up battle lines to replace his left-wing ideals with something much less compassionate.

There’s a large cast of characters, rapidly introduced, and to begin with this tale of warring factions on a parish council threatens to be almost, well, boring… but then in a series of brilliantly dramatised scenes, Rowling makes her characters come to life. Take Simon Price, the terrifying, bullying dad of one of the most sympathetic characters, the teenage Andrew ‘Arf’ Price. Devastatingly, his father calls him ‘Pizza Face’ and unleashes a torrent of expletives. We ain’t at Hogwarts no more.

Gradually what appeared at first to be a series of ‘types’ is fleshed out, sometimes literally. Here’s Howard, grossly fat owner of the local deli: ‘A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it…’ Howard may be unappetising but his wife Shirley is vile, a wonderful study in small-town spite and self-satisfaction.

Drug addict, single mum and occasional prostitute Terri Weedon is the town’s most spectacular screw-up, but Rowling’s unforgiving pen shows us barely a single happy marriage or functional family among those who see themselves as her social betters. Sons hate their fathers and despise their mothers, children hopelessly attempt to bring themselves up, middle-aged women dress inappropriately and dream about sex with young men; madness, criminality and lust lurk everywhere behind the demurely drawn curtains of Pagford.

Rowling is not someone who over-dresses her prose; the story is told in a plain yet vivid style with gives a strong sense of forward propulsion once the plot takes hold. Who could have guessed that her dialogue would be so clear and compelling, whether she’s depicting social workers doing a case review, teenage boys discussing sex, a young girl rowing with her stepfather or the practised evasions of a long-married couple? (Perhaps she slightly overdoes the speech patterns of the poorer characters: ‘”She din’ wanna come?” “She don’ know ye’. I on’y jus’ ‘eard”.’) Rowling generally likes her younger characters much better than the older ones, although one boy, Fats, forever nursing Nietzschean fantasies of supremacy, is almost as horrible as Simon Price. (Incidentally, I feel rather sorry for my former colleague, the music reviewer of the same name.)

The plotting is masterful, Rowling’s sense of how character inevitably drives action completely secure, the complex threads handled with assurance. The ending, as she apportions just desserts in a satisfyingly Dickensian manner, is breathtaking.

But what the book does seem to demonstrate is a clear-eyed and fundamentally pessimistic vision of human nature (this becomes evident when we realise she has killed off the most appealing character right at the start). There is a measure of redemption – for some. But overall, I can see why someone with this world-view might have wanted to spend a lot of time weaving magical fantasies.

Leave a comment | tags: J K Rowling, Simon Price, The Casual Vacancy | posted in Uncategorized

September 2, 2012

Bill Clegg’s rebirth

By suzi

Bill Clegg is the hotshot American agent – young, gay, highflying – who combined, for a short time at least, working for his authors with smoking crack in hotel rooms alongside casual pick-ups. The whole astonishing story was told in his first book, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.

I didn’t warm to that book. It was compelling and well-written, certainly, the sheer dirtiness and danger of the drug lifestyle outlined in vivid prose, but the author came across as smug, callous and careless of the impact his selfishness had on others. I struggle with the memoir genre anyway – all those suspiciously word-perfect conversations remembered with pinpoint accuracy after decades. James Frey did us a service by reminding us that effective memoirs are as novelistic as, well, novels. Clegg’s memoir had its share of self-exculpatory passages of childhood trauma, which to me sat oddly with the contemporary passages of life as a high-end drug user.

It strongly reminded me of a celebrated ’90s novel, Edward St Aubyn’s Bad News, another tale of New York hotel rooms, privilege, drug abuse and existential despair, though with the substance updated in Clegg from heroin and cocaine to crack. And somehow Patrick Melrose, Bad News‘s witty, self-loathing protagonist, never loses our empathy. There was a coldness, an aloofness about Clegg that I just didn’t like.

Perhaps he always had this sequel in mind. Ninety Days (Jonathan Cape) is the story of his valiant attempts to go ninety days without using, and connoisseurs of drug misery narratives will be cheered to hear it isn’t all plain sailing. The tone here is very different. Before we saw an arrogant young man just about managing to keep the circus open while wild animals raged untethered all about him. In Ninety Days he has lost almost everything: friends, money, job, apartment, clients and self-respect. Even the long-suffering boyfriend Noah has finally decamped. I liked Clegg a lot better for it.

Like the first memoir, it is exceedingly well written, with not a word to spare. It’s passionate without being histrionic, remorseful but without a smidgin of sentimentality. The first book’s whiff of ‘Face it, I am a bit cool, though, aren’t I?’ has completely dissipated as he finally counts the cost of his compulsion.

There are no more high-flying meetings with publishing giants for Clegg; instead he reports daily to a meeting for addicts, and sleeps on a former friend’s sofa, while another delivers care packages of deli goodies. In the meetings he finds a new order of friends, people the former Clegg would have despised, who mentor him and struggle along by his side. There are tragic crashes and painful lessons, shaky new relationships forged among the lost and the broken.

For all its valiant attempts to explain the addict’s mindset, the book is clear that with the best will in the world, no one can really understand an addict’s suffering without being one themselves. A new passion grips Clegg: to help others as he himself has been helped. His final appeal to any one else in the grip of addiction is a heartening hand-clasp of friendship and hope.

It’s a brief book, readable in one sitting (in fact I found it impossible to stop once I’d started). Somewhere in it he remarks that it took him two and a half years to write, and I’m not surprised: pain, self-abegnation and sadness are evident on each page. If the first book detailed the crazy downhill slope into madness, this traces the gritty, uphill slog. Some readers will no doubt find it less compelling. But he finally emerges into the sunlit uplands, you can’t help but cheer.

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