A Literary Life

In my reviews of novels long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:   Nicola Barker is no stranger to the Man Booker lists – she was shortlisted for Darkmans and longlisted for Clear – and yet she is one of those novelists that I’ve never gotten around to reading.   I should have come to her sooner, for on the basis of The Yips, she is bloody brilliant. It seems, to me, that Barker’s fiction is all about the characters – the plot is almost incidental – and in The Yips the cast of characters is broad and all well drawn.   There’s Shelia, a vicar, who is married to Gene, who works three jobs and has survived cancer seven times.   He works with Jen, who is a barmaid with a PhD in bullshit.   Together they meet Stuart Ransom, a golfing legend whose life is in freefall.   Then there’s a tattooist who specialises in genital tattooing, and a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist.   Their lives collide, again and again, quite ofte...

In the next of my posts about Man Booker Prize long-listed novels in 2012, I turn now to:  Alison Moore is a debut novelist, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, has been receiving rave reviews – and a lot of press attention for its small publisher, Salt – following its long-listing in the 2012 Man Booker Prize.   The book, winningly presented, comes adorned with praise from the likes of Margaret Drabble and Jenn Ashworth.   It is, then, difficult to come to this work without expecting rather a lot of it. A middle-aged man, recently separated, has come to Germany to walk part of the Rhine.   Futh’s life has not gone well – he has little to show for it, and he rarely makes an impression.   As he sets out on his walking holiday he begins to reminisce on the things that have gone wrong.   In a parallel storyline, hotelier Ester is becoming increasingly restless in her marriage to Bernard, a violent man who is drifting apart from his wife, and s...

In my reviews of Man Booker Prize long listed novels, I now turn to: Will Self has always been one of those writers whose work I hear about.   His novels all sound tricksy, clever and comic – three qualities I adore in fiction, and yet, somehow, I’ve managed to avoid reading his fiction all these years.   This is not to say I’ve not read his other work – his occasional pieces in British newspapers have been interesting, insightful, if occasionally sending his readers to their dictionaries.   This later quality is often seen as a negative to the Self-bashers – why does he see fit to exclude the majority of his readers by using words not in common usage?   It’s a crap question, and only an idiot would ask it.   That said, he is not going to win many over with his new novel, Umbrella, which will not only have them rooting out their dictionaries, but also their medical encyclopaedias.     This, as I see it, is a good thing.   Self has ...

In the latest of my reviews of long-listed novels for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I turn to: Communion Town, by debut novelist Sam Thompson, is one of the more surprising entries in the 2012 Man Booker Prize long-list.   Though the cover blurb does not advertise it as such – though it hints at it – this is a collection of ten short stories set in around the same fictional city.   This, as a description, however, suggests continuity, and this is the last thing on Thompson’s mind.   Much like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the one city seen in this work changes dependent upon who is telling the story.   Some of the stories are pastiche – of Sherlock Holmes, of American pulp detective fiction – some stray into science fiction, some into horror, others into thriller and romance.   The novel (if we can call it that) is then a blend, a phantasmagorical journey into the night of a city where anything is possible and indeed will happen. Being a colle...

By my reckoning, it’s a week until Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s magazine, releases the results of its ten yearly poll.   For those not in the know – every ten years, beginning in 1952, Sight and Sound has surveyed the world’s directors and critics and asked them what they think the 10 best films of all time are.   Every decade but the first has seen Citizen Kane come in at number 1.    I suspect this year will see Kane lose that top spot for the first time since ’52 – Tokyo Story might rise above it, as might Sunrise (a film more viewed and accessible now and in a quality blu-ray print).   As is usual, I suspect no film more recent than 1979 will make the list.   In 1961, Penelope Houston, then editor of the magazine, asked people to play this “impossible but intriguing game again” and nominate 10 films.   Nick James, the current editor, has been doing the same again over the last twelve months.   Because I’m not a famous di...

 In the third of my reviews of the Man Booker Prize long listed novels in 2012, I turn now to: Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, Narcopolis, tells the story of an opium den in Bombay in the 1970s.   Shuklaji Street is where the no-hopers, the prostitutes and eunuchs, the dealers and the users hang out, and Rashid’s opium den is the most famous.   Later in its life, film stars will come there, directors will look to it for inspiration, and the dispossessed will find solace in its walls.   Thayil’s prose is liquid gold.   He has perfect control, and his novel drifts between scenes as if riding the opium high.   That he has received critical acclaim as a poet comes as no surprise – there is poetry in these words.   His central characters – Rashid, Dimple, the eunuch, and Mr Lee, the Chinese worker who has fled his homeland (narrated through an exciting aside that takes us into Mao’s China) – are all equally well drawn.   There is a sub...