Literary Lumps

I've been away in Brussels, Ghent and Amsterdam, so apart from the company of Jonathan Frantzen's "Freedom", haven't been doing much that is literary. Well, it's all to the good, as there's going to be lots coming up with the Didsbury Arts Festival and Manchester Literature Festival hot on the heels. The former starts today, and lots on around the village for the opening day, though its a typical alabaster sky at the moment.

I'm one of many readers next Wednesday 28th September at Northern Tennis Club for the launch of the erotic "Quickies" anthology of flash fiction, and an evening, no doubt, of double entendres. All welcome. Just remember the safety word.

From 10th October the new literature festival is full of treats and the festival blog has writers picking out their own festival highlights.

Before then, and I'd almost forgotten, a change of night and venue for The Other Room, and their next event is at the Anthony Burgess Foundation this coming Monday.


And tomorrow you should head over to Chorlton where the Bad Language/Shoestring Press collaboration (aptly entitled the Bad Shoes Festival) takes over Elektric and Dulcimer bars.

If the weather is keeping you inside, the Bad Language next issue submission deadline is 30th September, theme:Bad Language, so go F- yourselves.

Is that enough?

A visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Does the novel exist as a cultural imperative in the 21st century? I would have said "no" - that it is purely a commodity and/or an artefact.

Imagine: reading "Ulysses", "1984", "Catcher in the Rye", "American Psycho" for the first time - with or without context.

It is late to the party to be giving the same kind of imperative to a novel which has already won the Pullitzer, but having read Jennifer Egan's "A visit from the goon squad", I could just scratch my chin and say "another novel" or could actually say that this is something more than special.

Anyone who is aware of American literature over the last 25 years should be aware that the Roth/Updike/Bellow/DeLillo great American Novel is not only a chimera but increasingly futile. American Pastoral, Rabbit Redux, Augie Marsh, White Noise happened at hapzard points in their careers - there is no peak, no trough, just an "is", they could, they did; and they are all men.

We can analyse that all we like but its an irrelevancy, because every generation creates its own macabre, its own serendipity, its own orthodoxy.

What is so amazing about Egan's "A visit from the Goon Squad" is that it cuts through all that, whilst being highly aware of where it's coming from. There seem, to be at least, two clear antecedents, Brett Easton Ellis's imperiously brilliant "The Informers" and David Mitchell's wonderful debut "Ghostwritten." Whether or not Egan has read these books, she takes from the first its fragmented stories, and from the second its sense of connection.

Fragments and connection weave through "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Its ostensibly a story about music industry types in the 80s, but weaves back and forward (again like David Mitchell) from the 60s to the 2020s(the future!) Whereas Micheal Cunnigham's excellent "Specimen Days" signals this, Egan's brilliant novel refuses to signal. This is a road trip without signs, and that is far harder than it should be. Yet, remarkably, she takes us with her, even as characters and perspecitves change. It would be so awful to call this a portmanteau novel, even though it is, because the weave is so fantastically achieved. Rather, I would say that Egan has "balance", because this, more than pretty much any contemporary novel I could mention, is a beautifully balanced novel. Conceits have a tendency to topple over; Egan's only topple to somersault again.

Does any of that make any sense? Here's the proper review: a group of 80s wannabes/casualties work out their life/come good/fuck up.

I can't write a proper review of this. The brilliant Sarah Churchwell has done that already - read that.

OK - you've done that. "We're the survivors" the central character Sasha says. I don't think I've read another contemporary novel that has been so aware of our frailty, our fragility.

"A Visit from the Goon Squad" is the novel that we should all be reading, all be writing, and it puts into the shade every other British or American novel over the last few years. It goes beyond the casualness of Eggars, whilst willing to embrace the whole McSweeney's footnote culture (but it does it better: it has a whole chapter that is a POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.)

I finished this novel and wanted to start it again - but I had to go and make a bonfire of this year's Booker prize shortlist first. It's that good. It transforms. It makes. It reduces.

Better than that it "questions." Whereas you can read most American novels and go "Who are these people?" after the usual consummate ironicness, something kicks in with "A visit from the Goon Squad" that stripped this reader of his cynicism. I've never met the people here, but I care about them alot more than the characters in A.M. Home's brilliant "This book can change your life." The not-caring was part of the action there.

The novel isn't perfect, (after all, which novel is?), there are a couple of emotional loose ends that don't quite add up. These are mine, maybe not yours, I want to read this novel again - immediately - from the start - and that's unhead of. There's a great Tom Petty song, Even the Losers, or there's the film "Dazed and Confused", or there's friends of mine who are not here any more....

And there's chapter 10, the second person (my favourite person, if it comes down to ranking them) "Out of Body" where a character lives and dies in Sasha's peripherary for purely a chapter, but may well be the best piece of American (or anywhere) fiction written in the first 11 years of this compromised century.

This is not a review, this is a homage.

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

"The Witches of Eastwick" may well be Updike's most well-known novel, as he remains a cult writer to many. (The brilliant Rabbit novels, which are his best and most famous work, don't seem to have had the wider cultural prominence of, say, "Portnoy's Complain" or "Gravity's Rainbow.") The reason for this, of course, is the 80s film that was made with Jack Nicholson as Darryl Van Horne and Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches. I must have read it not long after it came out (it was published in 1984)and enjoyed it immensely. Reading it again 20 years later, the enjoyment remained, but if anything, it's improved with age.

The 80s film has done it a number of disservices, not least by associating it with that time, when the book is firmly place in a particular time, the early 70s. The Vietnam war remains a crucial backdrop to the novel. The story, simple enough, is of a stranger, Darryl van Horne, coming to town, buying the "old Lennox mansion", and drawing in three divorcees in the town, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane. What draws Horne is their abilities, known to each of them, used sparingly, and for frivolous means. For these three women are witches, meet regularly in a suburban "coven" to share gin and reminisces about men. Female friends of a similar age call their own meeting a "coven", and Updike's novel offers a potent mix of female empowerment on the one hand, and a paeon to the mysticism of women on the other.

The 3 witches are already aware of their powers when van Horne comes to town; having not only deposited their respective husbands, but also using them for various domestic reasons. But this is a much darker witchcraft than Samantha in Bewitched, or even the Desperate Housewives-style of the recent for TV "Eastwick." In many ways, I think the novel is set firmly in the same world that his earlier sex comedy "Couples" takes place. It is a small town America that is no longer tied so much to its twin pillars of church and family. This is the messy America of the early 70s, with Vietnam firmly in the background, and the shock of economic downturn (and ruin) on every doorstep. Into this reality of the American dream Updike plants one of its most shameful episodes, the Salem witches, but in, what I think is a highly original conceit, witchcraft here is real, and part of being a woman. Their powers are acknowledged, even accepted by their community - as if in the madness of the times, a little witchcraft is the least of the problems.

What makes "The Witches of Eastwick" retain its power is both the richness of Updike's writing, for which this subject matter is perfect, and the originality of the story. Its frequent adaptions have shown how clean a concept it is - that of the small town contemporary witches and, as importantly, the arrival of van Horne into their lives. For van Horne has materialised, (and will dematerialise, just as quickly), without explanation. Have the witches conjured him up? Or, having detected their power has this "devil" turned up on their doorstep to harness it? Part of the book's brilliance is that Updike never gives us more than a few clues about van Horne's provenance, the strongest being the name. van Horne is in many ways as hapless in the affairs of man as he is magnetic to the women. His only power over the world is what he gets people to do for themselves. This is Crowley's "free will." He is a very modern devil as well; collecting pop art (he had no time for the abstract expressionists), installing hot tub, tennis court and stereo system; and he draws the three women into a web that they don't even understand for themselves. He provides each of them with the foil they need for their own talents - whether its admiring their music, their sculpture or their beauty. Yet, it is when the witches are together with him, mutually pleasuring each other in the hot tub, that their "cone of power" seems at its height. This is late 60s/early 70s sexual utopianism given a magic air. Under van Horne's prompting the women begin to take what they want from the town of Eastwick - not content with having affairs, the dreadful wives of their men have to suffer as well. All, you know, will not end well.

It is the friendship between the three women which is one of the book's triumphs. For Updike paints three very different women who share mutual respect, but have different characteristics and want different things. The beauty of Updike's prose to me has always been that he writes with his mouth full, there's abundance on every page, and in every sentence. By the end of his writing life, this abundance could sometimes slip over into parody, the books themselves unable to carry the weight, but in "The Witches of Eastwick", he has a subject that demands this omnivorousness. Written in three distinct acts, the "cost" of witchcraft begins to show in the collateral damage that affects their lives. The ordinary wives who they accidentally widow become a religious-charged coven of their own, the local priest being replaced at the head of his congregation by his previously subjugated wife; and the young son and daughter of the couple who have died as the result of the witches, return to town and become part of van Horne's coven - eventually driving apart van Horne's influence on the witches, when the young woman marries van Horne (and, we later find, the young man becomes his lover.)

In "witches" I think Updike found a grand subject that also offers endless opportunity to satirise small town life. van Horne is a most peculiar kind of devil, actually impotent (in both ways) without the powers of the women. He is drawn to them and to Eastwick like a parasite. When he gives a sermon to the local congregation at the end of the novel he talks about nature's parasites. The implication is that the witches too are this; but in reality he is talking about himself - and by implication, if this world of parasites is God's world, then shit, they might as well have given the other guy (him, the devil) a chance. This playful irreverance has mostly stood the test of time. Programmes like "Desperate Housewives" and "True Blood" seem to echo the ideas of Eastwick in different ways. Of course, Updike's fecund women (their many children are virtually running feral, uncomfortably out of earshot), are a very different kind than you find in Angela Carter's fairy tales, but that's because they are existing in a real world. The ultimate fantasy, of course, is that they are looking for the perfect man, and that they find him in the devil himself, shared between them, and a creature they cannot ever possibly be ruler over. Women are given a forceful sexuality in the novel, with men just dupes controlled by their wandering penis, but the novel ends with them all conjuring up the next male, and leaving Eastwick. Is there a conservative moralism here, that female sexuality uncontrolled by marriage is dangerous? It's one reading I suppose, but Updike is delightfully ambiguous.

I'm not sure whether Updike is studied extensively in Universities these days; if so I wonder if "Witches" is one of those studied? It deserves to be. It seems to offer a nice satirical counterpoint to the sixties and seventies suburbia of "Couples" and the Rabbit books, and remains both a delightful read, and a highly accomplished metaphor. Updike woudld revisit the Witches in his last published novel, "The Widows of Eastwick". Their enchantment is hard to resist.

Found this contemporary review by Margaret Atwood which intrigueingly compares it to the Wizard of Oz.

The Long Booker

With yesterday's announcement of the Booker shortlist, along with Dame Stella Rimington's remarks about the judges looking for "readability", we have another strange metaphorphosis in the long history of our premiere literary prize. This is a prize that has been won by such "unreadable" novels as "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha", "The God of Small Things" and "Life of Pi". "Literary fiction", for want of a better word, is inevitably a very large church. It's one of the myths of the Booker that there's a certain kind of "Booker book." There are these books, and they occasionally make the shortlist, but they very rarely come within a sniff of winning.

I think its more interesting to look at Booker lists not in isolation but in a historical context. 12 years into the century can we make some assertions about "twenty first century" fiction or, indeed, the Booker itself? It remains, under Man's sponsorship, our leading literary prize, and though the Orange is still with us (and was developed in response to an all-male Booker shortlist) there's been no real attempt to usurp it (the Guardian's "Not the Booker" notwithstanding.) Its quirks remain. Commonwealth writers allows Booker to select from "everyone writing in English other than the Americans", and as a result likes to slip in some pseudo American books - for instance, on this years short list, two of the books are American novels in all but passport, from the Canadian authors Edugyan and DeWitt.

I'd say, rather than there being a "Booker book", there's several memes that the prize returns to. High class historical fiction has long been a mainstay, and remains both a triumph of the English language literary scene ("Sacred Hunger", "Wolf Hall", "Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet") and an annoying arm of the British nostalgia industry. On every shortlist, they've won less often than you'd imagine (only Mantel and Carey really fit this category this century.) Ever since Rushdie (and perhaps since Naipaul), the Indian subcontinent and its writers have enthralled Booker judges. Adiga and Desai (the younger) have won this century, yet the last 3 years is the longest period without a subcontinent writer since the mid-80s by my quick reckoning. Is this meaningful, or just a blip? Time will tell.

The 3rd meme is the midlist writer - beloved of Booker lists in the 70s and early 80s - we've recently seen Banville, Enright and Jacobsen take the bauble for mid- or late- career novels. I'd guess that in a year without a standout-standalone book its a safe choice. Hollinghurst, Mantel and Atwood could also be placed in that company, but each of their winners has been much acclaimed.

What I've noticed is that those word of mouth phenomenons "Life of Pi" or "The God of Small Things" phenomenon (a step-up in class or debut novel that goes viral) rarely wins the Booker - though those books sometimes get nominated ("Brick Lane" or "White Teeth"). More often those viral books happen outside of the Booker firmament - think "One Day" or "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" - but hardly need its imprimatur. Only one real "outlier" - DBC Pierre's "Vernon God Little" - won this century, and like John Berger's "G" or Keri Hume's "The Bone People", its one of those oddities that most competitions spew up now and then.

The first decade of the 21st century has not been the best of decades for the Booker. The absurdity of establishment rather than cultural establishment figures such as Dame Stella Rimington chairing the judges isn't likely to push the prize in a more radical direction - whatever the Blogosphere would hope for. More damagingly, I wonder what happens to those third and fourth books from ex-contenders. Magnus Mills was last shortlisted in 1998, Jon McGregor in 2002, Sarah Hall and David Mitchell in 2004, Costa winner A.L. Kennedy has never made a shortlist, Impac winner Nicola Barker has just one listing (albeit as recently as 2007 for "Darkmans"), Will Self follows Martin Amis in the "apparently too clever for the Booker" pile. I would think that these seven writers (and there are others) would feature heavily in any discussion of the British novel of the last 15 years. The Booker remains unassailably our top book prize, but this years list, despite its good points - heavy on debuts, independent novels, and both the historical and the contemporary - confirms that the prize offers a poor guide to what's really happening with the English-language novel, whilst being undoubtedly very Booker.

My other blog's a Porsche

Maybe not, but having two websites does require a bit of cross-promotion now and then.

I've just updated my author website www.adrianslatcher.com


- video of me reading "A Colossal Machine" at the Manchester book market
- a new page collating the book reviews that have appeared on this site over the last 3 years or so
- new addition to the Writers section of the site: Simon Armitage

What's a poem about?

I've been spending the last week organising and rearranging the poems I've written since "Playing for Solitaire for Money" was finalised in Spring 2010; so close to 18 months of writing.

Do we have particular obsessions at particular times? I guess so - though the subject matter reappears. I think that some of the topics of that collection I've wanted to explore more; contemporary paranoia, nostalgic memory, engaging with the world, love, the absence of love. Additionally, there's something I've always been edging towards, a certain "metaphysicality" where situation and emotion are layers rather than explicit. Can you be a metaphysical poet in the contemporary age? If so, its not so much the connecting with the real world with the mystical, as extracting the debris of a spiritual sensibility from the consumerist nature of modern life, and finding some meaning in that life, however hard.

But without analysing my new work too closely (and its not yet available anywhere, anyway), I've noticed a certain pulling away from trusting words on their own, to trusting the poem. Form has become more important, at least in the shape of these lyrics. I've begun to distrust the glittering power of individual words, at least where they don't offer us a genuine sense. When we talk about "meaning" in a poem, I don't think its always about the literal sense, but for me, at the moment, the poem has to have meaning, even if its obscured (or layered). I've a jaundiced view of words for their own sake, or images that are beautiful but static. No great change here, anyhow, as I've never been much of an "imagist", never followed Stevens (or even Ashbery). Conversely I've dumped the more literal poems, however neatly they've stacked up.

What I want, I think, is a poem to stand up by itself, to have meaning without being explicit about that. The metaphysical poets were clear, direct, demotic, yet highly open to interpretation within that framework. Its why they're still read, I think, as approaching something of the contradictions of human consciousness, and utilising words with an awareness of how inadequate they are as tools.

The Long Hand of the Writer

A nice little Twitter discussion last few days around "writing longhand." Alex Preston was thinking of doing it, and being encouraged by Jon McGregor and Lee Rourke. I put my twopen'th in, but it got me thinking.

I've deliberately written poems longhand these last few years - though during late nineties/early noughties I was equally as likely to write poems to screen. There seems no reason why that should be a bad thing; and I found it interesting in terms of form and content; but in reality, I've nearly always written poems longhand, the scribbling out, the flash of inspiration, all seems to encourage it. But I've written good poems direct to screen as well.

Fiction's different though. I've been a type-writer since 1990 at least - helped along by access to word processors (typewriters were another matter) and a reasonably fast typing speed. When in full flow on fiction my handwriting had difficulty keeping up with the thought processes of getting the writing down and I still think that's true to a large extent; but that said, I've been struggling to get prose down in any way shape or form of late, and wondering whether something of this might be the ubiquity of the screen - the ever present internet in the corner of my vision.

When I participated in the multiple writer residency "the Reading" recently I found myself able/forced to write to the screen for a good 3 hours. At home, the distractions become too easy. Yet I've never given up longhand entirely - the issue has always been the extra work involved in typing it up (with the caveat that you get to 2nd draft it - but I'm a pretty good copy typist, so to be honest, I don't do much revising when doing that.) (And besides, my handwriting is sometimes illegible.)I was surprised a while back to find that the novel I'd begun on my M.A. was started longhand - though only the first few pages. In those days it was easier to be without a computer, now they seem a little too ubiquitous and maybe that's the problem. It almost takes a leap of faith to believe that you can go back to writing longhand - even though you know that Martin Amis and William Gibson still do (I think), and that the majority of writing that you revere was written in that way. Who used to type up these manuscripts? Obedient spouses? Hard-pressed publishing assistants? The writer...? In other words, you can romanticise the "longhand", when it can sometimes be cutting off one of the better tools the modern writer has.

I carry a pad with me these days, and every now and then start something longhand - either because I'm away from the computer, or, as importantly, because I'm wondering if that might be a more efficient way of channelling the imagination. Yet I've sat on trains with a laptop and written 3-4000 words - highly productively - so its not just that.

But anyway, the Twitter conversation got me thinking, and I was away from a computer for a few days up in the North East, and I had a pad with me, and a bit of spare time, and I started writing a story. I'm going to try and finish it in that form, even knowing that I've the job I've entering it on to the screen at some point; the writing doesn't necessarily seem that different, but I do think there's something in seeing the words immediately on the page - for if the computer can be a match for the notebook for writing, I'm still sure it's not what I need for reading my work.

The strangest thing was how it did tie my imagination a little behind my back. For I'd no computer on which to check a word, or a spelling, or to look up a particular technical term or other such detail. Those gaps are starting to appear in the narrative as I write, and I find it the least appealing part of the process. Just as Hemingway's newsman's Remington seemed to be echoed in his taut writing style, I think the longhand writer is potentially handicapping the imagination, by taking away the extended tools by which it now functions so seamlessly. My longhand story suddenly feels less modern than ones I write straight to the screen. Yet, for me, at this point in time, the suggestion seemed a good one. Short fiction in particular - but longer stuff as well - doesn't seem particularly interested in the modern at present; and by going back, I wonder if I might unlock at least something of the difference.

(Adrian uses Muji exercise pads. They are cheap, comfortable to hold, and the pages are wide).

Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson

English fiction of the post-war period is a series of roads not so much less-travelled as roadblocked off. Quite a few of those roads exist in the ever inventive work of B.S. Johnson. Periodically, we are encouraged to read Johnson, but I wonder if more than a few people actually do? Yet, if you pick up Jonathan Coe's biography, "Like a Fiery Elephant" (a description given to the Albert character by one of the schoolchildren in "Albert Angelo"), you need also to read the work.

"Albert Angelo" was his second novel and deconstructs the very form. Published in 1964, Johnson uses the (many) tools in his arsenal to tell a simple story in a multi-dimensional way. For Johnson all fiction is a version of a lie, but rather than leave it at that, he both gives us a conventional narrative (albeit seen from a number of different angles) and then exposes the lie. Yet, this is no mere gimmick. We've surely got over the idea that novelty in fiction "doesn't last", after all, Tristram Shandy is still with us, and the contemporary novel can sometimes seem to deserve every adjective other than "novel." Albert is an architect manque struggling with his designs for buildings that never get built, whilst affording a cheap lifestyle through the horrors of being a supply teacher. Recovering (or not recovering) from rejection by a girlfriend who Johnson has punningly called Jenny Taylor, (get it?), Albert (Mr. Albert, or Albert Albert, we are never entirely sure), resents visiting his parents, resents the education system that sends him from one underwhelming Secondary Modern to another, and most of all resents his own misery.

Of course, an architect should find work, but there's a clever humour in the chosen profession that he cannot quite follow, for Albert is a poet of architectural design. He tours a begotten post-war London looking for gems of Georgian, Victorian or later architecture, whilst despairing at the awfulness of the new Sadlers' Wells. In his classes he struggles with a worsening disorder amongst unruly pupils that could almost have been written today in the aftermath of the riots - students who can't write, and don't care that they can't; teachers who have given up; and an education system that seems to deliberately want it that way. The late 50s/early 60s of Johnson's imagination is carefully wrought, and puts into perspective contemporary writers who write about the period through a tinge of nostalgia.

Like Burgess, he takes after Joyce in wanting to show all of life, and only wishes he could not just describe but let you experience life. It is the paradox of "Ulysses", that by showing us our "reality", we look away, not recognising the methods that are needed to tell it. Yet, Johnson's world is nothing if not plainly wrought. A visit to see Chelsea (then as now, a mix of the tawdry and the talented) is described as minutely as the tortures of his school life. It's perhaps worth saying that we're further away now from my school days, than they were from the world Johnson depicts. The failed relationship with Jenny is the pain that keeps hurting for Albert, and stops him from moving on, even as he romanticises the relationship. Faced with an unruly class, he's daydreaming of an idyllic camping trip where they were at their best together. As he pulls himself together the pupils notice his erection under his trousers. But Johnson wants to not only write about sex, but about semen, about menstruation. Why, he seems to be asking, can't these experiences make the page, as well as others? Aren't they what makes us human?

Trawling round London late at night, sex seems infinitely possible, and love impossibly so; this is the world of Dennis Potter's "Lipstick on Your Collar". Like Burgess;s Droogs in "A Clockwork Orange" his teenage scoundrels are both demons and potent symbols of what the writer can no longer be; yet the pupils are drawn with some warmth. Johnson, one feels, was a good teacher, even if the litany of descriptions that Albert's pupils give his fictional surrogate say otherwise. School then was a mixture of sadism and crowd control, leavened on occasion by the passions of the odd teacher, or the attentiveness of a rare pupil.

This part of the novel (called "Development" - another part of Johnson's deconstruction) is a carnival of different styles and perspectives trying - and in many way succeeding - in giving a genuine picture of the somewhat tawdry world he's describing. There are some parts which haven't travelled; a joke about a tramp being asked by a prostitute if he has a (French) "letter" for protection uses a phrase that's now forty years out of common currency; black characters have "negroid features". Yet, there's a strange modernity to it all. Johnson is of our age, after all, the Beatles were already moving on from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." His pupil's most frequent criticism of Albert is that he should "cut his hair." Here is the small town FE lecturer of "Lucky Jim", but in world that is far from as comic as Kingsley Amis made out. The techniques that are most radically realised, are probably not the infamous hole cut through a page, but in the new openness that "art" could embrace at that period. The sixties may have been good for Johnson, if he'd been a decade younger. Like Potter, or Burgess, there's the regret of sexual opportunities not readily available. The book is explicit, sweary, ribald; it's after all, after the Chatterley ban, even if the Lord Chamberlain is still censoring the theatre.

For Johnson, for Albert, we have a world that has no room for dreamers, no room for romantics, and the answer seems to be to just "accept." If the format of the contemporary English novel was complicit in that acceptance, then Johnson's stylistic experiments make so much sense. Telling us what his lies actually are("she wasn't called Jenny", "that story was my fathers",) seems not so much another layer of artifice as technique to make us question all stories, even the ones we make up ourselves. How rosey are our spectacles? Reading "Albert Angelo" seems to take us back to a recognisable world, not too different than our own. It's owning up to its poetic licence, gives it a veracity. Like Lee Rourke's recent "The Canal", the distinct place names of a village-y London transplant us firmly to a place and time. To be read in our time, a novel doesn't need to have been read in its time, and Johnson had a tiny audience, a tiny influence; yet it reads - not so much as a period piece - but as an important document. Without being explicitly a "youth" novel like "The Outsider", Johnson is an angry enough young man, and, from this distance, seems far less compromised than Kingsley Amis, for instance. We don't revere our cult books in the same way as we do American writers, yet Johnson's mundane supply teacher is not so far removed from Bukowski's post office worker, after all.

Why read B.S. Johnson? Well, I was looking for a palliative after some of the recent contemporary-historical novels I've read, and it proved an efficacious one.
Also, there's a must-attend Johnson retrospective as part of this year's Manchester literature festival. Though his life and character are interesting, it is what he does in his books, and that's the writing as much as the parlour tricks, that makes him so vital, the best part of three decades after his death.

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Half Blood Blues was kindly sent to me by Serpent's Tail after it was longlisted for this years Booker. A 2nd novel by a Canadian writer, you can see why it appealed to publisher, and, to a lesser extent, Booker judges: telling a somewhat unusual story, that of an American Jazz band caught up in first Berlin, and then Paris at the outbreak of World War II. The twist in the tail is that their trumpeter, Hieronymous Falk, is a young black German, and, as the one surviving record of the group - "Half Blood Blues" - shows, was a unique talent.

Edugyan begins, not with the band in Berlin, but in Paris, as they make their final flee from the Nazis, following that auspicious recording. Flash forward half a century and Sid and Chip, the two survivors of the band, are called to Germany for a documentary about this legendary session. All is not as it seems, and our narrator, bassist, Sidney, is both uncomfortable about the return and drawn - as he always has been - by the insistent Chip. He was dragged into a brothel aged 13, by his more talented rhythm mate, and here he is, an old man, being dragged across the Atlantic, to face, as only Sid knows, the truth about the past. For "Half Blood Blues" is a book about secrets and betrayal. But like "The Kite Runner," "The Gathering" or "Atonement," the reader is kept waiting for the truth. A common enough contemporary trope, in some ways, this gives "Half Blood Blues" the air of a shaggy dog story. That Heironymous has somehow survived the Holocaust, creates a second quest story - as, following the revelations in Berlin - Chip and Sidney hunt him down in Poland. Given the momentous times they lived through, three old pals burying the hatchet seems a slight return.

The Booker, in not allowing American novels, has had a bit of a penchant for American-style novels the last few years, and this, like "Vernon God Little" or "Keepers of the Truth" is American to the core. Despite plenty of research, the story seems to lack veracity - partly because the act of ventroquilism that Edugyan gives us with Sidney is that of an old man telling stories on the stoop, never quite getting to the point; and partly because we are seeing this through time and memory. Music is notoriously hard to write about, and Edugyan does a good job of it, but what she gains in matching Sidney's jive with the spirit of her musicians, she loses through the somewhat playful way that the jazz band makes its way from the heart of the nightmare to safety. Its not just that Sidney is an unreliable narrator, he comes across as an unreliable witness. Not that all books about that period have to be morality tales - yet there seems something a little casual about this particular story of betrayal, given the events happening all about them. Also, Sidney's obfuscations make it a somewhat frustrating read. I'm remembered of Allan Gurganus's similarly obfuscatory "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All". Alone, Sidney's narrative isn't quite entertaining enough to make up for its shagginess. There's a love story at the heart of this as well, but Sidney's love for singer Delilah, and the latter's protectiveness of the young, vulnerable Hieronymous doesn't quite do it for me. Is it just sex? Or is it something more? With Hiero's voice being silenced throughout most of the narrative (though he gets given voice when it suits the author), he seems a mute character, brought alive by a music that, of course, we never get to hear.

Yet as I was about to give up on the book's longeurs, it begins to come alive. The rush from Berlin to Hamburg to Paris, and then the panic as they then have to arrange an escape to America (a near impossibility for the German-African Hieronymous) is truly gripping, Sidney's digressions notwithstanding. Here the backwards looking structure makes sense, for we know that they survived, and that the meeting with Hieronymous will be the climax of the book. The love and rivalry between these three men has sustained them all in different ways through the years.

I'd be surprised if it makes it beyond the Booker longlist, as its a somewhat frustrating read, and much too long in its early part, yet if we take it for what it is, both an old man's picaresque back into his regrettable past, and a not inauthentic paeon for a lost music, it works well enough on those terms.

For another point of view Bernadine Evaristo reviews it in the Guardian here.

90s

I've been putting a tape (yes, a tape!) together for a friend, and most of the tracks on it are from the 90s. What do we even think of this decade? Britpop and Nirvana, Friends and Alan Partridge, leaving the ERM and New Labour? Whereas the 80s seems to have an identity now, a polarised one, with the glam of the New Romantics alongside the strife of the Miners Strike, the 90s could well be characterised as the boring decade, at least in the UK.

Prosperity didn't come till late - the mediocre John Major government dominated the decade, but has left no legacy memories (but a privatised rail service), whilst New Labour's late century ascendancy has its awkward moments: Cool Britannia and Millennium Dome. Blair is remembered now for his Iraq misadventure not the slightly uneasy triumph of his 1997 landslide.

Musically, as books like Seven Years of Plenty have tried to show, it was a vivid time, but in retrospect surely "grunge" and "Britpop" were weak constructs that merely saw alternative and indie music making a final surge into the mainstream, with a few great bands at the heart of each. The 90s was a catholic period, with illegal raves having turned into lucrative festivals and franchises. Going back through old 7" and 12" vinyl I was struck not by how dated the music was - much of it stands up - but how, outside of the Blurs and Oasis's, we hardly hear any of the second division acts today, and how late 80s records (such as "The Stone Roses")seem to speak for the decade in the way that the Clash's "London Calling" seemed to herald the 80s.

Personally it felt like a failed decade - certainly my generation bore the scars of Thatcher, and we seemed to work hard for little gain. Friends married later or not at all, opportunities seemed scarce, and hard-earned. There was none of the insouciance of a generation that came after, with Easyjet and Ryanair flights taken as granted, a booming job market (at least until the last couple of years), and the wonders of the iPod and internet. In the 90s, I felt we all tread water, waiting for the future we'd been promised the decade before. Our favourite shows were Friends, This Life and Cold Feet, comfortable fantasies about people like us who were prettier and richer, but with all the same problems. Its easy to forget there was a house price boom in 1986-8, before things went sour again; the house I struggled to buy in 1989 in York would have been half the cost eighteen months earlier.

Yet, coinciding with my twenties, the 90s felt like a period when I was in a rush. I wrote 5 novels, none of which got published, but 2 got shortlisted for prizes, and I dedicated myself to studying full time, had 5 jobs in three different cities, changed career, bought and sold a house (at a loss!), rented nearly a dozen rooms and flats; recorded at least 7 "albums" (on cassette naturally - CD-R's were another bit of that delayed future!); bought my first (and 2nd) PC; went onClub 18-30 and Amsterdam trips. Looking back I bought CDs and vinyl - the latter were usually half the price of the former (and nowadays its the opposite, go figure!) - and lost a bit of my interest in literature only for it to come back towards the end of the decade. I was in a hurry to become an adult, at the same time, the world was welcoming the extended adolescence. Prosperity is part of it, of course - without it, you do live for the day.

Alternative comedy and music had stopped being political - the entertainment age was beginning; repackage, repackage as Morrissey prophecied on "Strangeways, Here We Come"... CDs were joined by (just about) affordable PCs and the internet felt like a private club with its own rules and etiquettes, rather than for everyone, and for everything. That said, I was on email by the middle of the decade (several years before Tony Blair ever sent one), and you knew you would never go back.

The 90s - not easy to love, but even harder to hate - a bedding in of 80s modernity, a last gasp for the Baby Boomer generation (Clinton, Blair), a consumer age, but without the money (and cheap credit) to do much about it.

Salt Modern Voices Interview 2: Lee Smith

Salt Modern Voices are a series of poetry and fiction pamphlets published by Salt Publishing. This Autumn, several of its authors will be touring the UK and reading in various venues. More info on this can be found on the website. In the lead up to the tour, SMV authors will be interviewing each other and posting the results on their personal websites. In the first of these, Lee Smith and Claire Trévien interview JT Welsch on form, masculinity, and his American heritage.

Interview with Lee Smith

In the second interview, made available here for the first time, questions from Claire Trévien, Mark Burnhope and Adrian Slatcher have been asked of Lee Smith, whose collection "Away from the City" was No.1 in the Salt Modern Voices series. Growing out of an exhibition of photography and poetry, the collection explores not just connections between written and visual arts, and also the two cities, Melbourne and Cambridge, where he has lived, and where the poems were written.

A lot of your poems seem rather minimal. When they're not 'short', they often consist of taut, clipped lines, or short numbered sections. One of them is a haibun. There are photographs included in the collection too, which add to a kind of 'travel journal' feel, where these elements might be collected together to chart a journey. Do you see visuals as an inherent part of your practice? Could you tell us something about your composition and organising principles?

Away from the City is indeed a travel journal, an account of a year spent in two cities. I wanted the poems to form a series of images, short instances of emotion, movement, or even nothingness, that transport the reader through these urban environments. This journey is very much a visual experience. The photographs create an atmosphere within which the poems emerge. This process reflects how many of the poems were written - observing and capturing visual exchanges, and then interpreting these elements in poetic form. I can't write long poems. The images get lost in the writing. I don't have a huge attention span, so the more immediate these observations are, the more they are allowed to resonate.


The title seems deliberately misleading considering the predominance of urbanity in these poems, but then as one realizes that it's a tale of two cities, it seems perhaps as if the title captures that sense one has when 'belonging' to two places: of always missing one when with the other. Did you write your Cambridge poems in Melbourne and vice versa, or where they done in situ?

The title does hint at that sense of belonging in two places. Indeed I did write some Cambridge poems in Melbourne, and vice versa — which led to a number of interesting links between different poems. I think the title also tries to convey the feeling of movement in the series as a whole. I felt sometimes that by merely walking and observing the people who inhabit the city, I was moving further away from it.

We're used to a "transatlantic" language writing between Europe and America, I wonder to what extent you felt you had to choose or develop a "trans-pacific" language to write about two such distant, and distinct cities as Cambridge and Melbourne. There seems a consistency in your writing between the two places, but its quite impressionistic - as if you're seeing both the new and familiar for the first time. To what extent was this deliberate?

When I first began writing these poems in Melbourne, I had been there a number of times previously. I was familiar with most of the city, but I still felt like a tourist every time I returned. I tried to harness these feelings of alienation, but apply them to local, everyday situations. Perhaps it's this element of alienation that ties the language of the two cities together. Or it may be that influences on my own dialect had seeped through when writing this series — I felt very strongly connected to Melbourne after I returned to Cambridge.

I like art/text collaborations - for you was this always an important element what you wanted to do? I'm interested in how the exhibition, and then the pamphlet emerged, and whether you had to write within those constraints, or found this enabling?

The collaboration with photography was an essential element in the germination of this book. I felt inspired by the way that these two cities had very clear visual identities (architecture, fashion, business etc.) and the power that photography has to capture poetic visual images. The original exhibition of Away from the City contained 24 photographs, and only eight poems. I wanted to experiment with the way that people navigated around the images and text, and what parallels they would draw between them.

With the pamphlet, I constrained myself to including only twelve poems from each city. Here I wanted the images created by the poetry to be in the foreground. The choice of using only eight photographs was a difficult one, and perhaps I would choose eight different ones for a new edition.

I'm just interested in what other poetry you like/read - particularly given that you must have come across a lot working for Salt. I published some of Chris McCabe's early poems for instance in Lamport Court, and his approach to how the poems look on the page, as well as the kind of short poems he does, seems to have something in common with your work. Did the Salt list/or particularly other poets feed into your work is it something in parallel?

Working for Salt obviously exposed me to a huge array of contemporary styles. And to an extent, I guess editing and typesetting the Salt list allowed me a broader knowledge of the range of poetry being published. I remember, not long after joining, reading Luke Kennard's The Solex Brothers and thinking how completely different it was from anything I had studied at university. It encouraged me to experiment with style, and I remember writing many more prose poems after reading that book.

I've tried hard not to emulate poets that I enjoy reading. It spoils my experience of their poetry. However, looking back on the poems now, I can see elements of Matthew Sweeney, Tobias Hill, Bashō. I believe I first read McCabe's work after writing Away from the City.

On the whole, I'd rather remove myself from style comparisons and influences. My fear is for a reader who stops mid-way through one of my poems (or anyone else's) to consider who the poet has been influenced by.

I believe you're returning to Melbourne. Where next for your artistic practice then?

I've just invested in a new camera, so more photography/poetry collaborations. I want to experiment more with exhibitions and digital. There may be room for a 'spin-off' pamphlet, but I certainly couldn't manage a full collection.

Melbourne's a perfect place to develop the visual aspect of my writing. Also, I'm looking forward to having a huge range of creative artists (music, art, design) to collaborate with. The poetry community in Melbourne is very different to the UK. I like the idea of not having to conform to a particular school/publisher, developing new audiences, and generally not being outcast by an antiquated poetry establishment.

What to Read When You're Not on the Beach

Summer reads dominate the newspapers. Usually at this time of year they're short of news, not this year of course. But there's something a little annoying about the sense of entitlement that sees August as a month to pack bags for two to three weeks and find a beach to read on, or whatever. Not all of us are following the political classes to Tuscany. Sunshine's in shorter supply than news this August.

But even in the summer, there's still a residual amount of literary activity. It could take most of the summer to read through the massive programme of this year's Manchester Literature Festival. There will be a few gems, I'm sure, and having the Anthony Burgess Foundation as this year's hub will cement its role as Manchester's new literary centre. Very much looking forward to a celebration of B.S. Johnson for instance. The Anthony Burgess Foundation has a brand new website just in time, not just for the festival, but for next year's anniversary of "A Clockwork Orange." This weeks Manchester riots give a contemporary and sociological subtext to the work. As a few commentators have pointed out, Alex and the Droogs are younger in the book than we see in Kubrik's film version.

If poverty and lack of opportunity create riots, they don't necessarily lead to criminality. An admirable art project from Arthur + Martha, with some text help from various writers, wonders what the equivalent of Engels' 19th century poor would be - and focusses on the cities homeless. Tweet From Engels (@tweetfromengels) gives voice to the homeless, funnelling their words through Twitter and is well worth following.

Admirably, at a time of year when most literary events shut up shop, The Other Room stays open for business. The week after next, the 27th event in this always fascinating series, takes place at the Old Abbey Inn on Wednesday 24th August.

I've been trying to organise myself a bit more in order to enter a few of the plethora of competitions that seem to exist these days. There's been an extension to the Didsbury Arts Festival short story and poetry competitions (Theme: Maps, Deadline: 26th August) and there's also an intrigueing new opportunity from Art group Blank Media Collective. Slightly more in the distance - the chance to have a poetry collection published should never be ignored, if only because it forces you to organise and arrange your work. The Anthony Hecht prize offers not just publication but money. What more could a poet ask for?

Coming up soon, as well, I'm one of a series of writers giving workshops at part of the Calderdale Writers Roadshow. I'm running a workshop on Creative Non Fiction on September 10th - but there's plenty of other opportunities, and a good enough reason to pop out of Manchester to nearby Calderdale.

Now is the Time for Your Tears

I'd like to spout some half-baked theories of disaffected youth; link the marauding teens with MPs expenses and banker greed; pontificate on our X-Factor meets Grand Theft Auto culture...

...but I can't because I'm too sad. Tonight's riots in Manchester, murmured throughout the day, but so flagged up that I thought they couldn't possibly happen - that the troublemakers would be stopped as soon as they crossed into the city centre - ended (if they have yet ended) far worse than I could have imagined. Marauding through the city - slipping from the main streets to the Northern Quarter - it looks like independent businesses as well as flash stores will have borne the brunt of the carnage. London braced itself for more violence with a show of police strength, but the meme had moved, to Salford, Manchester and the West Midlands. I feel that the riots are following me around, hitting every place I've ever lived (Croydon was last night's shocker), though I trust the well-behaved youths of York will spare me another night of personal sadness.

I've spent the last decade wanting to make things better within the limits of what the public sector can do, decrying the materialism and consumerism of our culture - but they're one and the same thing aren't they? Young people want "something to do" up to a certain point of self-gratification; hanging with their friends, messaging each other; getting the latest trainers or mobile phone, whatever the cost; and...finally, today, arranging a riot with a sense of Machiavellian planning that puts most Flash Mobs to shame.

Too early to see the damage; too early to see if it will flare up again. In Looters v. Police, the former are winning at the moment. What's at the end of it? An unlucky lottery of court cases? Juvenile detention? We've long admired America; its capitalism, its brands; are we now admiring its broken youth? Its extremes of wealth?

Another day for such thoughts. Bob Dylan once wrote the song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in which he held off your sympathy, "now is not the time for your tears." I've felt that for a day or two, the awful happenings in London, the tardiness of our political classes, the media circus of 24-hour television. Each fire, I thought, would bring death with it - not just flames. But somehow the city burns, the windows of the supermarkets and the fashion shops crack; and the horror goes on - live entertainment on a warm night for an incomprehensible generation. Now, with Manchester, fair Manchester, vibrant Manchester, the people's Manchester in the path of these misguided lotusts, now, as Dylan sang, now is the time for my tears.

Debates not contributed to

Forget about roads not travelled, there's an increasing number of debates I've not been contributing to. The travails at the Poetry Society (details are all over the web but here's one of the more reliable summaries) seem sad, because small organisations can have an impact far beyond their size, and good corporate governance is as important here, as it is at News International. The devil makes work for idle boards to do it seems. As neither subscriber to Poetry Review or member of the Poetry Society, its the kind of club that brings out the Groucho in me, but I'd hoped at some point in the future, as a poet at least, to have some nodding acquaintance with either.

As for the Booker longlist, announced yesterday, its the old and the new, as ever, and it increasingly seems the novel's top contest is as open as a Golf major in the post-Tiger Woods days. (Tigers do well in the Booker by the way, so its not a totally spurious analogy!) Great to see small publishers on there, again. I've not read any of the books, so I can't really comment. I have a sneaking suspicion that the "big names" might not make it to the final six, if only because quite a few of the new books seem quite interesting and original in subject matter (if not in style.) A judging panel including the ex-head of MI5 and the writer of "The Woman in Black" is likely to be going for a good story or two, I'd think.

What's clear - or has been for a few years - is that there's no new broom to the Booker, no new generation of writers taking all before them, and proclaiming the irrelevancy of those that have gone before. History features strongly, as ever, the Indian subcontinent seems to have fallen a little out of favour (or maybe it's just this year), and there's a welcome return to the list with Jane Rogers indepedently published pseudo SF novel.

I like the Booker, its quirks, its annoyances, and spits and spats - and also its occasional ability at picking out some of the better books of the year. I've read 7 of the last 9 winners, but only one ("Wolf Hall") genuinely seemed the best of the bunch.

In Residence

I'm at a "writing residency" today, for 2 and a half hours at least. This is part of a project called The Reading, and takes place in the Untitled Gallery, which is a tiny room underneath the Friends' Meeting House in Manchester. 72 writers are contributing and I'm following on from Kay Boardman, who I don't know, who may well be (one Google search later, so may not be!) an editor of a book on "Popular Victorian Writers".

So, all being well, from 12pm I'll be avoiding the sunshine and the jazz festival and sitting at a screen waiting for inspiration - my words being simultaneously broadcast to the Cornerhouse and other venues about town. Best keep it clean then.

Tweet me at @adrianslatcher if you've any words you'd like me to inculcate into the text and reception willing, I'll see what I can do!

Performing Seals It!

The Manchester International Festival finishes today, and although its a bit difficult to be objective, given that few people will have been to more than a couple of shows, because of the cost and the variety, it seems to have been another success. There were tickets still on sale as late as yesterday afternoon for the remaining shows - which, though surely not ideal, at least let people make choices after the reviews came in.

I popped into "11 Rooms" at Manchester Art Gallery yesterday - I simply hadn't found time and opportunity before - and the place was packed, and indeed closed its doors early. Performance art, that mainstay of TV comedy skits on art, has clearly come of age. Maybe it was already there... David Blaine in a box, or the hourly stints on the 4th plinth at "One and Other." I don't think I'm being elitist when I felt that I didn't want to be crammed into a small space watching this or that performer. The performers I have seen this last couple of weeks - Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Heaton, Lonelady - have been of the musical variety. In each case, although seeing them live seems a privilege it is the work that got me there. Classic albums from Rickie Lee (she took us through her first two albums in the order they were recorded), familiar songs from Lonelady, a brand new ensemble piece by the Beautiful South frontman.

I could (and perhaps should) have gone to something every day and night this week, but I've had to limit myself. In all of this "performance" you wonder where anyone gets the time to do any work nowadays. Bjork apparently doesn't speak for a day after the performance; yet everyone's been hoping to "star spot" round town, as if seeing someone outside of their show, drinking beer in Albert Square or coffee in the Cornerhouse, is somehow a more authentic experience. After all, its no surprise that you might bump into Damon Albarn out and about, as he's garrisoned in Manchester for a few weeks. The more authentic experience, of course, is the performance; but even more than that - it's the creation of the art, and that, so often happens outside the performance space.

I'm thinking of this because next Sunday I'm going to be in a "performance" space, one of a relay of writers in "residency" for a couple of hours at Untitled Gallery, a subterranean space under the Friends' Meeting House (run by Metallica fans if the typeface is anything to go by!) Jane Chavez-Dawson's "The Reading" is being broadcast onto screens across the city, including the lobby of the Cornerhouse. A full list of writers is here....

This piece appealed to me on a number of levels. Firstly because it is about writers doing what they do, usually in silence and isolation. Secondly because of its democratic nature - which has appealed to a wide range of Manchester's writing community. And thirdly because the chance to sit down and write something in "residency" even for just a couple of hours, feels a real privilege. In other words, it amazes me that any work at all gets done these days, so inculcated are we in the primacy of performance.

As a poet, as a well as a fiction writer, I know how long it can take for a poem to make it from first draft, to being ready for the world, to being published. For our art, I think this has implication, in that its only when a book or record or film is completed that the world sits up and takes notice. Our instantaneous culture is one of over-production, yet for an individual artist or writer this is so difficult. No wonder there's a trend in the art world towards minimalism, it's all people have time for.

Yet if you make art in isolation, it can be hard sometimes to know where it might fit in. There are writers who are fixtures in certain magazines, or who are an obvious fit for this or that project. Yet if you follow your own path - wondering where it might lead - it can sometimes seem out of synchronisation with the times. A disinclination to be a "celebrity" is anathemic to modern culture. Bookselling demands not only your presence, but your performance. In our cultural zoo it is the creatives who are best at being performing seals who often are most successful, at least in the short term. But all this activity is often counterproductive. I've read more about the Poetry Society in the last month than in the previous ten years, and all of it is to do with their administration and nothing to do with poetry (though there are poets involved.)

Anyone who is interested in contemporary art can find themselves invited to previews every week of the year - yet it is the silent contemplation on a wet Wednesday afternoon that offers the real communion with an artist, just like the real communion with a writer is in private, with the work. Anyone who has sat there uncomfortably as a friend asks to read your latest poem knows how irrelevant your presence is to the reading - after all the "presence" is all in the work. All art is performance, but when everything is performance, I fear a little for the art.

Vault by David Rose

Reading David Rose's debut novel "Vault" I didn't quite know what to expect. After all, Rose has been a writer of unusual, terse short stories for decades, and this - his first longer work - is novella length, and described as an "anti-novel." I shouldn't have worried.

At its heart, "Vault" is a noirish thriller, and Rose provides both the tension and the detail that such a description deserves. It strikes me that if you play with genre fiction of any kind - the war novel, the spy novel - then the best way is to play the genre bits as straight as you can. In the hands of a careful stylist, and Rose is certainly that, details are both spare and appropriate. Our lead character is a cyclist, a World War II sniper, a Cold War accidental spy, and defiantly the "hero" of his own life. McKuen is himself a character in a novel, which dramatises the life of this fascinating maverick, yet in "Vault" the "real" McKuen is also commenting on that life, correcting the errors, puncturing the mythical. What might seem a gimmick is far from one. In fact, the dual perspective provides a powerful way to tell a life from two different perspectives. We are given the action scenes through the novelist - who plays up the heroism, creates an atmosphere, and creates an anti-hero. Then, through the narrator, the myth is punctured, the man seeps through.

If not a unique way of telling a story, "Vault" is cetainly more explicit about its dual narrative. Usually it would be the narrator who inflates his own importance, and up to the reader to do the puncturing. A fictional life told through the key moments seems a rich model - it's not so far from Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers" or Jim Crace's "Aracadia" after all - but given the subject matter, I think Rose gives his subject a depth and perspective that a less postmodern treatment would hardly do justice to.

After all, this is, ostensibly, a historical novel. Our main character is a minor player in large events. We get a very personal story. His two main skills, as sniper and cyclist seem wonderfully complementary, and in both the war scenes and the racing scenes we get the sense of a talented loner having to learn how to be part of a team effort for the greater good. That's as far as Rose goes in spelling out any deeper meaning, and the novel is the better for it. I've written before about a certain kind of contemporary "mock noir" which takes the conventions of genre fiction and adapts them to other scenarios, and there is an element of this double-take in "Vault", yet at the same time, Rose stays true to his character's life. There is no retrospective analysis; no attempt to contemporarise the past. I'm no cyclist but the descriptions of racing seem lived, real. Isn't sport so often praised for being a metaphor for war? Here the link is made explicit. The myth busting real McKuen never stops mentioning his busted knee and what it prevents him doing.

There's much pleasure to be had in this short novel, and though its easily read in one sitting it seems more substantial than many longer works. What it takes from the short story is a purity of vision. There are no subplots, no side issues. the dual narratives (with chapters named 1a, 1b etc.) is used for a reason, rather than strictly adhered to. Only when reality and fiction are far apart do we get two different accounts of the same story, elsewhere, Rose uses the method to drive forward the story. I wondered about a few of the details in the war scenes, with references to "no mans land" and "trench warfare" being associated with the First, rather than the Second world war; though I imagine they are accurate enough, they cause a jolt with a reader accustomed to certain conventions, and perhaps should have been removed. Generally the war scenes are very powerful. The sniper is such a tiny cog in the big wheel of battle, that his decisions are both "life and death" and hardly relevant to the bigger picture. Chasing through Europe after the German retreat, he comes across latent horrors, and it brings out his own dark side in a way that the tumult of war doesn't. This haunts him in civilian life, and cycling, one feels, is both escape - and in what it takes out of the competitive rider - penance.

There's something of Calvino's appropriation of genre writing in "Vault", and inevitable echoes of Graham Greene; whilst the bleak south east of post-war Britain reminds me of the same landscape in McEwan's noir novel "The Innocent", yet these are echoes rather than signature themes. McKuen listens to Mahler, and there is something musical about this book. The clank of the bike chain, the silence after a sniper's kill; Rose seems acutely aware of the auditory possibilities of the worlds he is documenting. It's a wonderful little book, that is a pleasure to read.

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin's acclaimed late 90s novel "The Blackwater Lightship" is a story about three generations of an estranged Irish family brought back together by the news that Declan, brother to Helen, is dying. In an arresting opening scene, Helen is acting as a party host for her husband, whilst preparing for him to take their two sons away for a week. As soon as she has seen them off, she has a visitor. Her brother Declan has asked for her to go and see him in the hospital. Declan has AIDS. This elegant opening is used by Toibin to set up a contrived setting, where Declan is taken to his grandmother's where 3 generations of the women in his family are brought under the same roof, alongside 2 of his friends. We discover that Helen doesn't speak to her mother, and that her mother and grandmother also don't get on. The silences of broken families are filled in by them all being brought under one roof for the first time. Of Declan we learn little, other than what he was like as a child, he is defined almost entirely by his illness - the friends who have tended to him, and now, reluctantly, at his request have let his family back into his life. We find out more about their lives than Declans. Toibin's adept at describing the replacement family a gay man builds around him when his real family exclude, or are excluded.

The setting, on a crumbling coastline, where the Blackwater Lightship is a metaphor for what has been lost (there were once two lighthouses, looking at each other, like lovers across a room). Over the course of the novel, which follows the trajectory of Declan's illness, the three women are asked to confront their hostilities to each other. Whether or not you are taken by this novel depends, I think, on how easy you are with Toibin's manipulations. The only straight men in the novel are dead (Helen's father) or absent (her husband), and the story - an unwrapping of past hurt, missed opportunities - is played out through the women in the family, with their shared love for Declan, being the glue that starts to bring them together again. Helen is a successful head teacher, her mother is a thriving business woman, yet they cannot see their similarities. Rural Ireland is played out as a place that has to be got away from, else it will draw you in and strangle you - yet there are no great events in this family's life, the betrayals are unspoken, perceived. Helen's husband tiptoes around her past, and decides not to delve too deeply when she doesn't invite her family to her wedding. Yet, Helen has estranged Declan as well. Here is hurt left to grow over the years.

The other Toibin I've read, "Brooklyn", takes a similar theme, but the millieu is different, an oppressive Ireland of the 1950s dominated by poverty and priests, with power maintained through silence. In 1990s Ireland, Toibin seems to be saying that the silence is what remains.

It's undoubtedly an elegant novel, and Toibin's prose is much praised, yet he writes in a transatlantic style that though it travels easily (to Booker shortlists and to American universities) isn't really strong enough to carry what is, in many ways, a long short story. If the Jamesian languidness of "Brooklyn" (and presumably "The Master") aren't quite formed in his prose at this point, there's still a pointing towards it. Like Ishiguro you feel that there has been a deliberate excising of a more emotional style. Yet, transatlantic as it might be, its also a very middle-class novel. These characters would easily fit into the mainstream of British literary fiction. Like in Mike Leigh's film "Secrets and Lies" you only really feel they exist within the parameters in which we see them. The backstory is just that, in the background, to illuminate points of difference between the claustrophobic cast of characters.

Family and death - perhaps "The Dead" retains a hold over Irish fiction even now - yet this novel seems almost pathological in its self-imposed misery. Unlike Anne Enright's similarly themed (but differently structured) "The Gathering", there is not much fun to be had. I can't remember another novel that so dwells on the illness of one of its characters, another pathology - perhaps the end of the 20th century allowed the "taboo" to be not just lifted but explored? There is resolution of a sort, after all there has to be, given the novelist's contrivance, though its of a tentative sort. Helen's mother would very much like to come and see her and her children, but she promises not to stay "overnight." Certain proprietaries are necessary it seems, not to mend the past, but to retain the truce. Toibin seems to be saying that in a very modern Ireland, nothing much has really changed, underneath it all - but perhaps the reader, or at least this reader, requires a bit more convincing. "Get over yourself" you feel like saying, but in this novel, nobody would have the language for it; and, unusually for an Irish writer, neither does the novelist.

Business as Usual

Dragging myself away from the News International scandals (and trying to wonder why since everyone I know has been suspicious of the "Digger" and his nasty little newspapers for as long as I remember, the political class are only just realising it. Reminds me (as many things do) of the tale of the frog and the scorpion).... as I say, dragging myself away.

In Birmingham on Monday I had a long-overdue visit to the magnificent city Art Gallery. As well as sitting there enthralled by Epstein's "Lucifer" I spent some time with their pre-raphaelites, read about the progress of the Staffordshire hoard (which was dug up a couple of miles from where I grew up), and had lunch in the wonderful Edwardian Tea Rooms. The real reason for going was to see the "Home of Metal" exhibition in the basement. Something strange hearing Black Sabbath, Diamond Head and Napalm Death in an art gallery. Birmingham's attitude to culture always seems a little ambiguous. I looked in vain in Waterstones for any Roy Fisher. Still writing at 80, he seems a nearly invisible figure, even in the city where he came from.

I'm writing about the West Midlands - partly about my own past, but partly the landscape, partly trying to uncover the somewhat hidden literature of the city - and it strikes me that there remains a literary hole of sorts, despite the usual preponderance of literary festivals etc. The Lichfield festival this week has brought in Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke as the main poetry event. The recovery of the Staffordshire Hoard reminds us that Mercia was once a powerful kingdom. I wonder what its "national" literature would look like?

There's a sense of overstimulation elsewhere as the Manchester Festival continues in the city. I've hardly had a chance to see the main events, never mind the fringe, though was so glad I went to see one of my musical heroines, Rickie Lee Jones, on Sunday night.

There's quite a lot of static on the poetry airwaves at the moment. Like buzzing fly at the window I can't quite ignore the furore over the Poetry Society/Poetry Review whilst realising that it has little relevance/resonance for me, either as a poetry reader or writer. Poets, despite the popular perception, do seem to like a scrap - a shame that this one appears to be about the administration rather than the art. The Forward Prize shortlist is the usual mix of the well-known and the new, and you get the sense that "prizes" are now the poetry equivalent of patronage, great if you get them, furiously derided if you don't.

Little pleasures continue: there's an Oxfam "book jam" on Sunday night in the Northern Quarter at Apotheca ; there's a competition to write "quickies" (adult flash fiction - that's what happens when you let the Chorltonites into the Didsbury festival!); the Other Room returns with its packed summer programme, next Wednesday; and Kate Feld is running a workshop on creative non-fiction leading to a competition for this year's literature festival.

The Cult of Beauty

Our relationship to the Victorians is always an intricate one. We still live in and love many of their houses; we are sniffy about "Victorian values"; we have a Commonwealth when once we had an Empire. Victoria was on the throne for so long, however, that it is the later part of her reign that we are seeing in our minds-eye when something is described as "Victorian." Yet Albert died in 1861, and the museum that bears her and his name, the Victoria and Albert (or "V&A") only took that name at the end of the 19th century.

It's an appropriate place for an exhibition on late Victorian art and design. "The Cult of Beauty" is billed as the first comprehensive exhibition of "the aesthetic movement 1860-1900." The V&A may well be my favourite British exhibition space, and as ever with their major shows its a curatorial triumph. At its best, the V&A augments its remarkable exhibits with a vast sweep of historiogaphy, and the Cult of Beauty is no exception. From paintings, to artefacts, to a whole range of late Victorian social and cultural histories, the show is in some ways breathtaking.

What was the "aesthetic movement" then? This is an exhibition that takes in the Pre Raphaelites, Whistler, Leighton and other late Victorian painters; finds room for designers such as Morris and Liberty (whose shop still exists in Central London), and still find time for the fin de seicle decadence of Wilde and Beardsley.

If "The Cult of Beauty" has an agenda it is to revitalise our interest in this familiar, yet increasingly distant time. In parts it succeeds. Our 20th century middle classes are stubbornly enamoured of the late Victorian aesthetic, whether its willow pattern China, or Morris's wallpaper. The examples given throughout the show are luscious, pristine, but at the same time trite. This "aesthetic" was one of a very particular, and peculiar design. New materials and techniques provided artists with the means to produce things of beauty, to their own design; yet this was also a precursor for the "mass produced". The arts and craft movement, as idealised in William Morris's utopia "News from Nowhere", would end up influencing the mass-produced.

The four spaces given over to the exhibition take a chronological and thematic approach. The Pre-Raphaelites, though towering over the exhibition in terms of their influence and quality, are seen in the context of their times, their influence extending beyond their own work. But though the exhibition shows their influence, it is not theirs alone. The vivid colours and even more vivid life that we saw in the recent "Desperate Romantics" TV show comes to mind; the set designers of that show had clearly done their homework. I loved Millais's "Esther", where General Gordon's coat was turned inside out producing the vivid patterns you see in the Biblical character's beautiful gown, and the red-haired heroines of PRB legend return again and again in the art that follows. I was fascinated as well by the story of the Grosvenor Gallery, which was opened as a rival to the Royal Academy and became something of a home from home for the Aesthetic movement. It was here that Ruskin famously slammed Whistler's painting for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

This exhibition was full of such historical gems as this - and you realise how febrile the capital's artistic scene must have been during the late Victorian period, even as Victoria herself stayed in secluded mourning following Albert's death. The riches of the Empire were finding their way directly into the homes and tastes of London's middle classes. Whereas the Pre-Raphaelites had worked with carpenters to design furniture to their taste, or had scoured London for 17th century eastern pottery, by the 1880s and 1890s, the wealthy middle classes were keen on showing their own ostentation. Pottery from Stoke-on-Trent emulated Chinese willow patterns; whilst furniture makers and metal workers created elegantly designs. The exhibition even imports a pair of iron gates, which were built to show off the skills of the craftsmen who made them.

A reader of Quiller-Couch's first edition of the "Oxford Book of English Poetry" (1900) is struck by how well-formed is the English canon, up to the age which has just finished. Yet the last 50 or so pages of the book are full of tedious versifiers, reminiscent of Tennyson, but without the great man's brilliance. Few survive in our memory. Modernism was not just the period that followed, but a necessary reformation, and the same is true elsewhere in the arts.

The British painters that came after the PRB seem minor. After all, in Europe a revolution in painting was being undertaken. Whistler seems a bridging figure, both between old world and new, but also between the tastes of late Victorian England and the revolutions on the continent. Other painters we look at now for their decorative powers. Leighton's Flaming June for instance (not featured in the exhibition - but there are other examples of his work), or Albert Moore's luminous "Azaleas." (My favourite painting in the show.)

The natural world is popular with the Aesthetic Movement, but its the peacock that dominates, the exotic beauty of its feathers, becoming a leitmotif, particularly in Whistler's the Peacock Room, which is recreated via audio visual display. One can only admire such attempts at bringing art to the centre of life, but we also see how increasingly these attempts are part of "fashionable society" rather than an art for all. Art for Arts Sake, as Whistler's regular pamphlets would have it, becomes a stick which Punch cartoonists can beat the asethetic movement. In Oscar Wilde, we have both an exemplar of the aesthete and the period's most lasting criticism. Few dramatists are revived as frequently. If Wilde was very aware of the absurdities of the movement, as is clear from "The Importance of Being Earnest", he was mocking his own friends and circle, for the benefit of a wider, more conservative audience. Today, we share the laughter, mocking the pretension, whilst still admiring the decoration. It is the pre-Victorian imagination - the romantic poets, J.M.W. Turner - that still dominates British aesthetics, yet Victorian kitsch casts a long shadow.

The "decadent" 1890s end the show. We see revolutions in book design, exemplified by the Beardsley illustrated "The Yellow Book." Here we have a vibrant literary journal, and an enthusiastic educated audience for its writers and illustrators. Yet if, from the distance of a century or more, we are looking for "decadence", its not in the "shocking" illustrations of Beardsley, or stories of the trial of Oscar Wilde, but in the bourgeois sensibility of the times. Wonderful as this show is, I think it falls short of rehabiliting its art. There is something a little too mesmerising about this "cult of beauty", that seems to reflect the technological advances and great wealth of the late Victorian British Empire. You will look long and hard for the real Victorian England, particularly the non-Metropolitan world. Aestheticism brought a certain European sophistication to the galleries and drawing rooms of London, but quickly became commoditised by the class who embraced it - who, in turn, felt morally outraged by the artists (such as Wilde) who had provided their guilty pleasures. For all that Rosetti, Millais, Morris and others were dedicated to illustrating truth through beauty, at some point their innovations became little more than bourgeois fashion. In the end, it is in the history of design and home furnishings that the Aesthetic movememt influenced, rather than the history of art. At its best, the paintings of Hunt and Millais, "Goblin Market", or "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", late Victorian art and literature has a fragile magic to it. It is no surprise that we still admire their buildings, and their interiors. In this exemplary show at the V&A, we see an earlier age of commerce than our own, and the echoes are very clear. Yet we have forsaken beauty for expediency, satire for prurience, Whistler for Emin. The exhibition's title is a clever one for a "cult" can mean two things; an obsessiveness about something which others don't share, and something that appeals to a small group of people. In calling the aesthetic movement "the cult of beauty" the curators of this show are noting only how strange we would now think it to want to design our lives along aesthetic purposes. Modernism, a far more European movement, never really took hold in Britain, as a previous show at the V&A amply demonstrated; and the strong hold that the aesthetic movement still has on our visual imagination is perhaps one part of the reason why.

American Account

The last of Martin Amis's Public Lectures tonight at the Martin Harris Centre at the University of Manchester was an independence day special, with him being joined by Erica Wagner and Will Self to talk about America. As Ian Mcguire, from the Centre for New Writing, made clear in the introduction, its a big subject. Too big in the end.

All three speakers were a little bit American. I didn't know that Self had an American mother (but British passport, which delayed him somewhat in one post-9/11 visit, "Are you an apple or a pear?" the customs guy asked him, repeatedly.) Wagner, an American by upbringing and accent has lived here since her late teens. Amis, of course, writes American, however English he speaks, specifically in the accented "Night Train", but also in his attempts to bring the full American hubbub of U.S. prose to his British writing. (He also emigrates on Wednesday, with his American wife and American children, becoming a - very - Englishman in New York.)

The big subject was a problem. Amis talked of the discovery of America across the frozen Baring Straits; Self, accidentally given the anti-American role (not really necessary, I thought), preferred personal anecdote to historical relativism, though smirking at the space mission naming of its Atlantis after a mythical, sunken continent, whilst Wagner seemed almost apologetic of her accent; whilst conceding that being an American in England had given her immediate authority on its literature, even if she didn't quite know it. One of her first book reviews was of a Western... so, hell, she'd better know a bit more about Westerns.

It seemed a given that we should talk about America in the context of anti-Americanism, the post-9/11 dislike and misadventures across the world. I'd have preferred a debating point on "why America matters" rather than another going over the decline of Empire. Certainly, on July 4th, it was interesting to hear an overview of America that crossed time and nation. There were some interesting points. "America is a world", said Amis, "India is a world, Brazil is a world," disagreed Self, "not America." It could have made an interesting debate in itself, but wasn't followed through. It was, Wagner, I think , who talked about American literature being better for embracing a multiculturalism it had found in British literature. I'd have liked more on that. Is it true that the British + authors like Rushdie and Ondaatje have made America think more about cosmopolitanism? I'd dispute that, but I think she was hitting at a larger truth, that in a globalised market place, authors are now hybrids. Books like "The Kite Runner" or authors like Junot Diaz are American +. But as Amis pointed out, Bellow (as a Jew) and others were always American + anyway.

The beauty of tonight's talk, looking back on it, was that there was a certain joie de vivre about it, despite the concentration on America's myopic world view. There were a few open goals missed, I felt. That there's been a Reagan statue unveiled in London today, for instance. The post-Iraq, post-Blair worldview seemed a little too easy. Everyone's a little disappointed in Obama it seems; but Britain, and its own neo-con coalition was not mentioned. Talking about Blair seems easier somehow. Misadventures abroad have longer consequence.

Yet, when we did touch on novel writing, the three speakers were mostly acute. The instance response to 9/11 of writers hasn't been that great. As Amis said, DeLillo got terrorism much better in "Mao II" and "White Noise" than "Falling Man." Self's dismissal of Jay Mcinerney's "The Good Life" (though he didn't mention it by name) seemed the wrong choice. Mcinerney tries to incorporate 9/11 into the early 21st century contemporary sequel to "Brightness Falls" and though it does feel contrived in parts, I actually think he is doing the very difficult task of being too contemporary, which meant that 9/11 had to be incorporated. The incorporation seems trite, but I don't think he ever exploits the subject.

But that conversation, like a lot tonight, didn't go much further. After all, Amis is one of those who has written extensively post-9/11, and readers of "The Second Plane" are quite rare. The audience questions were, in that uniquely Manchester way, as random as you might expect. I've often felt a "Question Time" format with submission before the event might work well at this kind of event, but, for these public lectures the University of Manchester have stuck with a slightly dull format that could probably benefit, as gracious as Mcguire was, from a more pro-active chair, or a more mediated public response.

As ever it was good to pull out the best thoughts from our esteemed speakers. I'd have liked to hear more from Wagner on literature, as I've always been impressed by her editing of the Times book section, but she was relatively quiet on the subject. It was Amis who mentioned most books by name. Self was funny, particularly when asked to respond to the maddest of the audience's questions (something about drugs and religion that none of us really understood), and made a good case for reading Kafka's "America" if you really want to understand the country. Amis got his best response when he quoted Larkin; Manchester audiences always enjoying the erudition (I think it was Milton last time I saw him here.)

If tonight felt a bit like a missed opportunity, I don't think the audience were too minded. I didn't recognise a single person from the Manchester literary scene, yet the Martin Harris centre was virtually full. Here, it seems, is a very different audience than you see elsewhere at literary events in the city. The slightly null feeling I had at the end of the evening probably came from this juxtaposition. Finishing his four years in Manchester, Amis has proven there is an audience for this kind of event, and it will be interesting if he's left some kind of legacy on the city, with the students he's taught, the conversations he's had. Perhaps even in what he writes next.

With Colm Toibin replacing him in the Autumn there's clearly more than a change of "manager", like when Derby County replaced Brian Clough with Dave Mackay: the styles were very different, but they got a similar result.

Festival Season

Manchester International Festival began on Thursday. Counterintuitively I went down to London Friday, as I'd long planned to, to see "The Cult of Beauty" at the V&A (more of which later.) MIF (or #MIF11 on Twitter) isn't a festival that you can take the full two weeks off for, as it would probably bankrupt you. Most people I know have booked for one or two events and will see what else they might catch. Yet there's also a festival pavilion in Albert Square, many of which events are free. So, over the next week or two I'll be catching a few things I'm sure. Its also spurred its own fringe, this time with quite a large, coherent programme. The "Not Part of" festival takes its name from the somewhat dismal community offerings of the first MIF, but has thankfully grown into a welcomed little brother of the main festival. As ever in Manchester, the city is a diverse beast, and events not associated with either festival of fringe are going on at just the same time. So tonight I'll be going to the last of Martin Amis's public lectures as Professor of Creative Writing at University of Manchester.

The Administration of Poetry

The worst thing about my job is the endless administration and bureaucracy it entails. You come to learn that it will never all be done, that all bureaucratic systems have their own inbuilt tendency to multiply. All you can ever do is mitigate it, say enough is enough.

Having a day off after an overload of necessary administration over the last two weeks, I feel I've earned a bit of time to get back to being creative. So, here I am, looking through the fifty or so poems I've written in the last year and a half, wondering which work, which don't, which need more work, which don't. And you know what? I've spent several hours this morning on the administration of poetry. I've been a bit slack on some things recently, but have mostly typed up my handwritten poems as I've gone along; thank God for that. But you can't revise poetry on the screen, so my printer's been spewing out pages for most of the morning, and then I had a pleasant hour, reading through, and putting them into 3 piles: almost there; those worth returning to; and those probably not. Its the first time I've done this ordering since last year putting "Playing Solitaire for Money" together, and the experience of doing that has helped here. Poems need to find friends, rather than stand alone - whether that's form or subject.

Then, what am I going to do with these poems? I kind of stopped sending out randomly to magazines quite a while ago; though there are certain magazines I'd love to get published in. So, I've done what Kirsty Maccoll apperently did in choosing the tracklisting for "The Joshua Tree", put them in order of my favourites. I needed a dozen or so - there's a couple of poetry competitions with deadlines next week (Bridport Prize and Lightship poetry competition) and though I've never even got shortlisted for a poetry competition I thought it worth choosing a poem for each - then there's two of my favourite magazines, one online, one offline, and I've sent a batch to each of those.

It's not that the other poems in the pile aren't worth sending off, but they're perhaps requiring a bit more TLC. Noticeably, a lot of the poems I've been happiest with are 2010's batch, rather than 2011's. Takes a while you see. So, it's mid-afternoon and apart from a brief coffee with an old colleague in Didsbury's ever pleasant Art of Tea, and a brief scavenge through the charity shops, all I've done today is the Administration of Poetry. Stamps. SAEs. Online payment systems. Hole punching. Printing. Ring binding. A satisfying day off, but in some ways, something of a Busman's holiday.