Milligan and Murphy

Let me say straight away that I very much enjoyed this book. I found it an excellent read. It was necessary to get that in first lest you, dear reader, should take the wrong impression from what I am about to say, which is that the book begins very slowly. Indeed, for the first twenty pages or so nothing very much happens - and the nothing much happens at something less than walking pace. It is not a fault, this slow start, it is a necessary acclimatisation to the pace of the story about to unfold and to the pace and energy levels of its two heroes.

Reading these early pages I constantly heard - or thought I heard- echoes of Samuel Beckett. I began to fantasize that maybe Milligan and Murphy were two characters who'd proved surplus to requirements when he was writing Waiting for Godot or one of his other plays. Maybe that was just my own mind set - I had been thinking about the play not long before. Whichever way it was, rest assured Vladimir and Estragon, Milligan and Murphy are not. And as there is no firm reason why a review should be chronological or follow a logical course, it might be helpful if I say here and now that when I was a bit further into the book I suddenly realised that I was not hearing echoes of Beckett, but a different, and I believe original, voice.

There is, shall I call it a family resemblance, but nothing more than that. For one thing, there are levels of philosophical debate (home spun philosophy for the most part, it is true, but philosophy none the less) in their apparently vacuous talk. This for instance from the early part of the book (it is Murphy talking):

"Do you not think that Mary Maguire has the most magnificent breasts?"
"I think it is a bit early in the morning to be considering weighty matters such as those."
"They're massive, they truly are."
"It makes me thirsty just thinking about them Murphy. Can we go and get fed now? I'm so hungry I could eat a cow."

Somewhere a bit earlier than this I should have told you something about our two heroes. They are half brothers. Murphy was a little late in arriving in this world and sometime after the event his father disappeared in strange circumstances. Whether or not the two events were connected appears to be in some sort of doubt. Mrs Murphy, it seems, took off with Murphy Junior in search of an adequate replacement, but ended up with Mr Milligan. Milligan and Murphy are inseparable, still living with mum and still sharing a bedroom, if not a bed. In any other milieu we might have dubbed them layabouts, but so invisibly do they merge into the oddities of Lissoy, the little village in Ireland which is home to them, that such a judgement would seem harsh.

The story proper begins with Ma Milligan telling them that "O'Connor is on the lookout for bodies for his farm." Milligan appeals against the implied instruction in this on the ground that it is Tuesday,
the day on which it is customary to collect their unemployment assistance. This argument is quickly shot down in flames and they set off for O'Connor's farm. They never arrive.

The last thing Milligan and Murphy could be accused of is being proactive. They do not control their lives. Stuff happens (like they come upon an unconscious tramp at the crossroads) and they take a certain direction, are nudged towards it. It is not quite clear how the event causes the result, but somehow that is what happens. They do not take the turning that leads to O'Connor's farm. The road they are on goes on, and somehow so do they. A pivotal moment in their lives passes unrecognised and vanishes for ever into the great blue yonder.

So begins their odyssey. During it they will discuss the meaninglessness of life with four strangers they will meet: the aforementioned tramp, a priest, an artist and an old woman. They are not without their humorous aspects, these conversations, as here with Jesse, the old woman, in her kitchen after she has befriended them and taken them to her home.
Murphy says:

"Over the last few days three people have spoken to my brother and me, in brief and at length, about the meaningless of existence: a tramp, a priest of all people, an artist and now you: this can't be a coincidence."
"What, and you think that means something?" Her tone was sarcastic. "You think God is trying to tell you that he doesn't exist? Ha!"

Not wishing to give away too much of the story, I will just add that Milligan and Murphy ends with the two of them leaning on the rail of a ship bound for Southampton, they having at an earlier point in their odyssey decided that it was the sea for them - though somehow I don't believe that will be the end of the tale.

Milligan and Murphy is available in paperback from FV Books and an ebook version will follow in due course. You can read the opening chapter here.

Jim's blog, The Truth About Lies, is here

A book is... what?

Ask me three score years and ten ago
'What is a book?' I'll tell you this:-
'A small one is a thing we have in school;
sometimes the teacher opens it
and looks inside it as she speaks.
It makes her use a different voice.
Sometimes she's funny and I laugh;
sometimes she's sad; sometimes just daft,
but while she's sat there with the book
she's not Miss Gottlebug at all!'

'A big book, though, that's different now!
We have a big black one at home;
it lives in Gran and Grandad's room,
I've seen it on the smaller dresser - which seems odd,
seeing how very big it is. They've opened it
(a few times only), not far in, to let me see
the picture of our family tree. When they've done that
they've let me touch someone, then told me all they know -
a distant tale of who they were
and what they did. But further on,
there's Adam and there's Eve and Noah,
and best of all, the Tower men built at Babel.
That one shakes me down.'

Ask me, the teenager, I'll tell you how
books became my rabbit hole, bolt hole and mirror,
a magic door through which I'd disappear
to surface in another world.
A worm hole, long before worm holes were known.
Since when, that truth has held, is still in place,
but as a man it needed to be broadened.
Non-fiction elbowed its way in, deserved its place.
Some book are wands (and long have been),
are wands that wisdom waves
to carry necessary knowledge to
a mind that craves it more and more.

Ask me tomorrow as a child again, I'll say:-
'A book's a magic screen on which words fizz,
change their identities and do not
say the same from one look to the next.
They make new sense - or none at all.
But nonsense is not no sense, so they find
their way into my mind the way they always did.
That's where the magic's done, and no one knows -
not even me - what they do there -
or what the truth of that will be.'

Poetry, Technology and Google

I've never thought of myself as a Luddite. Not even an incipient one. I spend time trying to keep up with the latest technologies. Some. I say "some", because as long ago as when I first retired, I made the decision to do my best to stay with certain of them, but to let the rest swing by. Keeping up consumes just too much time and energy. Time and energy that I prefer to devote to other things. I made the same decision with regard to charities - for slightly different reasons. So with regard to computing, I do my best. But as for mobile 'phones, I've largely turned my back on them. I do have a phone, one that Alexander Graham Bell would have been proud to own. I can send and receive texts with it. I can make and receive telephone calls. That's it. That's what a phone's supposed to do! Ah, but I also have two grandsons, so I know what an i-pad and a Blackberry are. So, though the effort and the time involved would outweigh the advantages, I am basically on the side of these things. I classify them under the heading of "Good Guys".

Or I did. Until yesterday morning, over breakfast, to be exact. In the Saturday Guardian Review I came upon Nick Laird's column. Always a good read, it was the second revelation of my early morning peruse. Alas, he doesn't write in it every Saturday, but it's worth taking it each week so as not to miss him when he does. He was writing about poetry apps. Now I knew there were such things, at certain times the knowledge has all but tempted me to overcome my resistance and to sport out on a "proper" mobile. You see, I had assumed that the apps in question would somehow give a new slant on Eliot or Pound or allow a new comparison between them. Something like that. Perhaps open up some form of library to the hungry soul. Maybe there are some that do, but no, not the ones of which Nick was writing. They help you to write the stuff. And the stuff, once written, looks like you had no hand in it. It looks - and sounds - as though the apps wrote it with no other help at all. Which is why everybody's effort looks and sounds the same. (Scrub "everyone's" - but you'll know what I mean!) As Nick put it, it looks as though a computer has translated a poor poem into another language and then translated it back again. It might as well have. Strange, that people who would not dream of getting someone else to write their poem and then claim it as their own, have no compunction about getting a machine to do the job for them. And, maybe because it's come from a computer, they feel no necessity to work on it further. Surfing, I have arrived at so much poetry on which I just cannot comment. Maybe if I knew the person concerned, their background and their life story, I could do so, but in the void of cyber space there is nowhere to start. Should I see it as poetry's first stirrings or as therapy? It has never occurred to me - until now - that I should blame an apps.

If you did not read Nick's article, go raid the recycle bin and reclaim The Review. If you did not take The Guardian yesterday, go raid your neighbour's recycle bin. It really is revealing and explains why so much poetry on the web reads as though it was all written by the same adolescent person. He also makes a plea for more time and effort to go into the writing. This is something I have posted about in the past - and also something I have been guilty of just recently, something I was and am watching, something that is not a permanent state of affairs. The fact is, though, that so much verse on the web is no more than chopped-up prose.

I said that I had had two revelations. The other was from the same Review, but in a book review. The book in question was: "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You", by Eli Pariser. Did you know that if you Google a word and I Google the same word, we will get different results? Maybe you knew that, but I didn't. It is because Google is running our requests through filters it has built of your tastes and mine. Preference algorithms, they are called. They give you and I what Google thinks we'd like to have. In my case it has been spectacularly wrong of late. Interestingly, the suggestion is that there is too much filtering going on on the web, whilst Nick Laird thinks there may be not enough.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

When I first heard of this book, the idea that came to mind was that this could be some sort of split-personality Jesus, a man torn two ways, maybe even a Jekel and Hyde, of whom we have until now only been told the good bits. I was wrong. I could not have been more wrong. This is a book with what for some will be a shocking conceit. It is that Mary gave birth, not just to Jesus, but to the twin boys, Jesus and Christ. Jesus is the Jesus that we know from the Gospels. Christ is a nickname, a tag for his brother who was forever in Jesus's face, thwarting him at every opportunity - or at the very least, representing a world view which is the very antithesis of everything that Jesus preaches.

And if you find the above scenario scandalous, there is more that might be found upsetting: the Annunciation by the Angel to Mary, telling her that she would conceive and bring forth the Saviour of mankind, was a seduction. Worse: in this version of the Gospel story, Jesus does actually die. The business of Him rising again was staged. It was His twin brother Christ who was pressed into service to play the part of the Risen Lord. So you might expect that the Anglican primate of all England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, would not think too highly of this book, on account of its theology. And you'd be correct. Reading between the lines, he doesn't think anything of its theology. It's theology stinks. Yet he commends the book for what its author, Philip Pullman, has achieved in the figure of Jesus. Dr Williams considers him a figure of great spiritual authority. He makes one other point, too, which I confess had escaped me, but is maybe very telling: that the figure of Christ is in fact the figure of Thomas the Doubter. This, as he points out, is never stated in the text, and yet it makes a lot of sense and things do seem to fall into place, emotionally at least - or did for me - once that connection is made.

But leaving that small issue aside, some support is needed, I think, for the contention that the book's Jesus is a figure of great spiritual authority. So back to one who should be able to recognise that attribute when he meets it, Dr Williams again. Among his reasons for so thinking is the account of Jesus's meeting in the synagogue with a man possessed by a devil. In the Gospel account Jesus orders the demon to be silent and come out of him. In the book Jesus addresses, not the demon, but the patient: You can be quiet now. He's gone away. Time to confess, I think: I have used Dr Williams as a witness on the book's behalf, and so he has been, but he is not an unbiased witness in that it was he who prompted Pullman to write it in the first place. Pullman had written about God, but not about Jesus. And Dr Williams asked him why not.

Having hit upon this conceit, that Mary gave birth, not to one child, but to twins, Pullman gives us a chalk and cheese pair. Jesus is the extrovert, always playing up and getting into mischief, Christ is the thinker, the introvert, who time and again gets Jesus out of the trouble he's in. Perhaps not the way round that you might have supposed, but it accords well with everyday experience.

You may know Pullman as the author of The Dark Materials and there is an echo of this in the book's Garden of Gethsemane. This is in large part a long soliloquy by Jesus and is quite unlike any other passage in the book. Jesus is out on his own, there is no answer from Heaven and He is expecting none. Nothing is to be found there. It is a shock that the book does nothing to soften. Jesus having accepted complete responsibility for man's sin and redemption is stuck with it. There is nowhere else to turn. He has Himself made it so.

To that extent the story reminds me very much of Albert Schweitzer's book on The Quest of The Historical Jesus. There are differences. Schweitzer believed, as Pullman seems to, that Jesus was not born The Son of God, not given a divine mandate from birth, but that the role was one he eventually and reluctantly came to accept for himself, the role, in fact, of the Jews' Saving Remnant. First the Jewish race was to achieve man's salvation by its exemplary life and worship, but it proved unworthy and the mantle fell to one tribe. That tribe, too, proved itself unworthy. In time the role fell to the thirteen - Jesus and his disciples. When they proved themselves equally unworthy Jesus took the whole responsibility upon His own shoulders. Schweitzer's book made a profound impression on me as a boy. One difference is that Schweitzer believed Jesus was trying to force God's hand. Pullman, who wears his learning lightly and tells a cracking good tale, seems to think that Jesus did what he did from a state of despair, his belief that God could do nothing.

But if that is the main thrust of the story - the Gospel story retold as it might have been written today - there is at least one other thread: it is a meditation on the nature of truth, myth, falsehood and story-telling. Furthermore it's a cracking good tale. There is a hurdle for some Christians to get over - fundamentalists need not try - but there is much to be gained in the attempt.

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Haiku #109

Sack him, he'll write books,
a lot of them - Gordon Brown.
(Promise? Or a threat?)

The Glass Room

When Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize, by all accounts so convincingly and deservedly (for I have not yet read it, though I am about to put that right), there arose a persistent rumour that the judges had unofficially placed Simon Mawer's Glass Room in second place. It caused some commentators to raise again the question of whether it wouldn't be better in future to split the prize money in to three and award first, second and third prizes. (And interestingly enough, I was reading only a couple of days ago that the French equivalent to our Booker awards the winner a cheque for a measly ten euro. The award is no less coveted, it seems.)

It so happens that I had The Glass Room in my to read pile and took it with me recently for my holiday reading. It's a cliche I know, but I genuinely could not put it down - not for long at any rate.

The focus for the story is pre-war Czechoslovakia, though it begins in Venice where Liesel and Viktor Landauer (of Landauer car fame and wealth) are on honeymoon and where they meet and become friendly with a stranger by the name of von Abt, who proves to be an internationally regarded architect. Viktor suggests that von Abt might like to design a house for them. The suggestion excites von Abt and both men become enthused by his idea of a house of the future. "Ever since man came out of the cave he has been building caves around him, he cried. Building caves! But I wish to take man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit."

Glass space, Glassraum. It was the first time Liesel had heard the expression..

As you might have guessed, the house becomes the hub of the story. There was such a house, though how much of the story is based upon the people and events associated with it, is difficult to guess. In the story the house becomes a metaphor, indeed a series of shifting metaphors. At first it stands for the optimism with which the story's three main protagonists regard the future. The two men particularly, have no doubt that the new style of house will breed a new way of thinking and living. The house will prove to be Abt's great masterpiece with travertine floors and an internal wall of onyx in a room composed entirely of glass. In such a house the way a man thinks and lives will become more open and transparent, more honest, more worthy.

By the time the plans arrive Liesel is pregnant. Viktor explains them to his wife: "He wants to build a steel frame. Apparently there will be no load-bearing walls at all, just the whole thing hung on a steel frame. And where the uprights pass through the interior he is proposing to clad them in chrome. Gladzsend, he calls it. Shining. Hard steel rendered as translucent as water." Viktor pulls a letter from his pocket and reads: "Steel will be as translucent as water. Light will be as solid as walls and walls as transparent as air." But before the baby is born Viktor is having an affair with a woman called Kata whom he met by chance in a park, she asking him for a light.

So where does that leave the great metaphor which is the house? There is irony now in talk of honesty, transparency and openness. Over the course of the story the house will become a metaphor for other concepts (tranquility, illusion, dream), for these are the dark days before W.W.II, and although Liesel is Aryan, Viktor is Jewish and they have to flee, leaving the house which has come to mean so much to them. Before that moment arrives however, the pressure of external events causes Kata to be taken on to look after the young child, much against the wishes of Viktor who has considerable anxieties about the move. However, Viktor arranging papers for her to allow her to accompany them, initially to Switzerland. Sadly, she does not make it across the border.

There follows a confused period in which the house is first confiscated and then changes hands and purpose several times. For a while the Nazis have it for their own particular brand of research - into racial characteristics. It becomes a clinic and a refuge for handicapped children. Viktor's one time chauffeur becomes a self-appointed janitor with eyes on the black market. Then comes the cold war and, eventually, the collapse of Communism clearing the way for the return of the family - but a very changed family. Doctor Tomas, who had run the clinic, had had a firm belief that the past is an illusion. He had also shared (unofficially) the glass room with a girl called Zdenka, letting her hold her dance classes there, in return for which she would dance for him, and for him alone, each evening. Tomas had found it very disturbing that the Glass Room possessed a past, that it had not always been this sterile gymnasium, this fish tank in which Zdenka danced for him, this room of glass and quiet." Dr Tomas had maintained that there is no such thing as time. Past and future are both illusions. There is only a continuous present.

The author includes an Afterword, which for me threw further light on the metaphor and on his thinking, though I think I would have preferred to read it first. I am therefore including it, almost entire. He writes:-

The title of this book, The Glass Room, needs some explanation.It is, as is clear, a translation of the original German - Der Glasraum. Raum is, of course, "room". Yet this is not the room of English, the Zimmer of our holidays, with double bed, wardrobe and writing desk beneath a print of some precipitous Alpine valley. Within the confines of the Germanic "room" there is room for so much more. Raum is an expansive word. It is spacious, vague, precise, conceptual, literal, all those things. From the capacity of the coffee cup in one's hand, to the room one is sitting in to sip from it, to the district of the city in which the cafe itself stands, to the very void above our heads, outer space, der Weltraum. There is room to move in raum.

So: The Glass Space, perhaps; or The Glass Volume; or The Glass Zone. whichever way you please. Poetry is what is lost in translation, as Robert Frost so memorably said. So we do our best with this sorry and thankless task, aware that we will be condemned for trying and condemned for not trying. Take it as you please: The Glass Room; der Glasraum.

So have I any quibbles, regrets, carping comments? Well, certainly nothing that is more than nit-picking. There was not much in the way of character development that I could see, and that is something I look for in a novel, but it is something for which this particular story offers very little in the way of opportunity. People disappear for years and come back changed, it is true, but the change occurs off stage, not in front of the reader. There is, though, one exception: you might say that the house, der Glasraum, is the chief protagonist, and we do watch its character change and develop considerably.

If I had never read Heaney...

He appeared on the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked. I thought perhaps the warrior buried there had stood up again to haunt us. I thought this as I blew out the lanterns one by one around the pen. The sheep jostled and I was glad of their bells.

He came down towards me, stumbling down over the tussocks of the scarp's slope that was cold and wet still with the night, and I could see he was a soldier from the red tunic that all the army now wore, it was said. He stopped at a distance. He had that wary look of one used to killing. His face was dark with dirt, and stubbled.

Deserters had been known to kill. I went on blowing.

He watched me all the time. Then as I turned towards him, he looked away and down into the valley where the village was beginning to smoke.

I saw him side on and I recognised him.

"Gabby," I said.

He turned.

"I wondered when," he murmured, so I could hardly hear. He was the tiredest man I have ever seen.



I first read Ulverton by Adam Thorpe I suppose five or six years ago, maybe more. It became famous as the book that did not win the Booker. More than one author has bemoaned the fact that if Ulverton could not win it, what chance have the rest of us? That opening scene has haunted since my first reading. The very mention of the book's title summons up my images of that scene. I have read the novel a couple of times since, but it never loses its power or its freshness so far as I am concerned. I say novel, but is it? Its subject is the story of a fictional village over three centuries, but whether you see it as a novel or as a collection of short stories relating to the people of Ulverton and the surrounding hills close to The White Horse, is, I suggest, largely a matter of taste. Most will settle for it being a story, and I have neither doubt nor difficulty with that, but here's another suggestion: you could see Ulverton as a collection of prose poems, for in many respects that is what they are.

That being so, it seems almost unbelievable to me that, but for another amazing example of the Internet's synchronicity, I might even now not have been made aware of the fact that Thorpe has a total of four volumes of poetry to his name. Worse. Research has elicited the fact that he was a poet first - and I knew not!

I recently began to re-read Ulverton once more and almost immediately was introduced to his most recent collection of poetry - from five years back! - Nine Lessons from the Dark. To have been so totally unaware of such a treasure from the pen (or keyboard) of one so greatly admired for his prose (or prose poetry) must count as some sort of offence against poetry's Highway Code, I'm thinking. Following without due care and attention, perhaps. Something like that.

Speaking of following, brings me immediately to what was both an encouragement to read and a disappointment: his debt to Seamus Heaney. Discipleship is perhaps too strong a word, but he treads a similar path and in many places the sound of his footsteps echoes those of his hero. The disappointment is not Thorpe's fault. If I had never read Heaney on The Grauballe Man:

he seems to weep
the black river of himself

I would have thought infinitely more highly of Thorpe on The Tollund Man:

Tollund was pickled
in his own ghost, petrified

to an absorbed, ebony drape
of self...

Like Heaney he derives much from the Danish bodies preserved in their peat bogs, but there is more than one way of looking at that. You could view it as a cheeky mining of the seam which Heaney has made his own; you could see it as showing the courage to follow his own muse no matter where she might lead; or you could think it an act of discipleship. Alternatively, you could look at the differences. Heaney was writing against the background of a troubled and violent Ireland, and saw the bog people and their brutal deaths as a metaphor around which to build confessional verse. Thorpe is interested in the bog people as an aspect of the natural world and the site as a place where he unintentionally terrified his son. A touch of humour, the natural world, the seriousness of human sacrifice and the abject fear of a small boy all somehow retain their true characters, their own realities.

I sensed as a medium might
in some Islington cabal

a second presence, no more than a hint,
watchful of me.

But later he draws on Heaney again with his description of the body:

the body shrivelled to the leather
of its stitched hood, stubble

that gave the vexed, late-
night look under the calm

of someone who did not scream.

But do I detect borrowings - echoes, let's say - as between the poems and the prose? Well, yes, and why not, indeed? Some are mundane. For example, the second chapter (or story) of Ulverton is actually a sermon. It begins:It was not snowing when we set out.
For good measure, a half page further down we read:
'Twas not snowing nor in any ways fowl when we set out.
Cairns, the first poem in Nine Lessons from the Dark begins: And the sky was clear when we started out. Of course, the similarities do not end there: the implied threat in each of those statements is realised only too forcefully. The stories have more than their opening statements in common.

One other example may suffice. Thorpe likes a good piss, or he imagines that the country folk of 1712 did, or he imagines the reader will think the country folk of 1712 did. And for all I know, in cruder times they did. It sounds authentic, and may well be so. I am getting round to the fact that one of my favourite poems from the collection is Productivity which explains at one point the (eighteenth century) countryman's method of putting a bloom on the horse's coat:
a wet of piss on the chaff
would make the coat shine.
An echo, if you like, of the third chapter (or story) in Ulverton, which has the character of a journal or a diary has this passage:
Today I caught the maid at her offices. She was pissing within the dairy and not, as instructed, upon the dung-heap which is hidden from general view. Being midway through her passing of urine she made no effort to hide herself and I was afflicted with a view of her private place, which, unlike my wife's, is crow-black.

There is more than a touch of pastiche, I think, particularly in Ulverton and the use of a slightly archaic language which I, perhaps in ignorance, find compelling.

What sex is your computer - & 3 Brilliant ideas

Are you one of those for whom time always seems to be moving at the wrong speed? When we are bored it slows and drags, when engaged in some exciting project it flies by and there are not enough hours in the day or days in the week. Lying awake at night it almost stops. At my age it is increasingly lethargic. For those unfortunate enough to have such problems, the depressed find that it crawls and cannot be prodded into faster life, but for the manic it, too, goes at a hundred miles an hour and there is nothing to be done to slow it down. If you happen to be a tad obsessional you will be focussed too firmly on time future at the expense of the present, whereas if anxiety is your black dog you will be interested mainly in time past.

This is all very well known, of course. I mention it only because this last week I discovered that there was help at hand. Well, if not help, then certainly illumination.

You have but to click here to be whizzed away to the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. Here you will be asked a series of questions and rated according to the degree to which you are influenced by : Past Negative, Past Positive, Present Fatalism, Present Hedonism, Future and Transcendental Future. You can also, should you so wish, take what they call the Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory - but I'll leave you to discover all about that for yourself. (Just so there's no misunderstanding: so far as I have been able to make out none of this has anything to do with Transcendental Meditation - just thought I'd make that clear.

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From a source that must remain anonymous, I learn that a certain police sergeant was in trouble with his inspector for referring to one of his P.Cs (female) as a W.P.C.. This, apparently, is offensive in the present climate. It is like referring to an actor (female) as an actress. Well beyond the pale, no? This one worries me, though, and not least because I had not realised that computers came with gender differences. How do you tell? What is it about my friendly inspector's computer that marks it out as being female? Is there a test for it? Can I buy one in P.C. World? It really worries me that I have not noticed any such distinguishing features in any of the computers I have had dealings with in the past. And certainly not in the one I am up close and personal with at the moment. What has happened to me? Am I slipping? And what mightn't I have done in close contact with them over the years, and not even been aware that I was doing it? It does of course answer one mystery: the question of why it is (allegedly) that so many officers would prefer to be in the station playing with their computers rather than out on the beat.

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No doubt it had to happen, and on the 5th November it will happen, for on that auspicious day Penguin will publish a volume containing over sixty of the world's classic novels Twitterized. This, apparently, is what Elizabeth Bennett is reduced to: It's as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well.

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From a source which modesty forbids me to divulge comes the most brilliant idea of all. An idea that foretells the day when you will click on File on your word processor and see, not just the options New, Open, Save, Save as, but now: New, Open, Save, Save as, Save as verse. Think about it: You will have typed into your W.P. (something like) It had been a wet night, but Jim had remained focussed on the small float bobbing in the dark pool at the end of his line... and at that point the muse had walked out on you, slamming the door as she went - obviously not intending to return any time soon. Dejectedly you click on File, are about to click on Save as when inspiration (daughter of the muse who has just left) whispers in your ear. Following her suggestion, you click instead on Save as verse and are rewarded with:

the angler -
his dreadful intensity
in the evening rain!

Okay, so Buson (painter-poet, 1716-83) got there before the computer on that occasion, but one day the computer will get there first and you will be famous. I understand (from my not-to-be-divulged source) that the originator of the idea is prepared to let Microsoft have the idea to develop for free, as that is all it is just now, just an idea.

Stranger than Fiction

Author - Jim Murdoch : Published - fvbooks : pp180

If you enjoyed the author's previous book Living with the Truth - as I did _ you will enjoy this one. I enjoyed this one even more than the previous one. As with that one, Jonathan Payne is the chief protagonist. Living with the Truth was the story of his meeting with the personification of truth. As always with such stories you have to be able to accept the conceit on order to relax and enjoy both the story and the writing.

In many way Stranger than Fiction is a re-run of that first book, for it is again the story of Jonathan Payne's encounters with the figure of Truth. Only this time the story is not confined to humble Earth. Oh dear me, no: this time we have not so much a broader canvas as an endless wall available for the author to expand his grand designs. We have macro-universes - called macro-verses - for example. Our gallant protagonist and Truth may now range far and wide. But the conceit becomes more involved than that: before too long we learn that everywhere he goes and everyone he meets Jonathan Payne has generated himself from his own memory. For example, he remembers an early 70's pub, so that is what they find themselves sitting in when Truth takes him for a drink. It is a conceit that allows Jonathan to interact with people from his past. It allows him, to take another example, to face up to the memory of his mother and his own childish fantasies and to the consequent guilt feelings. You ask a child, he is told, why they did something, I don't know, wet themselves, stole a penny, scribbled on the new wallpaper and they answer if they dare, "Because," because that is all the truth there is. You want to know "Why?" but I don't have the answers you're looking for. Because they never existed. This is your chance to examine the other routes in your life to see if there are any better choices just waiting to be made.

But the conceit does more even than that, for it has yet more to offer both the author and the reader. It allows Murdoch to examine a variety of issues and to put forward various viewpoints. It must be said - and this is perhaps the one down side and my one slight disappointment - that it is not a debate between equals. Truth has all the big guns and the heavy armaments. Jonathan can only muse, something he does quite a lot - and even then his musings are often cut short! I was actually longing for him to win just one argument and so prove for all time that Truth could be false - Oh, all right: "wrong", if you must! - But that, I realise, was expecting too much. Maybe it would have sent the whole macro-verse spinning off course. I don't know; it is likely that only the author could say for sure. That was just one small me carping a bit - the me that instinctively feels it must champion the underdog or Justice will depart from this small universe of ours for ever.

So what are the issues that the author manages to raise? Well, Truth is one, of course. What it is and what it isn't. Xenophobia another. Then there is Reality. As in: Your mother was only as real as you remembered her to be. Belief in God and Relationships both get an airing. Not exactly trivial stuff, this, you will notice.

I am not - as some of you will know - a great film buff, although there was a time when I might have claimed to be one. However, I did very much appreciate the way the author took the presented opportunity to play around with films. This is obviously something that he very much enjoyed doing, and consequently it was enjoyable for this reader, who invariably derives great pleasure from the enthusiasm of a speaker or a writer for his/her subject.

If I was to be asked to pick my favourite scene or passage from this book I think I would choose one from near the end in which Jonathan is taken to a convention of Jonathan Paynes. Here he meets all those other selves from all those other times and universes across the macro-verse. There is a Father Jonathan, a prophet Jonathan, a Jonathan Payne from Earth 334, an android Jonathan Payne, even twin Jonathan Paynes and a Lady Joanna Payne. I found this extremely humerous, but it was humour with a point. And the point? Well, perhaps each reader will come to it differently, but what I did find was that much in this book could be taken in any of a number of ways. It was possible at times to see it as metaphor, parable, maybe allegory. No doubt you could read nothing into it and just enjoy what would then be a rather far-fetched story.

But having finished the book and reflected a bit on the author's two books, I found myself playing with the idea of these being the first in a Jonathan Payne series, a time travel series with a difference. We could have Jonathan visiting his distant ancestors, for example. Okay, I've gone beyond the remit of a reviewer, but I do believe it not impossible to imagine a cult following somewhere down the road one day.

The elderly keep slipping into graves.

The real subject of this post is a book for which I have been waiting avidly for some time now. It has recently appeared and I have only just now ordered it, George Szirtes's Collected. It must be the subject of some future post. Let me explain: something like eight or nine years ago I bought a collection of poetry called The Budapest File by George Szirtes. I can't recall how or why I bought it: was I browsing in the local bookshop and just happened upon it, or did I read a review and order it? I don't know, so I must assume that at the time of purchase I regarded it as no big deal. If that is how it was, then it did not stay no big deal for long. I knew the work of Szirtes, of course. Which is to say, I had read some of his poetry and thought I knew it. But the moment I began to dip into The Budapest File there came a seismic shift in my understanding. Which in itself was strange, because The Budapest File was Szirtes's tenth collection, or something like that, and most of its poems had been published in those earlier volumes, were distributed among them. I must have read many of them in the years before I bought the book. Whatever, I can't explain what happened, I can only recount it. Suffice to say that I was plunged into a world the like of which I had never inhabited before, indeed would not wish to inhabit save in the safety of Szirtes's poems.

Szirtes came to this country as a refugee from Hungary. It was sometime, apparently, before he began to write about his childhood memories of Budapest, but when he did, it was as though it had an inevitability about it - which likely it did have - and it became a theme, a major one which was at the same time very personal and distanced enough to place the personal in its political and social setting. His remembered world, his lost childhood - perhaps I should say his nearly lost childhood, maybe to some extent and in some ways regained in his poetry - is redolent with threat. It is a world in which nothing can be taken at face value, anything at all might turn out to be other than it seems. It is a place of echoing voices, of assaults on the senses that seem to have no rational cause. And indeed, very little of it could have been called rational. It is all the fears and nightmares of childhood that you and I have ever experienced, but multiplied a thousand times. It is all that, but experienced by children and adults alike. It is darkness which is always hostile, always malevolent, never neutral. The Budapest File has conveyed to me the horror of that time, and of the regime that made it possible, with greater clarity than all the political speeches, photographs or magazine and newsprint articles. It is horror writ as such horror is always writ: personalised.

I committed whole chunks of the poems to memory. Some, I didn't need to, for they lodged there, quite naturally, without any conscious help from me. But I have prattled on enough. Let me give you a few tasters of what I mean:-

The first verse from The Photographer in Winter:-

You touch your skin. Still young.The wind blows waves
Of silence down the street. The traffic grows
A hood of piled snow. The city glows.
The bridges march across a frozen river
Which seems to have been stuck like that for ever.
The elderly keep slipping into graves.

and the fourth verse:-

The white face in the mirror mists and moves
Obscure as ever. Waves of silence roll
Across the window. You are in control
Of one illusion as you close your eyes.
The room, at least, won't take you by surprise
And even in the dark you'll find your gloves.

This from Undersongs

Desire again, the Undersongs. The lost
Children feel it in their sleep,
and turn uneasily to the wall through which
Symbols pass and cool their blood like ghosts.
My mother's family has passed through it,
No one remains, and she is half way through.
Her brother disappears, the glove has closed
About him somewhere and dropped him in the ditch
Among the rest. The ditch becomes a pit,
The pit a symbol, the symbol a desire,
And this desire's the thread. The tunnels creep
Under the skin, the trains with their crew
O passengers can glide through unopposed.

This from part 5 of TheCourtyards

Think of an empty room with broken chairs,
a woman praying, someone looking out
and listening for someone else’s shout
of vigilance; then think of a white face
covered with white powder, bright as glass,
intently looking up the blinding stairs.

There’s someone moving on a balcony;
there’s someone running down a corridor;
there’s someone falling, falling through a door,
and someone firmly tugging at the blinds.
Now think of a small child whom no one minds
intent on his own piece of anarchy:

Think of a bottle lobbing through the air
describing a tight arc – one curious puff –
then someone running but not fast enough.
There’s always someone to consider, one
you have not thought of, one who lies alone
or hangs, debagged, in one more public square.

This from Transylvana: Virgil’s Georgics:-

May
Poplars full of thrushes. Sky leans
on earth. The river dreams.
Shrubs light their torches. A bullfinch
sputters on a branch, bursts into flames.

So this review has not been about the book I have been waiting for, the book I have now ordered. I have done myself proud of late. It will be my third new book within a month - well over my usual budget. But if I had to ration myself to just one for 2009 it would be George Szirtes Collected, even though he has referred to Collecteds as Tombstones. I am confident enough to believe that this will not turn out to be a tombstone, merely premature.

It's Literature, Jim, but not as we know it.

Or: there's literary literature and then there's non-lit lit. Tolstoy's War and Peace and William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience fall into the former category. So does Shakespeare's Hamlet. The menu for a Royal Banquet does not. Neither does the manual for a Ford Focus. Ford may describe their manual as literature, but literary literature not even they would dare to call it.

But what about this from the Mills and Boon range?

She moved closer to him, her eyes intent on his face. "I never imagined such a thing could happen to Jean-Jacques Armentier of all people. Not when you used to laugh with me over the ridiculous claims in the tabloids linking me to this prince and that shipping magnate. Remember?"

Oh yes. I remember. How I wish I didn't. For the love of heaven, Nicole, don't look at me like that.

It was the same way she used to look at him whenever he tried to play hard to get. He did it on purpose to gauge her reaction. Her eyes would glisten over in pain and she'd go all breathless. Every time she responded that way, it would prove that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

Something dark in his nature had always needed that proof because he couldn't believe that Nicole Giraud, the exquisite brunette men all over Europe fantasized about, the daughter of a family worth billions, would rather be with Jean-Jacques Armentier, a son of the soil who was very good at entertaining her, but could never be her equal.

No matter how many times he tested her, she still came after him, undaunted. In front of his peers her unswerving desire for him fed his inflated ego. In the privacy of night, with the taste of her mouth still on his, he felt his heart soar. Then the morning would come, when the harsh light of day brought reality, dashing every dream.

Have I yet sown the seeds of division among you, I wonder. I think probably not. But if that is not literary, why is it not? Is it just a bit of snobbery creeping in, I wonder? Are we equating literary with intellectual? One of my early English teachers did just that, or so I think now, looking back. Let's leave Mills and Boon for now. Which, if any, of the following do you think might be literary? An Eagle Comic, a Bat Man Annual, John Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress. Easy that last one? It's a classic, is it not? So in what way(s) is the following superior as literature to the Mills and Boon extract?

Then Christian fell down at his foot as dead, crying, Wo is me, for I am undone: At the sight of which, Evangelist caught him by the right hand,
saying, All manner of sin and blasphemies shall be forgiven unto men; be not faithless, but believing. Then did Christian again a little revive, and stood up trembling, as at first, before Evangelist. It is an allegory, of course, of the Christian Journey, so it could be said to be more intellectual than the Mills and Boon...

Perhaps it's time to define terms.. The adjective literary implies, as I understand it, some degree of artistic creation, an imaginative construct which can clearly be seen to be related to real life, but is not synonymous with it. It refers to something carved out of words which can only be known through the medium of those words. Furthermore, the track that has been laid is but a single track; it leads to no other reality or truth save the one which has been created by the author using the words of which it is composed.

So that is what it is - unless you disagree. But how do we recognise it when we meet it? By what authority can we say of one text, This is literary and of another, This is not?

One of the tried and tested tests, if I can put it that way, concerns the effect it has upon the reader. The literary text, it is said, will have some beneficial consequence, provide him or her with some additional experience which has not been forthcoming, perhaps could not be forthcoming, in real life. At second-hand, or vicariously acquired, the reader may be introduced to environments, situations or characters that it would not be practical to encounter in reality. Aristotle maintained that drama had a cathartic value, that by arousing terror or disgust in the viewer it purged the soul of such passions. Plato, though, distrusted the mythical aspects of poetry and in The Phaedrus he argued against poetry's use of persuasion as opposed to the pursuit of truth. In The Republic he stressed that in a perfect society the poet would have no educational role to play, not because he thought education to warrant no such power, but because he regarded that power as something of a loose cannon. The weight of opinion now would seem to be on the side of literary works having the possibility to affect the reader, not just at the time of reading, but for an indefinite period thereafter.

Traditionally, though, there are other tests that we might like to apply, two main ones, the first being the degree to which a text succeeds in presenting a truthful image of life. Here again to examine the roots of this belief we must go back to Aristotle. For him poetry was mimesis or imitation of life. The mimetic theory of literature survived, pretty much unchallenged, from his day until the late eighteenth century when it was replaced by the Romantics for whom poetry was very much an expression of the poet's inner world of feelings. Mimesis has made recurrent comebacks, though, and is still very much a force to be reckoned with.

There is still the third and final of my tests, one I have already mentioned in passing: the Intellectual test, my old English teacher's test, as part of which he would have included correct spelling and punctuation, grammar and syntax. Intellectual in this context implied a degree of difficulty and/or ambiguity. The text did not have to be impenetrably difficult, but open to interpretation. He also was very definitely of the opinion that there existed a literary language, a pool of words, phrases expressions and a syntax (for example the reversal of word order) that was permitted the poet and the elevated author, though not the prosaic writer. This literary language was somehow more refined than, and superior to, common usage. Dictionaries, of course, still do tag some words as poetic.

Perhaps there is, though, a specifically, if not exclusively, poetic language: the language of metaphor. It is this, after all, that most often allows the poetic method; allows, for example, the poet to crystallise an image having several facets such that future images may be refracted through them. The methodology of the language structures the poem. The method may not be confined to poetry any more than the metaphor itself can be, but both are found far more frequently there, and though the prose writer may adopt poetic language for this or that purpose, it is rare for it to be sustained throughout a work, if only because of the length of the text and the effort that would entail.

The Cliché's Bad Press

A recent visit to Poet Hound's Poetry Tips set me thinking about clichés. The post was concerned with them and with catch phrases, the tip being: Why not use them in poems the way Andy Warhol used pop culture in his art? I decided to have a bit of fun with the idea, concentrating on clichés. The poem below was the result. I emphasise that it was just a bit of fun, (I spent no more than 15 minutes on it, possibly less, so it is definitely not Wordworthian), but it led to deeper thoughts, not profound, mind you, but deeper - thoughts which have led on to this post.


At the end of the day...

when all that is not rocket science has been said
and done, God will be the final cliché. Fact
of the matter is he is a God to die for, for his raft
of special measures for mankind has led
to millions going head to head to win their daily bread;
by millions more a too low profile kept;
and further millions rated last who had been least;
not to mention donkeys flogged who were long dead.
It's neither here nor there to say
that those who sing from another sheet
may live to sing another day,
may have the young and callow at their feet
or on the soul's back burner stoke
the fires without which is no smoke.

Until early in the nineteenth century, the word cliché meant a stencil or stereotype as in a printer's metal printing plate. The process was that papier-mâché or some such material would be used to produce a mould from a block of type. The plates would then be cast from the resulting mould. Towards the end of that century, however, cliché had begun to take on the critical meaning that we give it today.

Just so that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet, a definition might be in order here. A cliché is an overused expression, a word or phrase that has lost its original power and meaning by being so overused. (Ideas, too, can become clichés, but I will come to those later.) Today, the word cliché usually refers to a word or phrase that has become annoying to a significant number of people, so over-used is it. This is apt to occur when it has become difficult to detect a specific meaning for it in a particular context. Also today the word is taken to indicate a certain sloppiness or laziness on the part of the author, perhaps even insincerity.

So where along the line did the word come to gather around it the pejorative associations that are now almost always ascribed to its use? For it was not always so. It is interesting to note that the modern meaning of the word dates almost exactly from the first stirrings of a general desire for originality. This is no coincidence. If we go back to classical times we find that writers like Virgil and Homer used expressions which in a modern writer we might denounce as clichés, and used them for a variety of purposes including the maintenance of the work's rhythms and as an aide-mémoire. Homer's Odyssey, for example, I have heard criticised for its repetative use of the phrase rosy-fingered dawn, but in fact Homer was writing within a well-accepted and established tradition. His readers back then would have seen nothing there about which to be critical. Neither should we forget that Shakespeare and the Bible are both rich sources of cliché, nor, indeed, that today's cliché was yesterday's powerful - and possibly original - phrase. Some will argue that the only reason a cliché is so called is because it has stood the test of time and is now what it always was: a good turn of phrase.

There is another valid use of cliché, which is in extempory speech where it may be used to give the speaker thinking time to mentally plan the next point or idea.

Even today, a good case can be made for certain uses of cliché in literature. The expression of irony, for example, this may involve the twisting of a cliché, thus: Never do today what you might put off until tomorrow. It might be useful to portray a character, maybe by putting a string of clichés into his mouth: You've let the grass grow under your feet, m'boy and now you are reaping what you have sown! tells us a great deal about the character. It might also help ro realise that a complete avoidance of all clichés is hardly a practical proposition.

So when does a cliché stop being a positive contribution to the work in question and become a thing to be avoided? I have already hinted at one answer, the one given by most people, I believe, in their response to a speech or a reading: it is a cliché of the kind to be avoided at all costs when it is irritating to its readers or listeners and/or when it appears to have no specific meaning in a particular context.

I also said earlier that cliché does not have to be a word or a phrase, and neither does it. All the arts have clichés of their own. Film for example, is heavily laden with them. Here's one: we see a pair of feet creeping across a dark screen. We cut to something shiny, reflecting the light. Cut. The something shiny has become a hunting knife. It is being held aloft in a gloved hand. The screen goes black. There is a scream. We see the knife again, now dripping blood.

Think of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the clichés in that, from the shower and shower curtain, to Perkins's oedipal relationship with his mother... except that they were not cliches when he made the film. He was working creatively, but the film spawned a whole genre of clichéd films. (To my mind Psycho was not his best film, nowhere near as good as the earlier North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train.)

One of my all time best ten was cliched, though, but in my opinion rose magnificantly above them: High Noon and
Now here is a list of general clichés. You almost feel you ought to be able to buy them at the corner shop. Buy two, get one free.

• Sunsets into which lovers walk and cowboys ride,


• Escaping goodies and baddies who always make for the top floor from whence escape becomes more difficult


• Good dying characters who would not be seen dead unless they were surrounded by friends


• Good dying characters whose final words are always lucid and significant, if not philosophical


• Good dying characters who nearly always close their eyes at the point of death


• Good friends of the good, dead character on hand to close the eyes of those who do happen to die with them open. (The eyes always stay closed after such ministrations.)


• Characters having nightmares who invariably sit bolt upright upon waking. (Unlike us in real life.)


• Dogs who never fail to detect the baddies with their highly moral doggie sixth and seventh senses

Examples occurred to me faster than I could write them down, but I have probably given enough here. No doubt you could add scores of your own, for they are not difficult to come by. But here are a few I think work and work well as stereoypes, though you may not think well of them on moral or ethical grounds:-

• The sinister lump on Richard III's back.


• Captain Hook's evil prosthesis.


• Captain Ahab's wooden leg.


• Steinbeck's use of the moron to portay menace in his character of Lenny.


• The stereotype of the Jew in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

But at the end of the day and bearing all things in mind, it remains the fact that that which causes us to frown heavily at the cliché is that which gave us the word in the first place: the desire for originality. All of which leaves one question still bugging me, a side issue perhaps, but germane to an extent: do we sometimes sacrifice too much in our quest for originality? I was left pondering the question again this morning after reading James Campbell's account of an interview with Derek Walcott in this morning's (04.10.08) Guardian. Walcott quotes Pasternak's remark that Great poets have no time to be original.

Why Books?

Overheard in the supermarket: a woman bemoaning the fact that she had visited the local public library with aview to using one of its computers, only to find that they were in great demand and she should have bookedher session beforehand: They just don't have enough computers, she announced with some venom, they seem to be spending all their money on bloody books! What they want them all for? So that's my question: Why books? For the purposes of this post books are: novels, short stories, plays - truth-telling verisimilitudes of any kind, which from this point on I will call TTVs for short. That out of the way, it is a fundamental question right enough, particularly so at this point in time when there is so much coming on stream that threatens to trivialise, or to appear to trivialise the TTVs. There are e-books, for instance, electronic book readers, techno-books, soaps, games machines, docusoaps, docudramas and much else, none of which are in themselves necessarily trivialising, though the ways in which they have been, and are being, used tends to make them so. I have even seen the soaps proclaimed as today's novels - more on that later. So, given all that, what are books for?Do they have purpose which cannot be fulfilled by any of these would-be usurpers?

We first encounter the TTV as children - not necessarily in book form, and always assuming we were lucky enough to have that sort of childhood. For us then they had much the same purpose as play. With no experience of the world, we role-played to discover as best we could what it mught be like to be a bus driver, fighter pilot, parson or parent. From stories read to us we heard what others thought it would be likeor had found it to be. Or maybe we encountered threats, real or imagined, that our small world held for us, and in the safety of the game or the story we rehearsed the ways to deal with them. We learnt, too, that actions - including our own - have consequences and began to realise that we should have to deal with those as well.

Some things never change, or not much. I remeber that our professor at London University used to impess upon us that: There are more ways of living a life than can be lived by one person living one life. If we want to try the other ways - or some of them! - we can probably best - or most easily - do it in a book. And the book in question will be a TTV, a novel or a biography, a mask of artifice revealing in its fiction a valuable truth.

We could widen the question, of course, and ask what are T.V. dramas for? For have I not already mentioned hearing them proclaimed the new novel? That proclamation was put out by no less a person than Jane Tranter, Controller of Fiction at the BBC in a recent speech to The Royal Television Society. What she actually said was that: television has supplanted the role of the novel in addressing the big social issues of the day. She was comparing the nineteenth century novel with present day television drama, but her words leave scope for some ambiguity: did she mean that in the nineteenth century folk read novels for the same reasons that people today watch T.V. dramas? Or did she mean that the world of the imagination has moved on from the nineteenth century novel and is better served now by T.V. drama, an altogether superior commodity? Certainly, those nineteenth century readers were an enthusiastic bunch, going to much greater lengths to satisfy their passion than we are likely to have to do today. Many clubbed together to buy the instalments they could not afford by themselves, many were illitierate; in both cases they would gather together and have the latest instalment read out. Today we sit mostly in family groups in front of the box for our nightly fix. Maybe even the family group is doomed; the writing has been on the wall for some time in the form of games machines, but now there is another threat: a television set that two programmmes at the same time. Which one you watch depends upon the angle to the screen at which you sit. Of course, you need earphones so... But I digress:There seems little doubt that Jane Tranter meant to imply that the T.V. drama was superior to the novel in terms of imaginative content and the variety of experiences available to the viewer. I find that a staggering assertion at a time when B.B.C. drama, if not actually being dumbed down - and I think it is - is certainly at an all-time low.

To test my feeling, I retrieved an old Saturday Guardian Review from the recycle bin and found in that one paper the following books reviewed: When Will There Be Good News?, described as a crime novel that is funny, clever and always surprising; Casanova, a biography of energy and brio;From A to X; A Story in Letters, John Berger's long-listed Brooker contender; Palace Council by Mark Lawson, a historical thriller that chronicles the fortunes of black America; The Bellini Madonna by Elizabeth Lowry, a mischievous tale of high and low intrigue that entertains; and Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold the re-telling of Dickens's life with his estranged wife taking centre stage. There were others I could have added, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example, not new I know, but then neither is everything on the box. The point is that just taking the books listed here, you would be hard put to it to find a comparable selection anywhere in the T.V. schedules.

Barely had I written the above, than Doreen suggested we sat down to watch My Zinc Bed, a BBC2 drama I had recorded a few days earlier. It was everything I have just been suggesting is no longer to be found among the schedules. It was on the theme of addiction, which did not immediately endear it to me, I having seen so many on that subject that were harrowing and nothing else. This was not like that. Indeed, nothing much happened. For sure, there were no tummy-wrenching scenes. The plot, such as it was, meandered, but mostly it was words. Dialogue. dialogue that made you listen and listen attentively. The pace varied, as did the emotive charge. It was difficult at times, but totally original. The exception that proves my rule, obviously! Encouraging, though.

So now it's Jim and me!

Okay, I put my hands up, I have been a trifle tardy in getting round to coin a few words on Jim's book, Living With the Truth. Actually, that is partly because I was a trifle tardy reading it, and that in turn was because I had to finish War and Peace first, which, foolishly I had chosen for my bed time reading, which would have been okay but for this tendency I have to nod off as soon as I get into bed. (Senior moment type 2.) Why didn't you read it during the day, then? I hear you ask. Because the tendency to nod off is even greater then, I reply. (I didn't nod off reading Living with the Truth funnily enough! Make of that, what you will.)

But to resume: finding myself (not for the first time in my life) the tail-end stooge, I thought I might put aside my desire to review the book for a while yet in order to hit the blogosphere with it when the intial excitement had died down. In fact, it was just beginning to dawn upon me that this might never happen, that Living With the Truth might become a web phenomenon, when, Lo and behold, I hear that Jim has dished out a blog award to me. Naturally, I would want to say a word or two about that, so putting those two developments together, it seemed now might be a good time after all to rush into print with my review.

The award first - of course! My initial reaction was much like Jim's: a certain concern that the method of making the awad - i.e. the blogger having been given the award, then chooses up to five further blogs to be awarded - has the potential, eventually, to award everyone and make the award itself meaningless. My instinct was to suppose there should be some criteria at least, on which the choice is based. That's the professional coming out in me, I am afraid. I was overlooking the traditional amateur nature of the web, which is in fact one of its strong points. Being given a commendation by someone whose judgement you rate highly is in no way inferior to be awarded it by a committee ticking all the boxes. This one has come down to me via Jim (see his Kick-Ass Blogger Award post) and Cataherine at Sharp Words, so the pedigree is as good as it gets - which means I now have to contemplate choosing a blog or blogs, a task I fancy I will not find easy. Not because of their rarity value, but because there is no shortage (so far) of worthy blogs who are yet to be awarded, and because the choice will, by definition, be personal and to that extent subjective and therefore prejudiced. I will do my best, for which read: I will take a day ot two.

So to the book. Living With the Truth. In a sense I feel there is little I can add to what has already been said, and in the main, well said. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book, and an easy book to read - that not being intended as a criticism by the way. Quite the reverse. It is a serious book that pretends it is no such thing, and a humerous book that does not care who knows it - a combination which I find particularly attractive. The seriousness runs below the slightly acerbic wit and sarcasm, but not invisibly so; it shows in the same way a bone structure shows in the shape of a face. The net result is a gentle and humane portrait of humanity.
The first two sentences set the tone admirably:-

Had it been death that had called that day everything would have been all right. After all, he had been waiting patiently on death for some time and, by his calculations, The Grim Reaper was well and truly overdue.

But it wasn't Death, of course. It was Truth. Hence the consternation that the call would occasion. Death, he was ready for, Truth... ah, well that was an altogether different matter! Our protagonist, Jonathan Payne, is in a sense Mr Everyman: he tells lies to himself, mainly about himself. His is a very fashionable attitude, but one with all sorts of dire - though initially unrecognised - consequences for himself. Some of Truth's colleagues get cameo parts (Destiny for one) and just when you think it might turn to farce it clicks back to serious.

If you know Jim's blog you will already have a fair idea of what to expect (and if you don't know it I would recommend that you remedy that forthwith): the width of his interests and knowledge, for example; the well thought-out and thoroughly researched material; a well-paced and lively, lucid text that leads you into areas you had not altogether expected. Actually, it always gives you rather more than you had expected. It does so here. Read it, read it anywhere: if you have not yet taken your holiday, read it on the beach or in the plane. You could even read it in bed - but not if you want to fall asleep.

Just for openers...

The other day I picked up my copy of "Lempriere's Dictionary" by Lawrence Norfolk, with the intention of re-reading it. The opening sentence read "The young man dropped the book.". Nothing to write home about there, you might think, except that it reminded me of a talk at the local library that I and the rest of my class were taken to in my youth. It was given by a novelist whose name and details I have long since forgotten. I have forgotten most of the talk as well, and remember only that it was a tips-for-wannabe-writers sort of talk. What I do very vividly recall, though, is the bit about the absolutely primary importance of the opening sentence (or two). He told us he had written his first novel as a youth of about our age, and that its opening sentence had been: "Crash, the captain's head struck the deck!" It was, he assured us, still the best opening he had ever written. He could, he further assured us, tick all the criteria boxes for it: it made the reader want to read on because something was happening from the very first word; it set the tone for the writer to follow, making it that much easier for the story to unfold. There were other plusses, but they, too, have been lost to fading memory.

I suppose that "The young man dropped the book." might seem a little tame beside "Crash, the captain's head struck the deck!", but the one reminded me of the other and furthermore, it started me thinking about opening sentences that have struck me as being among the best, and why that was. We would all produce a different list, of course, and a thought that occurs to me is that I probably remember best the openings to those books that I enjoyed the most. Maybe there are great openings I have forgotten along with the forgettable novels they opened. Another caveat would be that they do not necessarily strike me now as they did then, when I first came to them. I have tried, therefore, to recall what were my feelings then. With that in mind, then, here, in no particular order, are the selections I remember thinking great when I first read them:

"They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide." : "The Sea" by John Banville : A story is all the better, to my way of thinking, for a touch of mystery or a hint of the supernatural. Both are here in the same sentence.

"A war ends in rags and dust." : "A Dance Between Flames" by Anton Gill : Succinct, and at the same time intruiging

"He appeared on the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked." : "Ulverton" by Adam Thorpe : Once again, a touch of mystery in the description, deepening towards the end of the sentence - why the shock?

"Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse." : "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bernieres : Here it was the humour that got me - what else?

"I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the bike that it is eight-thirty in the morning." : "Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance" by Robert M Pirsig : Unnecessary and apparently inconsequential information from a narrator who yet presents as someone with no time for such frills. Needs resolving.

Rattisbon Arno Domini mense decembri mclv Cronicle of Baudolino of the family of Aulario" : "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco : Well, 'sobvious, innit?

"STATELY, PLUMP, BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." : "Ulysses" by James Joyce : A touch of humour - and a hint perhaps of something darker. Will there prove to be any significance to the crossed mirror and razor?

"That was when I saw the pendulum." : "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco : We know it is Foucault's pendulum from the book's title, so the question arises: So?

"Up above the wagon rolling along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying East through the dusk." : "The First Man" by Albert Camus : Just a workman-like bit of scene-setting which does its job well and leads you to think the rest of the book might be as well written.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." : "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez : A rather refined version of "Crash. The Captain's head struck the deck"!