The Guardian's Blog, page 156

Russell Brand banned from Guantánamo Bay

According to Shaker Aamer, the British comedian's memoirs have fallen foul of the censors at Camp Delta. But I fail to see the funny side

I guess it's funny. Funny the US government is so keen to look after Shaker Aamer's wellbeing that despite judging him one of the "most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth", they're worried he won't be able to handle a bit of swearing. At least, according to Aamer, that's the reason censors have stopped him reading the second volume of Russell Brand's memoirs, Booky Wook 2.

Writing in the New Statesman he explains that almost 12 years into his detention without charge at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, he's been trying to work out what gets the camp's censors hot under the collar. His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, drops off a few books every three months or so, but it's still "difficult to identify any consistent or logical basis for the censorship". Nineteen Eighty-Four is apparently fine. Gulag Archipelago is not.

On his most recent visit in October, Clive gave me a list of the titles he had dropped off for me, so I could let him know later what had been banned by what I prefer to call the Guantánamo Ministry of Information. One was Booky Wook Two by Russell Brand. I understand that Brand uses too many rude words. I suppose you have to be amused by that: the US military is solicitous of my sensitive nature, and wants to protect me from swearing. These are the same people who say that all of us at Guantanamo are dedicated terrorists.

I suppose it's funny that while David Copperfield is a hit with prisoners, Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law didn't make it through – Aamer quips that the former law lord's book would clearly be "inconsistent" with the values of a detention camp where the rule of law is suspended. Maybe it's amusing that Alan Dershowitz's Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence was hijacked, or that Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment found itself under lock and key.

But almost four years after Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the prison there are still 162 men locked up in Camp Delta without trial. Twenty nine of them are on hunger strike, with 19 of those – including Aamer – currently being force fed, so forgive me if I find it a little hard to see the funny side.

Way back in 2007 Mark Falkoff – the lawyer who put together a collection of inmates' poetry, Poems from Guantánamo – said that prisoners were "writing poetry because they need some kind of mental stimulation, some way of expressing their feelings, some outlet for their creativity". Five years later Aamer writes that when he is "allowed to read, for a short while it lifts the heavy gloom that hangs over me". It's 12 years since he saw his wife and children, the youngest of whom was born the day his father arrived in Guantánamo Bay. Twelve years of imprisonment without charge. If literature can help him face the prospect of another day in prison, the least I can do is send the guy a decent book. Let's see if it arrives.

CensorshipGuantánamo BayShaker AamerRussell BrandGeorge OrwellFyodor DostoevskyClive Stafford SmithCharles DickensRichard Lea
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Comfort reads: The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe, by Penelope Lively

A mischievous boy hero and an equally amusing ghoul. Not without its bittersweet edge, this is also very soothing storytelling

The back of my copy of The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe suggests it is suitable for readers aged nine and over. That easily includes me, although now and again I wonder if I might prefer it if it didn't. Viewed from my increasingly distant standpoint, under nine seems a wonderfully simple thing to be. No bills, no debt, and few thoughts that the future might not go on for ever. Nothing much to worry about at all except long division and the odd spelling test, and in summer, even less of that. A comfortable time, in other words. So I'm glad of a book that can take me back there as skilfully and enjoyably as does this little book Penelope Lively wrote back in 1973.

The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe is a glorious reminder of the fun of being a boy. It centres on James – a fun, clumsy, Just William kind of character who delights in just scruffing around with his almost-talkative dog Timmy. He makes a mess in the kitchen, digs tunnels in the garden and conducts "studies" on interesting insects. It is all delightful, and it all happens under golden sunshine, in a peaceful village, in a lovingly described cottage. Lively evokes bliss for her young hero – and just as brilliantly disrupts it.

James's problems begin when a new message is chalked onto the blackboard his father has put outside their cottage to advertise the sale of apples. It reads: "Sorcerie, Astrologie, Geomancie, Alchemie, Recoverie of Goodes Lost, Physicke."

Soon ornaments are being smashed, doors are being slammed and trouble is kicking off all over the place. Most people assume it's James's fault, not least because a series of notes appear around the village of Ledsham instructing people to go and call on him and demand he make them various potions. James knows better though. Responsibility lies with the ghost of one "Thos. Kempe Esquire. Sorceror" who has re-emerged from the 17th century and is convinced that James is his apprentice.

Our young hero's worries increase when Kempe vandalises the doctor's surgery, writes across the blackboard at James's school and daubs across a fence the information that James's next door neighbour Mrs Verity is a "wytche". Penelope Lively describes it all with infectious glee. The best scene comes when a pompous vicar visits. Doors slam. Chairs are moved out from under him. Tea is made to cascade over his trousers. A barometer is smashed. His head is made to collide with a roof beam. Why? The ghost writes his explanation on clean page of James's personal notebook: "I lyke not Priestes."

You don't have to be nine to find this stuff funny. When I re-read the book for this article, aged 36, I laughed just as much as ever. There is also great comfort in these descriptions of boyhood – even if they also come with their own difficult truths. This may be a book targeted at children, but it's still Penelope Lively. She never talks down to her younger readers, never assumes that they are less than intelligent. The result is a book more profound than most written for grown-ups. And also sadder.

Even in the opening pages, we hear that the village of Ledsham has "the air of being dwarfed by the present". A new, uglier reality is encroaching on the cosy past: "New housing estates were mushrooming now on two sides of it, but the centre remained as it must always have been with the houses and streets a size smaller than the houses and streets of a modern town. Lorries, and even the tops of cars, rode parallel with the upstairs windows of the terraced cottages."

It soon becomes apparent that everything in the book is at odds with time – as James becomes all too aware. His innocence is pricked by piercing revelations:

"Somewhere deep within stout, elderly Mrs Verity, with her rheumaticky hands that swelled up around her wedding ring, and her bad back that bothered her in damp weather, there sheltered the memory of a little girl who had behaved outrageously in Sunday School. And that when you stopped to think about it was a very weird thing indeed."

Thomas Kempe most obviously carries this kernel of a different age and of time working against him. The ghost is funny, but he is also, eventually, tragic. He is out of step, out of place, unable to cope with the changes that the passing years have wrought. And as we reflect on these vagaries, we also come to realise that James's childhood summer isn't all that long in the greater scheme of things. And so, this retreat into childhood brings a freight of melancholy. The past is a place you can never properly revisit. You always remember what you've lost as much as what you once had.

That knowledge adds to the sweetness of Lively's lovely descriptions of messing around in apple trees, meandering by the river, and long empty days under blue skies – but it's bittersweet. Yet even here, there is comfort. The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe also shows that plenty of other people share the pain of mortality - and that one of them is a writer as fine as Penelope Lively.

FictionPenelope LivelyChildren and teenagersSam Jordison
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The best books on Democratic Republic of the Congo: start your reading here

DRC tales focus on a 1950s missionary family, greed and corruption in the 1960s, and the fallout from 1990s genocide

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

An American Baptist missionary, Nathan Price, drags his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a remote village in the Belgian Congo to bring the word of his God to the natives. It's 1959, just a year before the country gains its independence.

The Poisonwood Bible spans 30 years in the life of the family as it slowly implodes – under pressures brought on by the intransigent father and political and social upheaval in the country – and then rebuilds itself.

Congo permeates the story, as it grapples with its fledgling independence and a descent into violence exacerbated by the machinations of the colonial power, Belgium, and the CIA.

The novel is written from the perspectives of Orleanna Price and her daughters, who tell the story in turn. We never hear directly from Nathan, but his presence and stifling righteousness loom large, and the King James Bible echoes through the storytelling.

Kingsolver wears her politics on her sleeve and fearlessly skewers colonialism, patriarchy and religious fanaticism, while also reflecting on guilt and personal responsibility.

The author says she "spent nearly 30 years waiting for the wisdom and maturity to write this book". The result is hugely ambitious and enjoyable.

Before the Birth of the Moon by Valentin Y Mudimbe

Set in the 1960s, shortly after Congo's independence from Belgium, Mudimbe's story reflects the political uncertainty and instability of the period. It's told through the complex relationship between a government minister (known only as The Minister) and a prostitute (named Ya), who meet in the steamy world of Kinshasa's bars and nightclubs.

Their personal stories are inextricably linked to the turmoil within the country as it struggles for nationhood. Each has committed a grievous act of betrayal against the other, which costs them dear. Loyalty, deceit and greed lie at the heart of the tale.

The Minister is attracted by the wealth and power of office, and appears to have little concern for his country or its people. Ya left her village to avoid an arranged marriage, and has her heart set on enjoying life in the big city. She wants nothing to do with the anti-government rebellion of her tribe, which is led by her father, a village chief.

But neither can escape the tumultuous events taking place in the country.

Mudimbe, a respected philosopher and writer on Africa, was born in what was then the Belgian Congo. He teaches literature at Duke University in the US.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns

Stearns details how after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda the Hutu-Tutsi conflict spills over the border into Congo and unleashes a web of wars, fuelled by ethnic rivalries and fed by hunger for the country's rich mineral deposits.

"Africa's world war", fought in Congo – a country the size of western Europe – sucks in the armies of nine states, along with a bewildering range of militias. More than 5 million people die, and hundreds of thousands of women are raped. The world looks away, perhaps because this "endless war" becomes ever more messy and complex.

Stearns bravely sets out to counter the west's indifference and ignorance, doing much dangerous and arduous legwork to hear from key players – both perpetrators and victims – and eyewitnesses. He attempts to understand why Congo has been in turmoil for decades and stability has been so elusive.

His account of this brutal and labyrinthine conflict is not for the faint-hearted. Although it's a complicated tale with no heroes or happy endings, it's still gripping – and is delivered with empathy and backed up by meticulous fact-finding.

Stearns, a veteran American human rights activist, has lived and worked in Congo and been an intrepid observer of the country for more than a decade.

Democratic Republic of the CongoAfricaFictionPushpinder Khaneka
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

12. Signs of the zodiac

We continue with our daily extracts from Barnaby Rogerson's fascinating Book of Numbers. Today, we look at the zodiac

Aries (ram)
Taurus (bull)
Gemini (twins)
Cancer (crab)
Leo (lion)
Virgo (virgin)
Libra (scales)
Scorpio (scorpion)
Sagittarius (archer)
Capricorn (goat)
Aquarius (water carrier)
Pisces (fish)

The zodiac is a very old concept, which has impregnated our thought patterns for thousands of years. In essence it was the observation of the sun's circular path through the heavens (as viewed from the earth) and the division of this into 12 equal sections of 30 degrees to make a complete circuit of 360 degrees. Like so much of our world, the start date is spring, the vernal equinox of 21 March, so Aries (21 March–20 April) must always start the cycle.

The symbols chosen by the Sumerian astrologers and their imaginative pattern making of sacred shapes from the most prominent stars passed seamlessly into Babylonian, Egyptian, Hindu and Greek thought – notably through the teachings of a pair of well-travelled Greeks, Eudoxus of Cnidus and from the Egyptian-Greek scholar Ptolemy, whose Almagest colonised the imagination of both Islam and Christendom.

But just to read the Sumerian names is to stand in witness of an impressive piece of 5,000-year-old living continuity: Luhunga (farmer) is Aries; Gu Anna (bull of heaven) is Taurus; Mastabba Bagal (great twins) is Gemini; Al-Lul (crayfish) is Cancer; Urgula (lion) is Leo; Ab Sin (virgin land) is Virgo; Zib Baanna (scales) is Libra; Girtab (scorpion) is Scorpio; Pabilsag (soldier) is Sagittarius; Suhurmas (goat-fish) is Capricorn; Gu La ('great one') is Aquarius, the water bearer during the winter rains; and Dununu (fish cord) is Pisces.

Tomorrow: the 13 hallows of Britain

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

Reference and languagesBarnaby Rogerson
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Comfort reading: Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's story of happiness, self-deception and cruelty is not a reassuring read, but the richness of the writing delivers deepening pleasure with each revisit

I tend to be chary of the idea of comfort reading. To me it suggests complacency, a hankering for reassurance, or the restoration of an earlier period – typically childhood – through the enveloping power of what Proust called involuntary memory. These aren't things I look for from books. One thing in its favour, however, is that comfort reading is an act of rereading, and many seasoned readers insist that that is the most rewarding kind of reading there is.

According to Vladimir Nabokov, "A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader". Sean O'Faolain, discussing Anton Chekhov's short story Verotchka, writes, "Having reread it I feel … that nobody should read more than he can in 10 years reread; that first reading is a pleasure for youth, second reading an instruction for manhood, and third reading, no doubt, the consolation and despair of old age. For Verotchka reread is simply another thing altogether." What O'Faolain identifies here is an altogether higher form of comfort: that provided by an inexhaustible work of art.

In 1898, Chekhov wrote a trilogy of stories describing a summer hunting trip taken by the vet Ivan Ivanych and the schoolteacher Burkin. Each features a story within a story recounted by the men in natural breaks from hunting. In the first story, The Man in a Case, Burkin describes a fellow teacher who shuts himself off from life. About Love describes a love that was professed too late. In the central story, Gooseberries, Ivan Ivanych tells a story about happiness, self-deception and cruelty.  

I find myself returning to Gooseberries again and again. On the surface it is a simple story. Ivan and Burkin walk contentedly through the Russian countryside. When a hard rain begins to fall they seek shelter at the nearby estate of their friend Alekhin. They are welcomed, given refreshments by a beautiful servant, and they bathe. Later that evening, Ivan tells his friends a story about his brother.

The story's opening section offers much straightforward pleasure. I like to read it in the warm, where I can best enjoy the men trudging wetly through the heavy rain, and Chekhov's description of their feet "weighed down with mud". I want to be given hot tea by beautiful Pelageya, go out to the bathing house and afterwards, clean again, throw myself into the pond and swim in the rain, as Ivan does. In her book-length study, Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcolm writes that he "liked to contrast the harsh weather of God's world with the kindlier climate of man's shelters from it. He liked to bring characters out of blizzards and rain storms into warm, snug interiors", and he does so here with the evocative simplicity that is one of the principal pleasures of his prose. 

But when the men return inside and settle down to their refreshments, the mood begins to alter. Ivan returns to a story about his brother Nikolai that he had first begun telling Burkin just before the rain began. It is a bitter story about a "kind, meek man", a civil servant, who nurtured a dream to retire to a modest plot in the country where he would live a simple life and grow gooseberries. But as he saves money his avarice grows, his dream becomes less modest. He marries for money, and forces his wife to live so frugally that Ivan suggests Nikolai was responsible for her death. Eventually Nikolai retires and buys a scrappy farm with "a brick factory on one side … and a bone-burning factory on the other". Nikolai orders and plants 20 gooseberry bushes.

When Ivan visits he finds his brother pompous, insufferable. The gooseberries – the first harvest – are "tough and sour", but Nikolai, "with tears in his eyes", pronounces them delicious. Ivan then embarks on a passionate tirade against the inequality of a society where "'the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible'":

We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes.

 

Ivan's speech drags injustice and misery into Alekhin's snug drawing room. It is, to borrow Jack Kerouac's description of Naked Lunch: "a frozen moment when everybody sees what is on the end of every fork". As Malcolm writes of Gooseberries and its fellow stories, they "do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself". The meaning and purpose of life, Ivan exhorts his friends, does not reside in happiness and comfort, "but in something more intelligent and great", in kindness to one's fellow humans.

Ivan's behaviour irritates Burkin and Alekhin, who find it "boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries". They understandably don't want to hear about inequality and hardship, cosily swaddled as they are. But there is another, more enigmatic layer to Chekhov's story, one that perhaps only rereading unearths. Ivan calls happiness, just like the perceived succulence his brother's gooseberries, an illusion; and yet a suspicion grows that it is Nikolai's happiness, pure and simple, that angers Ivan, and that perhaps his impassioned argument has been constructed retrospectively in order to justify his position. We then consider that earlier, when the men were bathing, only Ivan swam in the pond, which when the men first entered the farmyard was described as "cold, malevolent". As Ivan splashes about his two friends stand moodily at the pond's edge, urging him to hurry up so they can go inside. Is the pond, then, a symbol intended to rhyme with the gooseberries? Are Nikolai's happiness on his farm and, in a smaller way, Ivan's happiness in the pond related? As is so often the case in Chekhov, the story poses questions but supplies no definite answers; in a letter of 1888 to his publisher Suvorin he writes: 

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes … You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

 

At the story's end, as rain beats against the windows, Burkin lies in bed. He is bothered by a strong smell that he can't place (it is the smell of stale tobacco from his friend's pipe). Here, in miniature or like a fading melody, Chekhov repeats the blend of contentment and unease that have intertwined throughout the story. And so we too are left like Burkin with something nagging at us, taking pleasure in Chekhov's artistry but haunted by the questions it asks.

Quotations are taken from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Gooseberries.

Short storiesFictionAnton ChekhovVladimir Nabokov
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

11. Footballers

Our festive countdown, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers, continues with the perfect number for a team

Historians of numbers have long noted that 11 makes a team.

For example: the 11-strong team of detectives charged with identifying murderers in ancient Rome; the 11-strong vice squad of women established by the Spartan state to keep a lid on Dionysiac orgies; or the 11-monstrous giant-beasts who assisted Tiamat, lord of chaos in his doomed battle against the pantheon of Babylon led by the king of the gods, Marduk.

Of course, the main 11 in modern life is that of football teams. The 11 traditional positions are: goalkeeper, left back, right back, left half, centre-half and right half, and the five forward positions – left wing, inside left, centre-forward, inside right and right wing.

However, as illustrated by the classic lineup (below) that won England's only World Cup title in 1966, the formations have long had different permutations, most commonly with the outfield players arranged as 4–3–3 or 4–4–2.

You would imagine that the 11 players in a football team must have some significance, for the game is as old as humanity, but in its early centuries football was often played by hundreds of people. The game as we know it today was developed largely in the English public schools of the 19th century and first codified in the "Cambridge Rules" of 1848, thrashed out from the various schools different traditions. Oddly, there was no mention of the number of players in a team then, nor in the earliest surviving set of rules from 1856, though the number had been accepted by the time the FA Cup was established in 1871. It may have followed the example of cricket, with a convenient division of five attackers, five defenders and a goalkeeper.

Rugby, of course, went its own way in the 19th century, allowing not just the handling and carrying of the ball but a player count of 13 or 15.

Tomorrow: 12 signs of the zodiac

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

Reference and languagesRugby leagueRugby unionBarnaby Rogerson
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading and the authors and topics you would like to see covered on the site

Guardian readersHannah Freeman

Comfort reads: The Barley Bird: Notes on the Suffolk Nightingale by Richard Mabey

So vividly written you can almost hear the song of these rare birds, it provides similar solace

Several years ago, on an Easter holiday in Suffolk, I got up at 4.30am, pulled the children out of their beds and we drove together to Minsmere Reserve. This apparently madcap behaviour was because we had an early morning date with a nightingale and with RSPB guys who knew where to take us. When, in the pre-dawn dark and April cold, the nightingale started to sing, we were elated beyond measure – and felt a huge, unearned sense of achievement (and not just because of our early rise). It was almost as if we had produced the song ourselves.

The Barley Bird – Suffolk nickname for the nightingale – by Richard Mabey, is partly based on his longer book Whistling in the Dark and is the best of comfort reads not least because it describes the nightingale's song so well that it is the next best thing to hearing it yourself. The book has been produced by a small, choice East Anglian publisher: Full Circle. It is a slender hardback and can be read in a sitting – a single helping of comfort. I love the feel of the book, which is illustrated by Derrick Greaves, its bright green cover suggestive of spring, with spikily elegant drawings of birds and barley and oak leaves that separate sections (John Clare observed that nightingales always include oak leaves in their nests). Its end papers are musical lines.

I envy Mabey his ability to translate what he sees and hears with such freshness, precision and lyricism. I feel I am standing beside him listening and seeing:

"There is a lull in the singing, a huge emphatic silence that is part of the performance. It is about 10 o'clock and the moon is almost at its height. By Suffolk standards, I am on top of the world. Below me, Arger Fen arches like a whale-back across the southern horizon. Everywhere, dead elm stumps rear in silhouette amongst the scrub. The light is extraordinary – luminous, dusty, giving every pale surface the lustre of mother-of-pearl. Mounds of cow parsley and scythed grass glow in the moonbeams like suspended balls of mist. By the side of the lane I catch the scents of broom and bluebells, a blend of coconut and honey, the exotic and the homely, that has something of the ripened quality of the song itself."

The book is a nightingale education, too, detailing the ways the song has been appropriated – by Coleridge, Keats and Clare and by medieval writers. Its song has been heard as melancholy, cheerful, lust-inducing. Yet Mabey sides with John Clare in wishing not to be the nightingale's interpreter but to respect its otherness. Clare did not think much of Keats as bird-watcher – and probably wasn't too keen on Ode to a Nightingale. Mabey, on the other hand, gives us a penetrating reading of Keats's poem.

And I adore the account of 1920s cellist Beatrice Harrison who persuaded Lord Reith to let her broadcast a cello recital from her Surrey garden where local nightingales could usually be relied upon to join in whenever she started to play. When the appointed day came, Sod's law appeared to be operating:

"Beatrice tried playing 'Danny Boy"' , parts of the Elgar concerto and snatches of Dvorak, all to no avail. Donkeys brayed, engineers tripped over in the dark, rabbits gnawed the vital cable, but no nightingale sang."

Then, at the 11th hour, the nightingales relented – the broadcast was a sensation. Beatrice got thousands of thank you letters from listeners because hearing the song, even on the wireless, had a touch of ecstasy about it. Mabey gets to the heart of what underlies this ecstasy in his last paragraph – he makes you understand why the song is such a message of solace:

"Beauty is always mysterious, beyond analysis. But one aspect of it is universally appreciated. It is the quality I would describe as grace, the constant re-enactment of the vitality and elegance of life under pressure. Whatever other cultural meanings it may have acquired, at heart the nightingale's song is a small hymn to survival."

Richard MabeyScience and natureBirdsWildlifeKate Kellaway
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

What's your favourite book of 2013?

As the year draws to a close, it's time to reflect on the best books published over the last 12 months

What have you read this year that deserves to be on a list of the best books of 2013? We'd like to draw up a top 10 of your best books of the year. Tell us what should be up there - and which titles didn't live up to their billing.

Was the anticipation of another Bridget Jones novel more exciting than reading it? It may have won our Not the Booker prize, but does Kate Atkinson's Life After Life hold its own against Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch or Morrissey's Autobiography? Terry Eagleton thought Morrissey might one day win the Man Booker prize, but don't let that sway you - tell us what you think.

To help jog your memory, here are links to some of our roundups of the biggest books published this year:

• The best fiction
• The best science fiction
• The best crime and thrillers
• The best political books
• The best food books
• The best drink books
• The best paperbacks
• The best children's books
• The best nature books
• The best stocking fillers

... and many more, as well as celebrity picks and graphic novels, psychology, history and more from the Observer.

Join the comment thread to discuss the books of 2013, and I'll put together a list of the most popular titles. Guardian Review will be publishing a special feature on readers' books of the year, in the paper on December 28.

Best books of 2013Hannah Freeman
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How Mary Webb and DH Lawrence helped build Cold Comfort Farm

It's not hard to identify the writers who inspired the fruity passions and overripe descriptions in Stella Gibbons' novel

Let's have a quiz. Can you tell which of the following bits of writing were written in all sincerity - and which are spoofs?

Exhibit A

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky – shepherdless, futile, imponderable – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

Exhibit B

She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.

[...]

When she came to herself she was tired for sleep. Languidly she looked about her; the clumps of white phlox seemed like bushes spread with linen; a moth ricochetted over them, and right across the garden. Following it with her eye roused her. A few whiffs of the raw, strong scent of phlox invigorated her. She passed along the path, hesitating at the white rose-bush. It smelled sweet and simple. She touched the white ruffles of the roses. Their fresh scent and cool, soft leaves reminded her of the morning-time and sunshine. She was very fond of them. But she was tired, and wanted to sleep. In the mysterious out-of-doors she felt forlorn.

Exhibit C

Growing with the viscous light that was invading the sky, there came the solemn, tortured-snake voice of the sea, two miles away, falling in sharp folds upon the mirror-expanses of the beach.

Under the ominous bowl of the sky a man was ploughing the sloping field immediately below the farm, where the flints shone bone-sharp and white in the growing light. The ice-cascade of the wind leaped over him as he guided the plough over the flinty runnels. Now and again he called out to his team:

Upidee Travail! Ho there Arsenic! Jug-jug! But for the most part he worked in silence and silent were his team. The light showed no more of his face than a grey expanse of flesh, expressionless as the land he ploughed, from which looked out two sluggish eyes.

Exhibit D

It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.

Exhibit E

'And as she dunna like the chaps about here much—'

'I canna think why — good chaps they be, drawing a straight furrow and handy with the sheep —'

Exhibit F

From the stubborn interwoven strata of his subconscious, thought seeped up into his dim conscious; not as an integral part of that consciousness, but more as an impalpable emanation, a crepuscular addition, from the unsleeping life in the restless trees and fields surrounding him. The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under the Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated.

Exhibit G

'Dirty beasts!' said Eli, sweeping them back with his stick. 'Not but what that black 'un will bring a good price come Christmas.'

'Dunna clout 'em, Eli!' came John's voice from the threshold. 'I'd liefer they'd come round me than find the pot of gold under the rainbow. They be my friends, as you know well, and they'm not speechless from emptiness of heart. No, sorrowful and loving they be.'

'Meat, that's what they be,' said Eli.

'Deb!' whispered Lily, 'isn't he an old beast? I hate him more every day, and I wish I could get married—that I do!"

*

Amazingly, only C and F were written by Stella Gibbons and intended to raise a laugh. B was taken from DH Lawrence's Sons And Lovers and D from Lady Chatterley's Lover. A came from Mary Webb's Gone To Earth while E and G came from her book The Golden Arrow.

DH Lawrence needs little introduction. Anyone familiar with his ripe prose, daft dialogue and fondness for rutting will recognise his influence on Stella Gibbons. Mary Webb needs more explanation. It was The Golden Arrow, according to legend (and better still, Wikipedia), that first inspired Gibbons to write Cold Comfort Farm. When the Evening Standard serialised the book in 1928, Gibbons was given the job of summarising previous plot points before each new instalment was published. She grew weary of the "large agonised faces" in Mary Webb's book and dreamed up the Starkadders soon after. "I did not believe, that people were any more despairing in Herefordshire than in Camden Town," she later explained.

Poor Mary Webb was ripe for the send-up. As the passages above show, her novels were laden with pathetic fallacies, heightened rural dolour and appalling, patronising attempts at regional accents. Worse still, she was championed by Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative Prime Minister – then as now the last thing you would want associated with any serious literary endeavour. He even wrote a forward addressed from "10 Downing Street" to her final novel, Precious Bane, when it was rereleased in 1928, during a general revival of her strain of English country romanticism.

A fashion, it's safe to say, that has long since passed, not least because Stella Gibbons makes it appear ridiculous. I've tried to read both Gone To Earth and The Golden Arrow this week and have been unable to take either seriously. I'd struggle to read about "feckless clouds" at the best of times, but after a healthy dose of Cold Comfort Farm it becomes impossible. As the illustrations above demonstrate, Gibbons' satire is just too well-aimed.

Which leads to the interesting question of what Gibbons has done for Webb's legacy. Lawrence, of course, is secure. So are plenty of Gibbons' other big influences, such as Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë. But Webb is a different matter. Like Sherwood Anderson (drowned by Hemingway in The Torrents Of Spring), this writer is best-known today mainly because she has inspired such a famous parody. And as with Sherwood Anderson, it's quite possible that this is unfair. Precious Bane in particular, which Virago re-released in their superb classics series in 1978, sounds like a sincere and passionate book, full of poetry and humanity (as well as over-the-top nature writing).

Perhaps when Cold Comfort Farm is less fresh in my mind I'll be able to come back to Webb and appreciate her properly. In a way, Gibbons has sparked my interest. Parody is often a form of flattery, after all, and Cold Comfort Farm seems affectionate as well as scathing. There was something there that interested and delighted Gibbons, as well as plenty that made her want to laugh. Sadly, we'll never know what Webb made of the book, since she died aged just 47 in 1927, five years before it was published. But what we can say with certainty about Webb's legacy, love or hate her writing, is that she inspired a masterpiece. There are worse things to be responsible for than Cold Comfort Farm.

DH LawrenceFictionSam Jordison
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds