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Poem of the week: To Autumn by John Keats

Marked by sensuous profusion and artistic control, this most widely published of English poems is laden with meaning

It is, apparently, the most anthologised English poem. And if critical essays were apples, and the poem a tree, John Keats's ode, "To Autumn", would have toppled by now under the mass of its exegetical fruit.

As a fellow poet's lovingly intimate close reading, Seamus Heaney's Keats essay in his 1980 collection Preoccupations can't be bettered. But the more recent "it's not just about autumn" school has produced stimulating analysis – from Tom Paulin's high wire revisionist act in deciphering a call to armed revolution to a persuasive investigation of local politics and topology by the authors of a recent Review of English Studies article. Are there any unanswered questions left?

Like many readers, I've always linked the poem's story of rich fruition with Keats's superlatively productive "learning curve" in 1819, and puzzled no further. But then a belated reading of Helen Vendler's essay in The Odes of John Keats (1983) stopped me short. Vendler asserts that Autumn is a goddess, a Ceres with a touch of Milton's Eve and Spenser's Autumn. I'd always imagined him as male, so my first and primary question concerns identity: whom does Keats want us to see when he leads us into the grain store of the second stanza? God or goddess? Divinity, homespun allegorical figure, or weary agricultural labourer for Winchester's corn-farming "new rich"?

All of Keats's Odes abound in mythical beings. There are the three urn-figures of "Indolence" (Love, Ambition and Poesie), the eponymous "Psyche" and "Melancholy", the "light-winged Dryad" of "Nightingale", and the "marble men and maidens" in "Grecian Urn". Like Ambition and Poesie, the addressee of "To Autumn" may be allegorical, Keats taking his cues not only from Spenser's "Mutabilitie" cantos, but from Chatterton's "Ælla: A Tragicall Interlude", both of which feature a male Autumn.

A character "oft" seen at rest on the granary floor, or dozing on a furrow when he should be working, Autumn initially resembles neither a farm labourer nor a corn goddess. But if not a corn goddess, what about a wine god? A Bacchus-like being in hangover mode, or even Bacchus, ie Dionysus, himself?

Keats's Greek influence during this period was mediated through sculpture – the Elgin marbles and, especially, the bas-relief which probably suggested the "Ode on a Grecian Urn". This decorates the Sosibios vase, which Keats himself traced from an illustration and depicts a Bacchic procession. So the god of drunken orgy and self-sacrifice may well have lingered in the poet's mind as he worked on the series of Odes. In fact, before repudiating "Bacchus and his pards", he lavished some particularly sensuous description on wine-drinking in "Nightingale". But Keats would also have been aware of the discussion in Plato's Phaedrus, in which Dionysus and Apollo are described as two of the four enablers of Divine Madness (interestingly, Poetry and Love are the other two).

Originally a god of fruit and vegetation, Dionysus introduced the world to viniculture and presided over all things sappy, juicy and fecund. Such a god might aptly be termed the "close bosom friend of the maturing sun" – Apollo's fertility conspirator, no less. The plants named in the first stanza – apple trees and vines – both supply fruit for alcohol. If the poem is to be trusted, cottagers in the 19th century trained their vines to climb along the eaves of their thatched roofs, presumably sheltering the fruit and exposing it to sunlight. Any grapes probably wouldn't have been suitable for wine, but they could certainly have been made into grape jelly and other "dainties". Those laden vines may simply be a fantasy of Dionysian drapery. If not – and I hope not – the symbolism still holds.

The original Dionysus and Apollo are stepbrothers; brother-enemies, according to Rabelais. Dionysus is a raver, Apollo plays the lyre at concert-standard and bestows the gift of prophecy. One pours out words in spontaneous joy, the other intellectualises. In bringing Dionysus and Apollo together, Keats gives symbolic resolution to a personal, creative conflict. I'm not suggesting he was an alcoholic – poetry was his intoxicant. But now the young enthusiast who wrote "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thought", and told John Taylor that poetry should "come as naturally as Leaves to a tree" (an image perhaps recalling the wine-god's penchant for foliage), attains a point in his own "maturing" where sensuous profusion and artistic control find perfect balance. "To Autumn" becomes a parable of its own making.

Those two faces of inspiration almost correspond to the two faces of autumn, a season that overlaps with both summer and winter. The first stanza ends with a Dionysian flow of inexhaustible abundance, with "more,/ And still more, later flowers for the bees" echoing the "More happy love! More happy, happy love!" of the "Grecian Urn". But now, Apollo warns, enough is enough. So in the last stanza, Keats forgoes rich fruit and honey-brimmed "clammy cells". The sun sets, the short-lived gnats wail, "the light wind lives or dies", the swallows prepare to migrate. If the mood is valedictory, the writing maintains, even increases, its high charge as it replaces the ecstasy of semi-mythical harvest with a fine-tuned naturalism that fuses "beauty" and "truth".

Even at the level of the rhyme scheme, there is an opening and closing, Romantic and Classical contrast. The 11 lines of each stanza begin with an ABAB-rhymed quatrain: the following sestet introduces a new pattern, with a run of three unrhymed words before the rhymes are picked up and symmetry is restored.

Not all of Autumn's behaviour suggests Dionysus. That "patient look" at the "cyder press" doesn't belong to any divinity: it belongs to a real person, probably female, who brews cider. And although Dionysus sports a wreath of vine-leaves, and Spenser's Autumn a crown of corn, Keats's vignette of the gleaner crossing the book with "laden head" similarly suggests women's work and strictly non-Elysian fields.

My answer to the question "Who is Autumn?" is that "he" starts off as a drowsy Dionysus, but evolves toward the human and loses his fixed identity. The figure is a shapeshifter, a male divinity at first, but androgynous in mortal form. Keats knows him well. He doesn't even use the word "Ode" in his poem's title, and the opening line of the invocation is so low-key it might be mistaken for description: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …" Autumn is Keats's own Daemon.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John KeatsPlato PoetryCarol Rumens
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The 100 best novels: an introduction

Robert McCrum introduces our definitive list of the greatest novels written in English, a 100-week project that begins with John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress

If lists are a guilty pleasure, then book lists are a sinful addiction. That's an observation for which the Observer can adduce empirical evidence.

Ten years ago, on 12 October 2003, in a headline-grabbing stunt, writing as literary editor, I compiled (with a lot of help from colleagues) a list, provocatively entitled "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time".

Say what you like about lists, but this one rapidly developed a life of its own, like a sci-fi alien. Once the initial furore – why no Updike? How on earth could we exclude PG Wodehouse? – had died down, the creature we had created continued to circulate in cyberspace, sponsoring a rare mixture of rage and delight, apparently without rhyme or reason. Every now and again, some particular group would tangle with the Observer list. And it would drive them mad (in good and bad ways) all over again. For reasons I have yet to fathom, it excited special notice in Australia.

It was not all browbeating and brickbats. There have been some lovely creative dividends. Last year, the Antwerp artist Tom Haentjens came up with an idea that promises to give the list a whole new lease of life – an artistic reinterpretation of all 100 book covers, curated by Haentjens himself.

As well as puzzling over the strange appeal of the list throughout this past decade, I have had a sneaking worry that, drawn at random, from many different literatures, our selection was too spontaneous and too wide-ranging. Was there not a case for a more considered compilation? What, for example, would a list of the 100 classic British and American novels look like?

Today, we begin to provide the answer. What's more, we will show our reasoning in a series of short essays, a kind of footnote to each choice. Without any reference to the 2003 list, for the next 100 weeks the Observer, in collaboration with the Guardian, and supported by Waterstones, will publish a serial account of the classic English and American novel, from A to Z, and from the late 17th century to the present day.

We start with The Pilgrim's Progress of 1678. This, for the Oxford Companion to English Literature, is "a seminal text in the development of the realistic novel", a book that inspired Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Mark Twain. Exactly where we shall end is anyone's guess, but one possible cut-off is the year 2000, when JM Coetzee won the Booker prize for the second time with Disgrace.

The list we have in mind is a work-in-progress. It will be shaped by the narrative suggested by the historical sequence of Anglo-American fiction. In all other respects, we have few restrictions. Yes, we focus on America and the English-speaking world (Australia, South Africa, Canada, etc), and we exclude the translations that were such a feature of the 2003 list. In all other respects, we have attempted to choose the classics that Observer readers would most want to investigate for themselves.

So: what is a classic? There are many duelling definitions. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Italo Calvino and Sainte-Beuve have all written at length on the classic. Calvino's definition – "a classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say" – is probably the sweetest, followed by Pound's identification of "a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness". One necessary, but not sufficient, characteristic of a classic is that it should remain in print.

After that, the issue quickly starts to become subjective. Classics, for some, are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from. The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic. There is, as we know only too well, no accounting for taste.

Speaking of taste, we have chosen, where possible, the title most central to the author's voice and vision, which is not necessarily the most famous. Jane Austen is a case in point. Pride and Prejudice is much-loved. Northanger Abbey is highly entertaining. But we have chosen Emma. Discuss. With Dickens, the choice gets even harder. You will have to wait until week 14 to read about our Dickens selection.

Inevitably, this list reflects educational, national and social influences. Some Scottish readers may say that we have not given enough space to the great northern tradition.Irish readers will argue about Flann O'Brien (aka Myles na gCopaleen). In or out? Wait and see. Further afield, in the English-speaking world,some Australian readers may feel short-changed. All we can say in response is that this list was compiled for a British newspaper, based in London, in 2013.

Anyway, like all lists, ours is intended to sponsor discussion. We kick off with John Bunyan. Let the debate begin.

FictionClassicsRobert McCrum
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Reader reviews roundup

Historical novels from Jonathan Coe and Rhidian Brook and 'a new myth for the modern day' from Caroline Smailes are among the fiction under review this week

This week's reviews include a couple which take interesting perspectives on historical fiction.

Jonathan Coe's latest novel, Expo 58, has been getting some tepid reviews, but few have called Coe so clearly to account on historical detail as peacable, who has the benefit (or disadvantage) of living in Belgium where the novel is set. peacable writes:

Historicity was one of my main grumbles, specifically the modern Flemish-based perspective on an event of history that was far more francophone than the book suggests. For example, Coe uses 'Leuven' throughout, when at that date the city was called Louvain. The Dutch phrases his characters use are too modern in style, and concerns expressed over an affair are expressed in a too 21stC style. In the acknowledgements Coe thanks various Belgian friends and contacts, who may have skewed his use of Flemish, unwittingly, by applying their own usage to a 1950s context.

Christopher Philip Howe's thoughtful review of Rhidian Brook's novel The Aftermath is premised on the absence of personal experience of a traumatic period of history that is receding from living memory. The aftermath in question is the one that followed the second world war: "Rhidian Brook's novel shows us that immediate post-war austerity, from the perspective of the British who were sent to help Germany rebuild, as well as the Germans who survived," writes Howe.

"Can you imagine the reaction of the British as their government sent food, supplies and manpower to a country that was, last month, still killing their young men, while children at home went hungry? Can you imagine what it was like to have all semblance of civilisation stripped away before surrender, and now be faced with the very soldiers who were killing your families arriving and throwing you out of your house?"

Around these intensely personal and emotional interactions, there is the horrific backdrop of a devastated nation. Hamburg, with its important port, was flattened. There were no services, no government, no jobs. Children roamed the streets scavenging food and cigarettes. Ordinary German men and women were demoralised, destroyed. Brook carefully lets us know that the world is not black and white. Some British army officers are coarse, corrupt and cruel. The Allies were at war with Germany, not all Germans. There are people on both sides who wish the war had never happened, and those on both sides who wish it hadn't ended. And, in the background, there are the international tensions that led to the Iron Curtain and the Cold War.

Finally, it's good to see one of our Not the Booker prize longlistees continuing to get attention, even though it didn't make the shortlist. Redbirdflies writes that Caroline Smailes' The Drowning of Arthur Braxton is "one of the best works of fiction I have read this year."

Jamieson Wolf brings to his review an apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of Smailes' work, writing:

[She] has always delivered and her stories always have a character that you're drawn to. First it was Jude and then it was Ana and Nina and in her eBook novella, 99 Reasons Why, we are given the story of Kate. Her protagonists and their story are her greatest achievement. From the first page her characters grab hold of you, the story sinks into you and then you are held enraptured. For a little while afterwards, everything you try to read doesn't draw you in. You are left haunted by the story for a little while and want to read it again; at least I do.

Two more novels on the must-read pile, then. Drop me an email if I've mentioned your review and I'll send you something good from the books cupboard. You can also claim a book if your review has been featured on the front of the books site (if you're reading this, simon92 or FrankieCherry92, that means you)

Jonathan CoeClaire Armitstead
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Reading group webchat: Chris Ackerley

Chris Ackerley, the author of A Companion To Under The Volcano, will be online at 1pm on Wednesday 25 October to give us some signposts to Malcolm Lowry's symbolism. Post your questions on this month's Reading group book now

Sam Jordison

When favourite authors become an addiction

Some writers are so addictive I find myself tracking down every word they've penned. But which authors do you crave?

It's that desperation to have the gleaming hardback, despite the £20 price tag, that shrill, pulsing excitement at coming across an obscurely anthologised, previously unread short story. These are not the tokens of a passing fancy; this is full-blown author addiction.

Being addicted to an author means that I crave not just his or her acclaimed or best-known output – I loved the Harry Potter books, but, not wholly hooked on JK's voice, didn't have the urge to read The Casual Vacancy or The Cuckoo's Calling. Addiction is an insatiable appetite for the unique style, attitude and assurance I know I'll find in anything they've penned. It involves putting up with bum notes and off days, scrabbling around for obscure, laundry-list juvenilia once the canonicals have been polished off, and returning again and again to favourite titles as to a parent's embrace. In my smoking days, I'm ashamed to admit I occasionally reconstituted ash-tray remnants in times of student scarcity – I place author addiction further down the scale than that ravening nicotine need. But only slightly.

As a teenager, Georgette Heyer was my fix of choice. Her exhaustive knowledge of Regency fashions, manners and cant exclamations decked out an affluent, claustrophobic little world where heroines with guinea-golden curls inevitably ended up in the arms of powerful-thighed, privately-incomed aristocrats, being ruthlessly kissed. Considerably too young to drink blue ruin in Cribb's parlour, or even a lady-like glass of negus, I loved the whale-boned orderliness underlying the frothy romance – a balance Heyer struck in almost everything she wrote. When the romances ran out, I read her detective novels (although they weren't a patch on Regency Buck et al), and diligently tracked down her short stories in the days before internet book-hunting excised the thrill of the chase.

When it came to proper detective fiction, however, it was Dorothy L Sayers all the way. Crushing inordinately on her lean forensic hobbyist, I read and reread the adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey until I could recite them, but also branched out into Sayers' standalone epistolary novels, poetry and Dante translations. At first I repudiated Thrones, Dominations, a Wimsey novel finished after Sayers's death by Jill Paton Walsh – although pathetically eager to meet Lord Peter again, as a pious teenage purist I found the concept of shared authorship too alien to satisfy. Rereading it now that my addictive pedantry has waned, I see it as a bravura feat of imitation.

But being fanatically devoted to a contemporary writer's unique work has the sad knowledge built in that authors are mortal and that their oeuvres are finite. This I find easier to deal with when the writer is long gone – the recent death of a beloved writer is a continual, low-key unpleasantness, like treading repeatedly on a last step that isn't there. I'm still fogged with sorrow that Diana Wynne Jones will never write another book, although there will be one more, finished by her sister, Ursula, next year – an unexpected, poignant last encounter. And remembering that Iain M Banks will create no more new worlds is a small sore patch that refuses to heal.

I'm currently hooked on Frances Hardinge, whose intricate, cruel societies and lightly-worn erudition and humour, appealing to but never dumbing down for children, make me rage at the prospect of waiting till 2014 for another hit. China Miéville's rat-boys, giant squid and immense moldywarpes have also made me a believer. I'm yet to gird my loins and read his PhD thesis, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, although I'm sure the day will come.

I'm now morbidly hoping my two newest addictions will outlive me so that, at least as far as I'm concerned, they'll generate new worlds into eternity.

Dorothy L SayersGeorgette HeyerJK RowlingDiana Wynne JonesIain BanksRomanceThrillersFictionChina MiévilleChildren and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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The Booker prize's US amendment was a long time coming

The self-styled 'most important literary prize in the English-speaking world' has finally ironed out the disabling anomaly that threatened to undermine its global significance

So they've done it. After years of prevarication, non-denial denials and unflattering comparisons with the fiction prize formerly sponsored by Orange, the self-styled "most important literary award in the English-speaking world" has finally ironed out the disabling anomaly – the thorn in its side – that increasingly threatened to undermine its vaunted global significance.

From 2014, US novelists (so long as they are published in the UK) will for the first time be eligible for consideration by the Booker panel. It's a measure of the obsessive and competitive nature of our literary prize culture that this change to Booker's rulebook should seem almost as significant as the nomination of the latest shortlist. Certainly, the award's administrators did not pass up the opportunity to indulge in another spasm of self-congratulatory comments.

Nevertheless – credit where it's due – in the evolution of English-language culture in the contemporary world, this is a small but significant milestone, a recognition that you cannot lay claim to being "most important literary award in the English-speaking world" and exclude the American literary tradition.

This being Booker, the amendment has not come with any serious overhaul of the all-important prize apparatus. Booker has left what its officials call "the basic structure" unchanged. So, no new approach to the judging panel or its chairing. No recognition of a need for younger critics. No increased "transparency" on the model of the former Orange or the innovative Folio prize.

In adjusting the rules governing the submission of novels, Booker has conceded a mild advantage to the big conglomerates over the lively (and smaller) independents. No doubt some will say that this demonstrates the degree to which Booker is in bed with the Big Six (conglomerates). Well, perhaps.

Andrew Kidd, of the rival Folio prize, told me that he thought this amendment to the submission process was "eccentric" and lacking any radical intention. The fact is that the process whereby the annual competition is winnowed has always been flawed and partial. The new entry process is probably going to make authors with an eye on the prize more, not less, likely to stick with the bigger imprints at the expense of the independents.

I will not be the only commentator to discern in the introduction of this headline "US amendment" the timely impact of the Folio prize, whose debut shortlist, drawn from the fiction of the English-speaking world and chosen by its "academy", will appear in February 2014. Literary awards have become big business, and Booker's business (as "the most important literary award in the English-speaking world") is bigger than most. Indeed, if it had not swiftly adjusted the eligibility criteria for its competitors, it would have been in danger of becoming pointless and irrelevant.

Now, for the first time, an influential English cultural icon has acknowledged, de facto, an important cultural truth – namely that the novel in English is every bit American as it is "British". It will hardly come as a surprise to UK readers to be reminded that Lorrie Moore and Ann Tyler are the equal of Anita Brookner, Hilary Mantel and Penelope Lively.

Pace Philip Hensher and Dame Antonia Byatt, this Booker news is not the end of the world, or even a crisis for Booker, though Hensher has found a tame (but anonymous) literary agent to make that claim. One unintended consequence, confined to the US, will be to deprive US readers of a useful window on "British and Commonwealth" fiction.

Yes, the prize will have to adapt, and there will be many cries of of "la patrie en danger". Actually, there's a strong case for saying that, after 45 years, Booker could do with a makeover. It's a shame, in some ways, that its administrators did not go further.

Hensher's other point – that a global Booker will deprive the homegrown writer (aka Philip Hensher) of the potential dividend of winning (or being shortlisted) – strikes me as odd. What could be more shameful, for a serious writer, than to admit that the sails of his or her inspiration can only be inflated by the prospect of success in the annual spin of a roulette wheel described (by the croupiers) as "most important literary award in the English-speaking world".

Here's the bottom line. Booker is a longstanding literary trophy. But no amount of longevity can disguise its essential character: it's a lottery; a sweepstake. It has only a coincidental and fortuitous relationship with literary excellence. As Julian Barnes put it (in a phrase that's almost obligatory to quote in these discussions), Booker and the other prizes are simply "posh bingo".

Finally, in literature, there is only the long game. It's called posterity, a word that, whatever the intonation, means the same in Chicago and Sheffield, Brighton or Baltimore.

FictionMan Booker prize 2013Awards and prizesBooker prizeUnited StatesRobert McCrum
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'Well, that's the end of the Booker prize, then'

Allowing US writers entry into the UK's most prestigious prize spells disaster, says Philip Hensher

When the news that the Man Booker prize is to be opened up to the vast and dominant fields of the American novel broke this week, I heard of a well-known London agent who remarked succinctly: "Well, that's the end of the Booker, then." When eligibility shifts from the UK, Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to English-language novels published in the UK, it is hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate. Not through excellence, necessarily, but simply through an economic super-power exerting its own literary tastes, just as the British empire imposed the idea that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived throughout its 19th-century colonies. The tendency was already at work in this year's Booker shortlist, where a superficial multicultural aspect concealed a specifically North American taste. Jhumpa Lahiri's Lowland had fascinatingly airport-bestseller features, including the favourite trope of two brothers divided by the currents of history. 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

Under the Volcano: the alchemy of alcohol

Has there been a more alcoholic book than Malcolm Lowry's tortured classic? For his antihero the Consul, booze brings tragedy, but also revelation

As promised, it's time to hit the bottle in this month's Reading group. Has there been a more alcoholic book than Under the Volcano? Sure, there's drinking in Hemingway's Fiesta. Booze causes problems in Tender Is the Night. Charles Bukowski managed a few jars. Jack Kerouac struggled with the DTs in Big Sur. The Long Goodbye starts with the line: "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk …" and just about everyone else Philip Marlowe meets is a lush. But Under the Volcano takes things to another level.

Early in September, Reading group contributor Rastignac asked: "I wonder how feasible a drink-along would be for this novel?" I emphasise how early this post came because once you're immersed in the book such a question becomes absurd. It isn't just that the poor Consul drinks enough before breakfast to leave anyone else reeling; alcohol, though it is a source of many funny moments in the book, is no laughing matter. This isn't Withnail and I. No one would want to go on holiday with the Consul. His is an awful, terrible tragedy.

The Consul's story is mainly sad, but it isn't completely simple. There are many layers, meanings and refractions in this fascinating book. Every time the drink is held up, it reflects back a different light. The Consul doesn't simply imbibe because he has become chemically dependent on the alcohol, because it stops his trembling, because it makes him able to face the world, because it helps him forget. He drinks because alcohol is wonderful. It gives him moments of great beauty and truth. It makes him happy. It makes him funny. It makes him eloquent.

Bysshe22 neatly explained these contradictions:

"There's been much jolly talk of drink-alongs and such, but alcohol's effect on the Consul's consciousness is the lens through which … the world the book presents is seen, the light and the dark. What do we think of the paragraph-length passage about 10 pages into the second chapter that begins: "But look here, hang it all, it is not altogether darkness", and continues: "… not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy … All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here. The point here is not so much the splendid writing – and it is almost incredibly splendid – but can we relate to and do we sympathise with the Consul's early morning alcoholic vision? If so, it has always seemed to me that the Consul himself becomes no less than an heroic figure."

I can only answer Bysshe22's question by asking another: how can we not sympathise with the Consul? This is a man who seems able to grasp the marvellous essence of life. He has the same sense of wonder as Cortez in Keats's famous poem. But the Consul doesn't need to be on a peak in Darien to provoke such "wild surmise". He just needs the alchemy of alcohol.

Sure, the Consul is drinking himself to death and his marriage has already been ruined by drink. Then his wife comes back to him, and he destroys his one chance to make things right by continuing to throw back the booze. It's agony to witness. Whenever we see him in the book, we are all too aware that his next drink is just about to go down. We fixate on it as much as he does. And on the rare occasions when he isn't drinking, a great weight is lifted. Those few moments when he pushes a tequila to one side, or even when he only drinks beer (which is, after all, "full of vitamins"), give us huge relief. We are often made to feel like voyeurs, witness to his intimate degradation. There's little fun in seeing the Consul puking, or on his knees in his garden scrabbling after a bottle, or turning into a cantina even though it means he may miss a bus, or finally starting on the mescal, against everyone's better judgement, including his own. We are desperate for him to stop. He is desperate to stop. Everyone who loves him is desperate for him to stop.

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And yet, and yet, there is something noble about his continuation. Something we are prepared to indulge. Late on, we see this: "Oozing alcohol at every pore, the Consul stood at the open door of the Salon Ofelia. How sensible to have had a mescal. How sensible. For it was the right, the sole drink to have had under the circumstances … he was … well able to cope with anything that might come his way."

In spite of everything, I still found myself half agreeing, because there is some kind of logic to his behaviour; he always gains strength from the drink. I knew some good would come of it, as well as bad, and that was before this glorious revelation:

"There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the mescal (which Yvonne couldn't of course have noticed) would have already invested the place with a magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense of love that haunted this nostalgic spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light, among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was a dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing still the gay colours he did not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he might never realise he was already a part."

Would you deny the Consul such astounding visions? Me neither. In fact, I think I'll have a mescal myself …

Malcolm LowryFictionClassicsSam Jordison
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Will a master's in creative writing get you a book deal?

Prajwal Parajuly left Oxford with a two-book contract … and some advice for potential students

I signed with my literary agent three days before I started the two-year master of studies in creative writing at Oxford, and I signed a two-book contract with Quercus three days before the second year of the course began. Some people, however, assume that my book deal was wholly the result of the course.

At first, I relished being an undeserved poster boy for creative writing courses. My publishing contract – like all book deals coming the way of students enrolled in or fresh off a programmes – was a slap in the faces of those who said creative writing courses were a farce, factories where writers who have never been published teach writers who will never get published. Then the emails started pouring in.

They came from far and near: from north-eastern India, where home is for me; from Nepal, where my mother comes from; and from the US, where I spent many years. In each congratulatory message, well-wishers asked whether they should pursue a master's. When I asked them how they hoped to pay for their degrees many people, especially those from America and the UK, said they would finance their studies with student loans. 

As an overseas student at Oxford, I must have spent more than £30,000. This, I understand, is about half of what most students on American creative writing programmes fork out and double what my EU counterparts at Oxford paid. What, exactly, was I supposed to tell people who thought they might take out a loan to pay for their studies?

Should I tell them about the student two years ahead of me who found an agent through the end-of-the-year readings and went on to publish a fantastic book with a well-respected publishing house? Should I talk about how one of the stories in The Gurkha's Daughter stemmed from a class exercise I wrote for a bestselling author? Should I describe the pathetic excitement that gripped many students when a lone tutor said he didn't mind receiving work from us even after we graduated? Or should I inform prospective students about the banal feedback process, during which platitudes such as "I don't usually get poetry, but this I totally loved" were bandied about? (Yes, the comment came from me, and it was 100% insincere.)

Maybe I could tell these hopeful writers about my early days on the course, when people said a collection of short stories wouldn't be picked by a publisher because … it wasn't a novel. Or how some tutors were extremely knowledgeable about the British publishing scene but less so about international publishing. To expect them to know the American, Asian and Australian markets was perhaps hoping for too much, but when you pay huge sums for a course, your expectations rise; you become extra-sensitive about some tutor not attending your reading, or not even knowing your name. 

I don't believe writing can be taught, and I think people who design creative writing programmes agree with me. Such courses, however, are predicated on the idea that writing can be finessed with the help of the right tutors, the right peers and the right atmosphere. Did that hold true for me?

In a way it did. I joined the Oxford programme because I had nothing to do; I had quit my job and was halfway through a rough collection of short stories. I was tired of people asking me well-meaning questions such as "What are you doing?". Also, I come from a country where advanced degrees, no matter how frivolous, give people multiple orgasms, so a master's it was going to be. I wasn't about to spend three semesters studying postmodernism, so I looked at courses at places like Columbia and the University of Iowa. The latter was in the middle of nowhere, Columbia was formidably expensive, and a few other places I was considering met daily. (Going to class every day was unappealing.) Oxford's retreat- and residence-focused schedule suited my needs. We had two to three months between every block of classes to read and write – this was when I completed a large chunk of my second book – and then we would meet from 8am to 8pm every day for three or four days. 

I dabbled with poetry and screenwriting – two genres I'd have avoided were it not for the course. To get my money's worth, I decided to write a screenplay for my final-year project. For assignments, I submitted my most experimental pieces. I brought in the weakest stories to be workshopped, reasoning that if I was spending so much money I might as well take to the course what I would be embarrassed to workshop elsewhere. Weighing the worth of every assignment, every reading and every tutorial against how much money you're shelling out is a common practice among students of creative writing.

I found two people on the course with whom I shall probably exchange work all my life, I published my first poem, and I have in my possession a puerile screenplay of which I am equally proud and ashamed. All wonderful things, yes, but not worth £30,000 of debt. (Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about interest rates, job placements and how to pay off my loans – a combination of savings and investments helped fund my education, as did the wonderful club that is the Oxford University Poker Society.)

I usually advise people to enrol in creative writing courses if they have the cash and the time. But to take out a loan to finance your studies? Considering the current publishing landscape – where a mid five-figure advance is considered a big deal – should give you an idea of where you might, if you're lucky, find yourself as a graduate. That is, of course, if things work out. If they don't, you could always teach.

• Prajwal Parajuly is the author of The Gurkha's Daughter (Quercus). Land Where I Flee, his novel, is scheduled for publication in January 2014.

Creative writingUniversity of OxfordHigher education
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Where are the great new science books?

After the chair of this year's Samuel Johnson prize bemoaned the quality of science writing, we're looking for books that prove him wrong

Last week we asked for your thoughts about clothes in literature, for a podcast about fashion inspired by a comment Margaret Atwood had made about army uniforms. So interesting was the response that we not only quoted comments from acwacw, swithering, katybird, FrustratedArtist and Dylanwolf but discovered a new podcast star, Moira Redmond, who blogs as clothesinbooks.

This week, we'd like your thoughts on science books for a podcast inspired by a comment from astronomer royal Martin Rees, who is chairing this year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

He said: "There are lots of biographies and history, fewer science, than in some years. We saw some books that were interesting, but that failed on the quality of writing test."

We're expecting his views to get a bracing challenge from one of our podcast guests, Uta Frith, a judge of the Royal Society's Winton prize.

The twelve books on this year's Winton longlist cover a dazzling range, from Tim Birkhead's Bird Sense to Caspar Henderson's Book of Barely Imagined Beings. But is The Book of Barely Imagined Beings even a science book?

Reviewing it in Guardian Review, Gavin Francis wrote:

In 1959 CP Snow delivered his famous Rede lecture on "The Two Cultures", in which he lamented the gulf between intellectual elites fluent either in the sciences or in the humanities, but all too rarely in both. Fifty years on, the landscape seems as divided as it was in Snow's day. It's a gulf of which the likes of Leonardo could not have conceived, and one that Henderson – an English graduate turned science writer – seeks to bridge. We have a great deal that we can learn from one another. As a neuroscientist/physician turned author, this reviewer applauds his ambition, and hopes that his extraordinary book recruits many more from both sides to the cause.

Tell us which science books you think we should all be reading.

And to get the inspiration flowing, here is one that probably isn't a contender - courtesy of @NicholasCollins on twitter

Science and natureRoyal Society Science Book PrizeSamuel JohnsonMartin ReesClaire Armitstead
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