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Summer voyages: Coasting by Jonathan Raban

An eccentric offshore progress around Britain is a sharp portrait of a nation at war and a brilliant depiction of the shape-shifting sea

Early in Jonathan Raban's Coasting, the author attempts a thumbnail sketch, or perhaps a small-scale nautical chart, of the voyage so far:

I got drunk in Torquay, had a fit of memoirs in Portsmouth, turned lyrical in Brighton and philosophical off Beachy Head, was affronted in Dover, ill in Harwich, happy in Grimsby, maudlin in Bridlington, was pleased with myself on Holy Island, got drunk again in Leith, was superior in Inverness, fell in love in Oban and out of love by Stranraer, was at my wits' end in Dublin, said some very clever things in Fishguard, lost my temper off Lands' End and summed things up pretty neatly in Falmouth. The End.

If only a story about a year circumnavigating the British isles, single-handed, were that simple. Or maybe we should be pleased it isn't. This narrative squaring-away is deeply uncharacteristic of Raban. If most books about sailing aspire to be racing yachts – spruce, yare, the rigging taut, every story folded neatly in its locker – Coasting is a more mysterious vessel, sailing under a tattered and grubby flag of convenience. Psychological barnacles cling to its hull; its rudder is dickery and unreliable. The emotional radar and depth-gauge are on the blink. This might, in fact, be the only book about an antique boat whose captain cheerfully admits that he's the wreck.

The clue is in the title: "coasting", Raban tells us, quoting wryly from a 19th-century handbook, is "the act of making a progress along the sea-coast of any country, for which purpose it is necessary to observe the time and direction of the tide, to know the reigning winds, the roads and havens, the different depths of water, and the qualities of the ground". The author admits it's not a bad analogy for his own life, as he bobs towards 40. As in many travel narratives, there are shadowy background hints of midlife crisis, perhaps even a breakdown; relationships gone sour, a struggle with childhood demons, a sense of being shunted to the margins, into exile. "For years, I coasted," he tells us:

from job to job, place to place, person to person. At the first hint of adverse weather I hauled up my anchor and moved on with the tide, letting the reigning winds take care of the direction of the voyage. In writing I found a good coaster's occupation, unloading my mixed cargoes at one port after another. The writer, sitting alone in a room, watching society go past his window and trying to recreate it by playing with words on a page, has his own kind of sea-distance.

It was merely a matter of time before he bought a boat and ran away to sea – even if, as Raban ruefully says, he's rather too old and short of breath for such a teenage adventure. So it is that, on 24 February 1982, in an overlarge blue-and-white vessel loaded with a happy disorder of hardbacks, wine bottles, antique engravings and unfinished personal business, he sets out from Fowey in Cornwall to sail. And write.

We realise it only gradually, but Raban could hardly have chosen a more opportune time. A matter of months after he weighs anchor, Britain plunges into the Falklands crisis: Argentinian troops raise their flag in Port Stanley, and the country is immediately on a war footing, with Thatcher resplendent and ferocious at the helm. When a naval task force is dispatched to the south Atlantic, we find the author in Plymouth, eavesdropping on yacht-club chatter ("I'd take my tub out there at the drop of a hat", froths one armchair admiral); he is stormbound in Dartmoor's lovely River Yealm when parliament is recalled. When news comes through of the sinking of the Belgrano, he learning sextant with a fellow yachtsman set adrift in Maggie's Britain. As Raban's own modest, drifting voyage progresses, he finds himself steering at an increasingly oblique angle to the recession-hit, war-mongering country he's sailing around – wondering, even, whether there'll ever be a berth for him back home.

Home is the leitmotif of Coasting; if not exactly its guiding star, more a distant lighthouse seen intermittently through fog. It's a cliche to describe travelogues as voyages into the self, but here the metaphor is absolute. Raban drops in at the naval college in Dartmouth, and is transported immediately back to the traumas of his boarding school. We have miniature discursions on the author's obsessions with fluid mechanics, the nature of religious belief, postwar left-wing British politics, and the battle between wooden boats (old, good) and GRP (new, bad). Father figures loom large; sometimes comically, often less so. There is a gloriously funny evening out with Philip Larkin, Raban's old university librarian in Hull, which culminates in Raban accompanying the deaf and all-but-blind poet on an expedition to a local Lebanese eatery ("he drove us to the restaurant as if the one-mile drive was a hazardous adventure and Hull a city as foreign as Beirut itself").

Raban's encounter with his real father, a Church of England vicar and former soldier, is painted in darker shades. With Raban's mother along for the ride, they go on a day trip from Lymington intended to show off a son's mastery of his boat – and, by extension, his life – but which leaves him feeling more footling and childlike than ever. Nautical adventures customarily feature a scene in which the hero grapples manfully in storm-force conditions, fighting to keep his vessel afloat; here, Raban's reckoning is with the heavy weather inside himself.

All this would be hard going if it weren't for the joyous surge and leap of his writing, stippled with mordant humour and rippling with rueful asides. Raban's earlier travel books, Arabia (1979) and 1981's Old Glory (an account of a trip down the Mississippi), are fine pieces of writing, but the prose sometimes feels parched, under-expansive; Raban, you sense, needs seawater to lubricate his pen. I can't think of another writer who captures the stuff in all its exquisitely magical differences, or who is able to achieve such crystalline beauty in the summoning of an aquatic image. He leaves behind the haunting calm of a small river, "scrolled by the tide and current with loops and whorls of teasingly near-legible Arabic," and enters "a broad stretch of water … rippling, off-white, like a field of grazing sheep". Later, he encounters the stormy English Channel, the waves at first "a loutish show of undirected energy", building relentlessly to a sea "lined with dark troughs [that] stretched away out of sight, as closely ruled as harp strings".

I could go on, but this would be to get in the way of you casting off with the book yourself. Coasting is a summer voyage to relish, even if you'd rather jump overboard than go anywhere near a real-life boat. Perhaps especially if you're a landlubber, in fact: it's a book for anyone struggling to stay afloat right here, on dry land.

Travel writingJonathan RabanAndrew Dickson
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Jane Austen's ring matters far less than the objects in her fiction

Chattels are a key component of Jane's novels – they matter much less to our understanding of their author

So Jane Austen's gold and turquoise ring won't be leaving the UK after all. At least, not until the end of September. Last year, American singer Kelly Clarkson bought the ring at auction; now culture minister Ed Vaizey has placed a temporary export ban on it, hoping that someone will come forward and buy it for the nation.

But the most famous piece of jewellery in Austen's novels is not a ring. It's a necklace: the amber cross that Fanny Price wears in Mansfield Park, a gift from her naval brother William. He gives it to her without anything to hang it from, a gold chain being far beyond his means. Poor Fanny, "young and inexperienced" and "with no confidence in her own taste", hesitates to wear it on a simple bit of ribbon: won't the other women at the ball laugh at her? Yet her religious inclinations, and her devotion to William, make it impossible that she not wear it.

Fortunately, help is at hand. First the unscrupulous Mary Crawford offers to lend her a chain that was a gift from her brother, the even more unscrupulous Henry. Then Fanny's beloved cousin Edmund steps forward with his own gift of a chain. She ends up wearing William's cross on Edmund's chain: "those memorials of the two most beloved of her heart". At the last minute, she adds Mary Crawford's chain on top, unwilling to offend even a woman she dislikes.

This episode is a perfect illustration of how objects work in Austen's novels: both as symbols and as plot devices. The chains and cross around Fanny's neck give physical presence to the most important relationships in her life. They also move the story along: when Fanny discusses Mary Crawford's gift with Edmund, she realises just how in love with Mary he is. In Emma, characters use a box of letters to spell out secret messages to one another. The game provokes a row between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax that contributes to their relationship coming to light and (eventually) to Emma's happy union with Mr Knightley.

Objects, and people's reactions to objects, convey information. So what does Austen's ring tell us? It's not clear who gave it to the author, but the fact it was passed on to her sister Cassandra hints at their closeness – just as the amber cross hints at Fanny and William's. But we already know that Cassandra and Jane were close, from the surviving letters between them: the ring confirms, rather than conveys, information. Paula Byrne's recent biography of Austen, The Real Jane Austen, promised to tell the story of her life through a series of objects relating to the author, such as the portable "laptop" desk on which she did much of her writing. But here, too, Byrne mostly used the objects to confirm what she deduced about Austen from letters, novels and other documents.

In the end, this ring tells us less about Jane Austen than about our desire to hold on to her and give her physical life beyond the page. If the ring leaves the country, Jane Austen won't be any less English; if we "own" her at all, we won't own her any less. The manuscripts of Mansfield Park, Emma and her other novels may be lost, discarded as a matter of course after publication, but her words still remain.

Which isn't to say that it won't be a shame if no one comes forward to buy the ring: like the amber cross, the ring is a symbol, and has emotional weight – it and its fate now stand for our relationship with Austen as much as Austen's relationship with Cassandra. But if the ring does stay with Kelly Clarkson, we can take comfort from the fact that, in a few years, we'll have millions of new objects to remember Austen by: every £10 note both symbol and plot in the ongoing story of Austenmania.

Jane AustenFictionHeritage
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The Kindle has turned me off paper books

I'm a rare book dealer, but since getting an e-reader older reading media seem awkward and cumbersome

It was the second lead story on The News at Ten. JK Rowling, it seems, had just been unmasked as the author of a pseudonymous thriller, The Cuckoo's Calling, under the name Robert Galbraith. By the time the newsreader was on item three, I was on page three. Kindles are perfect for speedy delivery: 30 seconds between desire and fulfilment.

I was delighted to have the new text on my screen, having no desire to schlep it about in hard copy. Schlep it about? This is a book were talking about, right? Not a suitcase. There is nothing cumbersome about most books, is there? Admittedly, they can be inconvenient – if you want to read one in the middle of the night, you have to turn on the bedside lamp, and risk irritating your loved one. (Back-lit e-readers are not yet universal, but it's getting that way.) And too many books are a positive encumbrance if you are travelling, and want to take enough reading matter to cover your holiday, without paying for excess baggage.

My intention was to read the new thriller, a few days later, on my way to New York. But two things intervened: first, and predictably, I finished it before we left. Rather good, I thought: edgy one-legged private investigator and his temporary secretary with her inner sleuth unfurling. I preferred it to Rowling's debut adult novel, A Casual Vacancy, which is neatly told, if a bit clunky, bloody and bleak. Voldemortification in the shires.

Second, as I discovered on our way to Heathrow, I had forgotten to take my Kindle. This has never happened to me before, for it is now so essential that I almost buy it a companion ticket. When it became clear, checking my bags for the third time, that I was now Kindle-less, I had a reaction so acute as to qualify, almost, as an anxiety attack. No Kindle? What was I going to do?

The answer, of course, was pathetically obvious. I went to the airport shop, bought a Kate Atkinson thriller which would see me through to New York, where I could surely replenish my reading stocks. But my unease didn't abate entirely, and though I spent six hours in the excellent company of Ms Atkinson, I never got comfortable with her. It has been a few years since I read an actual book on a plane, and I was astonished at how cumbersome, how intractably wrong, it felt in my hands. I found myself – which I have never done before and heartily disapprove of – folding the book in half so that only the page I was reading was visible. That gave me a cramp in my right hand, and the pages wouldn't stay still, quite, as I read. I found myself swaying slightly, as if at the Wailing Wall. Then I went back to the two-handed double-page-opened position – even describing it makes it seem like an obscure sort of manoeuvre, rather than a natural function – but I still couldn't settle down. The book was too fat. It was too heavy. It spread out too widely. It was as if I had taken an unruly small pet onto the plane and couldn't keep it under control.

Never again. I would even prefer to watch a tiny film on one of those seat telly thingies than read a book on a plane. We are going to Australia and New Zealand for seven weeks in November and December, and I will stuff my Kindle with lots of treats, and check obsessively that it is in my carry-on luggage. (The occasion for the trip is that I have been invited to deliver a lecture at a rare books library).

My wife Belinda and I went, last weekend, to the summer fayre at a local village hall near us in the New Forest. I like to support such events, but find it difficult once I actually get there, because it is so depressing. It was a homely occasion, with cups of stewed tea and pink iced cakes, local schoolchildren dancing, various games to play at which you lose 30p, local jams and chutneys for sale, and stalls stuffed with old teapots, odd cups and saucers, chipped figurines, and knick-knacks among which even Belinda (who has a great eye) couldn't locate anything worth buying.

I threw away my spare change on the games, and was turning to go back to the car when I noticed, across the way, a table lined with rows of bulky, multi-coloured objects. I wandered over, in a state of some bemusement, unclear what I was seeing.

Oh: Books. Rows of paperbacks, with their spines facing upwards. But my sense of dislocation didn't go away just because I could name the obscure objects, not quite. Perhaps I had been looking for too long at the depressing stalls of brocante, at too many ugly bits of junk? Because even when I started to examine the rows of paperbacks, and to find a number of titles that I would like to read – a couple of Stephen Kings, a Harlan Coben – the emerging sensation sharpened and defined itself: the books still looked cumbersome, dusty, and weighty. Undesirable. They were unappealing, not because they were used, but because they were books.

This rather shocked me, and I wandered off in a state of some perturbation. What? All of a sudden I find books fusty and old-fashioned? Can it possibly be the case generally – as it was particularly with Mr Galbraith's new thriller – that I would now much rather download? I still buy a lot of hard copy books. I divide my purchases between titles that are serious (and which I might want to annotate, reread, lend to friends, shelve) and those that I want the simple pleasure of reading once. But am I slipping towards a gradual abandonment of a form that I have loved? Of the pleasures of opening covers, leafing back and forth, the physical sensation of the turning of the page? Could this astonishing transformation of my tastes happen so quickly, sneak up on me when I wasn't looking?

And: if so, how much do I care? How much should I?

At the fayre, I made a note of the King and Coben titles I wanted, went home and downloaded them for my trip in November. I can probably read two or even three thrillers on our flight to Sydney to give my lecture.

The title of the lecture? "The Life and Death of the Book".

E-readersKindleJK RowlingRick Gekoski
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Summer voyages: La Modification (A Change of Heart) by Michel Butor

One man's train ride from Paris towards his mistress in Rome follows his thoughts on a fascinating journey

Michel Butor's La Modification, first published in French in 1957, describes a single train journey. It follows the middle-aged Leon Delmont from Paris – where he leaves behind his wife Henriette and family – to Rome, where he plans to surprise his mistress Cecile with news that he will end his marriage to be with her.

In subsequent translations, the novel's title has been rendered variously as A Change of Heart (US) and Second Thoughts (UK) but it is the original French which captures most closely the emotional, gradual transition played out between the Gare de Lyon and the Stazioni Termini.

That what might have been a banal tale is strikingly not so, from the outset, is thanks in no small part to the author's use of the second person to tell the story. It is "you" who boards the train, you who carries a book with the firm intention of reading it, you who smokes a Gitane. The intimacy afforded by this simple stylistic device pervades the reader's experience. We are Leon, whether we like it or not. We take this journey with him, in the designated time and space of the train compartment, where he is neither who he was at the departure point, nor who he will be on arrival. The sensation is of a porous neutrality, of the "between" stage that permits us to be ourselves, allowing thoughts and choices to surface.

Expressed as an emotional transition, the journey (which Leon presents to Henriette in the guise of a monthly business trip to Rome) retains a focus on the physical – the smell and feel of the compartment, the folded ticket bought that morning at Paris-Lyon, the pocket in which Leon finds it, even his choice of coffee, shine a light on how rarely the minutiae of travel are shared.

Henriette and Cecile flit into and out of these accounts as shadowy figures. Cecile embodies Rome, youth and freedom where Henriette, domestic and stiff, sleeps in Paris "on the other side of the bed … separated by an uncrossable river of linen". In tandem, Leon's descriptions of his fellow passengers broaden the focus of the narrative – a priest drumming his nails on a black briefcase, a young couple lowering the window to lean and gaze at another train blurry in the hazy rain of early evening, are framed in his middle aged eyes. Against a sequence of Turin, Genoa and finally Pisa their immediacy places the images of the two women at one remove. Slowly but irreversibly, the journey comes to reverse Leon's mental picture of Cecile, bringing to his mind her expression of disdain when last they parted, rather than the "peaceful respite" he has come to find in her eyes. Henriette's image conjures her "perpetual air of criticism hanging over her every word …" but also her hold upon him.

As he sets it down, the journey itself alludes to the Classical age and its protagonist is not above self-aggrandisement. Reading the letters of Julian the Apostate, Delmont likens himself to the ancient Roman Empire's representative in Paris, both in his working role in the Italian capital and in his initial opposition to the Christian church. We learn that his first wanderings through the Roman streets with Cecile acquainted him only with her enthusiasm for pre-Christian Rome. Subsequently and in the absence of his mistress, he has discovered the churches, the Vatican and their hold upon him, a passion shared by his wife and not by Cecile. It is with this version of the city that he finds he has fallen in love. The contrasted faces of Rome (as well as those of Rome and Paris) make Leon's choice between pagan and Christian equivalent to his choice between the two women.

Fantasy has a strong presence in Butor's novel. As the route of the train passes between the forests at Fontainebleu, a ghost-like apparition of "the legendary horseman who haunts the forest" appears to Leon, bringing to mind his wife's confession of her childhood fears that the same fabled huntsman would carry her away on her evening walks in the forest. We learn too that such fears were expressed by Henriette long ago, in the intimate moments of their honeymoon.

The rhythm of the train seems to predict Leon's thought processes, the slow emergence of doubts and fears that make his ultimate change of mind inevitable: "You realise the step is taken but not the one you had thought to take on boarding the train, another step … the abandonment of the luminous aspect of your future towards which you had taken this train, a life of love and of happiness with Cecile … it is now necessary not to think of it."

The knowledge comes to Leon that the reconciliation he envisaged with Cecile would be a "thin and fragile" one, that despite his physical journey towards her, the distance is opening up between himself and his mistress. The "implacable evidence of the fragility of your love, of its attachment to the place" unravelling his initial picture, pointing him back towards Henriette.

The interplay of the two cities in relation to the two women builds as the novel (and the journey) draws to a close. Leon's love for Cecile proves so intertwined with his passion for Rome, as well as with youth and freedom, that these aspects have overtaken her. Transported to the French capital, his mistress would lose her hold on his heart. Henriette, "sleeping" in Paris, representing family and work, comes to represent his closer "self".

Monitoring the progress of his own sea change, Leon determines then to express it in his own book, "La Modification". The novel thus becomes the book of itself.

Triggering thoughts of my own journey, between my first reading of the novel as a student and my second, 20 years later, La Modification retains its power. It is differently resonant but as vivid and as evocative of the process by which, privately, we change.

Summer readingFictionKeren Levy
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Happy birthday, Hannibal: The Silence of the Lambs turns 25

It's been a quarter of a century since Thomas Harris's cultured cannibal exploded on the thriller scene, winning fictional killers a place in our hearts for ever

Can it really be a whole quarter of a century since Hannibal Lecter took up residence in our cultural landscape with the immortal line, "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti"?

Well, actually, no. It is indeed 25 years since Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs was first published, but that famous quote is from Jonathan Demme's highly rated 1991 movie adaptation of the book; Harris's original line did indeed have the sociopathic psychiatrist chowing down on the offal of a census taker who "tried to quantify me once", but in the original text the cannibalistic serial killer's wine of choice is "a big Amarone". Perhaps chianti was the preferred plonk of Anthony Hopkins, who portrayed Lecter in Demme's movie; and certainly Hopkins added the "f-f-f-f-f!" to forever enshrine it in the list of most quotable movie lines.

The Silence of the Lambs inhabits that curious cross-media territory where only classics live. Its astonishing success as a movie – it scooped the so-called "Big Five" at the Oscars (best picture, best actor, best actress, best director and best adapted screenplay) – perhaps overshadows the source material for many people. But with 11m worldwide sales since publication and a clutch of awards for both horror and crime writing in its year of publication (the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy and Anthony awards) the importance of the book's impact cannot be overestimated.

Even Random House, publishing a 25th-anniversary reprint of the book, under the Arrow imprint, is spearheading its publicity with: "Seen the film? Now read the book that launched a legend."

Harris's book already has enough cultural cachet not to be overshadowed by the (admittedly fine) movie adaptation. Big names in suspense, crime and horror were falling over themselves to praise the book. "A huge talent," said Rebus creator Ian Rankin of Harris. "The great fictional monster of our time," was how Stephen King described Lecter. "A brilliant, superbly crafted thriller," said the late James Herbert. Perhaps most incongruously, Roald Dahl (though no stranger, of course, to the grotesque and terrifying) called The Silence of the Lambs "the best book I've read in a very long time. Subtle, horrific and splendid."

The book wasn't, of course, Hannibal Lecter's first outing, but it certainly remains the most memorable of the four books that feature him. In the first book, Red Dragon, he was incarcerated (it was filmed as Manhunter, by Michael Mann, with a weirdly disturbing 80s synth soundtrack, and then again in 2002 with Harris's original title).

In book two, we meet the doctor locked in a high-security facility, where rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling is enlisting his help in the psychological profiling of serial killer Buffalo Bill. Lecter is cold, calculating, charming, lucid, highly dangerous and utterly remorseless. And therein lies the magic of his character: we're scared of him and want to hate him, but when he rather horrifically makes his bid for freedom, we're somehow rooting for him.

After Silence, the somewhat reclusive Harris wrote Hannibal, which detailed what happened next to Clarice and Lecter, and Hannibal Rising, a prequel to the series, but none seems to have achieved the same status as The Silence of the Lambs. Quite the opposite in some cases: Martin Amis, a self-confessed fan of the early books, reviewed Hannibal in the now-defunct New York magazine, savaging Harris as "a serial murderer of English sentences", and calling the book "a necropolis of prose".

Before Lecter, fictional serial killers weren't the sort of people you would want to spend much time with. But if you look past Lecter's obvious flaws – extracting people's eyes with paperclips, tearing off faces to wear over his own … that sort of thing – he is educated, erudite and even suave. You probably wouldn't mind having dinner with him, in a very public place and provided he didn't do the cooking.

We would have to go back a long way to find a literary anti-hero anywhere near Lecter's equivalent. Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and EW Hornung's Raffles are criminals, certainly, but these gentlemen thieves were motivated by greed and thrill rather than a desire to kill. A closer fit is Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's Fantomas, a suave early 20th-century villain who took great pleasure in offing his enemies. But Fantomas – though he was successfully adapted to cinema, TV and comic books – elicits none of the reluctant admiration, and even empathy, the reader feels for Lecter.

Since The Silence of the Lambs, the trope of the charming serial killer has become entrenched in popular culture. Without Lecter, it's arguable there would be no Dexter, an insanely popular TV series currently on its eighth season, spawned from Jeff Lindsay's books. Also, NBC's Hannibal, featuring Mads Mikkelsen as a young and angular Lecter, who helps the FBI solve crimes at the same time as pursuing his own killing career.

In the 25 years since The Silence of the Lambs, fictional serial killers (the real ones are too horrific to think about) have acquired a handsome gloss. Perhaps now's the time to reopen Harris's book and remind ourselves just how terrifying they should be.

Thomas HarrisHannibal LecterCrime fictionHorrorFictionAnthony HopkinsJonathan DemmeFilm adaptationsDavid Barnett
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May Sinclair: the readable modernist

While the 'Men of 1914' take all the attention, this approachable innovator has been outrageously neglected

The "Men of 1914" – writers such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence – are as much the poster boys of modernism today as they were when Wyndham Lewis coined the phrase in 1937. But 40 years of Virago's modern classics have shown that Virginia Woolf wasn't the only female author at the head of the literary vanguard, rediscovering and repositioning the differing visions of modernity offered by writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West. But despite Virago's efforts, and her central role in the modernist revolution, May Sinclair remains shrouded in obscurity.

Sinclair was not only a critically-respected, popular and extremely prolific novelist, but also a poet, philosopher, translator, and critic. Her career, spanning from the late 1880s all the way to the late 1920s, produced 23 novels, 39 short stories, two philosophical treatises, one biography of the Brontës and several poetry collections.

She is perhaps vaguely recalled, by literature students at least, for her review of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage in 1918 in which she coined the literary version of the phrase "stream of consciousness", or alternatively her remarkably perceptive early review of TS Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock". Less appreciated by most, however, is Sinclair's pivotal role in that early modernist milieu. She provided patronage to the young Ezra Pound and introduced him to Ford Madox Ford, an old friend of hers who as editor of the English Review would be the first to publish Pound's poems in England. She was good friends with Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells, Rebecca West and others, and was heavily involved with movements as diverse as women's suffrage, early psychoanalysis and imagist poetry.

These myriad influences are filtered and distilled in her fiction, which displays many of the tenets we would now deem to be modernist – stream-of-consciousness narration, temporal dislocation and discursive fragmentation – while at the same time remaining fundamentally readable. Sinclair's masterpiece, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), for example, tells the story of one woman's life from birth to death in a refreshingly short and accessible 160 pages. It is a "small, perfect gem of a book", according to Jonathan Coe, who praised the novel's "tragic force" and the "reserve of authorial compassion we can sense in the gaps between each fragmentary episode and every terse, clipped sentence". Harriett's life of self-denial is Sinclair's indictment of a society which demanded women should turn themselves into self-sacrificing nonentities obsessed with pursuing "moral beauty" instead of self-fulfilment. Looking back on her life in middle age, Harriett finally realises how she has been complicit in her own subjugation and succumbs to despair:

The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriet was now fifty. The feeling of insecurity had grown on her … She had no clear illumination, only a mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense of shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and honourable self.

The characteristically elliptical brevity of those first sentences, Sinclair's experiment in translating imagist poetic principles to prose, can be seen as the precursor – or, depending on your point of view, the antidote – to the great and at times intimidatingly unwieldy modernist novels of the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses.

Yet, for all its merits, this is the only one of Sinclair's novels currently in print. The Three Sisters (1914) – an atmospheric re-imagination of the Brontë story – and Mary Olivier (1919) – a quintessentially modernist "portrait of the artist as young (wo)man" published just as Joyce, Richardson and Woolf were also making their first forays into stream-of-consciousness prose – were both published by Virago in the 1980s, but both have since dropped from view. Earlier novels such as The Tysons (1898), The Divine Fire (1904) and The Creators (1910) – the latter the first novel to represent writing as a potentially central occupation of women's lives – have never been reprinted, despite their consummate artistry and insightful social and psychological realism.

For such an accomplished author, to have just one novel circulating in the 21st century is appalling. Sinclair was never a self-promoter (unlike most of her contemporaries) and seems to have suffered the consequences – there is no brash polemic, like Ezra Pound's "make it new" or Wyndham Lewis's incessant "blasting", to act as a platform from which all of her work appears radical or holistically comprehensible.

Indeed, perhaps the disadvantage of spanning such a wide timescale is that Sinclair's work is constantly changing and adapting to new conditions and ideas; her early New Woman novels bear little resemblance to her later modernist works, though there is little difference in quality. Instead, her fiction is infused with a plethora of influences, and it is this eclectic synthesis, rather than pure originality, which is Sinclair's strength. While academic circles are plagued with anxiety about whether such a popular and approachable author can ever be quite "literary" enough, she falls uncomfortably into the gap between the two. Whatever the reasons for her neglect, it has become a vicious circle: not being read means things go out of print, which means they're not read, which means they stay out of print …

But there are glimmers of hope. Sinclair's complete works are available on Project Gutenberg, and the May Sinclair Society, launched this month, will be organising discussions, conferences and yes, some long overdue new editions of her works. Perhaps this archetypal modernist will be rescued by that most modern of inventions, the internet.

FictionModernismPoetryPhilosophyTS EliotVirginia WoolfJames JoyceJonathan CoeCharlotte Jones
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Reading in prison is not a trivial story

Questionable reports that Guantánamo detainees love Fifty Shades of Grey belittle this crucial bit of freedom in captivity

It's been reported that the prisoners being held in Guantánamo Bay's secretive Camp 7 are all raving about bestselling erotic romance Fifty Shades of Grey. "Rather than the Qur'an, the book that is requested most is Fifty Shades of Grey. They've read the entire series in English, but we were willing to translate it," the Huffington Post quoted US congressman Jim Moran as saying after a tour of the camp last week. "I guess there's not much going on, these guys are going nowhere, so what the hell." Excuse me for being more than just a tad sceptical.

One thing this titillating bit of underhand gossip does highlight is the importance of reading in prison. Prison life reduces and damages in so many ways – the spirit-crushing monotony of living the same day over and over in a hostile setting for months, years or decades can take a harsh toll on even the most determined mind. A good book can nourish, relax and energise an individual's mental capacity like little else.

One of the reasons I agreed to become a patron of The Reader Organisation, the charity that promotes and champions shared reading, was because of what I gained from my own prison reading experience.

Having entered prison barely literate, I credit reading – in isolation and in groups – with helping me to make some sense of who I was and guiding me towards becoming who I should have been. One TRO project currently underway is called RiSE – Reading in Secure Environments. A number of prisons in the UK now have TRO Readers running regular reading groups. Lizzie Cane of TRO explains what they are trying to achieve. "We believe that shared reading in prisons helps to improve health and well-being through human interaction and self-reflection. Reading a wide variety of literature helps to increase personal confidence and can assist in reducing re-offending," she says. I asked her if Fifty Shades is on any of her reading lists and she laughs. "No … it's not the sort of literature that we would … encourage."

One reading group in a women's prison in the north east recently read Charles Dickens's Great Expectations together. "I was impressed by how quickly and how strongly the story gripped the group," said the group leader later. "The drama of the narrative was heightened by the setting, but the women really liked the penal references. The prison visit caused quite a few nods of recognition and quiet reflection even if people didn't dwell on the similarities. The hints of domestic abuse were discussed, but in a thoughtful and sensitive way." When the women were discussing the chapter in which young Pip is struggling with the idea of telling Joe the Blacksmith that he has been stealing food to feed the escaped convict Magwitch, there were lots of empathetic nods and sighs.

One of the Guantánamo Camp 7 prisoners, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was reported to have "screamed the whole time" while the visiting delegation was in Camp 7. The delegates were told that the other prisoners don't like him. "He hears voices and he complains all the time, and he really is disruptive. So they say if the other 15 could have one wish granted it would to be to get rid of their colleague," Democrat Jim Moran said afterwards.

Fifteen prisoners serving endless time in a godforsaken penal void granted one wish and they all say, "please get rid of him"? That's about as credible as the notion that they are all wrapped up in Fifty Shades. I wonder if the delegates noticed that whoever was feeding them this pile of beans had his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Charles DickensFifty Shades of GreyFictionGuantánamo BayErwin James
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Summer voyages: Mugby Junction by Charles Dickens and Others

Fictional Victorian railway journeys make great companions for holiday train trips today

Journeys, new inventions, crime, the supernatural – these were the cutting-edge fictional topics for the Victorians as, in different manifestations, they are for us.

In the autumn of 1866, Charles Dickens had the shrewd idea of combining these themes in a group of collaborative "railway" stories, to be published in the Extra Christmas Number of his weekly magazine All the Year Round. The idea paid off, and an impressive 250,000 copies were sold.

The stories were issued as a complete collection, Mugby Junction, by the Hesperus Press in 2005. There are eight in total, four of which are by Dickens. The other contributors are far from amateurs, and would have been very well-known to readers of the time. They are Andrew Halliday, Charles Collins (Wilkie's painter-brother), Hesba Stretton and the novelist, travel writer and Egyptologist, Amelia Edwards.

I bought my copy of Mugby Junction last year on the way to King's Cross, aiming to mend the gaps in my Dickens reading. I recommend reading it on a long train journey, as I did. Though the rolling stock and landscape have changed, you can still look out of the window and see, from time to time, old engine sheds, rusting girders, sooty brickwork and freight cars, much like those that Dickens and the other authors describe. While the stories connect you to the past, it's a bonus to have traces of its physical reality within touching distance, reminding you not only how things have changed, but also how they haven't.

Mugby Junction itself is an imaginary Midlands station where seven lines intersect. As Robert MacFarlane says in the foreword, "it's an existential crossroads as well as a material one". The best fictional journeys usually generate, or accompany, a psychological voyage, and this is the premise of Dickens's two "Barbox" tales. The protagonist, Jackson, arrives at an unfamiliar station. It's not his destination, but, on impulse, he gets out of the train. He is a character almost effaced by sadness and failure, known at first merely by the company name printed on his luggage, "Barbox Brothers", or, to the puzzled railway-staff, "The Gentleman for Nowhere". How he finds his Somewhere and restores his identity is Dickens's theme.

It is, of course, a dark and stormy night. "A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black hours of the four-and-twenty," Dickens observes, in fine form as he always is when his subject is railway travel. The nocturnal scene is powerfully realised: "Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals … the half miles of coal pursuing in a detective manner …" An encounter with a genial character called Lamps sets Jackson on his new and brighter course.

These linked "Jackson" stories, Barbox Brothers and Barbox Brothers and Co, are like chapters in a novel, and suggest that Dickens needed a bigger canvas for the development of his plot. His tale hits the buffers in a sentimental coincidence – which I won't reveal, because there's still a lot of pleasure to be had from the journey. But be prepared for a saintly invalid, and a cute dimpled child.

Jackson now fades out of the picture. The other narratives concern new characters, though their stories were, supposedly, gleaned by Jackson as he wandered round the Junction, a fascinated newcomer. Their titles (No 1 Branch Line, and so on) represent the different railway lines, but the stories go off in various directions. It's a slightly rickety framing device, evidence of the combined pressures of running a weekly magazine and organising a literary collaboration.

Of the remaining Dickens pieces, one is the very fine ghost story, No 1 Branch Line: The Signalman and the other a satirical gem, Main Line: The Boy at Mugby. This latter takes the form of an anecdote by a disingenuous rogue of a refreshment room assistant, relating how the martinet in charge (Our Missis) sets forth to check out passenger catering on the Continent. She comes back with horrified reports of fresh picnic-baskets, a wide selection of drinks, good service and lively conversation – all the foreign nonsense outlawed at her own worthy establishment. Dickens loved France, and he clearly appreciated its station charcuterie. His wit sparkles like champagne, and you can almost taste the ham-filled "fresh, crisp, long, crusty" loaves, derided by Our Missis as "the universal French Refreshment sangwich".

Andrew Halliday's "No 2 Branch Line: The Engine Driver" is another lively monologue. The driver describes his job as if being interviewed. It's all very detailed, idiomatic and convincing: Halliday must have spoken to some real drivers, bringing with him his notebook and shorthand skills. It begins: "Altogether? Well. Altogether. Since 1841 I've killed seven men and boys. It ain't many, in all those years."

The women writers of the collection noticeably build the most ambitious plots. There's a clever, complicated spy story by Hesba Stretton. Amelia Edwards takes us from the Black Country to Genoa, with an astute account of two young men whose friendship and futures are ruined by their love of the same woman. The railways, it seems, inspired all these writers to branch out, whether geographically, psychologically, or in terms of narrative voice.

Steam transport must have been to the Victorians almost what the internet is to us – a revolutionary technology, loved, feared, fantasised. But in the end, of course, it's the human stories and voices which matter, and they're what make Mugby Junction so readable. If you find the usual Victorian novel too much of a long haul, this slim collection could be just the ticket.

Charles DickensShort storiesFictionCarol Rumens
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Choose August's Reading group book

In honour of a summer with some sun, let's go for a beach read. Lay down your literary towels on the comments sun loungers now!

For once, we in Britain don't need reminding that it's summer – recently, all we have had to do is look out of the window. In fact, it looks so great out there as I type this that it's taking an unusual amount of willpower to continue. What I really want to do is abandon the computer, pick up a book and catch the next train for the coast. (Of course, things may have changed by the time you come to read this.)

The burning question, aside from how I'll pay the bills if I spend the next three weeks swimming in the North Sea instead of working, is which book to take – which is where I'm hoping the Reading group will step in. I want a quality beach read. How you define that is entirely up to you.

If you insist on guidelines, I'm thinking it has to be something that is both intellectually satisfying and a page-turner. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas springs to mind, or Donna Tartt's Secret History – or better still, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.

But then, I'm not the best person to ask. I know, because I've recently been told as much. There are some excellent recommendations for summer reading in the Observer's annual round-up, to which I contributed, but I took a possibly well-deserved pounding in the comments for saying I was going to take Proust.

Regular Reading group followers will know that I was only telling the truth. I fell in love with In Search Of Lost Time after it emerged from the hat back in January and haven't spent more than a few days away from it since then. (I'm in the middle of book IV now, if you're interested. Baron Charlus! Oh my god! And poor old Swann!) Anyway, I stand by Proust.

Following this weekend's sad news, I'm also doubly glad I gave the late great Mick Farren a mention in that Observer piece. Even so, I do understand that France's wordiest genius and Britain's premier proto-punk troublemaker are not everyone's idea of a diverting holiday read. So can you do better? All nominations gratefully received. I'll put them in the hat towards the end of the week and then let's go!

FictionSam Jordison
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Guardian first book award 2013: finding the 10th title

Our search for the 10th title for the award longlist threw up nominations of all stripes. But poetry has triumphed

In defiance of some tricky technological issues – for which please accept additional apologies – we assembled a stack of tasty nominations for the 10th slot on the first book award longlist. From Helen Cadbury's "pithy little state of the nation book" To Catch a Rabbit to Andy Hunter's "difficult to categorise" Tearing at Thoughts and from Sam Byer's "scathing, savagely brilliant satire of modern life" Idiopathy to Leon Hughes's "beautiful, haunting" Wings of Contrition the list spanned the publishing universe from literary crime to experimental poetry, from big publisher to self-publisher.

With such an eclectic list, full of authors and publishers I'm discovering for the first time – shout out to the folks at Crooked Cat Publishing – it's invidious to pick out anything from the pile, but I'm going to do it anyway. Who could resist the daffy energy of Sharon Baillie's unstable chemist Veronica Dempsey in the novel Magenta Opium, published by New Libri Press:

Twenty-two year old, average weight, average height, average brown hair, average brown eyes, average bowel movements, average heart rate, average eyelash length, average top speed, above average recall, less than average social intellect, Veronica Dempsey had never experienced the touch of love. As she was more interested in turbidity than turgidity, this fact was neither here nor there. She hadn't fallen off a mountain either, nor stepped into traffic in full flow, nor learned Für Elise on the piano, nor visited the continent, nor ate Marmite, scallops or beef Pot Noodle …

This "zany, black comedy, lightly peppered with sex, chemistry, and sex chemistry" may not have particularly likeable characters, as mrsmorden says, but Baillie's wordplay fizzes along past dead bodies, vandalism and laboratory shenanigans. "Don't be misled by the pink cover," mrsmorden concludes. "Like the well-known chocolate bar, this book's not for girls. It truly punches above its weight."

There's more fighting talk from Rhian E Jones, whose Clampdown argues that popular culture has inverted over the last 30 years to reflect the voices of the powerful instead of voices from the margins:

For many there has always been poverty, precarity, petty criminality and police animosity, but the years since the crisis of 2008 have exacerbated their reach and increased their visibility, resulting in their sudden horrified pointing out by those who might previously have missed them due to being shielded by better prospects and broader horizons. At the same time, under the Coalition, the demise of upwards aspiration and social mobility, and the doublethink, delusion or deceit involved in the assertion of classlessness have put an end to the affirmative, if blithely ignorant, appropriation of working-class signifiers which was encouraged in the Blair years. Now that things are going badly, poor is no longer cool, merely comical or contemptible.

Key into Jones's quickfire, rat-a-tat, cultural-studies delivery and this book "bubbles like a boiling pot on a stove" as ID5591424 suggests. At only 97 pages, perhaps "everybody who cares about society and the arts needs to read this" after all.

There's raw power of a different sort in Eimear McBride's beautifully-produced A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Pitched into the head of an unnamed narrator, the reader rolls in the sway of a chaotic life in rural Ireland:

I take the bus home reeling over me. That's a feeling. Frighten brilliant new. I am just head on the pillow when she phone. The bring bring. It's half past nine. I'll sleep but landlady whack. You. You. Your mother's on the phone. She's been calling half the night don't let me say it again. Sorry.

It's certainly dark, as ID615949 admits, but the way McBride replicates thought "as it occurs: starting, stopping, jolting, flowing, jumping back and forth" is immensely impressive.

Which brings us on to the Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien, whose collection of poems, The Shipwrecked House, has – after much deliberation – been selected for the first book award longlist. Trévien's subjects range from Cyrano de Bergerac's defiant "fuck you to Death" to Great British Bake-Off tweets, from communion wine to a skit on the death of the author, couched in verses which stretch from a straightforward(ish) sonnet to a fractured riff on the violin and beyond to a disintegration of Antony Gormley's Another Place which evaporates towards nothingness over the space of four pages.

We're never far from the ocean, which creaks to a halt and solidifies in "Rusty Sea":

Saturday, the sea turned brown, shutters clattered / closed to keep the stink out. Dead fish burst to the surface, / seagulls flew so far in they forgot to return. Weeds clambered / up, tentacles piercing the plane, midges drew laced / patterns in the sky. We waited for the tide to start again.

Or washes up on stage in the delta-wing "Mélusine", a "human" above, but "below … a snake wrapped round a cello":

… in her hands she holds a crop to scald / the beast of wood and string. The stage is strewn with the wreckage / of a strange ship: amps, and wires teased into stands, lights blinkered, caged …

Or surges up from below, like the whales which "lived under our house", though "the carpet looked too smooth to hide a mammal":

Most of the time they just wanted to play / bounced against bookshelves, snorted leaks, / threw bodies across the room.

It's certainly "both accessible and slanting … A page-turner and a slow-burner at the same time" as caramail suggests, and goes forward to the first book award longlist with hearty congratulations to Claire Trévien, and to all at Penned in the Margins. And thanks for all your nominations, which have thrown up such a fascinating and varied cross-section of publishing life. I can't wait to see how The Shipwrecked House measures up against the rest of the longlist.

Guardian first book awardPoetryFictionBiographyPoliticsRichard Lea
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