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Rereading Stephen King, chapter 19: Thinner

The last time Richard Bachman and Stephen King were thought to be different writers, and King's signature is becoming ever clearer in its story

Richard Bachman could only have lived so long, I suppose. His voice – rich in language, nasty in tone – was never going to be a bestseller, really, but King's was. By 1984, everything that King wrote was selling by the truckload. He couldn't put a foot wrong: bestseller begat bestseller. But he was writing faster than publishers could cope with. We're on entry 19 now in this rereading experiment, and yet only 10 years into King's career. So, the pseudonym had been necessary to stop King looking suspiciously prolific. But all things have to come to an end, and soon after Thinner was released, that end arrived. But before it: a novel that summed up the rest of King's Bachman-attributed output, while adding in just enough evidence of its real author to raise suspicions.

Until this point, Bachman wrote human stories. The four Bachman books were about broken, trapped men, desperately clinging to humanity while the world they inhabited pushed them further away from it. Rage, Running Man, The Long Walk, Roadwork: while they might trip into SF territory, they all exist by focusing on the human side of their protagonists, backing them into corners and making them fight their way out . King's work at this point utilised more traditional horror tropes – the haunted or possessed whatevers that drove the stories along. That line dividing King from Bachman collapsed with Thinner, which throws its hat firmly into the supernatural ring almost from the first. This was the first Bachman book I read with King's name on the cover, not Bachman's; I didn't even know it was a Bachman until later on, and I didn't question the narrative voice for a second.

Billy Halleck is a complete asshole of a protagonist. He's a lawyer, morbidly obese, who runs over a gypsy when not watching the road because his wife is giving him a hand-job. When he gets the court case and charges dismissed, thanks to knowing the right people, the gypsy's father (whose predominant physical feature is his "rotting nose") seeks Halleck out outside the courthouse. He touches his face and says a single word: Thinner.

From that point onwards, Halleck finds that the weight he was previously carrying – he starts the novel at a pretty hefty 249lb – starts to drop off him. No matter what he does, off it comes. It's slow at first, but then speeds up, and after discovering that the people who have helped him evade justice are similarly tainted (with strange scaly skin and acne, no less), Halleck realises that this is a gypsy curse. However, because he's an asshole who sees no reason to accept blame for what happened he doesn'tworry about atoning. Instead, he decides to use his old ex-mafia friend Richie to help him track down and then pay back the gypsies, before…

Well, spoilers. So, the gypsy man bakes a pie (using some of Halleck's blood) which will pass on the curse to whoever eats it. Now, Halleck is – as already established – an asshole. He should, the gypsy suggests, eat the pie himself, and just accept his fate. That would be taking responsibility for his actions. The curse can't be lifted outright; and only a complete asshole would pass it. But, as we've established…

What maybe can't be seen coming is that Halleck thinks that his wife is to blame for his situation, because she was the onedistracting him from the road. He thinks about giving her the pie, knowing it will harm, hurt and kill her. But he doesn't. He sleeps on it. While he's asleep, his wife and young daughter eat the pie, damning them both. And then, in the novel's final moments, Halleck cuts himself a slice: a gesture that isn't as selfless as it maybe appears. It's a way of meaning that he doesn't have to deal with the guilt of his family dying. Penance through self-destruction.

Before this point, King had done a good job playing with notions of unlikeable protagonists (Carrie; Jack Torrance, certainly; I'd argue that Louis Creed's selfish actions put him on the wrong side of Nice Guy), but Halleck takes things a step further. I don't think there's anything redeemable about him, which actually makes reading the novel relatively tough. You want something to latch onto, and it's not there. When he's terrified, I didn't care. I wanted him to suffer, frankly. And he does, so it's satisfying from that point of view. But then that ending comes along…

I remember loving the ending when I was younger. It made the novel for me, frankly, because it was so dark and cold. Such a brutal way of ending a book: no hope, no going back. Even the innocent in the tale (his daughter) is punished because of his selfish actions. But maybe I'm going soft, because now I wonder whether there wasn't a way of redeeming him. Maybe he could have turned Halleck around. One thing's for sure: the ending being as bleak as it is makes the book feel more distinctly Bachman: the pseudonym's books have a way with endings that stare into the darkness.

So, it's a Bachman book: dark ending; man cut off and struggling to overcome something that is ruining his life; even structurally, the countdown motif that was used in The Long Walk and The Running Man is present here, as each chapter starts with Halleck's current (and constantly deteriorating) weight. But – and it's a big but – this novel is firmly supernatural. It's a supernatural horror story, the first that Bachman had apparently written, but a very familiar move for King. One reviewer at the time ironically remarked that it was "what Stephen King would write if Stephen King could write". In the text of the novel itself, Halleck refers to his experience as being like "something out of a Stephen King novel" – not just a moment of metafictional interjection, but a direct hint, if you're looking for it. So it's maybe not a surprise that King was found out. And while King was apparently disappointed that his secret was out, there's a case to be made for him maybe tripping up on purpose. How did he pick the Bachman books? What made a book Bachman rather than King? Was erring closer to King's usual output here some deep-level subconscious version of self-sabotage? Of wanting to be found out? Of wanting to be able to claim these books as his own again?

The next Bachman novel was meant to be Misery. It's a story for another day, of course; but that's a novel that ties in thematically with all of the previous Bachman books, while being probably the most perfect distillation of King's voice that he would write. It's a book that I think might be his finest, and there's a part of me that wonders if he didn't know that it would be as well. And who would want their finest work attributed to somebody else? Thinner might have just been a get-out clause: a fine horror novel that was never going to set the world alight if published under King's name outright, but that definitely worked to bridge the gap between King and his pseudonym.

Next time: King's second short story collection, Skeleton Crew.

Stephen KingHorrorFictionJames Smythe
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How to choose the Best Young British Novelists

Judging Granta's latest list of 20 best has been in some ways harder than doing the same for the Booker prize's much shorter field

When I was asked to be a judge on the Granta Best of Young British novelists, I thought it would be a doddle. Then I realised that I had just turned 40, and most of the writers I've spent the last decade enthusing about (the likes of China Miéville, Nick Harkaway, Scarlett Thomas, Sophie Hannah and Rana Dasgupta) were of an age with me – and therefore ineligible.

Judging this list is, in some ways, a far more difficult job than judging the Man Booker. With the Man Booker we have a very clearly defined brief – choose the best book, on and only on its own merits. With Granta's BOYBN we had clearly defined rules – under 40, British, and novelist, none of which I find unproblematic – and a set of coalescing, coinciding and sometimes contradictory ways of evaluating. Were we looking for promise or performance; potential or realisation? When an author had published several works, were we looking for a refinement and honing and deepening of craft, or the daring to change, to experiment continually, to reinvent with each book? When an author was at the start of her or his career, were we willing to overlook initial flaws because of a present dynamism, or were we unbedazzled by present shininess, suspecting it lacked depth and persistence?

The answers to which are a series of affirmative yeses. I'm glad that there isn't a unifying aesthetic that all 20 of the authors we chose share. It is perfectly possible – indeed, it's fundamentally necessary – for a critic to be able to appreciate the "big bow-wow strain" of Walter Scott as well as the guardian.co.uk © 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

       

Cover girls: this year's book jacket fashions

As the London Book Fair showcases this year's literary trends, we showcase the latest must-have looks

What's the fashionable book wearing, with publishing's spring/summer season just begun and its answer to London Fashion Week - the London Book Fair - starting tomorrow? Here are the hottest current looks in jackets; some would call them "cliches", but at Guardian books we prefer "trends".

Look: woman or girl's back in period frock
Example (latest from): Kate Atkinson
Also worn by: plenty, from Francesca Segal to Kate Summerscale
What it says: you'll like her - heroine and author - but she's a bit quirky, elusive and old-fashioned

Look: pure text - just name and title
Example: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Also worn by: Julian Barnes, Gillian Flynn
What it says: bow down - author is such a god that usual visual accessories would be vulgar

 

 

Look: red (lettering or background - usually non-fiction)
Example: David Goodhart
Also worn by: eight of the 12 Orwell prize longlistees
What it says: really not as dull as it sounds, trust us; sexy material there if you look for it, admittedly well-buried

 

Look: sunset and silhouette(s)
Example: Khaled Hosseini
Also worn by: Jhumpa Lahiri, Romesh Gunesekera; also crime, eg Lee Child
What it says: really not as bleak as it sounds; setting is lovely, anyway

 

Look: giant ancient symbolic object, eg torque
Example: Lindsey Davis
Also worn by: fantasy and hist-fic writers envious of George RR Martin
What it says: series bound to become another HBO drama and cult - or at least we desperately hope it is

 

Look: WTF – cover image no obvious relation to book
Example: JM Coetzee - jacket seems to be photo of English interwar trio post-tennis, but novel is called The Childhood Of Jesus and about strange Latin utopia
Also worn by: no one yet, but could start trend like McQueen bonkers frocks
What it says: help!
 

Look: suited man's back, often running
Example: Roger Hobbs
Also worn by: Chris Morgan Jones, Daniel Silva
What it says: trad blokey thriller, by writer who luckily is not a big enough name to make a fuss about our insultingly hackneyed jacket

Look: multicoloured cover resembling gallery art
Example: Taiye Selasi
Also worn by: Zadie Smith, Monica Ali
What it says: we're convinced novel's vibrant multiculturalism will make other fiction seem grey and stale (but have fingers crossed that full-on cover and book alike won't put off punters rather than wowing them)

 

Look: handwritten name and title, or jumbled typeface
Example: Nicola Barker
Also worn by: Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Self
What it says: linguistic antics from madcap maverick. Of course it's almost unreadable - didn't you get cover's subtext?
 

Look: copycat cover - references earlier hit crudely or subtly
Example: Sabine Durrant (mimics orange-on-black palette of Flynn's Gone Girl)
Also worn by: dozens of erotica titles imitating EL James black look; SJ Watson wannabes
What it says: we're still gutted about missing out on zillion-selling X, but might pull off a limited recovery if we can convince you Y is almost as good

And what's not hot? On the way out are yellows and pastels; the curious short-lived vogue for showing only women's feet or arms; images of furniture; ostensibly hand-illustrated covers (eg The Art of Fielding) - and the retro look in general has become passe

FictionKate AtkinsonJulian BarnesJM CoetzeeZadie SmithMonica AliEL JamesNicola BarkerJonathan Safran FoerWill SelfFrancesca SegalChimamanda Ngozi AdichieDavid GoodhartKhaled HosseiniTaiye SelasiSabine DurrantJohn Dugdale
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Speech: an ancient genre returns

Oratory has a well-documented classical pedigree, but it seems to be clearing its throat for a major revival

There's a new literary genre on the rise. Actually, it's an old one, with deep classical roots, whose masters have names like Demosthenes, Mark Antony, Pericles and Cicero. I'm talking about speeches, which are back in vogue.

In politics, there is, of course, never any shortage of speeches: Obama, Clinton, Cameron etc. And then further back, Reagan, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Churchill, Lloyd George, Nye Bevan and so on. But I'm struck by the upsurge in the contemporary appetite not just for making, but also for listening to, speeches long and short.

I was watching the Thatcher "debate" in Westminster last week when I had this undersized Eureka moment. Speeches: the public, unguarded personal expression of feeling and opinion. Everyone's doing it; and it's become part of the spirit of the age.

Consider this contrast. When Churchill died, the House of Commons gathered to listen to just four eulogies. The whole thing took less than an hour. Last week, MPs were speaking all day. For and against. On and on. When the proceedings were brought to a close, 70-odd speakers had addressed their colleagues during an astonishing seven-and-a-half-hour gabfest. And some of them still felt cut short.

Literary speeches are on the up, too. Every book prize now has its quota of rhetoric, and most book parties as well. I've been to three book launches in recent weeks. In one, my neighbour at the back of the room turned to me and said, "What does she (the author) think this is? A wedding?" The bashful biographer/novelist/poet, launching her own book, had been speaking for about 15 minutes.

At another book launch last month, the contented writer spoke so long that his guests began to peel away into the night in search of silence and solitude.

From the Booker prize, to renew the literary reference, the speech that sticks in my memory, though it passed little noticed was James Kelman's speech when he won in 1994 with How Late It Was How Late. Apparently impromptu, Kelman stood up and delivered a brilliant cri de coeur for glories of the Scots language and its literature, denouncing en passant the cultural supremacy of the English language.

The contemporary enthusiasm for live performance, and many other cultural factors, mostly to do, I think, with the need for self-expression, lies behind this new-old genre. It can only be a matter of time before someone starts a speech-fest, dedicated to the art and practice of rhetoric. Then the wheel will have come full circle. There are only so many genres in literature. It's certainly time that the Speech got its moment.

ClassicsJames KelmanRobert McCrum
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The best young novelists – from SF's universe

Speculative fiction can provide an equally inspiring set of young literary stars as Granta's latest list

The relationship between the literary and speculative fiction genres is like the episode of original Star Trek where Captain Kirk is teleported in to an evil, parallel dimension. Both genres have their own star authors, publishers, and of course literary accolades. (Which genre requires that you assassinate your rivals to advance is for you to decide.) Granta's lists of 20 novelists under 40 – American, Spanish-language, Brazilian and most famously the British contingent – being renewed for 2013 this week – have become an institution in literary fiction. SF has no direct equivalent, but if it did, who might be on it?

Two things connect the 20 writers on this list. The first is a fascination with the weird and fantastic. The second is their love and affection for the pulp roots of SF. One or two may be just a smidgeon over 40, but will no doubt be among the writers shaping speculative fiction for decades to come. And I have looked beyond Britain where I can to find the most interesting voices in what is increasingly an international SF genre.

Lauren Beukes is a South African author of "cyberpunk" science fiction whose novel Zoo City brought her very widespread acclaim, and a major publishing deal for upcoming novel The Shining Girls. James Smythe's The Explorer and The Machine are the kind of breathtaking conceptual SF long absent from the genre. Hannu Rajeniemi's soaring space opera The Quantum Thief and Madeleine Ashby's vN series both reawaken the slumbering body of "Hard SF" rooted in real science. French writer Aliette De Boddard fuses many ideas from SF and fantasy in both her novels and short fiction. And with indie publishing phenomenon Wool reaching more than a quarter of a million sales, Hugh Howey has become overnight one of SFs bestsellers.

Joe Abercrombie is the self-proclaimed Lord of "grimdark" epic fantasy, whose writing displays a wit and style beyond the battle sequences and torture scenes that dominate the gritty world of grimdark. NK Jemsin brings an immense storytelling talent to the tradition of epic fantasy, with a series of beautiful stories that have garnered Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award nominations. The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed is notable for its middle-eastern fantasy setting, but the work's real strengths are its deep sense of irony and dark humour. And of course British author China Miéville has re-worked the fantasy genre into many and varied weird forms from Perdido Street Station to Embassytown, though he is technically ineligible, as he turned 40 last year.

Joe Hill is arguably the most significant horror author of the last decade, with 20th Century Ghosts, Heart Shaped Box and the upcoming NOS4A2 setting the bar for the entire genre. Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds series fulfils the promise of an author who is a firm favourite among fans for his characterful online presence. Seanan McGuire scooped five Hugo nominations this year alone and as Mira Grant writes one of the most acclaimed and accomplished entries among a spate of recent zombie apocalypse novels. Robert Jackson Bennet's debut novel Mr Shivers drew acclaim by crafting an alternative fantasy from the milieu of the Great Depression. And any survey of the contemporary horror genre would not be complete without the bizarro masterpieces of Carlton Mellick III. If Mellick had written only Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland he would be on this list, but with dozens of other equally grotesque creations tearing up the world his name is set for sci-fi immortality.

Catherynne Valente's novels and stories range widely across the fantastic, but it is her dark urban fantasies such as Palimpsest that best showcase her baroque prose style. Tom Pollock's debut The City's Son marked the appearance of a powerful new imagination in SF, and hopes are high for the upcoming sequel. As they are for the debut novel of Elizabeth May, with The Falconer among the most anticipated fantasy novels of 2013. The young adult stories of Francis Hardinge follow in the footsteps of the great Diana Wynne Jones by being equally enchanting for children and adults. And Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor scooped its author a prestigious World Fantasy award in 2011, which we can only hope is the first of many.

Who have I missed from my top 20? It's almost a cliche to call the literary world elitist, but it's hard to escape the idea with lists like Granta's defining the best of the best. In contrast the SF genre is open and communal, driven by the passions of fans and the creativity of authors. The top writers in the field choose themselves by writing great books and engaging with the community. The door is open to any writer who wants to make their mark in the SF genre. All we ask is that you tell great stories.

Science fictionFantasyFictionHorrorDamien Walter
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Reading group: The Spire's many meanings | Sam Jordison

William Golding's novel seems to lend itself – equally plausibly – to a host of possible allegorical readings

Last week, I listed a few first thoughts about possible readings of The Spire. The discussion that followed showed that I hadn't even begun. As MythicalMagpie wrote:

"If ever a building could be said to be constructed entirely of metaphor and allegory, it must be Jocelin's spire."

queeqeg7 added:
"It can carry any number of readings and the characters are ambiguous enough [and real enough] to carry contradictions of their own."

Yep.

S/he added:

"I've tended to read Jocelin's folly as part of a profoundly human condition – the search for meaning, the construction of belief, even as exemplar of the novelist's ability to invent and elaborate. Nailing The Spire to Christianity works, but it limits or rather narrows our understanding of Art's capacity."

Inspired by queeqeg's handle, meltingman also pointed out that The Spire is "a poor man's Moby-Dick", a device for demonstrating what destroys the obsessed and those around them... That certainly rings true – although using the comparison to criticise seems unfair. What else is as good as Moby-Dick, after all? Besides, there is far more to The Spire than a retake on Melville, convincing as that reading may be.

Here are just a few of the possible interpretations that came up last week:

A symbol of hubris:
Dylanwolf says:

"The spire seems to me an enterprise equal in braggadocio and confusion to the construction of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis."

Meanwhile, jmschrei asks:

"How many completely inadequate people do we see promoted to positions beyond their ability in business, politics, the church? How much madness lies behind religious or creative vision? We have many great works of architecture, art or literature created by the efforts of individuals as driven and destructive as our poor dean. In that end what does this tell us about Golding's desire to make sense of his creative efforts in the context of his personal demons?
"The more I think about this brilliant novel the more it opens up questions. The ambiguity that I am sure has frustrated many a reader is, for me, the core of its power and strength as a work of literature."

A fertility symbol. (Kind of.)
everythingsperfect:

"The spire is also Goody Pangall, object of Jocelin's displaced sexual energy. But while the feared fertility sprouts in Goody, the spire remains pure and virginal."

An appletree
Dylanwolf again:

"Another metaphor for the spire that Golding proposes is Jocelin's late exclamation that 'It is like an appletree!'
"Interesting that again this presumably refers to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that bore the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden in Genesis. The 'apple' consumed by Eve introduced mankind to an inclination for evil. Other significant trees of the New Testament – the fig tree that Jesus curses or the sycamore that Zaccheus, the tax collector, climbs into are not within the scope of Jocelin's vision."
"Or perhaps Jocelin is referencing Psalm 1:3
"'He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.'
"Jesus is rather more ambivalent in Matthew 7:15-17 we read
"'Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognise them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.'"

A symbol of creation
JohnSelfsAslyum:

"One thing that struck me about The Spire is the sheer physicality and even violence of the writing. From the start, where the 'solid' light 'smashe[s]' through the windows, the sheer sensory force of Golding's style is almost overwhelming. Later, when a workman falls, 'the scream scored all the way down the air' and 'engraved' it. In that extraordinary (and again highly physical) sequence about a third into the book where the pit develops – what a set piece! – the sheet of metal they use to illuminate the lower depths causes the sunlight to be 'trapped and hurled straight down into the pit'.
"All this affirms the views expressed above that The Spire is, among other things, about the creation of something from nothing: buildings from empty space, gods from human needs, and books from thoughts. It's a fascinating, invigorating and challenging read."

A symbol of Golding's own struggle to write
rabburnout:

"Obviously a crudely simplistic 'Freudian' reading might see the spire as a symbol of both his writing – he aspired to create something of greatness, against some hostility, but worried that it was built on shaky foundations; and it is also a phallic symbol of course – again on shaky foundations."

Elsewhere in the discussion, the spire was also seen to symbolise Cold War fears, and even Golding's unhappy time in the navy. All valid readings. And that's just the spire itself. As Dylanwolf pointed out, we can also find plenty to think about in the rest of the building:

"The four pillars that support the spire might also be compared to the four gospels - they can bear the weight of the construction for a period but without the true foundation of Jesus Christ they are doomed to buckle and give way."

Clearly, this discussion could run and run - and I'll be glad to hear any other potential readings. But at this stage, I'm also developing a small worry. In talking so much about the "meaning" of the book, we aren't being entirely true to the process of reading it. As I turned the pages, potential interpretations were at the back of my mind – but quite a long way behind many other things. More pressing, for instance, was a desire to understand Jocelin, whether he was saint or sinner, genius or madman. The book too felt like a battle against God (or his non-existence), fate, the (presumably atheistic) laws of physics. And then, possibly even more importantly, there were the physical descriptions. The moving earth, the ladders, the growing building, the vertiginous heights:

"When a workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there, he did not wonder that no miracle interposed between the body and the logical slab of stone that received it."

More than the airy, intellectual book we have been describing, this The Spire is gutsy, primal, brutal. We should be able to provide an even longer list highlighting Golding's best evocations of solid stone, empty air and the claustrophobia they can cause. Over to you.

William GoldingFictionSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: The Overcoat by Peter McDonald

An atmospheric winter train ride connects the present to the past, and a father's experience to his son's

The title of this week's poem, Peter McDonald's "The Overcoat" inevitably recalls Gogol's eponymous short story in which a poor, industrious clerk is destroyed by the violence and bureaucracy of 19th-century St Petersburg. There's a tangible chill in the weather and the politics of both poem and story, and both have a ghost, but I'm reminded less of Gogol than of Philip Larkin in "The Whitsun Weddings". McDonald's poem, too, describes, and almost is, a train journey. In unhurried, expansive stanzas, a solitary narrator observes the passengers' comings and goings. This narrative, however, enfolds a further story, told through recollections of a particular individual, whom I take to be the speaker's father.

The poem's slant rhyming emphasises the way the present imperfectly echoes the past, with the four-fold "A" rhyme of each stanza nevertheless insisting on recurrence. Some ghostly atmospherics initiate the convergence of present and previous selves, and of son and father: the shared "early dark", fierce rain, chill air. The men who crowd onto the 21st-century train, after their patient, storm-soaked queuing, are "agents for winter afternoons/ and entrepreneurs of the cold" – a depiction that may suggest a light gibe at market-driven policies, while lending a significant unreality to these figures.

Damp and cold suffuse every stanza. Whatever the strange odour of cold is made of, this poem conveys it. A rarer smell, of cigarette smoke, eases the transition into Belfast, 1972. "Behind me by a couple of hours," the father is returning by bus from the Inglis bakery. The working day for both men concludes with tantalisingly near synchrony.

"Where he hangs up his overcoat" in stanza four indicates the "breezeblock, ground-floor" childhood flat, but the narrative swerves quickly back to the haunted present. The train seems to pass through time, carrying the innumerable shades in whose "infinite/ line of shapes" the singular ghost, the poem's ghost, risks being lost.

Earlier, the men walked "in envelopes of smoke and cold". Similarly, the remembered overcoat envelops little pay-day gifts, "sealed up" in their cardboard boxes. The precision which has noted proper nouns and bus numbers now records the pre-decimal prices of the toys – and, again, numbers share the potency of the poem's quietly-measured diction. Like the other objects evoked, the toys have solidity, but, by emphasising their unhandled coldness, the poet flips them into mystery. Yet nothing gothic or sentimental taints the chilly haunting. Never fully embodied, never warm, the coat is only momentarily sinister, when the child sees its empty shape in stanza four.

The incident that, one night, forced a late homecoming, was foreshadowed by the "hold-ups" on the road at the end of stanza two. It's outlined in general and unemotional terms in the climactic sixth and seventh stanzas, with a faint touch of extra-dry humour in the litotes of "pointed questions", "whoever they had come to see", etc. The chill comes indoors, as it did, benevolently, in stanza five, "with little said". The hostages are lined up; when released, they gather in a similar line, so that we recall the "lines" of the opening stanzas. But now they are reprieved by a perfect line of description, "smoking, and wondering, and free".

In the last stanza, there's "a grey overcoat", the indefinite article detaching the coat from its owner – fellow commuter or lingering ghost. The speaker, about to alight from his train, is "weighed down" with his own "dead papers" and the abundance (and shallow masculinity?) of the remembered gifts: "chilly racing cars/… brittle plastic soldiers." Son blends into father, and, in a forlorn, compelling final plot twist, he, too, is late coming home.

Metrically varied, the lines are mostly octosyllabic, and that count-of-eight seems fundamental, even where the audible syllable count is less, as in stanza three, line eight. It gives rise to some lively, unpredictable effects of substitution, contrasting with the repetition of the words and images that sustain atmosphere and form less escapable patterns.

"The Overcoat" was first included in McDonald's often elegiac, 2007 volume, The House of Clay, and can currently be found in Carcanet's edition of the five-volume Collected Poems, With its wide range of themes, and high proportion of memorable poems and translations, this "collected" is among the very few worth reading from cover to cover.

The Overcoat

We stop, and doors come open then
to let the early dark blow in
from whatever rain-raked platform
is just outside the lighted train,
as men who lined up in a storm
crush in to seats, bringing a chilled
February air along with them,
agents for winter afternoons,
and entrepreneurs of the cold.

On business now, and going home,
I'm no more than a few steps from
Belfast in 1972:
the cigarette smell is the same
in the same draught, that pushes through
with men who walk in envelopes
of smoke and cold from a slow queue
and onto buses with no room
in the stops and starts, the hold-ups.

Behind me by a couple of hours,
in winter downpours, sleet showers,
he comes by bus from Inglis's,
and the breadmen and the bakers,
to town, and waits again, and catches
the number 24 or 32
home, back over his own traces,
to a breezeblock, ground-floor
Braniel flat; to damp and mildew.

Where he hangs up his overcoat
the cold begins to radiate,
shaped out, like the body's ghost,
by the hall door at night;
and now the cold that presses past
me here is maybe a ghost's trail,
the time it fills already lost
and its place lost in an infinite
line of shapes: indistinct, frail.

On Friday nights, the coat sealed up
some toy bought from a closing shop
for a shilling or for one and six,
coming to me still cold, its shape
and size all cold, a cardboard box
with a soldier or a car inside,
and the toy and winter night would mix
together, as outside would slip
inside: with gifts and little said.

He was late one night, and came in
quietly; quietly sat down
and ate his tea, then told us how
at work for half the afternoon
the bakery had hosted two
men with guns, their faces masked,
who lined them all up in one row
on the cold floor, to wait, locked in,
for pointed questions to be asked.

The two men left eventually.
Whoever they had come to see
that day they missed, and would find
easily on some other day;
so, standing where they had been lined
up, as if in some anteroom,
everyone talked as they stayed behind,
smoking, and wondering, and free.
Little to do then but go home.

Beside me, a grey overcoat
in the train here is sending out
a smoky aura of sheer cold
invisibly in the carriage-light;
but when I get up, and take hold
of a case packed with dead papers
and a book or two, I come home late,
weighed down with chilly racing cars
and with brittle plastic soldiers.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Salman Rushdie, Cees Nooteboom and Kate Atkinson are among the authors reviewed this week

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been gathering admirers ever since it was published in 1981, with its demonstration of its own assertion that "to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world".

One of the latest to fall under its spell is NickVirk , who pointed to the quote in his review as embodying: "[A] philosophy [that] encapsulates the complexity of human life … Rushdie, like his protagonist Saleem, has swallowed the world whole and thus he is able to give the readers of Midnight's Children a breathtaking experience in this novel of magical realism."

NickVirk found the allegory powerful and the prose hypnotic, concluding:

Each page, full of mesmerising metaphors, is evocative, feeding the soul with its thoughts on life, death and everything in between … Midnight's Children has firmly cemented its place on the top shelf of my bookshelf – a humble honour reserved for those novels which have had an irrevocable impact on me.

Meanwhile, RedBirdFlies explores Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, which deals with themes of mortality and asks which aspects of our lives we would alter if we had the chance. Its central character, Ursula, repeatedly dies and is reborn. RedBirdFlies writes:

This is not a typical tale of transformation of a protagonist. While we recognise Ursula's character in the many lives she lives, the story shows just how different our lives could become ... It is clear that Kate Atkinson refuses to be bound by genre, labels or form, preferring freedom in her approach, she resists categorisation which makes her an exciting and unpredictable writer

comicrelief agrees that the book has many levels, arguing that "its philosophical message is never pompous, but subtle."

And finally, Dylanwolf offers a brisk perspective on Cees Nooteboom's Lost Paradise – "a slender but haunting novel that swoops from Sao Paulo to Australia to the Alps".

"Complex, intellectual, modernist," it is another novel with a strong metaphorical life. The title, writes Dylanwolf: "is a reversal of Milton, and what is being attempted is perhaps a contemporary meditation on ourselves and our relation to the world, an exploration of the 'riddle of what other people represent'."

And that's all for this week. As ever, if you are interested in posting your very own review, just find the book of your choice and click on the button marked "Post your review". And if we've mentioned your review here, get in touch at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk, and we'll send you something from our cupboard that you might just enjoy.

Salman RushdieKate Atkinson
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Poster poems: religion

Whether you're believer, blasphemer or Buddhist – this month's commandment is to share with us your spiritual scribblings

In an increasingly secular society, the place of our rich tradition of religiously inspired art is something that has come increasingly into question. People wonder if it is possible to appreciate, for instance, Bach's St Matthew Passion or Giotto's frescos if you do not share the beliefs that informed their creation. For me, this is a false dichotomy. Great art is great art, regardless of its ostensible subject. And the same is true of poetry.

Much of the finest English-language poetry is religious in one way or another, and perhaps the golden age was that of the metaphysical poets. Writers such as John Donne and George Herbert wrote works that explored the nature of their belief with a ferocious intelligence. One of my favourites, Donne's "Holy Sonnet: At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, Blow" starts in a blaze of glory as it imagines the triumphant day of judgment – only to switch mood on a line break: now comes a quieter meditation on the steps a sinner should take to find his place among the blessed.

Herbert's poem "The Collar" also opens vigorously, as the speaker resolves to cast off his religious life and titular clerical collar and go search of the freedom of "abroad". His conflict is expressed in an almost free verse structure of long and short lines alternating not to a set pattern but to fit the sense of what is being said. As with the Donne sonnet, Herbert ends his poem more softly than it begins, this time with the speaker turning inward and back to God.

While Donne and Herbert adopted an intellectual approach to religious verse, others wrote in a more sensuous vein, seeing the proof of God's existence not in the workings of the human mind but in nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet "The Windhover" is a prime example. The poet's delight in the sound and rhythms of language mirror his ecstatic vision of God, as exemplified by the perfection of the falcon's flight. Both bird and poem are hymns of glory.

It's a short step from Hopkins to the full-blown pantheism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp". Despite the poet's eventual lip service to conventional Christianity at the end of the poem, there can be little doubt that his true enthusiasm is for the vision of animated nature, possessed of a single universal soul, that informs its opening sections.

If Hopkins and Coleridge in their various ways saw nature as an expression of the divine, other poets have written about the natural world in a way that celebrates its variety and mystery without recourse to a divine agent. One such poem is George Oppen's secular "Psalm", where faith is a faith in language and its ability to comprehend experience. Oppen's poem is not against religion; it simply omits it from the picture. Mina Loy's "Religious Instruction", on the other hand, is positively hostile, not so much to religion itself as to its imposition on young children by "idle adult / accomplices in duplicity".

Of course, English isn't the only language to produce great religious poetry, and Christianity isn't the only religion to inspire it. The Sufi poet Rumi wrote meditations on death and the afterlife that would have been entirely comprehensible to Donne. In the Buddhist tradition, the teachings of the Buddha himself were written in the verses of the Dhammapada. However, the Zen tradition of haiku, with its flashes of insight into the nature of reality that appeal to religious and secular readers alike, has proven more popular among non-Buddhist readers than the longer scriptural poems.

This month's challenge is to share poems concerned with religion. You might be a believer, you might not; either way you're welcome to post your poems here. There's always the risk that it may turn out to be a bit of a curate's egg. Let's see what happens.

PoetryReligionSamuel Taylor ColeridgeGerard Manley HopkinsChristianityBuddhismReligionBilly Mills
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Are cats top dogs in the world of literature?

There are plenty of canine companions in the world of books, but cats can still compete for the crown of top literary pet

Book people, I need to know where you stand on a vital issue: literary dogs versus literary cats. Last week, I wrote about how cats and literature were a perfect combination; my own favourite was, I'd decided, Macavity, but you all came up with so many more suggestions – how could I have forgotten Edward Lear's Pussycat?

But after reading Daniel Engber's wonderfully straight-faced piece, on how dogs are actually "the champs in print, while kittens win online", I'm not sure what to think. He's checked it out with some assiduous browsing – there's even a graph – and found figures to support his thesis. "The other day I went to visit Yahoo and plugged in the words 'cat' and 'cats.' (I tried them 10 times each.) My searches pulled an average of 1.8 billion hits, nearly two giga-cats of data on the Internet" he writes. "Then I did the same with 'dog' and 'dogs,' and received one-third as many results." But in the world of letters, he continues, "on Amazon, canines held the lion's share of search results, by a healthy 2-to-1. A look at Google Books returned the same disparity: The corpus holds 87 million cats and almost twice as many pups."

Engber puts forward many suggestions for why dogs fit books, and cats fit the internet. "If cats tend to sit for quiet portraits, it's in part because they tend to sit. When they do go outside, it's to pad around alone, which makes it hard for cats to gin up exploits fit for publication." And: "Cats like to stare at things and lurk: They're built for surfing on the Web. We bond with them in little spurts, like videos on YouTube. Dogs, meanwhile, demand a lasting interaction. They're thick and shaggy, musty-smelling like a book, and while they have their standard tricks, they're famously unable to adapt."

I'm kind of swayed. After all, how can I forget the books I read and reread as a child: Colin Dann's Just Nuffin, the tale of an abandoned puppy, Eleanor Estes' Ginger Pye, about a lost puppy, the fantastic What-a-Mess, Timmy from the Famous Five, and also from Blyton, Shadow the Sheepdog ...

I learned Irene Rutherford Mcleod's Lone Dog by heart, and it's still one of the few poems I can recite in its entirety: "I'm a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and lone;  / I'm a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own".

I wept over Jack London. When Buck is beaten – well, oh my goodness. "Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell upon him ... So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb."

And then there's Tintin's Snowy, Dorothy's Toto, George RR Martin's direwolves from A Song of Ice and Fire – I want one of those.

But, but ... and I speak as a dog person, not a cat person ... the literary cats we came up with last week are still better. Thanks crazyjane, for reminding me of Yeats's Minnaloushe ("The cat went here and there / And the moon spun round like a top, / And the nearest kin of the moon, / The creeping cat, looked up.") Thanks pfuel13 for Mog. There's the cat from The Horse and His Boy, there's Pangur Ban, and, oh best beloved, kenwyn points us to The Cat That Walked by Himself. "All places," of course, "are alike to him."

I'm afraid the literary dogs – at least the ones I've come up with – just can't compete. Engber's numbers might suggest that literature has gone to the dogs, but surely cats are top for quality.

FictionPoetryClassicsAlison Flood
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