The Guardian's Blog, page 208

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

The weekly space to talk about the books you are reading and what you'd like to see covered on the site

How do you like your books? In pristine condition without dog-eared corners or scuffed edges, or well used, complete with cracked spines and yellowing crusty Sellotape on a half-torn jacket?

I've previously read conversations about this subject on other threads, and it does seem to divide opinion. If you, like me, want to keep your books as clean and undamaged as possible, you are probably unwilling to lend them to friends and family, making your enthusiastic 'you must read [insert title of latest favourite book], it's brilliant!' a lot less helpful.

Dylanwolf, for one, made very clear where he stands on the pristine v. well worn question, in last week's thread:

Oh tenuous fives! Your picture shows the scene from a book torture-porn movie. Stop cracking that spine.

(He's referring to tenuousfives' profile picture.)

tenuousfives:

@Dylanwolf - Let me assure you that no books were harmed in the taking of that picture... You sound a bit like my sister... She is fanatically chiropractic about book spines to the point of employing a protractor to maintain an optimum book opening angle.

goodyorkshirelass:

@tenuousfives - Just let me say that your sister and I are definitely "sisters under the skin" on this one.

GetOver99:

@goodyorkshirelass - Well, I reckon you guys would have a heart attack if you saw the state of some of my books! I love a well worn book. The damage inflicted on the book takes me back to the places where the deed occurred.
I am going to have to upload some pictures to the Flickr page to send you guys spinning.

And as if by magic, here's our Well-loved books Flickr gallery dug-up from the archive and displaying some worn but beautiful old tomes. Have a browse:

If you'd like to share a snap of your well-loved books, please post them in the Flickr group and I'll post links to a selection of them.

In other conversations from last week's thread, conedison reminded us about the perils - or imagined perils - of reading in public:

I was in a village cafe somewhere in Crete, just finishing Mr Sammler's Planet, surrounded at all the other tables by tough-looking men with big boots and bigger moustaches. At book's end I was so moved I began to silently cry, then stopped abruptly, fearful that these hard-looking men would kill me for my tears.

aikmen marked Women in Horror month with his/her choice of reading material:

I'm reading short stories from female "horror" writers. There is a long and rich tradition in this field, and some excellent examples, from the Victorian writers on. I re-read Three Miles Up by Elizabeth Jane Howard, which must be one of the most intriguing short stories ever written. Her first novel The Beautiful Visit is justifiably venerated, and a surprisingly 'modern' read.

and Ruth11 is after a book recommendation:

just rereading De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde, liking a bit of the personal insight into the man behind the playwright, but given Wilde's rather vituperative tone (each man kills the thing he loves indeed!) was wondering if anyone could recommend a biography of Wilde that discusses his relationship with Douglas more objectively?

If you have any suggestions, please do post them in the thread below, and as always, use it to chat generally about the books you are reading or interesting stories or links you've seen.

Here's a selection of the books we'll be reviewing this week, subject to last-minute changes of course.

Non-fiction

• Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy
• Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier
• Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms
• Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
• Anatomies by Hugh Aldersley-Williams
• The Fun Stuff by James Wood

Fiction

• The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee
• Exodus by Lars Iyer
• The Gospel According to Cane by Courttia Newland
• The Infatuations by Javier Marias
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
• A Treacherous Likeness by Lynn Shepherd

Children's fiction

• Binny for Short by Hilary McKay

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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From the back streets of Leeds to fighting through Germany

Leeds tailor Cyril James was "born at the wrong time" - his father was in the trenches in World War I and he served throughout the second war, from the retreat from France to the occupation of Germany. Alan Sykes delights in a new biography which tells the remarkable story of an 'ordinary man'.

A few days before his 21st birthday in 1939, and shortly before he was due to become a qualified master tailor, Cyril James was conscripted into the army.

In the preface to his biography of Cyril James, the author Dave Foxton writes that it was clear that Cyril James, now a sprightly 94-year-old

is a man from an ordinary background , who had shown extraordinary qualities under extreme conditions; and that his story deserved a wider audience.

Cyril James's father Albert was clearly another remarkable man, one who had left school at twelve and did not read books or newspapers, but thought deeply and was not afraid of holding strong opinions that were unpopular, including being an enthusiastic republican. He was active on the picket line of his factory during a strike, which led to him being blacklisted by most Leeds engineering firms.

Means testing meant that even Cyril's income from a paper round was included when his father's dole money was being assessed. However, some things were (slowly) improving. In 1930 the family moved to a three bedroom council house on the new Halton Moor estate, to the east of Leeds city centre. The rent, of twelve shillings a week (now the price of a first class stamp), was more than the 40p a week they'd paid for their previous house, but that had only two rooms, one upstairs and one down. The new house had electricity, an inside lavatory, hot and cold water, a bath and a new gas cooker.

Schooling was largely inadequate, and expectations dismally low – generally children of Cyril's background, no matter how bright they were, simply weren't expected to go to grammar school. So at 14 years old he started work at a big tailor's factory, earning a pound for a 48 hour week.

At the outbreak of World War II, Cyril was called up, and found himself a member of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. The rudimentary training he received, coupled with sporadic anti-English bullying from the Scottish troops and NCOs, in no way prepared him for his first taste of action, retreating in disorder through France, ending up with a shambolic evacuation of his regiment from Cherbourg late in June 1940, after the French army had surrendered, and several weeks after Dunkirk.

The following years saw him undergoing training in Scotland to prepare for reinvasion. During this time Cyril was promoted to Sergeant, briefly demoted, and promoted again. The training was intensive, frequently brutal and often dangerous, but there were peaceful interludes – Cyril and some of his friends became expert at dynamiting salmon from a nearby river, using a small explosive charge which would stun the fish but not damage them enough to affect their value. The regiment also trained for mountain conditions, camping in thick snow in the Highlands in preparation for a mountain campaign which never happened.

The chapters on the fighting itself make sobering reading. James was a good shot so was often on sniping duties. Wounded after taking part in the amphibious landing on South Beveland in Holland (later one of the regiment's battle honours, alongside Waterloo), he fought almost continuously from the moment his boots landed on European soil in late 1944 until VE Day eight months later. He took part in the Battle of the Bulge, fought across the heavily defended Siegfried Line and on across the Rhine, finishing the war on Luneberg Heath, near the banks of the Elbe, having also helped liberate slave labourers. The book vividly describes the mental and physical exhaustion that results from constant exposure to danger, coupled with irregular food and rest.

Unlike most war memoires, which tend to be written by officers, it is fascinating to read an account by one of the "other ranks". So, for example, we learn that it was routine to loot captured enemy soldiers of their watches, money and any other valuables they had on them –

Cyril didn't really see what the platoon did as proper looting: they just collected things as they went along ...Men always looked for food and drink, and if they found it hidden away they took it.

He also found it helpful to dull his nerves with alcohol, taking regular tots of rum before going into action – "the rum kept him calmer and reduced the instinct to panic."

Gary Sheffield, professor of War Studies at Birmingham University, writing in the introduction, says

Dave Foxton's achievement is to tell the story of a very ordinary man who was thrust into extraordinary situations... Cyril's story is an important contribution to understanding the People's War.

After the war Cyril James married and settled back into civilian life, working in England, Scotland and Wales before settling down to retirement back in Leeds, where he still lives.

Born at the Wrong Time: the biography of Cyril James by Dave Foxton is published by FeadAread.com and is also available on Kindle.

Alan Sykes is the Guardian Northerner's roving arts specialist and a sheep farmer in the high Pennines. He Tweets here.

LeedsSecond world warUniversity of BirminghamAlan Sykes
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Reading group: In search of further time to read Proust | Sam Jordison

Four weeks of reading feels like only the most provisional of acquaintances – so let's keep the conversation going

At the end of a month with Proust, I'm only at the beginning. It isn't just that I've read less than a quarter of In Search of Lost Time. I don't really feel that I have started to properly absorb and understand it.

Already I've revised my opinions about Odette and Swann, Marcel and his maman, dozens of times – and the more I read the more I understand that I'm barely getting to know them. To focus on just one strand, book two has entirely changed my view of Swann's emotional life and his marriage to Odette. As I'm writing this, I'm reasonably convinced that it may actually be a successful and happy marriage – but I won't be at all surprised if that changes almost as soon as I read further. Little, I'm learning, stays still in this book. It isn't just that Proust offers us so many angles of reflection and such various insights. It's also that the characters seem to have their own autonomous life – they are as likely to change as the narrator is to show a new view of them. That makes for a thrilling reading experience – but also makes saying anything sensible about the books ever more difficult.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a series of questions, promising answers later on:

Who, for instance, is Odette? We see her almost exclusively through the lens of Swann's obsession. He distorts her so much that I feel I know nothing about her – beyond that she has the power to be all-consuming. I've hardly even heard her speak beyond a few curt words about why she can't meet poor old Swann, and in denial of his accusations. So it is that, like Swann, I've experienced Odette almost entirely as an absence – and so, like him, I am pushed to wonder all the more about her, and what she may be up to. I feel unsettled, doubtful, unresolved. Is she worth the trouble? Is she at fault? Is Swann? What is she after? What will she get?

Some of these I can just about fill in. Odette is possibly after Swann – and certainly gets him. Rupert303 also offers the following:

"The first book of book 2 answers all the Odette and Swan questions. Namely, they are horrible old bores with an equally repugnant sprig."

OK.

Other answers are less clear. Is she at fault? That all depends on your point of view – and Proust gives us many to consider. Perhaps the only real way to respond is to recognise that the truth is never simple. It's dependent not just on how you see things, but on the personal prejudices you bring along.

I asked more questions:

"Why is the narrative about Swann there at all, beyond its inherent interest? Why did the narrator Marcel feel the need to include it? Why did Proust? Where is he taking us with all these words, these ruminations, these ideas, this talk of hawthorn blossom?"

I still don't know how to respond to those. Perhaps after a few more hundred pages I shall. But for now… It seems absurd to say I'm lost for words when Proust has supplied more than a million to discuss, but at this stage possibly the most honest way to approach the book is to admit that everything I do say is likely to be impressionistic and subject to revision. I don't even want to overstate how much I am enjoying it, because, while In Search Of Lost Time still seems marvellous now, I'm prepared to accept that a few more hundred-page dinner parties might sap my enthusiasm.

So, I have nothing to put on the record – but I have much more I want to discuss. What, for instance, are we to make of the Marquis de Norpois' opinions of art and writing? Do they tell us anything about Proust's? Or Marcel's? Or would we be foolish to even go there? Is Bergotte a good influence? What is Swann's type? Any enlightenment would be gratefully received.

And have you been reading around Proust at all? I made the mistake of reading Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. This book, while very well written, occasionally funny, sometimes fascinating and now and then enlightening, was also one of the most enraging I have encountered. All that eloquence and research given to the service of – forgive my technical language – complete bollocks. Every time De Botton wrote "it follows", I wanted to scream. It never did follow! Anyway, we can talk about that, and more, in the comments.

Since this is clearly a book that requires time, we'll also be keeping this thread open for a while after the end of this month. So do keep revisiting – if only to chart your progress. Personally, I'm 100 pages into book two, and still going strong …

Marcel ProustFictionSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: Words by Edward Thomas

This loose-limbed lyric on the elemental power of language seems rooted in a distinctly Welsh landscape

Poets choose their words with the utmost care, don't they? "The best words in the best order" and all that? In this week's poem, "Words", Edward Thomas echoes John Keats rather than Coleridge, calling on words to choose him. This is perhaps extreme negative capability.

But, despite Keats, and although Thomas is specifically addressing "English words", it's a poem that seems unusually attuned to the London-born poet's Celtic origins.

Both his parents were, as he said, "mainly Welsh", and he spent numerous holidays in Wales. He formed friendships there, a significant one being with the poet and preacher John Jenkins, known by his bardic name, Gwili. There's an entrancement with language and rhythm, a generally elevated tone, and a concern with national identity in "Words" which carry echoes from Welsh poetry, past and future.

Thomas may have known little of his forebears' language, but he certainly heard Welsh spoken, and, with Gwili's help, he made notes on Welsh verse-forms. Whatever cadences he was imagining as he wrote it, the long sentence comprising the first stanza is curiously un-English. It begins with a subordinate clause. It then brilliantly employs what I'd call a rhetoric of postponement. The adverb "sometimes" makes us wait, and the conceit of the winds whistling of "joy or pain" makes us wait longer. The inversion ("their joy or pain/ to whistle through") further complicates the syntax. These seeming distractions legitimise the repetition of the all-important verb "choose". His question is "Will you choose me, English words?" but he has so played the sentence that, by the time we reach its end, we hear an imperative: "Choose me, English words." The most significant word, "me", is the one that has no rhyme.

Rhymes are thickly strewn, but not enforced by symmetrical pattern. Their chimes are sometimes distant – all/wall, for instance, six lines apart in the first stanza. The non-rhymes are as deliberately plotted as the rhymes themselves really are, but this casual-seeming technique increases the sense that "Words" is more free of fixings than fixed, a kind of meandering stream or dry-stone wall of a poem. And this is surely the intended effect. Words, compared significantly to the wind, are treated as an elemental, and also nearly supernatural, force.

The second stanza is looser than the first, and at times more impressionistic than precise. "Light as dreams" and "tough as oak" make an effective antithesis, as, more subtly, do "poppies" and "corn" but "precious as gold" is less compelling, and the addition of the "old cloak" barely gets away with such obvious rhyme-reaching. The bards seem to hover again, exalted and be-robed. Thomas's adjectives, sweet, strange, dear, etc, and the superlatives, dearest, oldest, are catch-all words – vague but highly emotive. He enjoys playing grammatical variations on them, and the pun-paradox "worn new" confirms the exuberance.

But the poem often out-sings its logic. Why are English words "familiar as lost homes are"? It's a lovely and thought-provoking line but how, for an English poet, can English words suggest lost homes? Could he really thinking at this moment of the Welsh language – which might, in other circumstances, have been his mother tongue?

The comparatives of the second stanza form a landscape – old hills, newly swollen streams – but why are these features specifically English? Isn't it sentimental to suggest they are? They might just as well belong to Wales as to England. And how do English words (or the words of any nation) prove love of earth?

I think at this point Thomas has moved instinctively from language to identity. "Make me content/ With some sweetness/ From Wales" clarifies the shift. He's no longer talking about linguistic influence so much as his own heredity. Perhaps the intended move to America triggers the quest. The poem's uncharacteristic buoyancy may well reflect the optimism Thomas felt in 1915 as he made those never-fulfilled plans of joining Robert Frost in New Hampshire. But, besides the optimism, there's anxiety at the prospect of losing his native landscapes. Words, grounded in locality, may no longer come to him. This fear might explain the earlier preoccupation with familiar strangeness and the old made new.

There's a nice, humorous little tribute to Welsh poets in stanza three: they sing like wingless, ie human, nightingales. (Could he be thinking of Gwili, in particular?) But the "sweetness" he asks to be content with, doesn't end with Wales: the sentence continues with three English counties ("and the villages there"), including Thomas's favourite Wiltshire. Deeply explored in his writing, and part of his identity, none of these beloved English places is, however, specifically connected in the poem to actual words. The reference to "the names, and the things/ No less" is, of course, evocative: we imagine farm implements, wildflowers like the "burnet rose" mentioned earlier, nicknames, the colouring of different dialects. But wouldn't the poem be stronger if Thomas had included more of these names and things, and less of the windy dance and trance of inspiration, less of the "sweetness", whether of Wales or Wilts?

While I love Thomas's poetry, I read "Words" with mixed feelings. I especially wonder why, at the end, this most scrupulous of poets seems to distance himself from his vocation – in the line "As poets do"? It might be a wry little joke, I suppose, meant to raise a smile from an admiring friend, like Gwili or Frost. (Both would certainly have approved of the insight that the poet is both "fixed and free" when he rhymes.) But the last stanza becomes more credible if you imagine that Thomas is continuing to ask the really pressing question: will America cost him his identity, not only his Welshness and Englishness, but his identity as a poet?

"Words" overall is a powerful poem, with an important governing insight. Once more we can hark back to Keats's "negative capability". But, equally, we should remember another of Thomas's Welsh friends, the "tramp-poet" WH Davies, and his emphasis on taking time "to stand and stare". Thomas's poem can be read as an extended metaphor drawn from such ideas of receptivity. If "Words" lacks the pure focus of his greatest poems, the lessons it embodies are no less valuable. The sources of poetry are local to the poet. And it's not bardic mysticism but good psychology for any artist to be free-floating rather than manipulative during the first stages of creation, and only later to apply the fixative.

Words

Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Previous as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.

Edward ThomasPoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Alain de Botton, James Ladyman and Daniel Tammet are among the authors this week as readers turn to the great questions of existence

It has been a studious and reflective week, with readers tackling serious non-fiction exploring the breadths and depths of philosophy, religion, maths and science.

Alexbe tackled the philosopher James Ladyman's Understanding the Philosophy of Science in which he discusses "whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science".

Alexbe praised Ladyman's ability to translate this mystifying subject into an "incredibly clear, non-technical and thorough introduction", which could also serve as a fantastic resource for "all those currently engaged in Philosophy of Science" or those "with just a general interest in the subject matter".

Mathematical master Daniel Tammet got AggieH thinking in numbers with his book which explores "the way numbers, fractions and equations underpin all our lives".

AggieH points out that "Maths + literature is a sum that doesn't add up." Yet despite referring to Tammet's writing style as "easy and plain" she is conclusively convinced by this book's intelligence and accessibility.

It makes unimaginable numbers imaginable & provokes improbable thoughts. Especially about the previously unimaginable (to me) relationship between maths and literature.

Alain de Botton got two mentions this week from Perieradasilva, firstly with his "guide to life", The Consolations of Philosophy, which according to Perieradasilva "presents a witty and insightful analysis of how philosophy can be a comfort, inspiring us and providing motivation".

Botton aims to bring philosophy back to life by resurrecting the "finest minds in the history of philosophy" and examining how we can apply their logic so that we can improve ours.

This book is a relaxed and fun essay on the wisdom of life, in practical terms, based on personal experience of six great thinkers of all time, each in a distinct strand: Socrates on unpopularity, Epicurus, about the lack of money and the path to happiness, Seneca, about frustration, Montaigne, on the unsuitability, Schopenhauer, about love, and Nietzsche on the difficulties.

Pereiradasilva then moved onto theology with Botton's Religion for Atheists.

Alain de Botton, who says he has no sensitivity to faith in God, thinks that atheists have much to learn from the religions in fundamental problems. In this book, the essence of the argument presented here is that many of the problems of the modern soul can be solved thanks to solutions proposed by religions.

Whether you have "sensitivity" to faith or no, that's it for this weeks reviews. As ever, if we've mentioned your review in this article, please get in touch with richard.lea@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a treat from the cupboards. Thanks for all your reviews.

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The great sci-fi hunt: help us find the best independently published books

The search is on for the best sci-fi, fantasy, horror – or just plain weird – books that might otherwise go unseen and unloved

A year ago I set out on a quest to find the best weird stories on the internet. I looked at more than 500 independently published ebooks, many on Amazon's Kindle store, others on humble blogs and one embedded in status updates on Facebook. I found five excellent stories that readers of weird fiction would love, and a few dozen rough diamonds in need of further polishing. But I also found hundreds of books that were far from ready to publish, or might never be ready. So I wrote a checklist of seven signs to help indie authors find out if their book is ready to publish or not.

Since I started looking, the indie publishing revolution has grown stronger. Even as I was scouring the internet for self-published weird stories, Hugh Howey's science fictional Wool series was gaining hundreds of thousands of readers, a major publishing deal and the interest of film director Ridley Scott. Howey is only one of a wave of "artisan authors" making full use of new digital publishing technologies to put new writing out there. Like the music industry before it, the publishing industry is now embracing DIY authors who have already attracted a fanbase.

So this year I am setting out to hunt down the best independently published sci-fi. I'm throwing the net wide to any and all science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird and speculative fiction. Last year I was seeking the weird stories that might never otherwise see the light of day – and I still want to know about these – but this time I'm also searching for the sci-fi blockbusters of tomorrow. I love great storytelling, and I believe the next Game of Thrones is already being written and, possibly, self-published. If it is, I intend to find it and share it with you.

But I need your help. Do you know any independently published sci-fi gems? Is there an ebook smash hit you want to shout about? Maybe you are the author of a potential sci-fi blockbuster and you're ready to show it off. Follow the instructions below and tell me all about it.

1. Nominate your weird stories

You can do this in the comments below. Please let me know the title, author and where I can read more (this might be a link to a website or blog, or a listing on an ebook store). Only add one link or your comment will be filtered as spam. You can include the opening sentence of the story if you like, but no more than that. And if you want to include your own review of the story, please do.

2. Help spread the word

You can link back to this article from your blog or website. Or share it on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks.

3. Join the hunt

I would love to know your opinion on any of the stories nominated. I am only one perspective, so if you want to share yours please do so in the comments below. You can follow my responses to the stories on Twitter @damiengwalter.

And, as I'm sure they will be asked, here are the answers to some likely frequently asked questions. If you have any others please leave comments and I will answer as soon as I can.

What qualifies as sci-fi? Your call. Science fiction, fantasy and horror stories certainly do. And I'm open to any kind of writing that is weird or speculative in nature. I'm interested in books with great sci-fi storytelling, and also books that transcend genre all together.

What do you mean by independently published? Ideally published either by the author or an independent publisher. Books from major publishers already get a lot of attention, and this is a search for works that might otherwise go unseen. But if you think there is a neglected masterpiece from a major publisher, please go ahead and nominate it.

Can I nominate my own story? Yes. In fact, I hope you will.

I'll be returning in a few weeks to write about the best stories I've found in the great sci-fi hunt. Let the search begin!

Self-publishingScience fictionHorrorFantasyFictionEbooksSocial mediaDigital mediaSocial networkingBloggingFacebookInternetTwitterDamien Walter
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The Life of Pi sells 3,141,593 copies, and counting …

There's every reason why Yann Martel's irrational novel has been catapulted back into the bestseller charts

"My name is Piscine Molitor Patel," says Yann Martel's hero firmly, "known to all as – I double underlined the first two letters of my given name – Pi Patel. For good measure I added pi = 3.14 and I drew a large circle, which I then sliced in two with a diameter, to evoke that basic lesson of geometry."

Martel's narrator, who chooses his mathematical nickname to avoid being known as "Pissing", would undoubtedly be delighted at the news that the novel he narrates, Life of Pi, has just sold its 3,141,593rd copy for its British publisher Canongate – an extraordinary feat for a novel published only 10 years ago. Of course, given that pi is an irrational number, Life of Pi has not, in fact, sold exactly pi copies. "That's one thing I hate about my nickname, the way that number runs on forever," says Pi – though Canongate probably wouldn't be averse to the ideas of sales rolling on forever without end.

Pi's story sees the teenager adrift in a boat with a a 450-pound royal Bengal tiger. It won Martel the Booker prize in 2002, and has been catapulted back to the top of the bestseller charts by the release of Ang Lee's film back in December. "That sales figure – it's so irrational!" said Martel of the news.

Martel's novel is one of many with a number in the title. The chance to crow about Nineteen Eighty-Four is long gone, sadly, ditto 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but will Canongate's canny observation prompt a slew of announcements from publishers of similarly numerical novels?

Yann MartelLife of PiPublishingFictionFilm adaptationsAlison Flood
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Anything to declare? Oscar Wilde and me in America

Visiting the US, I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's tour there in 1881, which allowed him to become an orator and a celebrity

Entering California at LAX is never exactly pleasant, though recently the immigration officers have seemed less surly and invasive. So I was not expecting, as I queued at the final customs checkpoint, to be asked if I had anything to declare. I was still mildly apprehensive, though, because I had a box of Bolívar cigars in my suitcase. I was once warned by a fierce, bulky customs officer at JFK in New York, who took out my Habana box, looked at it with distaste, and told me "We don' like dem folks!" I said that I didn't either, naturally – damn commonists! – but that I was addicted to their cigars, and that my two-a-day habit was so imperious that I might well require medical intervention if she impounded them. How, and in what manner, I inquired, could I throw myself on her mercy?

She looked at me with a mixture of alarm, contempt, and amusement:

"Ah, ged ouda heah!"

Even she, though, hadn't asked me for a declaration, and had I told her that "I have nothing to declare but my genius," I suspect I wouldn't have escaped with my cigars intact. She was a smart cookie, that one, and though she might not have recognised the line, I'm certain she would have been hostile to any attempt at wit as lame as that. (Though, admittedly, she fell for mine).

My reader, of course, will have picked up the reference. That's easy, and if not, easily Googled: Oscar Wilde. And given that I was entering California to give a biennial talk on Wilde at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Library, it was impossible not to think about Oscar's entry to New York, late in 1881, to begin the nine-month tour that was to cover 15,000 miles and 140 lectures relating to the aesthetic movement. Art for Art's Sake (whatever that means). The House Beautiful. That sort of thing.

The trouble with the aphorism with which Oscar has been so widely credited, is that he apparently first said it in 1912, by which time he had been dead for 12 years. It is cited by Arthur Ransome, who having known many of the principals in Wilde's life, might just have heard it on the Oscarvine. By the time of his death Wilde had built his own myth so brilliantly – Three trials! Years in prison! An early impoverished death! – that words didn't merely came out of his mouth, they flowed into it as well.

Wilde worked hard and constantly on his aphorisms and epigrams, and I have twice owned manuscripts in which he coined phrases, honed and corrected them, and then deployed them, apparently effortlessly, when they seemed appropriate, either in his writing or his life. In any case, life and art were, for Oscar, pretty much indistinguishable, and he scripted himself, dressed up and enacted set pieces, as if he were the sole player in one of his own dramatic works.

He learned a great deal of this showiness – the Oscar monologues – when he was on tour in America. But what the hell was Oscar Wilde doing in America in 1882? He was 27 when he arrived, had never published a book there (and little enough in England) and it is a fair supposition that no one would have known who he was.

Indeed, even in London it was often remarked that he was a little too … present for one of his scant accomplishment. The Polish actress Helena Modjeska, arriving in London at the time, was soon moved to wonder:

What has he done, this young man one meets everywhere? Oh yes, he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing, or paint, or act – he does nothing but talk.

To Oscar this might have seemed a form of praise. Doing something is vulgar, unlike being something. His later aphorism: "There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession" makes the point with crushing bluntness. If you devote yourself to work or works – unless they involve playing or self-marketing – you forfeit beauty. Why your profile should collapse upon becoming a lawyer is not obvious, though when I think of lawyers the only ones with fineness of profile are actors playing at being lawyers, such as Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Could Oscar have been right? He would be mildly chagrined to think so. There's something vulgar about that, too.

He had entered America on a commission from Richard D'Oyly Carte, whose opera company was shortly going to open an American run of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, a light-hearted satire on the aesthetic movement. Indeed, it is often (wrongly) claimed that Wilde was the original for the poet Bunthorne in that play, so full of praise for beauty, and so beloved of beautiful women. It was Oscar's American brief to play at being such a character, to dress in velvet and waistcoats and britches of fabulous colours, to let his hair down, to act – as it were – as a barker or shill for his boss's play.

It worked. Oscar attracted bigger and more enthusiastic and noisier crowds as his tour went on, newspaper reporters begged for interviews, and both he and the play were marked successes. It was the first time in Wilde's life that he could be regarded as a celebrity: newsworthy, courted by the rich and famous, certain to attract an audience. Not that everyone loved him. Walt Whitman, clasped him to his bosom (he was a great clasper) but Henry James (who certainly was not) was fastidiously dismayed, and Ambrose Bierce attacked the Oscar show in the fiercest, public terms.

Oscar loved it. He was being noticed. And like many high quality one-man-show performers, he learned how to deal with heckling and abuse. He could turn criticism against its wielder, and do so in a way that caused merriment rather than offence. When he spoke at Harvard, undergraduates flocked to the lecture dressed flamboyantly and bearing sunflowers. Knowing they were about to do so, Wilde showed up in banker's drab garb, announcing that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. They loved him for it.

By the time he returned to England he was a more polished and finished version of himself, and had acquired habits of showmanship and repartee that were to serve him both well, and dreadfully badly. In 1895, he was ill-advised enough to sue the Marquis of Queensbury for sending him that card labelling him a "posing somdomite". Having lost the case, he was subsequently to endure two trials for gross indecency, during which he comported himself brilliantly, using the witness stand as if it were centre stage in a theatre, bristling with wit, irresistible.

What a damn fool, you may think. But tragic heroes are often damn fools – think of Macbeth or Othello – and their errors of judgment ("tragic flaw" is a mistranslation) lead them directly, as Aristotle put it, from a state of happiness to one of misery. Various compromising letters from Wilde to a number of rent boys were read out in court. Had he kissed the 16-year-old Walter Grainger? asked the prosecuting attorney. Certainly not, said Oscar, defending himself stoutly. "Oh dear no! He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly."

According to contemporary accounts, the courtroom audience laughed, and the jury scowled. Disgrace and prison beckoned. He went resolutely to Wandsworth Prison, and the foolishness and bravery of it make one both cry and laugh in that single sentence. Three years later, destitute and forlorn, he died in Paris, survived by the ugly wallpaper with which he'd had his final quarrel.

No amount of retelling – the story is constantly revisited and reinvented in new films, plays, television adaptations, novels, stories, and biographies – can diminish the pathos of Wilde's final years. If there is, finally, something thin and not entirely satisfying about his oeuvre, the story of the life is rich, tragic and moving. But there is nothing, quite, cathartic in one's response: nothing balancing and satisfying in contemplating, yet again, Oscar's fall. It leaves one feeling itchy, restless and frustrated, angry and dissatisfied. Character is destiny? What a shame, what a damn shame.

Oscar WildeCelebrityUnited StatesRick Gekoski
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Rereading Stephen King: week 16 – Pet Sematary

King was reluctant to publish this book at first. He had a point: while other books are scary, this tale of loved ones brought back from the grave is a genuine horror

King's introduction to this novel tells a cute story: about how he wrote it, then found himself horrified by it. It was so wrong, so dark, he put it into a drawer and thought he'd never publish it. It was, he claims, too horrifying to put out into the world. Then he reached the end of a contract, and he needed to publish a novel. There was only this one left, and his wife persuaded him to publish it, maybe against his better judgment. But he wondered if this was right; if it wasn't just too unpleasant.

It's a good story: the master of horror finding something too scary to exist. Doesn't matter if it's true or not; what matters is, it's part of the mythos. If you read that proviso before you read the book itself, you're in the state he wants you to be: ready, willing, but apprehensive, slightly on edge about what exactly this book contains – the perfect state to read some horror.

Horror has something of a bad reputation these days, surrounded by constant claims that, as a literary genre, it's on its last legs: there are, after all, only so many ways you can tell a ghost story. King has a curious relationship with horror himself. While his work moves between genres and styles, horror – in its truest sense – is what underpins much of these early texts. The Shining, Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine: they're all horror novels, in the most conventional sense of the word, the kind that is so unfairly maligned: haunted houses, vampires, possessed whatevers. But King knows that horror can be something else. It can, at its best, make us reflect on the darkness of the human soul. Sure, Pet Sematary is a story about evil from beyond the grave, reanimated animals, terrible physical injuries … But more than that, it's about what happens when we want something so much we don't care about the consequences.

I remember reading this book the first time around. I had only seen a few proper horror movies, because persuading my parents to rent them for me was easier said than done, but I already had a favourite: Poltergeist. I loved the idea that your house might have ghosts hanging around. It was so exotic, so unlike the Victorian house of nothing that I lived in. In Poltergeist, the house was built on top of a sacred American Indian burial ground, and the ghosts that ruined poor Carol Anne's life were affronted by the way the land had been dug, supplanted, ruined in a quest to build affordable modern housing. I loved that idea so much: revenge, hundreds of years later, and based on traditions and notions that we, so ignorant and modern, cannot understand. I found that burial ground again in the film of The Shining: an excuse for the actions of the Overlook Hotel, and of Jack Torrance himself. Terror, driven by these ancient spirits, desperate for revenge. So when I began reading Pet Sematary, and found a mention of the titular cemetery being built on Micmac Indian land … well, I was prepared. That way lies death; that way lies horror.

I was wrong, of course. Never let it be said that King gives the reader what they expect. In King's world, the Indian burial ground somehow means life. And those movies, and most of the horror I had read up to that point (King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert – even the gateway drug that was Christopher Pike), focused their ideas on central figures representative of evil: bad guys, if you will. So I expected this horror-proxy to make an appearance in Pet Sematary too. I read about Louis Creed and his family, moving to Maine so he can start a new job; and about Jud, their neighbour, a nice old man who knew something about the Pet Sematary up the hill; and about their cat, Church, being killed by one of the many speeding trucks on the road outside; and how Louis and Jud buried the cat in a secret, locals-only burial ground; and how the cat came back. There wasn't a hint of anything truly evil – just something wrong, and a feeling of inevitability. A darkness there, waiting: in Louis's two children; in the road; in the warning that you should never try to bring a human back, because that is a wrong-step too far. More than any King book – more than any supposed horror, full stop – I kept thinking about it, dwelling on it. It reverberated. Other books were scary; Pet Sematary was true horror.

Coming back to the book after nearly 20 years, I was faintly nervous. I remembered how the book made me feel, even if I didn't necessarily recall its content. It's curious: scares don't stay with me, not really; but horror (something that makes you question beliefs, emotional and moral responses, yourself even) hangs around. And reading it now, it was exactly how I wanted it to be. Still only the vaguest hints of something malevolent, still no terrifying bad guy. Yet still that terrible inevitability, even though I knew it was coming. The teasing of it. It's a hundred pages before the cemetery is even introduced; it's another hundred before the cat dies and then comes back. It's not until the novel's final hundred pages that Louis's youngest son, Gage, is hit by a truck and dragged down the road; and even longer, closer to the climax, before he stumbles back to the house, dead behind the eyes, grinning.

The book is built from the subtlety of behind-the-scenes malevolence, constructed slowly and forcefully, and so beautifully paced that you cannot help but be pulled in. King was facing his own demons at the time, but they don't present themselves here. Here, he shows how subtle his hand can be. Louis Creed is a weak man who thinks that he's strong; a man who finds excuses, blames his failings on things he doesn't understand. And they're not even failings that are specific to him: we all have them.

When the novel reaches its conclusion – one that terrified me then and still does now, frankly – and its heart is revealed to be the same as that of the classic WW Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", we're prepared for it. But not that prepared. Because there's a hope that Louis will make a different decision: that he'll be the conventional hero we expect in fiction. But Louis's desires are the same as ours: to keep those we love safe and close, and to ensure that they have the best life possible.

There's a lesson in the tale: sometimes it's better to let things go, no matter how much it hurts. As Jud says, earlier in the novel: "Sometimes dead is better." And while we know that, in Louis's position we might do exactly the same as him. That's the skill of true horror, I think: finding our weak spot and making us wonder.

Connections

There's a brief section in the later part of the book where Rachel Creed, Louis's wife, drives past Jerusalem's Lot as she races back to her husband; in Insomnia, there is a suggestion that Atropos (long story short: bad guy related to fate) killed Gage, as he has taken the little boy's trainer as a keepsake; and there's a nice moment early on in the novel where Louis says: "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy," which of course was a common phrase long before Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining, but took on a very different meaning afterwards.

COMING NEXT: Stock up on silver, it's Cycle Of The Werewolf

Stephen KingHorrorFictionJames Smythe
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Hilary Mantel: not the first LRB controversy

The London Review of Books quietly encourages writers to address front-page issues. And it's no coincidence that female authors have provoked the biggest rows

For once, we should have seen the latest London Review of Books kerfuffle coming. Hilary Mantel gave her Royal Bodies lecture on 4 February, preceded by publicity indicating she would riskily view the Duchess of Cambridge as another lovely bride in the tradition of Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, all three of whom suffered violent, untimely deaths. Dynamite potential: quite high.

And for once too, the LRB – in contrast to its flustered response in 2001 to the fuss about a Mary Beard post-9/11 piece that said many people felt America "had it coming" – seemed prepared for the media melee, even perhaps relishing it; it was ready with audio of Mantel's lecture for Radio 4's Today once the "story" broke, and pointed out on Twitter that "what she really wrote is about how the media make the royals suffer".

Yet by then things had followed a familiar, tardy pattern, rather eerily echoing Anne Enright's experience in 2007. Fifteen days after Mantel's lecture, five after its publication, a passage was noticed that could be dressed up as a "venomous attack" – just as the earlier Booker winner's reflections on Gerry and Kate McCann (also readable as really being criticism of the media) were spotted and denounced as a "venomous attack" over a fortnight after appearing.

That these rows seem to explode out of nowhere reflects the fact that the LRB doesn't behave like a magazine intent on causing conniptions in Westminster or invading tabloid territory. Buy if you are expecting classier celebrity-bashing or longer, better-written opinion columns then you are liable to be disappointed; its staple fare consists of history, literature and ideas), with pop culture an occasional treat and politics normally restricted to book reviews or foreign dispatches.

This differentiates it from the New York Review of Books, which it emerged from and was modelled on. The US organ offers more current affairs and is likelier to run free-standing political essays. The contrast in focus and style is nicely symbolised by the current covers: David Petraeus for the NYRB, versus not Kate Middleton, or even Anne Boleyn, but an antique jug for the LRB.

However, the British title is also markedly different in this respect from the Times Literary Supplement, which confines its non-review pages to the arts and scholarly speculation, and its writers' diaries (the format in which Enright voiced her feelings about the McCanns) to anodyne ramblings about the freelance life. TLS quarrels tend to be don-on-don, and don't require comment from David Cameron.

So while not primarily political like its US parent, Mary-Kay Wilmers' magazine is far from being as apolitical as its domestic rival, as a list of past and current contributors including Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Hobsbawm and Pankaj Mishra attests. Broadly anti-neocon, anti-neoliberalism and anti-Zionist, it has hence known more orthodox, NYRB-style controversies, following, for example, a 2006 article on America's "Israel lobby" or Mishra's 2011 Niall Ferguson takedown.

Its speciality, though, is the stealth (real or perceived) attack, coming from an unexpected direction or with spiky opinion camouflaged as academic or literary musings, and either challenging conventional pieties or declining to genuflect to them – a willingness it displayed early on with a Norman Stone hatchet job on the recently deceased historian EH Carr. It encourages superficially unlikely figures – ranging from the then-unknown classicist Beard to a series of novelists, from Angela Carter in the 1980s to John Lanchester and others now – to address front-page issues and public figures.

The LRB has been called "the leading journal in the west edited by a woman", and it can't be pure coincidence that Beard, Enright and Mantel have provoked the biggest rows. But that's partly because their sex gives the press a double stereotype to pounce on: not just bookish types straying dreamily into columnists' domain, but also in the recent instances, female intellectuals (snooty, sheltered, embittered, etc) who supposedly despise less brainy women.

Hilary MantelLondon Review of BooksJohn Dugdale
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