The Guardian's Blog, page 228

Open thread: Your odes to John Lewis

Gillian Clarke has written a poem in honour of the Cardiff branch's third anniversary. Can you do better?

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, has written a poem for display in John Lewis. To be honest, though, if you didn't know it was penned in honour of the department store, you might not realise – take a read. It's a rather lovely little piece about someone coming home on a winter's evening and startling their room awake.

Unlike Fay Weldon, Clarke's aim was "not to advertise stuff", so there are no mentions of John Lewis's new "retro-inspired range of festive bakeware", nothing about coffee tables, towels or clocks.

I wonder if we could do any better … Show us your homeware haikus, your sonnets to sofas, your limericks to freshly-pressed linen.

PoetryJohn LewisAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Now all books are available, for ever

The internet's almost infinite memory is a blessing, even if it keeps some embarrassments eternally alive

Last week, a friend of mine travelling in the Middle East came across a battered copy of Suspicion, a novel I wrote some 20 years ago, in an Israeli bazaar. It is, of course, out of print now, and rightly forgotten.

After some ironical back and forth about "rare books" and "modern firsts", it occurred to me that, in the age of the ebook, such serendipitous finds will become increasingly unusual. Eventually, there'll be no more browsing in secondhand bookshops, one of the world's great pleasures: everything will be out there, forever. At the click of a mouse the latest search engine will be able to locate any volume in the world's digital library, pages unyellowed and binding unfoxed.

My friend's discovery of a lost book in a faraway country sent me back to my home shelves in curiosity. I no longer have any hardbacks of Suspicion, but I tracked down a dog-eared Picador edition. For a few solitary minutes, I scanned its forgotten pages with that mixture of nostalgia, affection and embarrassment (mainly the latter) that any author must experience when delving into old work. In many ways, I concluded, there was some justice in the book's oblivion.

Such questions of permanence – the issues surrounding the afterlife of books and print – have been uppermost in my mind this week. Coincidentally, and for the first time in my career, Guardian Shorts has just published three ebooks, compilations of my Observer literary journalism: On Writing, On Reading and On Authors.

The unfamiliar experience of launching virtual texts into the global marketplace has been a strange but enjoyable one. While there's no formal publication date, and none of the thrill of seeing hard copies on the shelf, there are some obvious compensations.

The physical distribution of books has always been the author's bugbear. If publishers can somehow contrive not to have your book in the place where it is most likely to sell, you can be sure they will. That's the usual complaint, anyway.

With ebooks, that anxiety has gone. I can sit at my screen here secure in the knowledge that my new titles, and millions of others, are currently available almost anywhere in the known world. And because they are written in English, not Serbo-Croat or Swahili, there's the incalculable privilege of knowing that there's a better than even chance they will be intelligible to readers from China to Peru.

The astonishing advantages of the digital market, of course, are brand new. Even the frontiers of the English-speaking world continue to expand. What's unchanged, indeed immutable – alas – are the iron laws governing self-expression. There can be no reprieve from the age-old struggle with words and meanings.

We can spin the words out there farther and faster, and perhaps more cheaply, than ever before. But if they fail to interest new readers, seem derivative and unoriginal, or tedious and poorly expressed, we will have no bigger audience than the monk in his cell, scratching on vellum with a quill pen.

EbooksRobert McCrum
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scary stories for Halloween: The Landlady by Roald Dahl

Beginning our series on frightening fiction, a reassuringly ordinary-looking street conceals some very unusual secrets

Fear's a funny thing; what sets one person diving under the duvet can leave another entirely unruffled. An example: I recently discovered the joys of Stephen King, and took it upon myself to excavate his back catalogue, reading two early-period stonkers, IT and The Stand, in quick succession. IT, with its shape-shifting monster hiding out in the shadows, is billed as a slice of pure horror; a nightmarish vision of childhood in which clowns are emphatically not to be trusted. I assumed it'd have me climbing the walls, but although I fell for it hook, line and sinker, it barely raised a goosebump. The Stand, on the other hand, in which a man-made plague lays waste to the world's population and the survivors are terrorised by dreams of a dark man – the embodiment of a malign, American-gothic spirit that creeps behind cornrows and peers through the eyes of crows – reduced me to jelly. The Stand is light on IT's adrenaline jolts; rather it's a slow-building creepshow in which terror lurks at the edges of the action, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye and, for me, infinitely more frightening for that. It's not the flashy, fairground scares that send my heart-rate rocketing, but a sense of mounting dread. And that's why Roald Dahl's supremely sinister short story The Landlady leaves me twitching and gibbering and searching frantically for the exit.

My first encounter with The Landlady came in English class at the age of 12. Presumably whoever set the syllabus that year had figured the story was safe territory for kids: no monsters, no evil spirits, no knife-wielding maniacs. Nothing, in short, that would result in parental complaints. And on the surface that's true: there's little to trouble the watershed here. The story opens with Billy Wheeler, 17, "wearing a new navy-blue overcoat, a new brown trilby hat, and a new brown suit, and … feeling fine", disembarking from the train at Bath, whence he's been despatched on "business" for "head office", and casting around for a night's lodgings. On his way to a hotel, he happens to pass a house with a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window and glances in. The scene is gloriously inviting: green velvet curtains, chrysanthemums in the windows, a bright fire in the hearth and, in front of it, "a pretty little dachshund … curled up asleep". He spots a parrot in a cage, too, reasons that "animals were usually a good sign in a place like this", and decides to chance it.

The woman who opens the door is equally comfortable, putting him in mind of "the mother of one's best school friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays". The rent is "fantastically cheap". Billy signs up, but when he goes to write his name in the guest book he notices that there are just two others in there, dating from several years back. What's more, both names seem faintly familiar. He asks the landlady, who has entered bearing tea, whether her guests were famous for anything. "Oh no," she replies, "I don't think they were famous. But they were incredibly handsome, both of them, I can promise you that. They were tall and young and handsome, my dear, just exactly like you."

Up to now, there's been little to fret over – the landlady's appearance "like a jack-in-the-box" at the front door, perhaps, or her smiling declaration that they have the place "all to ourselves", if you're being picky. But here the first identifiably menacing notes are introduced. As the pair sit on the sofa, sipping tea, with Billy still worrying at the question of where he's heard those names before (and didn't he hear them in connection with one another?), he notices suddenly that the animals he saw through the window are, in fact, dead. Stuffed. Goodness, he says, "it's most terribly clever the way it's been done … who did it?" "I did," the landlady answers. And the scene fades out soon after, ending with the landlady, in response to Billy's question as to whether there really haven't been any other guests in the last two years, replying "No my dear. Only you."

Dahl's story is a masterclass in atmosphere. Through delicate hints (the stuffed animals, the way the landlady's eyes are seen to travel "down the length of Billy's body, to his feet, and then up again") and details that are alarming only in context (her "small, white, quickly moving hands and red fingernails", the tea with a whiff of "bitter almonds"), he shows us how it's possible to tell a whole story by indirection. The setting itself is a coup de grace: that which at first seems so delightfully cosy and inviting is revealed, as the story unfolds, to be nothing more than a stage set; a rickety facade whose charm throws into relief the horror of what's concealed behind it.

The road I live on in London is a Victorian terrace which, as it descends towards the station, expires on one side into a school playing field, leaving the houses on the other looking across an open space and giving the street, for a time, the vague feeling of a seaside promenade. In the window of one of these houses is a bird cage, containing a raven, imperfectly stuffed. It's not a B&B and there's no chance of the raven taking anyone in for more than a minute, but every time I walk past it on my way home, particularly in winter and particularly at night, I think of The Landlady. And I tell you what: you wouldn't get me inside that house for any money. Which is ironic, really, because the lesson the story should have imparted is that it won't be that house, the one I've got my eye on, that contains the horror, but the one it hasn't occurred to me to avoid; the next one down but three, perhaps, with the green door and neat front garden. Unlike the supernatural fables of MR James and his ilk, Dahl's chilly little tale cuts straight to the heart of what's truly scary: the real world, and the people living in it. There's no flashing neon sign above the heads of society's killers; they don't dance out of the shadows wearing clown masks or come at us flashing razorblade gloves. Chances are, they'll look just like you – and you won't notice anything's up until it's far, far too late.

Roald DahlFictionShort storiesStephen KingSarah Crown
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Reader reviews roundup

This week: Michael Chabon, William Trevor and a whole lotta love from winner-of-Booker-past James Kelman

I've been a fan of Michael Chabon's ever since I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union back when it came out, and I've had Telegraph Avenue on my bookshelf for a while now, but haven't quite got round to picking it up. This substantial review by Christopher Philip Howe shows me that I should delay no longer. The tale, which as Howe explains, "is set on the border of Oakland and Berkeley in California in the mid-2000s, and follows the owners of a small, independent record store, the existence of which is threatened by a new development – Dogpile enterprises, a music megastore – a couple of blocks away", sounds from his review like pure Chabon: complex, multi-faceted, riffing; packed with characters of "great depth" with "real lives, real flaws, real loves".

"I loved the way Chabon has constructed this novel," says Howe. "The incredible dialogue, the sense of place, the complex relationships, all create a vivid world for the reader. His metaphors may be strained sometimes, but a book that includes a pair of seventies Blaxploitation actors, an elderly kung fu teacher called Mrs Jew who claims to have 'kicked Bruce Lee's ass, every day,' and a Hammond organ playing musician who owns a parrot called Fifty-Eight and once made a record called Redbonin' is allowed to go over the top from time to time." That's the weekend sorted, then.

But if Michael Chabon's too bustling for you, try this for a change of pace: William Trevor's elegiac 2010 novel Love and Summer which, says Julian6, uses "spare economical prose" to evoke rural Ireland's "forgotten qualities, the sense of quiet, the certainties of farm work close to the land and a culture rooted in steady religious faith".

Julian's clearly a fan: he ends by telling us that "Trevor's story has dramatic twists towards the conclusion that grow naturally and inevitably from the dilemmas faced by the characters. The ending sounds a note as musical as the final bars of a finely-shaped symphony." Sounds like he's been taking inspiration from the man himself; this is beautifully put.

And finally, in the week of Hilary Mantel's return-triumph at the Booker, several readers hark back to a former, very different winner. No fewer than three reviewers posted glowing notices for James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late over the last week. "Absolutely the best Booker winner ever," says hornswoggle, "The most impressive, sustained construction of a severely limited world, and the technical ability required to alphabetise dialect of that density has not been sufficiently appreciated". "Truthful, uncompromising and engrossing," says Reddan of Kelman's portrait of "people on the bottom rungs of society's ladder and the almost impossible struggle they have to haul themselves out of the despair they find themselves in", while kingnakamura offers a succinct verdict and one which, the polite substitution aside, one imagines Kelman would approve. Anyone stuck for something to read in the wake of Bring Up the Bodies could do worse than try this.

As ever, if I've mentioned your review, drop me a line on sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you a treat from the cupboards. Meanwhile, have a great weekend and see you all next week.

Sarah Crown
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Jack Kerouac's Octoberish magic

There's something very autumnal about the master Beat's writing, and October was a key month throughout his career

When the leaves turn to gold and brown and the pale mist makes islands of the hilltops, and the dark nights start to creep in ever earlier, I always think of Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac is, for me, a highly autumnal writer, and I feel the weight of his words most keenly in October. It was a month beloved of Kerouac himself, who wrote at the close of the first act of On the Road, "I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October."

Home, for Jean-Louis Kerouac, was Lowell, a small mill-town in Massachusetts where he was born and where his gravestone has sat, with the message "He honored life", since his death in … October, of course, 21 October 1969.

This October seems particularly Kerouackian. Last week saw the release of the long-awaited movie version of his Beat classic On the Road, the unfilmable book filmed by Walter Salles. On The Road was famously written in a speed-fuelled haze on a long roll of paper so Kerouac wouldn't have to interrupt his crazy, spontaneous, be-bop prose-poetry by having to put a new sheet into his typewriter: the original scroll is on display at the British Library until the end of the year.

Jack's hometown celebrates the writer every October, with this year's festivities including a literary festival, the world premiere performance of a Kerouac play, The Beat Generation, and even a 5k road race in his honour.

And it's Lowell which surely must have made Kerouac so Octoberish. At the heart of New England, famous for its displays of autumn leaves, it certainly inspired one of his most intriguing works, Doctor Sax, a collision of childhood memories entwined with the imaginary adventures of the titular pulp anti-hero spook of Jack's childhood imaginings.

"In the Fall there were great sere brown sidefields sloping down to the Merrimac all rich with broken pines and browns," he writes in Doctor Sax, which is redolent with childhood adventures through the autumn dusk, loitering on the "wrinkly tar corner" of his beloved Moody Street.

In Book of Dreams, the 1960 collection of his mind's nocturnal wanderings, the only dated entry – October 14 1953 – harks back to the Lowell of Doctor Sax, "where figures stalk cleanly and sharp in soft gloom clouds…"

For all his travelling, Kerouac never let Lowell leave his heart. As a young man in New York in 1941 he swapped letters with his childhood friend (and later brother-in-law) Sebastian Sampas, many of which are printed as back-matter in the "lost" Kerouac novel The Sea Is My Brother, published by Penguin earlier this year. The letters include excerpts from a play the young Jack began to write called Oktober, featuring a personification of the autumn season and a recurring line "the end of something old, old, old" which reappeared in his poem "I Tell You It Is October", in the collection Atop an Underwood. Editor Dawn M Ward observed: "To both young men the month of October was in many ways magical, transcendent to the everyday."

Kerouac never really returned to Lowell, until his funeral on October 24 1969. There's a tale – apocryphal, I think – that two old Lowellians watched the procession up to Edson cemetery and one asked the other who had died. "Jack Kerouac," said one. The other shrugged. "Who's Jack Kerouac?"

Kerouac, of course, was past caring. He was dead and buried, and it was, (to quote the title of one of his beautiful prose-poems) October in the Railroad Earth, when "high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains".

Jack KerouacFictionDavid Barnett
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How to judge a literary prize

Helping to decide the Dylan Thomas prize, I've learned it's a more complex business than you might think. All help gratefully received

The newly unveiled shortlist for the Dylan Thomas prize reveals five young writers all a little closer to picking up the impressive £30,000 cheque. Every literary prize has some sort of angle. The Dylan Thomas's is youth and is open to published or produced work in English written by an author between 18 and 30 from anywhere in the world. (Contrary to popular belief, it has never been a prize for just Welsh writing).

Thomas himself was dead at 39, but by then already had well over two decades of productive activity behind him. All the writers on the shortlist, whittled down by myself and fellow judges including Catatonia singer and now BBC 6 Music presenter Cerys Matthews and chaired by Hay festival supremo Peter Florence, display equal precocity: Tom Benn (24) and his 1990s Manchester badlands novel, The Doll Princess; Andrea Eames (26) with her second novel set in Zimbabwe, The White Shadow; the youngest on the list is 21-year-old Chibundu Onuzo and her Nigerian Romeo and Juliet, The Spider King's Daughter; at a venerable 28, Maggie Shipstead is the oldest with her story of New England WASPish tensions, Seating Arrangements; Canadian DW Wilson (27) completes the shortlist with a collection of muscular short stories, Once You Break a Knuckle.

I know all judges say this, but it really is a notably strong list. And as judges also always say, there are difficult decisions ahead. But in fact those decisions have been made easier in one important way, and simultaneously made more difficult by that youthful angle to the prize itself.

First the easier part: Judges always complain about having to compare apples to oranges. As with the Costa and the Guardian's own first book award, pitting biographies against novels against childrens' books against poetry etc presents all sorts of problems. But while the Dylan Thomas is a competition open to film scripts, plays and poetry as well as fiction, this year only novels and short stories even made it to the longlist stage (chosen by a panel of readers, not the final judging panel). A Dylan Thomas prize list without a book of poetry? Makes life slightly more straightforward for a judge, but does it also say something about the judging process? Or about the wider state of poetry?

And then there is the question of youthfulness. In a prize for writers under 30, are you looking for promise, or for simply the "best book"? While these writers are all young, they are also relatively well established. Among them are alumni of the legendary Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as the prestigious University of East Anglia creative writing course. They have been signed by some of the most blue-chip of publishers. DW Wilson won the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award and Andrea Eames's third novel will be published soon. So if they are good enough, they are old enough and should be judged accordingly? Agreed. But should the most attractive aspects of the best young writing – energy, freshness, immediacy etc – be rewarded or simply regarded as givens?

How much value should be placed on technical accomplishment? Or on authority? Or …? You get the gist.

Yes, yes. I signed up to judge this prize and will therefore have to find a way through it all myself. But if you are moved to make any observations or suggestions, please do so. All help gratefully received before the final judging session in Swansea, Thomas's birthplace, on the afternoon of 9 November. The prize will be awarded that evening which, cheerily for a celebration of youthful achievement, also just happens to be the date of Thomas's death.

Dylan Thomas prizeAwards and prizesDylan ThomasFictionShort storiesNicholas Wroe
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: leviathan greatness

This giant masterpiece continues to draw fresh interest – there's more than enough brilliance for everyone to fillet its myriad brilliance

It might, as Google so kindly points out with another of its random-anniversary doodles this morning, be 161 years since Moby-Dick was published in the UK, but the novel still seems to be everywhere. If it isn't Lynne Ramsay plotting a film version set in outer space – "It's about this mad captain whose crazy need for revenge takes the crew to their death. I'm taking people into dark waters and you see some casualties on the way" – then it's China Miéville (I've just realised how similar their surnames are! Coincidence??) turning the whale into a giant white mole in Railsea, or – and I haven't seen this – last year's film adaptation, complete with dragons and Vinnie Jones.

At least it hasn't suffered the erotic fate so many of the classics seem to be undergoing these days … although we do have this Kate Beckinsale reading, which is faintly disturbing.

Philip Hoare, meanwhile, is currently embroiled in a bonkers-but-brilliant project to broadcast the whole of the book, with readers from David Cameron to Will Self taking part. Writing that story a couple of weeks ago, I realised it'd been years since I'd actually read Moby-Dick, so I began trawling through Gutenberg's version to remind myself, matching passages to famous names and basically getting totally engrossed and taking much longer to write the piece than I should have.

This morning's doodle gives me the spurious excuse to quote at greater length some of my favourite bits. There's The Cassock; it's hard not to delight in Melville's description of "a very strange, enigmatical object … that unaccountable cone – longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg". There's the chill of The Whiteness of the Whale: "Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark."

I could go on, but I prefer not to – I'd rather know which your favourite bits are. It's time for a reread, I think.

Herman MelvilleFictionGoogle doodleInternetGoogleAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Climate change fiction melts away just when it's needed

It's the most urgent problem of our era, but novelists appear singularly reluctant to address it

"Guys, the ice caps are melting now," wrote Chris Ross in the Guardian Review last year. "Where are those stories?"

The review's subject was a collection of short stories, I'm With the Bears, all on the issue of climate change. It featured good writing – from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Lydia Millet – but, as Ross put it, "much of this material seems to have been lifted from the wastebasket." Why was no one writing fresh fiction about it?

One year on, the question still stands. "In spite of the stakes," said Andrew Simms on the Guardian's environment blog the other day, "the issue has receded from the political frontline like a wave shrinking down a beach." It seems that the wave never quite reached our beach – the beach of fiction writing – in the first place.

Sure, there was Solar. Ian McEwan's 2010 satire of a balding, overweight scientist with marriage problems explicitly focused on "the most pressing and complex problem of our time". That's the one everyone could probably mention. But after that? There was mainly silence (if you leave aside poetry, where much more seems to be going on, most notably, perhaps, Tom Chivers' ADRIFT project).

There's apocalyptic fiction, of course, and you could, I suppose, connect a novel such as Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood to climate change. But is this type of literature really concerned with the issue, or does a vaguely related scenario merely serve as a purpose for other themes and situations? (Also, as environmentalists are increasingly keen to point out, climate change isn't really about the end of the world at all; it's about living conditions becoming harder and harder as we go along.)

Yes, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) touched on the issue (the "greener than Greenpeace" Walter is deeply worried about it), and one could stretch things by considering books such as Joe Dunthorne's Wild Abandon (2011), which is interested in low-carbon living. A number of childrens' books are on-topic, too. In Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008), for example, the UK has become the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing. But the kids are alright, really: many are getting climate change much better than the grown-ups do (and, naturally, they're much more worried about it).

No, it's we adults who are failing to have this conversation. It's an unpleasant conversation to have, no doubt about it – and maybe that's why it's not really taking place in fiction, at least not centre-stage. Many novels vaguely reference the situation; sentences such as "in a warming world" or "in these times of climate change" are common in much of what's being published at the moment. But that's about it.

As such, the portrayal of climate change in fiction might actually be a pretty accurate reflection of what's going on in the real world. We know about it, and we know it's a pretty damn serious problem, but engage with it directly? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Isn't someone else looking into it? We don't want to have this conversation, it seems; and neither do most characters in most novels being published.

It's probably also true that climate change is far too complex an issue to write a definitive novel about. But is it too complex an issue for fiction writers to make a contribution? To write not so much a definitive novel about it, but one of many complementary ones? My own attempt at this, From Here (2012), tells the story of a group of ordinary people (a supermarket cashier, an ex-banker, a hipster girl), who've come together in an unlikely alliance – realising how this one issue touches them all to the core. It's full of the contradictions surrounding climate change, and the confusion many people (even those actively involved) feel around it. Telling people that I was working on a story that tackles the issue head-on, and with a clear stance on it, the response I often got was: are you sure? Which, more than once, probably meant: are you completely out of your mind?

There's a school of thought that says novels shouldn't (even can't) be about a very current issue. One could reply that climate change isn't very current in that sense – it didn't start yesterday, and it will be with us for a long, long time – but I won't, because our response to it (or lack thereof) is as current as it gets. But ought that really to prevent us from writing about it?

Zadie Smith beautifully described the dangers of writing fiction that's grounded in the now in a recent Guardian podcast. People tend to find their own time "uninteresting, vulgar and stupid," she said, and they will constantly accuse you of "shallowness, because there's a sense that literature must be timeless". And yet, the novels that "end up being important to people are the ones which in some way express their time" – provided you're not simply producing a "springboard to talk about whatever is in the news."

It's definitely a fine line, but we need to have this conversation, and I refuse to accept that I'm the only one who believes that fiction can make a massive contribution to it. Novels are about human beings, and it's one of their great strengths that they can be as open and honest as they wish – about our errors and failures, about our confusions, but also about our deepest wishes and hopes. That's why they have the power to cut through many of the things that make our coming-to-terms with climate change so hard on a strictly factual level.

What is our fiction, if it's shying away from "the most pressing and complex problem of our time"? What is our fiction, if all we really strive for is to make some universal statement on humankind, avoiding the messiness that's the here and now? What is our fiction if, wanting to be timeless, we forget our own times? So, I'm putting this as a question, but also as a provocation: Where are those stories?

FictionClimate changeIan McEwan
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Booker prize judges let us down

Another prize for Hilary Mantel was unnecessary, and a missed opportunity to invigorate the books world

"You wait 20 years for a Booker," said Hilary Mantel, "and then two come along at once." The first woman and first British author to win the Man Booker prize twice (2009 and 2012), Mantel is undoubtedly a deserving winner, a writer at the top of her game. Sir Peter Stothard, chair of this year's panel, even called her "the greatest modern English prose writer". Even if you agree with this, which I most certainly don't, does that justify giving her this year's prize – for a historical fiction, a sequel, a book that was healthily plodding along on the bestseller charts pre-longlisting?

Emphatically: no. This year's Booker panel prided itself on the variety of the books and authors that made the shortlist. Stothard, in the announcement speech at the Guildhall on Tuesday night, praised the rise of small, independent publishers. "The new has come powering through,' he mused, patronisingly referencing Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Myrmidon Books), north Norfolk (Salt Publishing) and High Wycombe (And Other Stories).

Mantel does not need a second Booker. Publishers that cannot even, as Stothard reminded us, afford an office in London should they want one, could really have done with just one prize. Mantel's books, aided in part by her previous Booker win, sell in droves. The Booker judges had a chance to make a statement, to refresh a staid publishing industry by showing it that taking risks is worthwhile. Had Deborah Levy won with Swimming Home, a cohort of innovative, genre-bending writers might have won deals with larger publishing houses able to push their books out to wider audiences.

After the Stella Rimington debacle last year and the lifetime achievement award given to Julian Barnes, there was genuine hope that this year's winner might reward something unusual, fresh, exciting. Even Will Self, the other big name on this year's shortlist, would have been a satisfying winner, if not a game-changer. Here is a writer who has been taking risks for many years, writing complex books and not getting the recognition he deserves on the grounds that his vocabulary is intimidatingly diverse. Dear Booker judges: novels are experiments in language!

Stothard's speech droned on and on about the dire situation of publishing today. He had a chance to change things, ever so slightly, but shirked it, instead rewarding the biggest-selling author on the shortlist, from the biggest publishing conglomerate. Someone pointed out at the Hilary Mantel Booker party in Soho afterwards that Fourth Estate is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who hardly needs, or deserves, more honours. (Yes, I am hypocrite, I was there. If you can't beat 'em, drink their free champagne.)

This is the kind of conversation that could have been avoided if someone other than Mantel had won this year's Booker. Everyone involved in publishing – writers, agents, publishers, small presses, readers – would have been better for it. Instead, Stothard and co reminded us that literary prizes are just as staid as the industry that produces them. Instead of hope, a bitter aftertaste lingers.

Booker prizeHilary MantelFictionAwards and prizesDeborah Levy
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Open thread: Who are the great modern English prose writers?

In pronouncing Hilary Mantel the winner of the Man Booker prize 2012, the chairman of the judges declared Mantel is 'greatest modern English prose writer' but which other authors are in contention for such an accolade?

It is official. Now with two Man Booker prizes to her name, Hilary Mantel is the greatest English prose writer publishing today. And before you start contradicting me in the comment thread, I'm not just peddling the opinion of the Guardian books desk, or Sir Peter Stothard, the chairman of the Booker judges who last night pronounced Mantel the 'greatest modern English prose writer', I'm paraphrasing you, for you have said as much yourselves:

AggieH:

Never mind the Booker. It's the Nobel that honours a body of work. In Mantel's case, they can bring up her bodies of work and behold the fact that the styles and concepts are distinct and that each is brilliant in its own right. Add to that her fine journalism and literary criticism and I'm left to wonder if her writer's DNA is fashioned out of string theory strands.

greymalkin:

Hurrah! Well- deserved. And as Justine Jordan has said, she has earned the Booker, and not got it, in the past. What has happened now is only a belated crowning of a rare and precious talent.

StevenJensen:

Wolf Hall's story - that grand, bloodstained and unforgettable period of Queen Katherine's fall and Anne Boleyn's rise - is of course well known but very well told; in fact, I doubt there's ever been a better English historical novel. In truth, there's almost too much to praise: every character, no matter how minor, is memorable

Well, perhaps AggieH, greymalkin or StevenJensen might take issue with me for putting words in their mouths, but there's certainly a great deal of praise for Mantel's work amongst our books community, and for all of her novels, not just the two most recent.

So, Mantel's greatness is not in question, not on this thread anyway, no, the question here is, which other living writers rivals Mantel for the title of the 'greatest modern English prose writer'?

Booker prizeHilary MantelHannah Freeman
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds