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Poem of the week: The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare

An enigmatic allegory that seems steeped in Elizabethan court politics is full of music worth listening to for its own sake

This week's poem, William Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle", was first published in 1601, in an anthology entitled Love's Martyr. The collection begins with a long poem by Robert Chester, and includes work by various hands, including Ben Jonson and George Chapman, all of it having a "phoenix and turtle" theme. The volume is thought to have been designed as both a lament for the coming extinction of the Tudor monarchy, and a celebration of the Jacobean succession. The phoenix, that splendid mythological bird which is self-consumed by fire every 500 years and regenerates itself from its own ashes, was a symbol associated with the Virgin Queen.

Shakespeare's allegorical subtext has long kept the scholars asking questions. If the phoenix represents Elizabeth, does the turtle-dove represent her lover, the second Earl of Essex, executed in the February of 1601? Do the many birds represent specific historical figures? Could the "bird of loudest lay" in line one be a disparaging reference to James I of Scotland? Those who share the persuasion that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic sympathiser have taken a different view, and, for some, the phoenix and the turtle-dove represent the martyred St Anne Line and her husband, Roger.

The language of the poem is compressed. There are words whose meanings have changed ("property," for example, for "personality") and references a modern reader might find obscure. So a complete line-by-line "translation" is useful. At the same time, it's a pity to reduce the poem to a puzzle, especially a puzzle that, once solved, concludes the poetic interest. Many of the allegorical interpretations are conjectural. Once you've grasped the surface meaning, and the bird-lore, it might be rewarding to read "The Phoenix and the Turtle" as a metaphysical fable about a chaste but intense love-affair. Neither should the musical structure be overlooked.

Shakespeare's "defunctive" music has two parts. The trochaic tetrameter of the first 13 stanzas suggests a dead-march, formal and grand: we can hear the harsh, dark sound of the trumpet mentioned in the second line, and imagine the tread of the bearers in time to a monotonous drumbeat. For all the bird-life in the poem, there are not many sweet sounds – or not until the "Threnos". Does the fact that mere birds are performing such solemn rites suggest that Shakespeare had certain parodic intentions?

While retaining the same metre for the threnody, the poet shifts to a tercet-stanza, and the trio of rhymes in each is more gently cadenced. Now the "tragic scene" can be felt on the pulse. The identity of the imagined singer might surprise us: it's Reason, "confounded" in stanza 11 by the way in which "two" have merged into one.

The thought behind this development takes us back to the Neo-Platonist Plotinus and his theory of the three essences: the One, the Intelligence and the Soul. (This, perhaps, underlies the shift to tercets.) You'll notice a possibly familiar proximity of Truth and Beauty, strongly re-emphasised in the fourth tercet. Neo-Platonism conceives of an indivisible goodness and beauty combining in the "One". That ardent student of Shakespeare and investigator of Hermetic philosophy, John Keats, brings a related concept into his "Ode on a Grecian Urn".

The Canadian scholar, Thomas Dilworth published a brilliant essay on this subject last year in the TLS ("Keats's Shakespeare"), unfortunately not available online without subscription. Keats, in Dilworth's reading. obeys Shakespeare's injunction to the "true" or "fair" to "repair" to the urn where Truth and Beauty are interred.

In interpreting the meaning of "Truth" for both poets, the symbolism of the turtle-dove is useful. He represents fidelity, "being true" in the sense of "being constant". As Shakespeare – and long tradition – suggest, Truth (as in constancy) and Beauty, are rarely combined. In his poem, they unite and die. The phoenix is not reborn. The birds lack offspring and burn to cinders in one blaze. But, if it is that Elizabethan urn that speaks in Attic guise in Keats's Ode, it proves that poetry, at least, can be reborn from itself. "The Phoenix and the Turtle," thanks to Dilworth's reading, helps unlock the cage of Keats's chiasmus: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty…" Perhaps the hidden turtle and phoenix of the Ode represent a further impossible union – that of the constant John Keats himself and his beloved Fanny Brawne?

The Phoenix and the Turtle

Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phœnix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phœnix' sight;
Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded,

That it cried, "How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain".

Whereupon it made this threne
To the phœnix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.

Threnos

Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.

Death is now the phœnix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.

Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.

To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

PoetryWilliam ShakespeareCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

This week: Elizabeth Kostova, Peter Hessler and Maggie O'Farrell.

Hello, and welcome to this week's reader reviews roundup. Now that it's beginning to get colder perhaps more of you are choosing to stay inside and read, so listen up for our reviewers' newest recommendations.

WorcesterStorey's choice offers a chill for all seasons. It's The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which, he writes, is "more Dracula than Bram Stoker" yet would please even haters of "pulpy vampire novels". Ten years in the making, the book impressed WorsterStorey with its research. "The overriding sensation was one of poring over history through many academic pairs of eyes," he writes. It reads "largely like a European historical novel." Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the choice between The Historian and The Da Vinci Code, WorcesterStorey assures us, "I'd have no hesitation in deciding which I'd prefer to be shipwrecked with on a desert island." Well, that's told you Dan Brown.

Another strong recommendation comes this week from TimHannigan. Peter Hessler's River Town is memoir of Hessler's journey to Fuling, a small town on China's Yangtze River, that "functions as a microcosm of a greater China beyond it."Having recently spent a lot of time in China, I've got a bit of a soft spot for literature about the Far East, but this sounds as if it would be great for anybody interested in travel writing or cultural identity. TimHannigan describes it as a "masterpiece," and "a book about the experience of being a stranger in a radically foreign country". He commends Hessler for writing "without once reducing the people around him to an amorphous mass," and goes as far as to say that the writing is "perfect".

Finally, to one of the more unusual reader reviews of the week: it's of The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell, which combines an account of new motherhood with a portrait of bohemian life in Soho in the 1950s and 60s. Reviewer Marybibliophile loved it, but sided with Jackson Pollock against O'Farrell's plotting. "One final note - to O'Farrell," she writes, "could you somehow have rescued that Jackson Pollock from Margot's dressing room?"
Her more pressing concerns, though, were for the reader: "I believe that this book needs to be wrapped in brown paper and stamped clearly in black or red ink: NOT TO BE READ BY ANYONE STILL CONTEMPLATING MOTHERHOOD." So be warned...

And that's it for this week. As ever, if your review appears here, mail us at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you some books. Have a lovely weekend!

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Charlie Brooks' Switch reveals more than he intended

The spy thriller by Rebekah Brooks' husband tells us little about the world of espionage – but a lot about the Gloucestershire set

Genre fiction, especially thrillers and adventure stories, are a much more reliable guide to the way we live now than literary fiction. You can learn much more about late-Victorian London from Conan Doyle than Henry James.

True to form, Switch by Charlie Brooks, published by the pioneering Blue Door imprint of Harper Collins, is not only a promising diversion, it tells us quite a bit about its author, the husband of Rebekah Brooks who goes on trial this autumn on charges relating to the phone-hacking scandal.

Mr Brooks has always stood by his wife, asserting her innocence. On the dedication page of Switch, he goes one further. She is, he writes, "the best wife in the world – who inspires me with her sense of decency, her clarity of thought and her integrity."

Immediately before this touching, and slightly defiant tribute, the reader learns that Brooks was educated at Eton, but left '"to become a stable lad". Subsequently, he has worked as "a racehorse trainer" and a newspaper columnist (for the Daily Telegraph). All in all, a promising CV for a would-be thriller writer.

The disappointment of Switch is that almost none of this is explored in what follows. True, we get glimpses of the hero's adulterous girlfriend, Gemma. "She still took his breath away. Her long flowing hair falling down her back, her dress clinging to her body just enough to be tantalisingly sexy, and best of all those exquisite calf muscles."

Don't misread this. Gemma is not just good in bed, she is troubled, too. "She was such a confused soul. Spoilt and self-centred on the one hand, and yet generous and insecure on the other."

Brooks has read enough thrillers to know that the love-interest should step coquettishly into view no later than chapter two (check), give our hero (Max Ward) the rogering of his life (check), and then hover tantalisingly on the periphery of the action (check), offering up her body for occasional work-outs either in bed, or on a "very comfortable Moroccan rug" (check).

Students of Charlie Brooks' life and times will be interested to know that Max first met Gemma on "a typical, wild Gloucestershire weekend party. Everyone drank too much and a few people ended up doing things they shouldn't... Max had followed her upstairs to bed. By the time he knocked on her door, she was wearing the skimpiest of nighties..."

Sadly, Max Ward, happy-go-lucky "MI6 spook", does not confine his attentions to sexy Gemma. He's also playing away with Sophie. On top of this, he's whizzing about 21st-century Europe like a fruit fly on speed, pursuing "a mission" that involves an old master painting, some unlikely intelligence shenanigans, and a pervasive air of menace. Plainly with a possible movie deal in view, each chapter of Switch opens in another posh EU location. Now Monaco, now Amsterdam, anon London (and, weirdly, Eton). Note to author: cut the flashbacks. They slow the action, and confuse the hell out of the reader.

By the not-so-shattering climax of Switch, three things are clear. First, this is really a first draft with several potential stories (all of them under-explored). Second, Brooks has broken the first rule of thrillers: write about what you know. Horses, Gloucestershire, yes. International intelligence, no. His MI6 is, frankly, incredible. Third, the reader cries out for at least one even vaguely likeable, or interesting, character.

In place of an engaging cast, Brooks has spun a confusing, over-complicated yarn which comes with dutiful puffs from Jeremy Clarkson ("a turbo-charged race to the finish") and Alex James ("I couldn't put it down"). Did they, you wonder, actually read it to the end ?

I advise Charlie Brooks to flash his copy of Switch en route to court when his wife's trial starts. It will promote sales – and a leisured re-reading will show him how to do better next time.

ThrillersFictionRobert McCrum
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Non-fiction roundup – reviews

Steven Poole on Totally Wired by Andrew Smith, The Great Camouflage edited by Daniel Maximin and What You Didn't Miss by DJ Taylor

Totally Wired: On the Trail of the Great Dotcom Swindle by Andrew Smith (Simon & Schuster, £19.99)

In the late-1990s dotcom boom, one of the most colourful characters was Josh Harris, Zuckerbergish founder of web-TV startup pseudo.com who gave legendarily decadent parties in his Manhattan loft. Andrew Smith (author of the wonderful Moondust) tracked down the now-broke Harris, and here narrates the internet bubble and crash through his life story, while also musing on our lives today in new media.

There are fascinatingly weird facts aplenty, and a terrific sequence about a modern "New York Reality TV School", but readers might doubt that Harris – who apparently believes he is channelling instructions from beings in another dimension, and with whom Smith conducts a kind of mournful bromance – was ever quite such an age-defining visionary. Harris's 24/7 webcast of life with his girlfriend in 2000 came four years after Jennicam; today, men still don't, as Ferris fondly predicted, want to meet up virtually in the morning with other random shaving dudes around the world beamed into the mirror. "Are we, in some unconscious way, him?" Smith asks plaintively. Not really!

The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent, by Suzanne Césaire edited by Daniel Maximin, translated by Keith L Walker (Wesleyan, £16.95)

In the olden days, even animal sex was safe from the intrusive eye of reality TV, as we are reminded in these 1940s essays: looking down at the sea from a plane, "One can only guess the easy lovemaking of fish." Here are pieces published by Martiniquan writer (and early voice of the "négritude" movement) Suzanne Césaire in Tropiques, the review she co-founded, including a German ethnologist's theory of civilisation, surrealist poetry as a symbol of freedom, and the twee preferences in Antillean literature held by "colonial professors". Césaire's style is prettily and well described by the translator as "dissident lyricism". She has a coolly conversational habit of answering her own questions with a full-stopped "No", and a baseline tone of mildly amused irony that can suddenly erupt into a forceful call to arms or beatific praise, as in her splendid appreciation of André Breton: "And in effect Breton inhabits a marvellous country where clouds and stars, winds and swamps, trees and animals, humankind and the universe yield to his desires." Sounds even better than being an internet entrepreneur.

What You Didn't Miss by DJ Taylor (Constable, £10)

This collection of (mainly) Private Eye literary parodies from Taylor, the improbably indefatigable man of letters, demonstrates multiply how the send-up can work as serious criticism as well as gleeful cruelty. Here are snarky (in the best sense) impressions of Barnes, Byatt, Faulks, McEwan, Enright, Smith et al; parody biographies, memoirs, and journals (eg Larkin, the Mitford sisters; a postmortem Anthony Powell); and – for some mysterious reason – numerous sardonic references to this very newspaper.

Taylor's version of The Pregnant Widow – "That molten Italian sun, plonked up there in the cerulean firmament like some fucking fried egg or other" – perfectly captures the tossed-offness (to deploy a technical term) of the late M Amis style. Perhaps most virtuosic of all is the "Poetry Corner" section, featuring vicious take-offs of Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion ("The lanes of genteel Oxfordshire, bat-haunted night …"), Paul Muldoon, and Craig Raine. Not the least of the pleasures throughout is that of the made-up names. Taylor invented her for another era, but it's also nice to imagine "the mercurial Gladys Spode" once glimpsed at a cyber-Warhol dotcom loft happening.

Steven Poole
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Dictionaries are not democratic

Crowdsourcing has its appeal, but without professional lexicographers these reference works will lose the authority we want them for

A small thing in the larger world perhaps but Collins, the dictionary publisher, may have set a revolution going. If so it's because they just announced the first instance of a dictionary allowing input not only from the usual suspects – staff lexicographers – but from the public, or to use the pertinent language: the crowd.

Crowdsourcing, at least partially inspired by James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few, is first recorded in 2004. The philosophy of the more the merrier. And more creative. Now that task could include lexicography.

Everyone, we know, and thanks to self-publishing can now see, seems to have a novel in them. Maybe there's a dictionary too. For the last couple of months Collins has thrown open their files to all-comers. Suggest a word that qualifies for their dictionary and win a prize! Examples include Twittersphere, sexting, cyberstalking and captcha. Other contenders include mantyhose and photobombing. And amazeballs, an expression of enthusiasm.

Such shout-outs are the antithesis of traditional lexicography. "The dictionary" represents authority. "Is it in the dictionary?", "I'll look it up in the dictionary", and so on. If the dictionary-maker is a humble archivist while the lexicon is being created, they become a deity – or at least a cut-rate Moses – once it appears and becomes a source of supposedly trustworthy information.

The English dictionary, born in 1604, is four centuries old. Its first authors were soloists, often teachers or writers. Their exemplar remains Samuel Johnson, coiner of his job's self-deprecating definition: the harmless drudge (even if a glance at Johnson's persona suggests that no man ever wrote with tongue more deeply embedded in his cheek.) Johnson's Dictionary ruled at least the British roost until the 1880s when the Oxford English Dictionary began appearing. Alongside it appeared smaller works from such as Cassell, Chambers and Collins, all responding to an expanding mass literacy. Like the language, the task had grown: the individual, however dedicated and knowledgeable, could no longer do it. Henceforth lexicography was a profession, its practitioners a linguistic priesthood. To underpin their expertise they read, and in time took on new media and drew on vast digitised collections of usage examples known as corpora. But invariably, they kept it in-house. Now, thanks to Collins – and their crowd – this may be changing.

Of course trendy new words are the publicity launchpad for every new dictionary in a crowded field. They may vanish tomorrow – the longevity of a word is as hard to calculate as the long-term effects of the French Revolution – but today they push the product. That they come from the crowd is touted as a new democratisation: less kindly opinions might opt for "gimmick". Oxford University's Professor Deborah Cameron has termed it "less a democracy than a tyranny of nutters". Still, there are no sock-puppets, and reference publishing – in deep doo-doo – must do what it can.

We live in a relativist world: nothing is objectively "better" than anything else. To argue otherwise is elitist and reprehensible. This newspaper and other media seem to have abandoned confidence: every text is postscripted "What Do You Think?" But the dictionary is not designed for second-guessing. If it is not intensively researched, edited, proofed and rendered as "true" as possible, why bother to consult it? Of course dictionaries are human inventions and subject to human failings. How not. Research continues and research means revision. All the better. But the days of Johnson's cracks about oats and Scotland are over and the aim is the disinterested assembly of material.

And if not? Then we have the Urban Dictionary. Every line a laff, but do we believe this farrago of misinformation, theorising, one-off terms and a level of "definition" based on a count of thumbs up and down? There is gold too, but often lost among the dross. Let us look up "slang", always a challenge. Top definition: "The only reason Urbandictionary.com exists." I'm sorry but this does not help. If I want fun, then I'll go to Roger's Profanisaurus. But I, and millions of others, also want practical, utile facts.

Letting in the street will end no worlds but will it improve the quality of dictionaries? Form as ever faces off content. The form can be democratic as all hell, but in lexicon-land, surely the content is what matters. My own speciality, slang dictionaries, may engender a good deal of browsing, but slang fans also want to discover what an entry means.

Reference should be online. The opportunities for presentation, for breadth of information and for sophisticated searches that would be impossible in a print dictionary are too good to miss. But if reference is to remain useful then it cannot become amateur hour. The public can be informers , and we are duly grateful. But if we don't want to be told that fuck comes from "fornicate under command of the king", or crap from Thomas Crapper then the experts, willy-nilly, still have to be the cops.

Trust me, I'm a lexicographer.

InternetCrowdsourcingJonathon Green
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Watch a novel being written 'live'

Fantasy author is offering readers the chance to watch her novel taking shape, word by word, on a Google document

Fantasy author Silvia Hartmann is opening herself up to the kind of scrutiny most writers would pay to avoid: this morning, she started writing her new novel on Google Docs, and you can see it taking shape word by word as she types. (I just saw "something was happening here, and something was unfolding, and she was not in a position to put a stop to it" emerge on the page).

I've read the first pages of The Dragon Lords – she's already on chapter four, and she only started at 9am – and I'm not saying it's cracking stuff. It's fairly bonkers, to be honest. "At the beginning, she had tried to not feel so strongly about someone she knew nothing about. He could be an idiot, a pervert, a serial killer. Or he could be really boring, and when he woke up, his voice might sound like Kermit the frog." Goodness. Hartmann's taken the maxim of grabbing your readers' attention with your first sentence very seriously – "It was not every day that Mrs Delhany found a naked man in the driveway." And she's working her short paragraphs to the max.

But there's something, nonetheless, rather mesmerising about seeing the words emerge as you watch. Give it a go. Hartmann, who writes fantasy novels under the joyfully weird pseudonym Nick StarFields and self-help books under her own name, is allowing fans to comment on the story and make suggestions as she progresses, so perhaps it'll improve. It is her first draft, after all, and it's a brave thing to show it to the world.

She also tells me that she's read Fifty Shades of Grey, and is predicting that further down the line, things "may well be a little sexy". Crikey.

"I've never done this before. I do have faith that if something fits in with my vision and potentially enhances it further, it will definitely be taken on board. I am going to trust my instincts and go with what I feel is right, all the way through," she says. "For example, if I have a character and I love him, and all the readers hate him, I'll probably stick with him. He might be redeemed further down the line, who's to say?"

She's calling her experiment a world first. I'm not so sure – GalleyCat points to a few other similar efforts, and Will Self has already done so in three dimensions, twice, writing in public before any curious readers who thereby risked inclusion in his work. But hats off to Hartmann – "the Naked Writer", as she's styling herself – for laying bare her first musings to the world, and giving it a go. I'll definitely be checking in to see if the Dragon Lord and Mrs Delhany get it on down the road. Judging from their latest interaction, which has just tapped its way onto my screen – "he took a deep breath and slowly opened his eyes. She could not make out the colour in the dim light; but they were not dark eyes, they were liquid, beautiful ..." – I think they just might.

Creative writingEbooksFantasyFictionAlison Flood
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Don't look for e-literature in novels

There is a great deal of literature emerging from the new technology, but most of it is not in traditional forms

Robert McCrum asks writers some searching questions about where the literature of new technology is to be found. He makes an important point: in an age when many of us email, message, tweet, comment, like, pin, reblog, and update more than we talk, just why is it that the books and ebooks on the shelves of Amazon are still dominated by "spoken" dialogue?

But look closer and the questions are confused. More to the point, they are symptomatic of a trend that should worry those who scour the literary pages for a survey of reading material. "I cannot think of a contemporary scene or character whose narrative or development owes much, if anything, to the new technology," writes McCrum and I can't help feeling that he's looking in the wrong place. Or worse, not looking at all.

The line McCrum subsequently pursues highlights the problem he isn't getting to grips with. He follows the development of the narrative mind from linear to fragmentary, continuous to overlapping, unidirectional to scattershot. Rather unhelpfully he then makes points about Gutenberg before asking about the potential for this new narrative mind to produce something as yet absent from culture, "the first genuine e-novel". I say unhelpfully because this seems to me a rather unfair attempt to wire three unconnected strands – the novel, linear narrative, and the movable type/digital analogy – into a single plug, missing the marks of 18th-century leisure at one end and troubadour romances at the other by a couple of hundred years apiece.

McCrum's fallacy can be summed up very simply. If you want to argue that new technology has interrupted a way of thinking that worked through its own particular literary form, the novel, and you want to find literature emergent from that form, it might be best not to restrict your search to novels.

There is a wealth of wonderful literature springing from and reflecting upon the tangential mind for want of a better term. A lot of it (though by no means all – see Dennis Cooper's 2005 novel The Sluts and Amy Marcott's heartbreaking short story Flying the Coop) is poetry, though for all her prognostications Carol Ann Duffy would probably spit Soave on her stanzas at the sight of some of it.

Illustrative of the playfulness of the internet is flarf, a genre that cuts and pastes found internet phrases into new works like Anna Hobson's Tales Of Modern Courtship Part Three: First Impressions, a collage of statuses taken from an internet dating site.

Indeed, rather like a lot of music, manipulation of source material into something that transcends, questions, or interrupts in some way the source, or our assumptions about it, is something common to much alt lit (the umbrella term for a lot of these practices). Take Steve Roggenbuck's ebook DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM, which takes 100 excerpts from MSN Messenger and presents them in Helvetica font. Or Sian Rathore's ebook The Geisha Series, for which she plugged words of her choosing into sentence-generating software and pasted the results on to stock photos.

Encapsulating the subtle tensions and hermeneutic spirals within alt lit, and its capturing of and commentary on the tangential mind, is James Ganas's stunning ebook James Ganas Was My Best Friend and I'm Sorry He Died So Young of Cancer, pieced together from the fabricated flotsam of a semi-fictitious virtual life, such as this exquisite status:

People will remember me more for my online presence
Than how i interacted with them in real life
I frequently share pictures and like status updates
In this way i give back to the community
And forge unbreakable bonds

McCrum wants to look to novels for reflections on the way the internet impacts on our lives. But that method fails to shake the old hegemony of the linear it purports to be questioning. The novel is by no means spent, and is by no means redundant as a means of questioning the new matrices of community that shoot in all directions from the web, but the literary revolution, if there is one, will happen in forms that allow for reflection, anxiety, hope, experiment, play, comment, criticism, writers and texts to shuttle horizontally amongst themselves, and the paths that alt lit is beginning to explore allow that to happen. As such they offer a more complete and subtle portrait of the modern mind that receives, edits, samples, remixes, reformulates and sends a semiotic hailstorm boomeranging into the ether.

Of course, if the literary media is going to start bringing these forms to readers, it first needs to get over three of its biggest qualms. Almost all of this material is self-published. Most of it is free. And whilst much has been redacted, very little has been edited in a way most commentators would recognise.

EbooksPoetryFictionDan Holloway
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Internet sock-puppeteers could learn from some illustrious forebears

Examples of self-reviewing set by Alexander Pope and Walter Scott show the likes of RJ Ellory how it should be done

The idea of a patron saint of sock-puppetry is more than a little incoherent (perhaps St Bernardino of Siena pretending to be St Francis de Sales?), but if the practice did want at least an honoured ancestor, then I'd propose some form of monument to Esdras Barnivelt. Esdras Barnivelt was writing in the period when reviewing, publicity and the widespread discussion of literature in broadsheets, newspapers and magazines was just emerging. He wrote a pamphlet called A Key To The Lock, subtitled "a Treatise proving, beyond all Contradiction, the dangerous Tendency of a late Poem entitled The Rape of the Lock to Government and Religion", claiming that Pope's witty mock-heroic was actually a coded allegory about the Barrier Treaty. The joke is, of course, that Esdras Barnivelt was actually Alexander Pope himself.

Pope was both fascinated and appalled by the climate of literary flyting; Joseph Guerinot's magisterial bibliography, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744, runs to 360 pages, and includes work such as Tom O'Bedlam's Dunciad: Or Pope, Alexander, the Pig, Pope Alexander's Supremacy and Infallibility Examin'd and A Pop Upon Pope. This 18th century version of trolling often depicted Pope as a hunchbacked monkey wearing a papal tiara, his name reduced to A.P.E. Pope thrived on the contentions almost as a defence against their often vicious depictions of his disabilities. Rather than sit serenely above the fray, Pope revelled in it, critiquing his own works and attacking his enemies with even more poetic bile.

He wasn't the only author, pre-Amazon, to indulge in such practices. The Quarterly Review for January 1817 carried a long (anonymous) review of the recently published (and anonymous) Tales of My Landlord. The book is now better known as The Black Dwarf and The Tale of Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott; the review in the Quarterly was by Scott as well. Scott's chief objective in reviewing his own work, apart from keeping up the mystification around who the "Author of Waverley" actually was, was to counter a review in the Christian Instructor by the Rev Thomas M'Crie. M'Crie, a biographer of John Knox and Andrew Melville, took exception to Scott's depiction of the Covenanters, and his sympathetic portrayal of Claverhouse. Scott used the Quarterly to present historical evidence for his stance; but he also wrote perceptively about his own books – and not particularly positively. "Probability and perspicuity of narrative are sacrificed with the utmost indifference to the desire of producing effect", he writes, adding "the author errs chiefly from carelessness" and suffers from "flimsiness and incoherent texture". Warming to his theme he continues "in addition to the loose and incoherent style of the narration another leading fault in these novels is the total want of interest which the reader attaches to the character of the hero". They are all a "very amiable and very insipid sort of young men". One wonders how many people got the joke, especially when Scott writes: "Few can wish his success more sincerely than we do, and yet without more attention on his part, we have great doubts of its continuance."

For a while in the 1980s, few books were published without an Anthony Burgess review quote on the paperback. In an interview with Charles Bunting in 1973, Burgess said of the reviews of his own books: "It often happens that they're reviewed by Catholic priests, or Jesuit scholars, or something, which is not quite what I want, or they're reviewed by agnostics or atheists which, again, is not quite what I want. I suppose the idea is they want you to review one's own books, and I did this on one occasion. I got fired from the newspaper for it, but I did try it." The paper in question was the Yorkshire Post for which he reviewed, among others, Updike, Nabokov, Brooke-Rose and Lessing. But his infraction was to review, on 16 May 1963, Inside Mr Enderby, the first of his brilliant quartet about a failed poet, which he published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell. Burgess claimed he thought it was practical joke on the part of the literary editor. "This is", he wrote "in many ways, a dirty book… it may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone. It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing stocks. The book itself is a laughing stock." The review of Inside Mr Enderby was part of a round-up of eight titles: Burgess was far more enthusiastic about Malamud's The Natural and BS Johnson's Travelling People (which he compared to Ulysses) than his own book. That said, his self-review is not wholly selfless: in 1963 the cachet of being a "dirty book" like Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover was pretty high.

What is strikingly different about Pope, Scott and Burgess and the business of self-reviewing compared to the antics of RJ Ellory and Orlando Figes is the charming self-deprecation, the wry knowingness of the older authors. What really irks about the modern sock-puppeteers is how graceless and gauche their self-praise is.

Literary criticismInternetAmazon.comAnthony BurgessSir Walter ScottStuart Kelly
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Tips, links and suggestions: Our review list and the books you are reading

Our review list and your space to tell us about the topics, authors and books you'd like to see covered on the site

Each week we publish a list of some of the books we'll be reviewing over the week, and invite you to tell us what you've been reading recently and what you thought of them.

The demon comment thread-cutter struck again, rather truncating the time you had to get in touch, but not before two readers put their hands up to overdue reading discoveries.

SharonE6 wrote:

I've just finished Animal Farm - I have no idea why I didn't read it years ago. I found it fascinating and very disturbing. I was pretty upset by Boxer's fate - in fact, much more moved by the book than I expected to be. It certainly deserves its 'classic' status.

And Tisiphone wrote:

I am reading From a Buick 8 by Stephen King. I have to admit it is only the 2nd book by him that I have read (first being 11.22.63). I am utterly enthralled & kicking myself that I had not started to read his books earlier. Once I have finished the SK books I have borrowed I am going out & buying all of his books from the beginning. Can't wait.

7sisters is hoping for reading tips:

Just finished reading "So Much For That" by Lionel Shriver.
A book which deals with the raw, uncompromising themes of living and dying. Surprisingly, given the themes the book addresses I would nominate this book as one of the funniest I have read for ages and I mean real laugh-out loud moments which are very rare in my experience. Any books out there with those LOL moments readers can recommend?

So, if you have any wise advice for 7Sisters, this is the place to give it. And do let us know what are you reading this week. Meanwhile, here's our review list:

Non-fiction

• Spell it Out by David Crystal
• Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin by Barney Hoskyns
• Desert Island Discs: 70 Years of Castaways by Sean Magee and Kirsty Young
• My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major
• Bertie: Edward VII by Jane Ridley
• God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin
• Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

Fiction

• This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
• Part of the Spell by Rachel Heath
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
• In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa
• Merivel: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain

Hannah Freeman
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Booker prize shortlist 2012: Mantel and Self lead contenders

The Man Booker prize 2012 shortlist has just been announced. We'll have the full news story up as soon as we can; meanwhile, here's the list. What do you make of it?

Greetings, Booker-fans. The 2012 shortlist – as selected by this year's panel, Dinah Birch, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens, Bharat Tandon and chair Sir Peter Stothard – has been announced. News story, comment and gallery on the shortlisted titles to follow; meanwhile, take a look at the list and tell us what you think. Bookies' favourites Self and Mantel are there, but the other names are less well-known. Over to you.

The shortlist

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt)

Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury)

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books)

Booker prizeHilary MantelWill Self
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