Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 77

People Are Strange

Victoria Wood once wrote; ‘You don’t know how strange other people’s families are until you’ve spent Christmas with one.’ If we seem a lot less individual in these homogenous times than, say, the average Dickens character, it doesn’t mean we’re more rational. There was a time – say, in the eighties – when it felt […]

What Is It About Wodehouse?

Time and again I’m drawn back to PG Wodehouse when I feel a little low. In that spirit, this column is an amalgam of previous articles together with new observations on an eternally amusing author. ‘Isn’t it all just upper class stuff?’ asked a friend. ‘Who needs that now?’ No, it’s not, I told him. […]

Avengers Dissembled

(Tortuously spoiler free) Let’s assume for the sake of this article that Avengers: Endgame is terrific entertainment and take it from there, shall we? Normal likes/ dislikes can be resumed after. You either know the stats by now or don’t care. ‘Avengers: Endgame’ is over 3 hours long, cost $400,000,000 to make and covered its cost […]

The Invisible Novel

Does a book exist if nobody reads it? To the author, certainly. The profoundly innovative, ill-fated Ronald Firbank, who hid entire literary worlds in half-sentences, self-published in ever-shrinking quantities to no acclaim whatsoever. And that was in a time when the writer word was the sole media, so how about today, when authors compete against […]

Happy 5000th Anniversary!

What did I want to create? A place of ideas. This shot is from my very first blog post, taken on the South Bank. Actually it’s 5002 now – articles, that is. I passed the milestone this week, having written and illustrated an article for this blog nearly every day for eleven years. When I […]

On Being Ill

  The beacon of shining health you see before you when I attend readings is a misleading image. Like most other writers I’ve met I was a sickly child who became a physically delicate young man. Over the years you become inured to the role you have been assigned; the one who gets cancers along […]

Fun With Inanimate Objects

Choosing a children’s book these days is a complicated matter. First there’s the question of age-appropriate levels, and if it’s an old book, the matter of political correctness. If it’s classed as Young Adult you’ll find yourself surrounded by fiction featuring teens in nightmarish dystopias facing the kind of moral challenges that would reduce an […]

Gomorrah Never Dies

So, finishing up our Italian week, there’s this. For over two decades I watched no TV at all. I was running a company , working late, writing during every second of spare time. Working at home restored my TV habit a little, thanks to the relaxed structure and better writing of US streamer shows. I […]

Burke’s Law

Good popular writers are hired to be chameleons. The downside is that they go unnoticed. They write short films, books and stage plays sponsored by products, or performance pieces to show off actors’ ranges. One such fellow was John Burke, who had the oddest of all writers’ jobs – he’d take an original film and return […]

Saw Naples, Didn’t Die

Heading home, crazy week ahead, so if you’re thinking of visiting Naples these are my bullet-point observations. Go if you want to get the sights and smells of a rough working port that feels like a mash-up of Marseilles, Havana and Istanbul. Visit the National Archeological Museum and the Modern Art gallery. Visit Herculaneum over […]