XYDO.COM: Book Reviews

The Arrogant Elite

The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism by Bruce Frohnen. University Press of Kansas, 1996. vii + 271 pp., $30 cloth.

Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA

In 1958, the Paris Review’s George Plimpton wrote his Paris editor with a grand proposal. The Russian author Boris Pasternak had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. But under pressure from the Soviets — humiliated that "Dr. Zhivago" had to be smuggled out of the country — he refused it. “The Pasternak affair has caused such a stir here,” writes Plimpton from the journal's New York office, “and is in itself an event of such importance in lit’r’y history that we feel the Review somehow should chronicle what has happened…” Writing to Nelson Aldrich, the Paris editor, Plimpton suggests short statements by a “variety of authors asked to comment. What does Sartre have to say on this matter ... Aragon, Neruda, Waugh? Here [in New York] we have Niccolo Tucci … digging up statements, mostly from writers who (as he is himself) are refugees from tyranny…” Plimpton goes on to suggest that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, largely and covertly funded by the CIA, might fund brochures to help publicize the issue.Continue Reading...

On Statesmanship: The Case of John Adams

This article is the first of two parts and is based on a talk delivered to a Colloquium on Statesmanship and the Constitution at the Rochester Institute of Technology, April 13–14, 2012.

Review: I Only Have Eyes for You by Bella Andre

Book info: Publisher: Oak Press Publication Date: April 10, 2012 Official Description: Sophie Sullivan, a librarian in San Francisco, was five years old when she fell head over heels in love with Jake McCann. Twenty years later, she’s convinced the notorious bad boy still sees her as the “nice” Sullivan twin. That is, when he bothers to look at her at all. But when they both get caught up in the magic of the first Sullivan wedding, she knows it’s long past time to do whatever it takes to make him see her for who she truly is…the woman who will love him forever. Jake has always been a magnet for women, especially since his Irish pubs made him extremely wealthy. But the only woman he really wants is the one he can never have. Not only is Sophie his best friend’s off-limits younger sister…he can’t risk letting her get close enough to discover his deeply hidden secret. Only, when Sophie appears on his doorstep as Jake’s every fantasy come to life-smart, beautiful, and shockingly sexy-he doesn’t have a prayer of taking his eyes, or his hands, off her. And he can’t stop craving more of her sweet smiles and sinful kisses. Because even though Jake knows loving Sophie isn’t the right thing to do…how can he possibly resist? My thoughts: This is the fourth book of the Sullivan Series and if you have not read any of them, I suggest you go out and start reading them now. Haven’t we all had dreams of going after that one person who we think is out of our reach, be they the bad boy, our brother’s friend or someone we think is way out of our league? Sophie Sullivan has had feelings for bad boy Jake McCann since the day they met. Sophie has always been perceived as the good sister, as “nice” who will always be on hand to help out and do the right thing. Jake has always been secretly attracted to Sophie but has never acted on his feelings for her due to the fact that he sees the Sullivans as his second family. What I especially liked about this book was the fact that it shows how people’s perceptions of other people may not necessarily be the true representation of a person. This book shows that we really do put people in boxes as to how we see them and it only when a person takes a risk that their true character shines. It is only when Sophie puts it all on the line that we see her for who she really is, it’s only when Jake starts to trust himself and others that we get to see the person he becomes. Isn’t that what we should all be like…fearless. This was a great contemporary romance showcasing real life situations with humour. Loved it.

John Cheever: Master of the short story

John Cheever, the American writer called 'the Chekhov of the suburbs', was born 100 years ago today.

PD James - I would help a loved one die

The novelist PD James has said that she is in favour of assisted suicide and would help a terminally ill loved one end their life.

Peter James: how I hit back at my stalker - and Martin Amis

Best-selling crime novelist Peter James is seeking revenge, he tells Cole Moreton.

Richard Ford finds his place in 'Canada'

It's tempting to call Richard Ford a writer of place. Beginning with his first novel, 1976's "A Piece of My Heart," the 68-year-old author has tended toward the border among landscape, language and character, using setting to help drive his narratives. Think of Frank Bascombe, who in "The Sportswriter," "Independence Day" and "The Lay of the Land" drifts across the bland surfaces of New Jersey, seeking not stimulation but a stasis similar to that of the suburbs where he resides. Or the people of Ford's Montana books, "Rock Springs" and "Wildlife": etched by the stark environment in which they find themselves, staring down the elements of their lives. It's as if, Ford wants us to imagine, we live at the mercy of larger forces, forces outside ourselves, forces that determine who we are. And yet, he insists by phone from his home in East Boothbay, Maine, that's not the case — or not exactly, anyway. "Growing up in Mississippi," he recalls, "and being told that this defined me, set me on a path away from place as generative. When I started writing, I took the Toulouse-Lautrec attitude that place is background scenery. I didn't want the place I came from to be responsible for me." What Ford is getting at is a dual set of burdens: that of Southern history — "[W]e lived in an absurd racist society," he told the Paris Review in 1996 — and of the Southern literary tradition, which, encompassing William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, left him feeling "there was no place here for me." With his new novel, "Canada" (Ecco: 420 pp., $27.99), however, he has come to acknowledge that the issue of place is perhaps less clear-cut, more deterministic, than he may have thought. The book, which takes place primarily in Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, is a return, of sorts; set in summer and fall 1960, it is narrated by 15-year-old Dale Parsons, who must learn to fend for himself after his parents are arrested for robbing a bank. Dale is of a piece with Joe Brinson, the teenage protagonist of "Wildlife," whose life too comes unraveled in 1960. (Several of the stories in "Rock Springs" are also set in 1959 or 1960 and involve the travails of adolescent boys.) In that sense, place may be not only geographic but also experiential, a matter of both exterior and interior territory — although either way, it echoes through. "'Place means nothing,' I wrote in 'Independence Day,'" Ford says with a rueful laugh. "I was throwing down a gauntlet. But if I tried to make that true, I will concede now that I may not have been fully successful. Because when I write sentences set in Montana, I write different kinds of sentences. So there must be some generative relationship." "Canada" is very much about the interplay of character and landscape, although in this case the primary landscape has to do with family. That's because Dale, his parents and his twin sister, Berner, are in many ways isolated, a result of the peripatetic nature of his father's work with the Air Force as well as the family's status as outsiders, who naturally hold themselves apart. Ford introduces this via Dale's mother, a woman who prides herself on a skeptical intelligence. "These were the values that caused her never to want Berner and me to assimilate in the places my father's Air Force job took us," he observes early in the novel. "Those places, she felt, would 'dilute and corrupt' what was good and important about us and render us stale and ordinary in terms specific to Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, places she had low regard for and considered unenlightened." Right there, in two straightforward sentences, Ford establishes the central conflict of the novel: between family on the one hand and community on the other — or, more directly, between personality and place. Plot, in such a context, is secondary; what's important is how the characters react. "More than events," he explains, "I'm interested in consequence. What happens after the big event? That's when life gets lived." To make this explicit, he tips off the main dramatic action from the opening lines. "First," he begins the novel, "I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." For Ford, the diffusion of narrative tension opens up another, more essential tension — that of a character coming to resolution with himself. This is the arc Dale traverses throughout "Canada," and it echoes not just the author's earlier Montana books but also his Bascombe trilogy, which is all about the process of coming to terms. "With Dale," Ford says, "I tried to combine his adult and his childhood voice, to use two vocalizations: a 15-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man." The point is to show how he's reckoned with his past, even the parts for which he cannot make amends. "There's a debt to pay," Ford goes on, "but there's also a sense of accepting who you are. That's happiness, when you're 65 years old, to make do with what you're given, to come to a position of assent." That's what Ford has been writing toward for much of his career, going back to "A Piece of My Heart," which moves between two characters who, he suggests, represent "the two sides of my brain, one sensation and the other intellect." In "Canada," though, he's integrated the impulse in a broader way. As much as Dale recalls Ford's other Montana adolescents, he's equally reminiscent of Bascombe, looking back from the second half of his life in a voice equally piercing and reflective. "What I want to do," Ford says, "is to get at something like Walter Benjamin's idea of instruction, to illuminate the struggle of existence. What's important to Dale is not what he's been through, so much as his desire to find some purpose. He ends up happy because he has made himself useful." This is a traditional definition of art, of fiction: that it should instruct or enlighten us, that it should illuminate something about how we live. Yet at its center is a related notion: that the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary is often a tenuous one. "To me," Ford writes, tracing Dale's parents' slow drift from one side of the law to the other, "it's the edging closer to the point of no return that's fascinating: all along the trip, chatting, sharing confidences, exchanging endearments — since their life was officially still intact. … How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stick of land growing smaller and smaller. … You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away, and all is lost." That, he claims, is "the heart of the book, that these two experiences exist side by side, that we can always pull back from the line until we cross it." In a way, it's a bit of a commonplace, but then, this is part of the novelistic enterprise, as well. "There's no such thing as commonplace," Ford argues, "there's no such thing as ordinary. What I've found is that each thing becomes prologue to something we didn't expect. I didn't expect to write again about Montana, but it turned out there was more to say. What I've discovered about myself is that I'm a goer-backer" — and here, he could be talking about Dale, or Bascombe, or any of his characters — "I'm just a guy who goes back and gets more."

Photography: Marilyn and Me, By Lawrence Schiller

In this "Memoir in Words and Pictures", the Life, Time and Newsweek photographer Lawrence Schiller recounts the two assignments that made his name: photographing Marilyn Monroe on set during the making of Let's Make Love, which was released in 1960, and Something's Got to Give, shown right, which was never completed.

Selected Poems, By Don Paterson

In January 1994, the Poetry Society organised a promotion of the 20 so-called "New Gen" poets. An attention-grabbing subset – Don Paterson, Glyn Maxwell, Michael Donaghy, Mick Imlah and Simon Armitage – gave a whiff of blokeyness to the whole crew. And you couldn't get much more blokey than the titles of Paterson's first two collections, Nil Nil (1993) and God's Gift to Women (1997).

100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Sport, by John D Barrow

It is no longer considered smart to claim: "Oh, I'm hopeless at maths," but that doesn't mean most of us are much good at it. So certain chapters in this book, written by a professor of mathematical sciences, are a distinct challenge for those of us who haven't attempted to unravel an equation for years.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose – review

Forthright, waspish and often very funny, this is an essential book for all writers who purport to take their work seriously"Sooner or later some such book as this had to be written…" said Basil Hogarth in The Technique of Novel Writing, published in 1934 – possibly the first in what is now a Babel tower of creative writing manuals available to new writers. Most of what is on offer falls into three broad categories: works by academics seeking to treat the creative process with the same level of intellectual rigour given to other forms of analysis, such as David Lodge's The Art of Fiction; write-your-bestseller books, such as Carole Blake's From Pitch to Publication; and chirpy, exercise-based books full of practical anecdote for the newcomer: mea culpa.In such a bulging field, it is remarkable that there is any gap in the market, but an acerbic American novelist with the improbably suitable name of Francine Prose has found it and filled it. Reading Like a Writer is a clarion call for aspiring writers to do that most simple, time-consuming but enjoyable thing: their homework. Doctors go to medical school, barristers train at the bar: novelists may or may not choose a creative writing course but reading is the one training tool they can't do without. It's a case Prose makes with such vigour as to make this an essential book for any writer, new or experienced, who purports to take his or herself remotely seriously.Like most authors, Prose has been an avid reader since childhood: "On one family vacation, my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon." She read broadly and widely, everything from Carlos Castaneda ("Mary Poppins for people who had outgrown the flying nanny") to Sophocles. It's a habit she has continued throughout her own life as a novelist and teacher of literature and she expresses bafflement at writers who decline to read when they are working on their own book, "for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I've always hoped they would."The point about learning from great writers is well made but if there is fault in this excellent book, it is in Prose's anxiety to defend The Canon. "If a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males." Many a writer who happens to be alive, female or brown – or, God forbid, all three – might note that there is hardly a need for much resuscitation.Prose's defensiveness on this point is probably explained by her experience of teaching on American campuses, where the battle lines are much more sharply drawn than here. Nonetheless, she occasionally appears to be giving writers credit just for being famous: she admiringly quotes a passage full of sentence fragments from American Pastoral by Philip Roth, but later says new writers should pay more attention to grammar. If you're the kind of reader who finds sentence fragments irritating, then they are just as irritating when Roth does it as when your most pretentious student copies him.Where this book really takes off is with Prose's quite brilliant analysis of the power of detail in fiction. Turning to Kafka, she unpicks the famous opening of The Metamorphosis to show us that what makes us believe that Gregor Samsa really has turned into an insect is not the description of his armour-plated back but the picture that he has hung on his wall, of a lady in a fur stole. "Believing in this picture, we begin to believe in Samsa and in the possibility that he could turn into a bug." It is the ordinary that makes us believe the impossible. This calls to mind Elizabeth Bowen's observation: "The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie." A few pages later, Prose nails why cliched descriptions are so hopeless at conveying experience, explaining, for instance, why the sentence "Tom bit his lip" is a pointless banality.Above all, Prose's forthright, waspish and often very funny book is a plea to all writers for vigour and clarity, one which encourages them to tend to the details of technique, and the mastery of language, as closely as they tend to their own ambition. It demands that they love literature as much as they want the literary world to love them – an exhortation many published as well as unpublished writers would do well to heed. Reading Like a Writer makes it clear just how much work is involved in being a writer before, during and after the formulation of a sentence, and that's a point that can't be made often enough.Louise Doughty's A Novel in a Year is published by Simon & SchusterCreative writingLiterary criticismLouise Doughtyguardian.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

Martin Amis: over-60 and under-appreciated

He may feel like an uncool grandfather, but Martin Amis has lost none of his verbal firepower. His latest novel, Lionel Asbo, takes aim at celebrity-obsessed England

Review: Edward O. Wilson tackles 'The Social Conquest of Earth'

The scientist dissects the origins of the human condition in his latest work.The Social Conquest of Earth

World of Katie Piper, charity campaigner

The author of Things Get Better talks to Jessica Salter about her childhood ambitions, religion and her charity to support other burns survivors.

Lady Mary Montagu

May 26: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was born (or perhaps baptized) on this day in 1689. Montagu's adventurous life, independent spirit and vigorous writing attracted attention during her day, and she has a lasting place in medical history through her contribution to the eradication of smallpox.

“Black Box”

1 People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting. Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness. The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible. When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes. 2 Some powerful men actually call their beauties “Beauty.” Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties. If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you’ve gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind. Kindness feels good, even when it’s based on a false notion of your identity and purpose. 3 Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France. Sunlight on bare skin can be as nourishing as food. Even a powerful man will be briefly self-conscious when he first disrobes to his bathing suit. It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks. If you love someone with dark skin, white skin looks drained of something vital. 4 When you know that a person is violent and ruthless, you will see violent ruthlessness in such basic things as his swim stroke. “What are you doing?” from your Designated Mate amid choppy waves after he has followed you into the sea may or may not betray suspicion. Your reply—“Swimming”—may or may not be perceived as sarcasm. “Shall we swim together toward those rocks?” may or may not be a question. “All that way?” will, if spoken correctly, sound ingenuous. “We’ll have privacy there” may sound unexpectedly ominous. 5 A hundred feet of blue-black Mediterranean will allow you ample time to deliver a strong self-lecture. At such moments, it may be useful to explicitly recall your training: “You will be infiltrating the lives of criminals. “You will be in constant danger. “Some of you will not survive, but those who do will be heroes. “A few of you will save lives and even change the course of history. “We ask of you an impossible combination of traits: ironclad scruples and a willingness to violate them; “An abiding love for your country and a willingness to consort with individuals who are working actively to destroy it; “The instincts and intuition of experts, and the blank records and true freshness of ingénues. “You will each perform this service only once, after which you will return to your lives. “We cannot promise that your lives will be exactly the same when you go back to them.” 6 Eagerness and pliability can be expressed even in the way you climb from the sea onto chalky yellow rocks. “You’re a very fast swimmer,” uttered by a man who is still submerged, may not be intended as praise. Giggling is sometimes better than answering. “You are a lovely girl” may be meant straightforwardly. Ditto “I want to fuck you now.” “Well? What do you think about that?” suggests a preference for direct verbal responses over giggling. “I like it” must be uttered with enough gusto to compensate for a lack of declarative color. “You don’t sound sure” indicates insufficient gusto. “I’m not sure” is acceptable only when followed, coyly, with “You’ll have to convince me.” Throwing back your head and closing your eyes allows you to give the appearance of sexual readiness while concealing revulsion. 7 Being alone with a violent and ruthless man, surrounded by water, can make the shore seem very far away. You may feel solidarity, at such a time, with the beauties just visible there in their bright bikinis. You may appreciate, at such a time, why you aren’t being paid for this work. Your voluntary service is the highest form of patriotism. Remind yourself that you aren’t being paid when he climbs out of the water and lumbers toward you. Remind yourself that you aren’t being paid when he leads you behind a boulder and pulls you onto his lap. The Dissociation Technique is like a parachute—you must pull the cord at the correct time. Too soon, and you may hinder your ability to function at a crucial moment; Too late, and you will be lodged too deeply inside the action to wriggle free. You will be tempted to pull the cord when he surrounds you with arms whose bulky strength reminds you, fleetingly, of your husband’s. You will be tempted to pull it when you feel him start to move against you from below. You will be tempted to pull it when his smell envelops you: metallic, like a warm hand clutching pennies. The directive “Relax” suggests that your discomfort is palpable. “No one can see us” suggests that your discomfort has been understood as fear of physical exposure. “Relax, relax,” uttered in rhythmic, throaty tones, suggests that your discomfort is not unwelcome. 8 Begin the Dissociation Technique only when physical violation is imminent. Close your eyes and slowly count backward from ten. With each number, imagine yourself rising out of your body and moving one step farther away from it. By eight, you should be hovering just outside your skin. By five, you should be floating a foot or two above your body, feeling only vague anxiety over what is about to happen to it. By three, you should feel fully detached from your physical self. By two, your body should be able to act and react without your participation. By one, your mind should drift so free that you lose track of what is happening below. White clouds spin and curl. A blue sky is as depthless as the sea. The sound of waves against rocks existed millennia before there were creatures who could hear it. Spurs and gashes of stone narrate a violence that the earth itself has long forgotten. Your mind will rejoin your body when it is safe to do so. 9 Return to your body carefully, as if you were reëntering your home after a hurricane. Resist the impulse to reconstruct what has just happened. Focus instead on gauging your Designated Mate’s reaction to the new intimacy between you. In some men, intimacy will prompt a more callous, indifferent attitude. In others, intimacy may awaken problematic curiosity about you. “Where did you learn to swim like that?,” uttered lazily, while supine, with two fingers in your hair, indicates curiosity. Tell the truth without precision. “I grew up near a lake” is both true and vague. “Where was the lake?” conveys dissatisfaction with your vagueness. “Columbia County, New York” suggests precision while avoiding it. “Manhattan?” betrays unfamiliarity with the geography of New York State. Never contradict your Designated Mate. “Where did you grow up?,” asked of a man who has just asked you the same thing, is known as “mirroring.” Mirror your Designated Mate’s attitudes, interests, desires, and tastes. Your goal is to become part of his atmosphere: a source of comfort and ease. Only then will he drop his guard when you are near. Only then will he have significant conversations within your earshot. Only then will he leave his possessions in a porous and unattended state. Only then can you begin to gather information systematically. 10 “Come. Let’s go back,” uttered brusquely, suggests that your Designated Mate has no more wish to talk about himself than you do. Avoid the temptation to analyze his moods and whims. Salt water has a cleansing effect. 11 You will see knowledge of your new intimacy with your Designated Mate in the eyes of every beauty on shore. “We saved lunch for you” may or may not be an allusion to the reason for your absence. Cold fish is unappealing, even when served in a good lemon sauce. Be friendly to other beauties, but not solicitous. When you are in conversation with a beauty, it is essential that you be perceived as no more or less than she is. Be truthful about every aspect of your life except marriage (if any). If married, say that you and your spouse have divorced, to give an impression of unfettered freedom. “Oh, that’s sad!” suggests that the beauty you’re chatting with would like to marry. 12 If your Designated Mate abruptly veers toward the villa, follow him. Taking his hand and smiling congenially can create a sense of low-key accompaniment. An abstracted smile in return, as if he’d forgotten who you are, may be a sign of pressing concerns. The concerns of your Designated Mate are your concerns. The room assigned to a powerful man will be more lavish than the one you slept in while awaiting his arrival. Never look for hidden cameras: the fact that you’re looking will give you away. Determine whether your Designated Mate seeks physical intimacy; if not, feign the wish for a nap. Your pretense of sleep will allow him to feel that he is alone. Curling up under bedclothes, even those belonging to an enemy subject, may be soothing. You’re more likely to hear his handset vibrate if your eyes are closed. 13 A door sliding open signals his wish to take the call on the balcony. Your Designated Mate’s important conversations will take place outdoors. If you are within earshot of his conversation, record it. Since beauties carry neither pocketbooks nor timepieces, you cannot credibly transport recording devices. A microphone has been implanted just beyond the first turn of your right ear canal. Activate the microphone by pressing the triangle of cartilage across your ear opening. You will hear a faint whine as recording begins. In extreme quiet, or to a person whose head is adjacent to yours, this whine may be audible. Should the whine be detected, swat your ear as if to deflect a mosquito, hitting the on/off cartilage to deactivate the mike. You need not identify or comprehend the language your subject is using. Follow @NYerFiction to read more of “Black Box,” which will appear in ten nightly installments, from 8 to 9 P.M. E.T. If you miss it on Twitter, you’ll find each day’s installment collated here on Page-Turner. Illustration by Brendan Monroe.

Capturing New York in Scraps of Paper

A Big Apple-based artist duo get ready for their first major European survey, in Luxembourg.

For Healthy Eating, Bitter Is Better

A food developer urges resisting sweet lures and braving taste shocks, new cuisines and despised dishes.

Why We Lie

We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity, writes Dan Ariely.

The Internet's Longest Tubes

If the Internet is a global phenomenon, it's because there are tubes at the bottom of the ocean. A look at the undersea cables that connect us.

Graphic Books Best Sellers: A Teenager's Obsessions

Shuzo Oshimi's "The Flowers of Evil" enters the manga best-seller list at No. 3.

The Perils of Staying Inside

Young children are increasingly shunning the country, even as scientists outline the mental benefits of spending time in natural settings, writes Jonah Lehrer.

Twitter is a clunky way of delivering fiction

Jennifer Egan's Black Box is being published in 140-character bursts over 10 days. If, unlike me, you're staying up till 1am to read it, please let me know what you thinkProof, if proof were needed, that stories really aren't what they used to be. Yesterday evening, the New Yorker began what is, for them, a novel experiment: tweeting Jennifer Egan's latest story, Black Box, in hourly instalments over 10 days from 8pm to 9pm EST. Egan's certainly not the first author to dip a toe into the waters of Twitterfiction, but when an organ as stately as the New Yorker espouses what has heretofore been the province of the out there and the maverick, what previously looked liked dabbling starts to resemble a plunge.In truth, I'm not yet convinced that Twitter has been positively integrated into the fiction-writer's armoury. When tweeters discuss what's great about their platform, they focus on its immediacy and its interconnectedness; its responsiveness to the wider world, and the quick-fire back-and-forth it fosters between its users. Long-form fiction, served up by Twitter, is neither immediate (in the case of Egan's story it's being fed out over a 10-day period, with 23-hour gaps) nor part of a conversation. I can see how Twitter is a perfect fit for genuine flash fiction, where the form (140-character bursts) meshes wholly with the function (epigrammatism), but the problem with a longer story is that the medium isn't integral to the work itself, and ends up as nothing more than a quirky/clunky method of delivery. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to read Egan's story in its entirety, when it appears? There's some hopeful speculation over at Wired magazine that the New Yorker's wheeze might herald the return of serialised fiction, but frankly I don't buy that either: the magazine's planning to publish Black Box in full as part of its SF edition on Monday (at around the halfway-point of the Twitter serialisation), which kind of blows that argument out of the water. So I'm left unsure as to what, precisely, the Twitter drip-feed is going to add to the experience.Having said all that, I imagine if anyone can convince me, it's probably Egan; she is, after all, no stranger to the fun you can have with format. Her Pulitzer prizewinning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad shuffled together 13 semi-discrete chapters ranging in dimension from a celebrity interview to a Powerpoint presentation: sounded gimmicky as all hell in the press release; worked beautifully in the flesh. And this latest experiment is clearly something she's serious about – she's taken "a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material". Explaining her rationale on the New Yorker blog, she says:"I'd been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialisation on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it's a rich one – because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and 40 characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea "Unfortunately, in order to see if Egan can make something new and compelling out of this mix, I'd have to stay up until 1am GMT every night for the next week or so, which I should say here and now isn't going to happen: that dedicated I am not. So US readers/nightowls, I'm relying on you to tell me: does it work? And everyone else: what do you think of the notion? Is there anything in it, or are we guilty of trying to fit a quart into a pint pot?Jennifer EganFictionTwitterSarah Crownguardian.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

John Waters Tries Some Desperate Living on a Cross-Country Hitchhiking Odyssey

John Waters, the director of "Hairspray," "Polyester" and "Pink Flamingos," recounts his hitchhiking experiences from a recent road trip as he collected material for a book he plans to call "Carsick."

Twitter celebrates Towel Day

These froods really know where their towels are Happy Towel Day! #hitchhikersguidetothegalaxy #douglasadams #towelday twitter.com/HanRobinson92/…— Hannah Robinson (@HanRobinson92) May 25, 2012Today is #TowelDay in memory of the genius Douglas Adams he gave me this one.yfrog.com/oe431ekj— Wincey Willis (@WinceyWillis1) May 25, 2012Morgen das #Handtuch nicht vergessen. #Towelday #42towel-day.com/de/ twitter.com/rueetschli/sta…— Michael Rueetschli (@rueetschli) May 24, 2012Celebrating #TowelDay 2012. Remembering Mr. Adams :) twitter.com/chatteNoir88/s…— Susana Ortiz (@chatteNoir88) May 25, 2012Sehr praktisch auch als Kaffeewärmer. #adams #TowelDay twitter.com/Mezkalero/stat…— Thomas Frank (@Mezkalero) May 25, 2012Apparently, it's #towelday - Marc, our resident "hoopy frood" proudly displays his and wonders why he's single. yfrog.com/gyanfjjj— Emcy Garden Centre (@emcy_norfolk) May 25, 2012He's learning to use the computer. #towelday twitter.com/gretzki/status…— Jernej Gračner (@gretzki) May 25, 2012Don't panic and #towelday twitter.com/giannakarenina…— Gianna Karenina (@giannakarenina) May 25, 2012Douglas Adamsguardian.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

Canada by Richard Ford - review

A skilful novel that catches the loneliness of American life"Children know normal better than anyone," says Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford's luminous and utterly forlorn new novel, and certainly Dell when he was a child knew far better than most what a normal life, especially a normal American life, is likely to turn out to be. The opening sentences of the book, which are bound to go straight into the collective literary memory, tell us what he, and we, are in for: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."The year is 1960, and the Parsons family – father Bev, mother Neeva, and 15-year-old Dell and his twin sister, Berner – are settled, just about, in the city of Great Falls, Montana, having moved there four years previously. Bev, a good ol' boy from Alabama, had been an air force bombardier who saw action in the Philippines and Osaka, "where they rained down destruction on the earth". Having left the service, he works as a car salesman and then gets involved in a beef-smuggling racket with a local band of Indians. Neeva, short for Geneva, "a tiny, intense, bespectacled woman with unruly brown hair, vestiges of which ran down her jawline", is Jewish, and has literary pretensions, or longings, at least. She and Bev are an archetypical American married couple of the time, who just happen to become bank robbers."While from a distance," Dell writes, "it may seem that our parents were merely not made for one another, it was more true that when our mother married our father, it betokened a loss, and her life changed forever – and not in a good way – as she surely must've believed." At a certain level, and although Dell specifically denies it, Canada is a study of that sense of loss, which was, and is, pervasive in American life – consider today's Tea Party movement and its members' plaintive wish to "take back" the country from the mysterious forces that somehow stole it from them. The Parsons, man and wife, are not particularly unhappy together, just discontent and uncertain, so that Dell can honestly say that to him and his sister "life in our house seemed normal". Normal: there is that word again.Dell writes of his father that when he came back from the war in 1945 "he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecified gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately misunderstanding the world he'd returned home to and having that misunderstanding become his life."The portraits of Bev and Neeva are masterly. These are perfectly ordinary people who get dragged down by the force of that "great, unspecified gravity" and, still gamely in pursuit of "normality", turn to desperate measures to solve the difficulties of their lives. Inevitably, the beef-smuggling scheme goes wrong, the Indians threaten serious violence, until Bev and Neeva can see no way out of their predicament other than to rob a bank and use the proceeds to pay off their ill-gotten debts. That plan also goes awry, of course, and one day the police arrive and the couple are put in handcuffs and taken away, with no immediate arrangements in place for the care of the twins.The chapters devoted to the arrest of the parents and how the children cope with the calamity form the beating heart of the book. What makes these pages so powerful is the unrelenting control that Ford exerts over the style and pace of the writing. "You'd think," Dell observes, "that to watch your parents be handcuffed, called bank robbers to their faces and driven away to jail, and for you to be left behind might make you lose your mind. It might make you run the rooms of your house in a frenzy and wail and abandon yourself to despair, and for nothing to be right again. And for someone that might be true. But you don't know how you'll act in such a situation until it happens. I can tell you most of that is not what took place, though of course life was changed forever."It took this reader a little time to become accustomed to the measured, downbeat tone of Canada. In the superb trilogy of novels centred on the character of Frank Bascombe – The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land – Ford developed an idiosyncratically playful, slyly dandified voice that owed as much to the great European stylists as it did to Emerson and Twain. In this new book, he writes with deliberate flatness, eschewing stylistic flourishes – except when describing North American landscapes – so that Dell speaks in the cadences of a permanently damaged spirit. Listening to him, sentence by careful sentence, is like watching a car-crash survivor making his way along a hospital corridor, step by careful step. His voice, at once muffled and clear, is remarkably resonant, and devastating in its directness, as when he almost casually describes how he and Berner engage in a brief bout of consolatory incest, or when he remarks of his father, "In truth, we were never close, although I loved him as if we were."In the middle, the book divides abruptly, and at first it seems that there are two novels here that have been spliced into one. This is a feat of great technical daring, which Ford just about pulls off. As part two opens – "Life-changing events often don't seem what they are" – Bev and Neeva are in jail awaiting trial, Berner has walked off into the wide American afternoon, and Dell is being driven by a friend of his mother's, Mildred Remlinger, across the border to Canada, where he will be left in the care, if that is the word, of Mildred's brother Arthur, who owns a run-down hotel in Fort Royal, a dingy town outside Saskatchewan. Before he encounters Arthur, however, Dell finds himself left to the untender mercies of Arthur's henchman Charley Quarters.This pair are extraordinary creations, at once enigmatic and vividly alive on the page. Arthur, handsome, finely dressed, urbane, is a man with a past who knows that "bad things were coming to him". "Absence," Dell tells us, "was his companion in life," and he needs Dell to be for him a "special son" who will "do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences". In contrast to his boss, Charley Quarters is a feral creature, a hunter who shoots anything that moves, dyes his hair and on occasion wears lipstick.Here we seem to be in the territory of Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy, or on its borders, at least. However, the inevitable violence when it comes is presented in the same low-key manner that is maintained throughout the book. "I remember very well how fast the shooting and the killing took place. There were no dramatics to it, as in movies. It happened at once – almost as if it didn't happen. Only then someone's dead." These violent acts are of far less moment to Dell than the struggle he must engage in to hold himself apart from the mayhem and not allow his spirit to be damaged by it. Here, once again, we hear the enduring refrain: "Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself." But what, by now, would constitute normal life?Canada is a superlatively good book, richly imagined and beautifully fashioned. Although it is too early to do so, one is tempted to acclaim it a masterpiece. It catches movingly the grinding loneliness at the heart of American life – of life anywhere. As the narrative makes its measured progress, the sadness steadily accumulates, a weightless silt that gets under the eyelids. The final encounter at the close of the book between Dell and Berner is one of the most tenderly drawn scenes in modern literature, and could only have been written by a writer of Richard Ford's empathy, insight and technical mastery.• John Banville's Ancient Light will be published in July by Viking.FictionRichard FordJohn Banvilleguardian.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 Secret Olympian by Anon – review

Discover the real reason why Sydney ran out of condomsSecret in the title and Anon as the author is always an irresistible proposition. I get as many people asking me if I have the inside track on the identity of the Secret Footballer as I do about any of the Guardian's other activities. For the record I don't, and I'd like to know just as much as everyone else.In much the same way, I spent far too much of the first half of The Secret Olympian trying to work out exactly who the Olympian is. He is definitely a he: his male team mates and his girlfriend get frequent mentions. He also competed at the Athens Olympics in 2004 and it sounds as if he were a rower. That's as far as I got. Partly because I didn't actually know the name of any rower at Athens other than Matthew Pinsent, but mainly because I realised my attention had been diverted away from a good read into the irrelevant marketing sideshow of keep the punters guessing.This Secret Olympian must be cripplingly shy to insist on anonymity. There are no sordid revelations of post-event mass orgies; no exposes of British Olympic officials on the make, agents taking bungs or races being thrown; no confessions of drug-taking on an industrial scale throughout the British Olympic team. Just about the most scandalous things that happen to Anon is that he marches out of step at the opening ceremony and suffers a small pang of envy watching several blondes and brunettes throwing themselves at a fellow competitor in a night club, before going off to watch the marathon with his girlfriend. Even his girlfriend might have got over that misdemeanour eight years down the line.What Anon does extremely well though – with the assistance of other, less private Olympians, including the hockey player Steve Batchelor and fencer Nick Bell – is to give you an insight into the life and mindset of a professional athlete. With the London Olympics just a couple of months away, the media are already constructing the narratives of their stars in waiting; the plucky, down-to-earth Brits, the triumphs over adversity, the poster men and women. Anon shows us something more real: the myths, absurdity, frailty and futility that are the constant companions of the all-or-nothing, four-yearly bid for sporting immortality that will be decided in a matter of minutes – if not seconds – on a fixed date, at a fixed time, in front of a TV audience of billions.First the myths. That every Olympic athlete excelled at sport at school. Not true; many of them were fairly rubbish at the traditional sports and took up their chosen sport as an escape from failure and mockery. Anon was hopeless at football and rugby, always the last person to be picked for the school side: Nick Bell took up fencing as a soft option to rugby. It was chance that they both happened to end up taking part in a sport at which they were any good. The transition from uselessness to excellence came as much as a surprise to them as it did to anyone else. Even then they didn't have the dreams of glory that are supposed to be etched on to the heart of every 12-year-old future Olympian. Neither imagined themselves as potential super heroes; rather the realisation they might be capable of competing at a world level grew slowly as their performances improved.The absurdity and frailty isn't to be found so much in the precisely measured training and nutrition regimes or the obsessive levels of detail applied to something so trivial and transitory, it's in the mind-games the athletes have to play to keep themselves going when they know that one injury niggle or one sore throat can turn four years of preparation into a waste of time. Small wonder that relief is often the overriding emotion for successful Olympians: the relief of making it into the British team, the relief of just getting to the start line and the relief of not having screwed up. Compared with this, the joy of winning comes a distant second.And then there's the futility. The popular image of the Olympic village is of an ongoing party of the world's finest physical specimens, a party that gets bigger and noisier as more and more athletes finish their competitions and start to go wild. The parties do happen, but Anon makes them feel like rather soulless, empty affairs – a few days' time out where nothing feels very real, where winners and losers alike try to avoid thinking about what happens next. "Do I put myself up for another four years of self-denial or retire? And if I retire, what do I do?" Even the sex isn't all it's cracked up to be. The papers were full of how the condom machines ran out of stock in the Sydney Olympic village. Anon points out it wasn't because the athletes were all shagging one another; it was because the condoms were free and athletes helped themselves, hoping to flog them as souvenirs when they got home.At least this year's British Olympians will be spared the usual class divide of the flight home in which gold medallists get a first-class upgrade while the also-rans are crammed into steerage. But they will all still be expected to provide the uplifting narratives the public expect from them, regardless of what they really feel. Their image and their funding depend on it.So come July, should you find yourself watching a Brit step on to a victory podium and wishing it was you, you might want to ask yourself whether – even if you had the talent – you had the necessary psychological resources. Or the self-delusion. Because, come the winter, long after the Olympics have finished and the rest of us have gone back to watching football, there's going to be a gold-medallist somewhere wondering why the phone has stopped ringing, why the media appearances have dried up, why they are getting up for another 6am training session in the freezing cold and whether it is all really worth it.Sport and leisureSocietyOlympics & the mediaJohn Craceguardian.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

San Francisco literary figure Kathi Kamen Goldmark has died

Kathi Kamen Goldmark, a beloved figure in the San Francisco literary scene, died Thursday, her husband Sam Barry announced on her Facebook page. Her son Tony Goldmark added that his mother had succumbed to cancer. Kathi Kamen Goldmark, author of the novel "And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You," was a founding member of the author rock band the Rock Bottom Remainders, highlighted above at a show with Steve Martin at UCLA's Royce Hall. Goldmark's Facebook page soon began filling with heartfelt memorials from friends and fellow authors. Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea: "Kathi--goodbye for now. You changed my life, but so many of us could say that. So sad, so terribly sad. But you were about the joy and the laughter and the love. Give me a minute, honey. I'll get there. RIP." Oscar Villalon, editor of the magazine Zyzzyva: "Kathi Kamen Goldmark was a great person, one of the best I've ever met. For all of us who had the pleasure of knowing her -- and there are many who did, because she was such a warm woman -- we mourn her death." Janet Fitch: "What sad news that Kathi has passed. What a bright spirit. What a tactful critic. She brought the party with her." Andy Ross: "As a former roadie for The RBR, I'll miss you and think good thoughts. Thanks for making our lives richer and happier." Kevin Smokler: "San Francisco lost Kathi Kamen Goldmark today, a giant of this town's cultural life. We are better for her having been here, colder and grayer for her passing. I will miss her terribly." Victoria Shoemaker: "Kathi, you gave me some of the brightest moments I've had in all of my bookselling, publicity, agent years. Your grace, immense talent, generosity, and wicked humor made all of us fall in love with you. Save room in your next band for us. I will miss you and love you always." Author Julie Klam: "I am so so sad and so so sorry to hear we lost such a wonderful woman. RIP, Kathi. xxx" RELATED: Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain has died Barney Rosset: 'Most important' U.S. publisher of the 20th century -- Carolyn Kellogg Photo: The Rock Bottom Remainders -- Dave Barry, Roger McGuinn, Steve Martin, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Ridley Pearson -- at UCLA's Royce Hall in 2003. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

Tales of the Night – review

Michel Ocelot uses the darkening properties of digital 3D to make his animated silhouetted characters come alive and enact sad, strange and funky storiesFrance's Michel Ocelot made a striking case for the revival of traditional animation techniques with his Kirikou films and Azur & Asmar. His latest is a technological leap of sorts, using the darkening properties of digital 3D to make its silhouetted characters – an old man and two youngsters, enacting global legends on an abandoned cinema stage – pop out even further from vividly shaded backgrounds. The tales, sad, strange and funky, are a riot of wandering accents, nipples, morals and monsters, underpinned by a love of storytelling and pretty things, whether melancholy princesses or illustrations ripped from art history books. The pick-and-mix approach is limiting, but there's no denying these are gorgeous amuse-bouches, likely to be devoured by older, more discerning children and dyed-in-the-wool stoners alike.Rating: 3/5AnimationArtMike McCahillguardian.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

John Scalzi's Star Trek Spoof: Even Cleverer and More Moving Than You Expect [Book Review]

The love of Star Trek and other classic space operas is built on compromise, and a certain amount of irony. So many tropes in these shows are stylized to the point of unreality, and things happen to punch up the story, rather than for any real reason. Especially the deaths of "redshirts," or random extras. More »

Human Evolution Isn't What It Used to Be

Has human evolution stopped? Matt Ridley's answer.

Love of Pencils, Freely Expressed

I got a peek inside David Rees’s pencil-sharpening kit last week at his appearance in Williamsburg, sponsored by the bookstore Word, at Public Assembly. It was the last stop on his book tour (“How to Sharpen Pencils” was reviewed on Page-Turner recently by Mark O’Connell), and for the occasion he was joined onstage by John Hodgman, who wrote the foreword for Rees’s book, and who read a hilarious piece about wine from his new collection, “That Is All” (“One kind of wine is … RED WINE”), and by Jonathan Coulton, who, at Rees’s request, sang melancholy songs from his new album, “Artificial Heart.” One of the things Rees keeps in his kit, besides his sharpeners, rags, sandpaper, vinyl tubing, and replacement blades, is plastic bags, for collecting pencil shavings. It was this insight, Rees explained—that the shavings belong to the client and should be returned to the client along with the hand-sharpened pencil—that made him realize that he could make a go of it as an artisanal pencil sharpener. To illustrate, he said that he had been so excited about that night’s show that he’d gotten a haircut, and when the barber began to sweep up the clippings on the floor, he insisted that those clippings belonged to him. He produced from his kit a large baggie of gray-brown locks. This reminded me that I once asked my hairdresser if he would bag up the hair on the floor for me as a surprise for a friend who was using human hair to keep deer out of the garden. (Urinating along the perimeter of the garden daily is also effective.) Before I return from this Martha Stewart-like digression, I should add that Rees told the audience that he once worked for Martha Stewart, as a fact-checker at Martha Stewart Weddings, and he gives Martha Stewart latent credit for inspiring his venture into artisanal pencil-sharpening. He calculates that his pencil-sharpening business was the second-to-last to cash in on the market for all things artisanal: next came the Dunkin’ Donuts artisanal bagel, and then “the door came down.” Rees went on to develop the analogy of the human body to a pencil. The head, of course, is the point. The hair, like graphite, has to be trimmed to stay sharp. The body is the shaft—in his narrow black craftsman’s apron, Rees could be described as pencil thin—and the feet and shoes are erasers, as evidenced by the fact that soles are often made of rubber and feet are used to back out of a room after making a mistake (he shuffled backward), thereby erasing one’s humanity. I had found a pencil that morning in Tompkins Square Park, where I went to meet my acupuncturist to practice Tai Chi and learn some new upper-body moves. Actually, the acupuncturist found the pencil before I got there and was about to pick it up when he remembered whom he was meeting and left it for me. (He has a deep insight into his patients’ needs.) The pencil had been decapitated—it looked as if a squirrel had mistaken it for some kind of nut and tried to crack it open. I carried it with me on the L train to Brooklyn, along with my new Palomino long-point handheld sharpener, hoping for an opportunity to show it to the master. But first I watched as Rees demonstrated his technique for Celebrity Impression Pencil Sharpening (Robert De Niro and Sean Connery are favorites) and took suggestions from the audience for pencil-sharpening improv, a new direction for him. You’re at a funeral and you’re broke: “I’ve got an idea—I’ll sharpen pencils for a living!” It’s Hanukkah and euphoria is in the air: “Somehow the conversation turns to … pencil sharpening!” There was also a Q. & A., during which we learned that there are two styles of classifying pencil lead: the American system, which uses numbers (1, 2, 3), and which was developed by the father of Henry David Thoreau, and the European system, which uses letters (HB = Hard Black). Then Rees took up a position at a table at the back of the room and I got in line to have my book signed. My copy of “How to Sharpen Pencils” is already showing signs of wear. “You’re using a Blackwing!” I said when I got to the head of the line. Because Rees specializes in the artisanal sharpening of No. 2 pencils, I was surprised to see on the table in front of him two Blackwings, reduced by about two-fifths of their length, along with a candy-apple-red Carl Angel-5, a Japanese mechanical sharpener, with little pincers, like rabbit ears, above the hole, for stabilizing the pencil. “Its soft, so it’s nice for signing,” he replied. I showed him the pencil I had acquired that morning in Tompkins Square Park. “Is that a Papermate?” he said. “It is,” I replied. I got out my Palomino long-point handheld. “I have one of those,” he said, and lifted from his kit a polished wooden box with his name etched on the lid—DAVID REES—and pointed out the Palomino long-point in its customized compartment. I was dazzled: he keeps his collection in what looks like a jewelry box for socket wrenches. He couldn’t resist unpacking the El Casco, a Basque pencil sharpener that may be the most expensive pencil sharpener on the market (“It was a gift”), and demonstrating its suction base. I asked Rees if he thought the Papermate—a Classic TM/MC HB2—could be rehabilitated. I confess that I had secretly been hoping he would take an interest in my case and perhaps provide his services pro bono. But he saw through me. His face took on a remote look, and he said coolly, “We can talk about it,” from which I inferred that I would have to make an appointment and bring in the Papermate during office hours. But then I won him back by thanking him for what he has done. By bringing pencil sharpening out in the open, David Rees has lifted a taboo: he has given us all permission to express our love of pencils, to abandon ourselves to pencilophilia—a love that till now has always been slightly embarrassed to speak its name. “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” he said. Written originally on hotel stationery from the Eldorado, in Reno, Nevada, with a Palomino Blackwing, May 23, 2012. Photograph of David Rees by Meredith Heuer.

The Mormon Constitution

Garry Wills Howard Chandler Christy: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, 1940 Some years ago I had a brilliant student in several of my classes—the only student, in fact, I ever recommended for a Rhodes Scholarship. In the first class he took, we were discussing the Declaration of Independence, and I argued that the Continental Congress was wise in deleting Jefferson’s attack on the King of England for keeping open the slave trade. Jefferson’s original draft claimed that the King did this against colonial efforts to restrain the trade. I pointed out that some colonies (South Carolina and Georgia, for instance) were for keeping that traffic open. Virginia, it is true, had tried to put limits on the importation of slaves—but mainly because the state was suffering a surplus of them, with consequent reduction in their value. Congress was therefore eliminating an inconsistent and hypocritical attack on the King, one that falsely suggested he was foisting slavery on a people opposed to it. My student defended Jefferson’s original draft, in ways that puzzled me. But then he came to me during my office hours and stated more clearly his problem. He said that, like his fellow Mormons, he held that the Declaration of Independence is divinely inspired—in that sense, it is part of Mormon Scripture. I asked whether the inspiration was for the original drafting or for the official publication of the Declaration. He was not sure at first; but since he said that the US Constitution was also inspired, it was hard to see how divine dictation could apply to all preliminary drafts of that work, as well as to all the state ratification procedures for enacting it. So we agreed that inspiration must be only for the final document in both cases. The young man was learning Portuguese, to do his missionary year in Brazil, for which he left before graduation. When, after a year, he came back to complete his studies, he took more of my classes and we had further discussions. I wondered if amendments to the Constitution were also inspired. He was a little uncertain, but I think he decided they were not. That poses problems I have often thought of since. For instance, the Constitution rated a slave as only three-fifths of a person. Did that have anything to do with Mormon reluctance, in the past, to admit blacks to full equality? Mormons have since recognized black rights, but does that violate their belief in the divine Constitution that originally limited them? Does the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was an addition to the originally inspired document mean that God first limited black rights in a directly inspired document, and only restored them in a non-inspired amendment? This was not a criticism of my student’s faith, and all our dealings were cordial; but I was left wondering about the theory of inspiration as a legal tool of interpretation. Will a Mormon president treat constitutional clauses as divine injunctions? If so, what grounds will we non-Mormons have for interpreting with secular arguments what is presented as God’s will? For that matter, what right will the Supreme Court have to treat the document as anything less than a divinely inspired covenant? Does the First Amendment actually separate church and state, or does that not count, since it is merely an amendment, not the original word of God? But why, then, did a mere amendment change the first inspiration that made slaves less than full persons? Accepting the Bible, in either its Jewish or its Christian forms, raises problems enough when it is treated as divinely inspired. Do we need further entanglement in a fundamentalism of the law?

Which out-of-print book would you like to see republished?

Hesperus Press are asking the public to nominate a novel for republication, with the winner's pitch used as an introduction. Post your suggestions belowHesperus Press is a small independent publisher, quietly devoted to shining a light into the shadows cast by the literary canon to rescue those titles that have – often through no fault of their own – simply disappeared from sight. Thus have some of the more obscure works of writers such as Jane Austen (Sanditon), Henry Miller (Aller Retour New York), George Bernard Shaw (The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; On War) and Ernest Hemingway (On Paris) been dragged out of the darkness, dusted off and placed back into the public domain where they belong (complete with new introductions from the likes of Colm Tóibín, Matthew Sweet, Fay Weldon and Mark Rylance).Now, to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Hesperus is asking members of the public to nominate a work of literature currently out of print and explain why it's worthy of republication. The winner will see their chosen work published this September with their pitch used as an introduction.And guess what? Hesperus has agreed to accept entries posted on this site. So please post your own choice in the comments below. If you don't fancy entering the competition, that's fine: feel free to alert us all to the out-of-print books we should look out for anyway. If you intend to enter the completion, however, bear in mind you'll have to keep the word count below 500. If you'd prefer to keep your cards close to your chest and submit in private, then email your suggestion to info@hesperuspress.com. Full competition details can be found here.(As an aside, and knowing Hesperus will be reading this piece, I wonder if they can do anything about getting John E Woods's translations of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain made available in paperback? As lovely as the Everyman hardback editions are – and they are – it seems a shame that most people will be coming to Mann's two masterpieces via the paperback editions with their inferior translations by HT Lowe-Porter. Here endeth the aside.)So then, gamely flinging my own hat into the ring, I nominate William Trevor's 1966 novel The Love Department, which was last in print as a single title in the 80s and last seen in 2001, along with The Old Boys and The Boarding House, as part of the collection Three Early Novels – now also out of print.I first stumbled across The Love Department a few years back in a secondhand book shop. I had yet to read any Trevor, and bought the book on a whim, Trevor being one of those authors whose name I recognised as someone I probably should read, without actually knowing anything about their work. Taken home, the book was promptly flipped through, shelved and forgotten. A few months later, while convalescing from an operation that had left me temporarily immobilised, and after trying and failing to read a number of works by my favourite authors, I found the simple prose and gentle (albeit black) humour of The Love Department was all my shattered concentration could deal with.Set in the suburbs of south-west London (quirkily stylised a la Muriel Spark or a more upbeat Patrick Hamilton), the novel concerns one Edward Blakeston-Smith, a naive young man who, after fleeing some kind of monastery-cum-mental institution, is employed by an agony aunt to track down a serial seducer by the curious name of Septimus Tuam. (Which looks as if it should be an anagram, but, as far as I am able to tell, isn't.) Tuam is a kind of blandly satanic sociopath (think an introverted Mr Sloane) who is able to charm middle-aged married women into falling in love with him. Perhaps charm is too strong a word: the women, starved of romance from their husbands, seem ripe for seduction. The novel picks repeatedly at the social and private pretentions of the characters, revealing the fear of failure and loneliness that drives them from one pathos-drenched scene to the next.Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrative voice maintains an ironic distance, slipping playfully among a fairly large cast of characters. This constantly shifting perspective gives the book an unsettling, almost dreamlike quality, which at the time I attributed to lack of sleep and too many painkillers. Rereading it two years on, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find these qualities still very much evident. Admittedly, The Love Department is not Trevor's finest work. The characterisation is slight, the structure a little haphazard, and it's perhaps 50 pages too long. But the story is engaging, the prose precise, the characters amusing, and the overall effect one of eccentric charm. As one of the characters muses at one point, "the streets of London are full of strangeness". The Love Department is a fine example of it.William TrevorPublishingFictionWayne Gooderhamguardian.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

Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”

This evening, the New Yorker Fiction Department (@NYerFiction) will start tweeting Jennifer Egan’s new story “Black Box,” which will appear in its entirety in the Science Fiction Issue, out on Monday. We asked Egan what inspired her to structure her story in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or fewer. Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself. Another long-term goal of mine has been to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!,” in which the three pigs move through picture books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I could do something analogous with a character from my novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: create a cartoon version of that person, for example—or, in this case, a spy-thriller version. I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.” Follow @NYerFiction for “Black Box,” which will appear in ten nightly installments, from 8 to 9 P.M. E.T. If you miss it on Twitter, you’ll find each day’s installment collated here on Page-Turner. Notebook page courtesy Jennifer Egan.

Queen Victoria's Complete Diaries Released Online

Web site is launched to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of another long-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin – review

The London tube system deserves this hymn of praiseI don't know if I'm going to be able to convey – surely the apposite word – the full extent of my love of the London tube. It's a love that exists prior to any sense I have of an estrangement from the world – I suppose if I were inclined to all that Freudian malarkey I'd say that the tube is not "other" to me, for it – or possibly she – is no mere transitional object, but my very internalisation of Mother London herself. Let me expand: I grew up about 10 minutes' walk from East Finchley tube station, and I cannot properly remember a time when I didn't travel by tube. That said, the first regular journeys I clearly remember were when, aged about eight, I began going to school in Hampstead. My older brother and I would travel the five stops to Camden Town, change to the northbound Edgware platform, and go the further three stops to Hampstead. A more direct route was to take the 102 bus to Golders Green, but while I liked the 102 well enough – and especially the breakneck plunge from the back platform as the Routemaster caromed on to the station forecourt – I loved the tube.I loved its foody-dusty-breathy warmth – a zephyr that seemed to be expiring from the bowels of the earth once the trains had sunk below Highgate Hill. I loved the frowsty look of my fellow-passengers, their faces creased by the ivory light, their clothes lying dishevelled on the dark red moquette. I loved the acrid stench of the smoking carriages – soon enough I was puffing along in them – and I adored the huge and creaky old lifts that winched you up the deep shaft at Hampstead, and which, with their brassy levers, wooden-slatted benches and concertina doors, were undoubtedly steampunk avant la letter. (Although, actually when you come to think of it, London's entire multi-layered infrastructure is, was, and always will be steampunk to the core. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time in Leicester Square, then descending into the tube to be confronted by the same monstrous spaghetti of flaking ducts, and a convoluted mechanism made out of beige metal miniature Venetian blinds that had a small Bakelite sign attached to it which read "SPEAK HERE". I collapsed, helpless with laughter.)Actually, my brother and I also adored the new lifts just then being introduced at Hampstead, because if you jumped up as they plunged down you experienced a split-second sensation of weightlessness, a spatial oddity perfectly in tune with 1969. As I grew older I explored the tube further. I can never claim to be like those eccentrics Andrew Martin writes about in this book, who strive to break the world record for the fastest trip to every one of the 270-odd (some very odd) stations on the network – indeed, I doubt I've got on or off at a fraction of these – but the tube remains coextensive with my own marrow, that's how much I feel it bred in my bones. With the run of the city, I would tube down to the museums in South Kensington – in the 1970s there was an exhibit there that consisted of a coal mine sunk several levels down into its basement. It was experiences of this form: rising from deep below ground to walk through a foot tunnel, rise up momentarily to the surface, and then descend once more into the bowels of a large public building that turned the urban world comfortably upside down.In winter, when there were still thick fogs in London, you could easily get the sensation that the "outside" as usually understood, didn't really exist at all – that all there was were these lighted burrows connected by long tunnels through which we, the rat people, scuttled. Martin writes of the 60s and 70s as decades when the London tube was unloved – rundown through lack of investment, and out-glamorised by road transport. But for me this wasn't the case – indeed, the very epidermal tattiness of poster peeling away from poster peeling away from poster was its glamour. Besides, the salient moments in my life often occurred in or around the tube: I was violently assaulted one midnight in Chalk Farm tube station only minutes after seeing the Jam play "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight"; I missed out being immolated by the 1987 King's Cross fire by a matter of a half hour or so, as I walked up that fateful escalator en route to a karate class on Judd Street (and yes, I probably was smoking); I've been drunk on the tube more times than I care to think about; had sexual congress; and, on one hopefully never-to-be-repeated occasion, actually fainted on the platform at Camden Town during the rush hour, where I lay for about 10 minutes during which people stomped on and about me, before a kindly woman – a retired nurse, natch – tenderly got me on to a bench and pressed a boiled sweet between my lips. "They probably thought you were on drugs," she said, to explain away the indifference of the rather more acute masses.What I'm trying to say is that the stylised statue of a Native American with his bow, who sits incongruously atop the softly Modernist prow of East Finchley Tube Station, was loosing me into the metropolis, and it's against this highly emotive background that I read Underground, Overground: it's a comprehensive book (Martin edited the tube talk column in the Evening Standard for some years), it's an amiable one, it's reasonably well-written, and it's by a man who clearly loves the tube. But, with the best will in the world, he simply ain't a native Londoner, so it isn't the smother love that we feel. True, as a teenager he would borrow his father's free pass (his dad worked for British Rail), and come down from York to ride the system, but for him it must always be something outside of himself, not the uncoiling of his own electrified bowels.The story Martin tells, from the early cut-and-cover sections of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s, through to the colossal deep-bore tunnelling machines that will hollow out the 17 miles of the new Crossrail beneath the city centre, is, to the tube buff, a familiar one: Charles Pearson, the visionary of underground railways as a public good, is succeeded by others that Martin thinks of as "tube martyrs" – such as Watkin of the Met, the American Yerkes (the Sam Kiley of his day), Greathead of the tunnelling shield and Whitaker Wright of the Bakerloo – all men who died before their visions of the system could be fully realised. Then there are the successful tubesters: Albert Stanley, Frank Pick, Lord Ashfield, and the great designer Harry Beck, who between them really made the modern integrated network that we know today. This grand narrative is well-told by Christian Wolmar in his The Subterranean Railway, and Martin leans on his account, quoting extensively, as he does from Stephen Halliday's equally fine Underground to Everywhere, and from Stephen Smith's brilliantly whimsical Underground London.But where Martin's book comes into its own is on the experiential aspects of tube travel – and this is what justifies its subtitle as a "passenger's history". Whether he is meditating on the vexed question of urinating on the live rail (would you survive?), or the flattering qualities – for women of a certain age – of the aforementioned ivory lights in the 1930s-vintage rolling stock, or uncovering the recording history of that great ambient hit "Mind the Gap", Martin is never less than engaging. He also mounts a spirited – and even to this sceptic, thoroughly convincing – defence of Ken Livingstone's tenure as London transport supremo, which should be required reading by public policy wonks all the way to the top. On balance, if you're a tube neophyte – I mean reading about it, as much as riding it – I would strongly endorse Martin's book as the stop to get on at. On the other hand, if you're an old baby like me, you probably needn't bother, as you've already sucked most of it in down that umbilicus some people call the tube.• Will Self's new novel, Umbrella, will be published by Bloomsbury in August.HistorySocietyLondon UndergroundLondonWill Selfguardian.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 new Penguin English Library is a far cry from its 1963 version

A fair few 'genre' novels, no non-fiction at all, and the mysterious disappearance of the previous No 4 make the new Penguin library a radical updateThe literary canon, supposedly, is a monolithic entity, serenely permanent against the merely voguish and faddish. Looking through the Penguin Press catalogue for July to December, I was struck by their relaunch of the Penguin English Library – which shows just how permeable and fluctuating the canon actually is.The distinctively orange-spined Penguin English Library first appeared in 1963, "planned in all respects to take its place alongside the Penguin Classics" – which then was reserved for work in translation. Its aim was to be "a comprehensive range of the literary masterpieces which have appeared in the English language since the 15th century". As an avid collector of them, I have never quite managed to shake the idea that if a work wasn't in the Penguin English Library (or the Classics, or the Modern Classics, or the American Library) then it probably wasn't much good.There is, of course, a great deal of crossover between the original 1960s list and the 100 titles Penguin will publish this year – the "Great Tradition" of FR Leavis still hangs over the whole endeavour. But the differences are more significant.One of the first in the new series, Bram Stoker's Dracula, wasn't considered for the original at all. It seems to be part of a trend for recognising literary merit in ostensibly "genre" fiction. Stoker is joined by HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Victorian "sensation novelist" Mary Elizabeth Braddon. There is a pronounced bent towards the gothic, with James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Matthew Lewis's The Monk all being honoured as classics. By contrast, the original 1963 list included "Three Gothic Novels" – Frankenstein, The Castle of Otranto and Vathek – bundled together as if they were insufficiently serious to be read on their own.All of the first 100 books in the new Penguin English Library are novels, but the original list was equally open to non-fiction. Nor was it just selections from the great essayists, including William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Johnson. Works such as Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France were deemed works of literature as much as of philosophy or science. The English Library was an empowering phenomenon; with one foot in the old belles-lettres tradition (I still rather hanker for the days when every gentleman's library was considered incomplete without Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic and Stanley's Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church) and the other in the Open University curriculum.The biggest loser in the new series is a book that has never been out of print, and was once almost universally known: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. It was the fourth of the 1963 publications (after Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and Great Expectations) – and it isn't even in the first 100 of the new series. There are far more "difficult" literary texts in the new 100, and given the preponderance of Trollope, it doesn't seem as if there's an allergy to church, rather than religious, literature. I am rather at a loss to explain its omission, although it is noticeable that the new Penguin English Library only begins in the 18th century, and is somewhat scant even in it: no Rasselas, or The Vicar of Wakefield, or any of those novelists like Robert Bage, Ann Radcliffe and Henry Mackenzie who graced the grandfather of this project, Ballantyne's Novelist's Library). Certainly it is odd not to have The Pilgrim's Progress but to have a novel whose title is derived from it – Vanity Fair.Overall, the 2012 English Library so far is less keen on fact, more keen on fantasy. Is this a fair reflection of our contemporary state of letters?PenguinPublishingFictionBram StokerHG WellsArthur Conan DoyleSamuel JohnsonEmily BrontëGeorge EliotCharles DickensStuart Kellyguardian.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

McCullers's "Heroic Moment"

May 24: Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published on this day in 1951. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, putting her in a rank with Faulkner, de Maupassant and D. H. Lawrence, said V. S. Pritchett, for her ability to give regional settings and characters "their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy."

Edith Wharton’s Houses

Edith Wharton knows houses. Her first published book was “The Decoration of Houses,” written with Ogden Codman, Jr., which argued for “house-decoration as a branch of architecture,” and against “the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness.” Wharton and Codman took a reformist stance, suggesting that clients stop treating the interiors and the exteriors of their houses as separate projects and start seeking more simplicity and less ornament. Wharton had an opportunity to play architect and decorator herself in Lenox, Massachusetts, where (with the help of professionals) she built the Mount, a Georgian mansion with a cascade of beautiful gardens. She wrote to her sometime lover Morton Fullerton, “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth… ” Yet “The House of Mirth” is bookended by contrasting visions of domestic architecture. In the first chapter, we visit the lawyer Lawrence Selden’s bachelor apartment with its “shabby leather chairs,” “pleasantly faded Turkey rug,” and shaded balcony, and it seems a personal oasis. In the last, we visit the unmarried heroine Lily Bart’s spare boarding-house home, “where there was no other token of her personality about the room, unless it showed itself in the scrupulous neatness.” Those rooms show the difference between the lot of the single man and the single woman in New York society as vividly as the dialogue. The societal rituals Wharton satirizes and elegizes always have specific sets. In “The Age of Innocence,” she nods to the future development of Manhattan real estate with a sidelong reference to the pioneering spirit of Mrs. Manson Mingott, who “put the crowning touch to her audacities by building a large house of cream-colored stone … in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” Location, architectural style, and decoration make a language—one Wharton could read and write fluently. “The Custom of the Country,” however, is her architectural masterpiece. The novel follows the social progress of Undine Spragg, an American beauty from Midwestern Apex City, whose one desire is to move up. Lily Bart and Newland Archer, the protagonists of Wharton’s better-read “House of Mirth” and “Age of Innocence,” are both society-born insiders. Undine Spragg is an outsider, and her name itself encompasses the warring forces at work in her desire for progress. “Undine” suggests finer things, but is actually an homage to a more mundane invention, a hair-waver put on the market by her phlegmatic father the week she was born; “Spragg” is pure Apex. (Wharton does a similar thing with Ellen Olenska, in “Age of Innocence”; “Ellen” is New York, while “Olenska” forever sets her apart from the Wellands and the Archers.) Undine’s lovers want to see her as divers et ondoyant, but she is really a Spraggy businesswoman. There’s a parallel plot where the husbands and fathers make and lose fortunes through real estate and the stock market, but Wharton seems as uninterested in that kind of commerce as Undine is. Instead, houses become the way we readers chart Undine’s climb, which is entirely accomplished by strategic marriage. With each husband, she changes city, house type, and architectural style, moving from brownstone to château to hôtel particulier. It is Undine’s misreading of those houses (she assumes big house equals money equals freedom) that leads her into each bad marriage, and pushes Wharton’s plot forward. Undine will never be satisfied, as the last lines of the book make clear, but our magazine-bred voyeurism is. The first scene of “Custom of the Country” is set in New York’s fictional Hotel Stentorian, and includes the following description: The Spragg rooms were known as one of the Looey suites, and the drawing room walls, above their wainscoting of highly varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe. In the center of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human use… The rest of the book is Undine’s flight from this damask prison. She doesn’t know why it wrong, just that it is, and she is desperate to know what is right. A box or the stalls? Pigeon-blood stationery or plain? New pearls or old sapphires? Wharton has created a character less visually literate than her readers, so Undine’s errors in décor translation create a consistent sense of foreboding. When she visits her future in-laws for the first time, we know that “the room they sat in after dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness, and its rows of books from floor to ceiling,” is in the best of taste. But Undine doesn’t understand the lack of upgrades: wood fire versus an electric grate, ferns versus orchids, roast meat rather than foreign delicacies in ruffled papers. This means she doesn’t understand the old New York family into which she will shortly marry. And this means domestic tragedy. Wharton underlines the disconnect between Undine and her future husband, Ralph Marvell, by making the sympathy between man and manse explicit. Ralph arrives home in Washington Square and, “mounting his grandfather’s doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he might have looked into a familiar human face.” Old, frugal, human: these are not qualities that Undine respects. Paris beckons, as does a French count with a château in Burgundy. Undine’s first glimpse of this house (so much better than a Greek Revival townhouse!) is magical, even Disney-esque. As she describes it, “It’s the most wonderful house you ever saw: a real castle, with towers, and water all round it, and a funny kind of bridge they pull up. Chelles said he wanted me to see just how they lived at home, and I did; I saw everything: the tapestries that Louis Quinze gave them, and the family portraits, and the chapel, where their own priest says mass, and they sit by themselves in a balcony with crowns all over it.” It’s an embarrassment of riches—Louis Quinze, crowns, a moat—but Undine never considers that this castle, like that red housefront, may come without a cellar full of gold. Even sitting in a balcony with crowns may grow old, month after winter month, when your husband’s mother and assorted elderly, embroidering-loving relatives share that balcony. The “real castle” is transformed by marriage into an “empty house.” Everything in the great empty house smelled of dampness: the stuffing of the chairs, the threadbare folds of the faded curtains, the splendid tapestries, that were fading too, on the walls of the room in which Undine stood… The chatelaines of the castle don’t understand her restlessness or the rootlessness of her little son Paul (who I always think of as the saddest boy in literature), but that quality may well be based in Undine’s first experience of architecture. After a fight with Chelles, Undine realizes, “there was no more hope of shaking his resolve or altering his point of view than there would have been of transporting the deep-rooted masonry of Saint Desert by means of the wheeled supports on which Apex architecture performed its easy transits.” She left Apex long ago, but birth houses have seemed to Undine to be transportable, consumable objects, like her father’s hair-waver. It’s symbolic, in a petty way, that in both Washington Square and at Saint Desert she tries literally to reset the old customs, altering family jewels along a more modish pattern, having a fire in the gallery rather than sitting in her mother-in-law’s room, and worst of all, calling in an appraiser to find out the monetary value of the Louis Quinze. In her last marriage, in the last chapter of the book, Undine seems finally to have it all. The house and the money, the rarities, and the modern conveniences. She’s roused herself to be more than ornamental, helping her new husband assemble the spoils from impoverished ancient European families and install them in a new hotel, one behind “a pair of tall iron gates with gilt ornaments, the marble curve of a semi-circular drive, and bands of spring flowers set in turf.” It is a house on the model of her own beauty, a little too bright, too obvious, her rooms decorated like one of her dresses, “all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps, and the boudoir as big as a drawing room, with pictures he would have liked to know about.” It is suggested (shades of Betty Draper Francis) that she might have become a little bit fat. “He” in the following quotation is Paul Marvell, and this is the first house we see through his eyes, not his mother’s. She still has no perspective, but he’s starting to gain one. In the bedroom, on the brown wall, hung a single picture—the portrait of a boy in gray velvet—that interested Paul most of all. The boy’s hand rested on the head of a big dog, and he looked infinitely noble and charming, and yet (in spite of the dog) so sad and lonely that he too might have come home that very day to a strange house in which none of his old things could be found. Above: photograph of Edith Wharton, circa 1884, courtesy of Granger Collection. Below: room in Wharton home on West Twenty-fifth Street, courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed?

John Paul Stevens The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron Carl De Keyzer/Magnum Photos A Ku Klux Klan rally in Hico, Texas, 1990 In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron discusses a loosely defined category of expression that he addressed in a review of Anthony Lewis’s book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in The New York Review in 2008, and in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard University in 2009. Although his references to Justice Holmes in this book are not exactly flattering—Waldron writes that “at one time or another [Holmes] took both sides on most free speech issues,” and that Holmes’s judgment “that criticizing the military was comparable to shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” is “preposterous”—in her introduction of Waldron at the Holmes Lectures, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow praised Waldron as “one of the two or three greatest legal philosophers of our time.” That high praise also applies to one of Waldron’s former teachers, Ronald Dworkin, who has criticized Waldron’s writing about hate speech. While references to learned debates among such scholars suggest that the average reader might have difficulty understanding the arguments in Waldron’s book, such is not the case.

In the Chloroformed Sanctuary

Tim Parks Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos University scholars marching in Kiel, West Germany, 1965. “Walk around a university campus,” fumed Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage, “and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.” In my last piece in this space I suggested that writers are anxious to present literature as somehow more alive than life itself—a place of great intensity and courageous engagement—perhaps out of concern that the profession they have opted for is actually a space of relative refuge and fearful retreat. But what about those who write about writing, the reviewers and academics? Is Dyer correct that while original literature throbs with life, literary criticism is the work of cloistered drudges who suffocate the very creature that provides them with a living? At least on this score reviewers can be quickly exonerated; it may be miles away from facing and firing bullets, or performing open heart surgery, but reviewing does have an immediate impact on other people’s lives. Panning or praising a novel, the reviewer is aware he is administering pain or pleasure and that quite possibly there will be a reaction, as when Jeanette Winterson turned up on a reviewer’s doorstep to berate him in person for a poor review. One celebrated novelist who felt I had reviewed him unkindly spent an hour making a transatlantic phone-call to my own publisher to complain about my wickedness. A reviewer fearful of the fray would be well advised to find another job. Not so the academic critic. While the reviewer is generally freelance and may hope to increase his or her income through a policy of lively provocation and polemics, the academic, though hardly well off, is more reliably salaried within a solid university institution. Rather than being part of the market with the obvious function of swaying reader’s purchasing choices, these critics treat literature as an object of quasi-scientific research. They’re not obliged to entertain, but then nor is there any question of their findings being used to propose any program of improvement; they needn’t fear the moment when their work is measured against reality. In short, the academic critic’s task is purely one of exegesis and clarification. So it may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with this kind of writing how frequently it resorts to a jargon and manner that guarantees ordinary consumers of literature will be repelled. Here are three typical passages, nothing extreme, the first pulled (at random) from an essay by Paul Davies in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett: From its first words, then, Comment c’est acknowledges the aesthetic of recommencement that Beckett had already developed with such compaction in Texts. Working together, these two projects carry out the wisdom of the pun: ‘commencer’ is ‘comment c’est’. Beginning again, he returns again. Commencing, he quotes. As I argued above, it was the insistence of this insight that had led Beckett in the Texts to the strategic deployment of the gap between texts. These twelve gaps were in their turn yet another seed for How it is. They grew into roughly eight-hundred-and-twenty-five gaps, each of which, as John Pilling has pointed out, enabled a formal re-enactment of the book’s inception. Here, equally at random from the shelves beside my desk, is Amit Chaudhuri writing about Lawrence’s poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers: What is agreed upon generally then is that, to appropriate a term from linguistics, the “signified” of the poem is undefinable, powerful, ineffable, but mysteriously transmissable and even paraphrasable. This “signified” which may be called “otherness” or “life,” lies outside the text, out there in the landscape or object described, while each signifier—bat, snake, eagle, tortoise, fish—makes a connection with the “signified,” thus capturing, conveying or evoking it. Finally, from the realm of translation criticism, this is Lawrence Venuti, in Rethinking Translation, talking about Iginio Tarchetti’s 19th century Italian “adaptations” of stories by Mary Shelley: Yet Shelley’s authorship comes back to worry the ideological standpoint of Tarchetti’s intervention by raising the issue of gender. To be effective as a subversion of bourgeois values which deterritorializes the Italian literary standard, his text must maintain the fiction of his authorship, referring to Shelley’s tale only in the vaguest way (‘imitation’). At the same time, however this fiction suppresses an instance of female authorship so that the theft of Shelley’s literary creation has the patriarchal effect of female disempowerment, of limiting a woman’s social agency. All three of these pieces contain useful, almost “common sense” observations on the texts they are talking about. Yet this common sense is made to seem arduous through the use of unnecessary jargon. There is also a solemnity that combines with the ugliness of style to push the writing towards bathos. I suspect Davies’ metaphor of “twelve gaps” being “a seed” that “grew into roughly eight-hundred-and-twenty-five gaps” would have had Beckett laughing out loud. The mix of intellectual control and creeping tedium goes hand in hand with a focus on the arcane rather than the evident; technique rather than content. Areas where the critic can claim special expertise are stressed, while a book’s part in the writer’s life is played down, as if for fear that any layman could discuss such matters. Academics are naturally attracted to the kind of writer whose flaunted complexity offers scope for that expertise, rather than one taking on his material in a more direct fashion. So Joyce is infinitely preferred to Chesterton (in passing it’s interesting that Borges, himself the object of endless academic criticism, preferred Chesterton to Joyce). What is in it for these critics? They stake out a field in which only a relatively small group of initiates can compete; their writing is safe from public scrutiny, it threatens no one and can do little damage; at the same time they may enjoy the illusion of possessing, encompassing, and even somehow neutralizing the most sparkling and highly regarded creations of the imagination. This is what Dyer so comically hates in Out of Sheer Rage. Here he is opening the Longman Critical Reader to his favorite author, D.H. Lawrence: I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on “Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality” (in the section on “Gender, Sexuality, Feminism”), Daniel J. Schneider on “Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence” (in the section featuring “Post-Structuralist Turns”). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on “Radical Indeterminacy: A Post-Modern Lawrence” and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? But is Dyer really angry? Is he angry for the reasons he says he is? Might it not be that the creative writer, conflicted over issues of fear and courage (Dyer seems terribly eager to demonstrate that his own writing is alive, engaged, and courageous) is actually a little envious of the academic who is perfectly happy to retreat from life into the chloroformed sanctuary of academe and has no pretense at all of being in the front line? Or, alternatively, could it be that the creative writer is delighted to find in the evident dullness of academic criticism a kind of writing in comparison with which his or her own work will inevitably seem vital and exciting? Dyer is wonderfully alive and engaged as he lets rip at the academics, “this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off.” At this point you might begin to think that the secret purpose of dusty, phobic academe is to reassure the insecure “creative” writers of their own liveliness. This “vast graveyard of dust,” as Dyer would have it, is a place you visit to congratulate yourself you’re still up in the sunshine. It is also a very soft target. Nobody need be afraid, attacking academe, that the critics will lash back, or that they could hurt much if they did. Indeed the idea that academic critics ‘kill’ literature tells us more about Dyer’s lively imagery than about the critics’ lethal powers. These men are hardly killers. If there’s an assassin here, it’s the creative writer. At worst the academics will tuck an author to sleep in mothballs. We can enjoy getting a whiff of camphor and feel superior. For myself, I’ve written too many novels, plenty of reviews and an academic monograph on translation and literature. Reviewing, I try to say what I think without actually being offensive. Writing fiction, I try not to worry how offensive the reviewers might be. Writing academic criticism—a ticket-punching necessity if one wishes to teach at a university—I’m relieved, of course, that offense and abrasion just don’t come into it, but immediately anxious no one cares what I write; life is passing me by. But here’s a conundrum to close on. If, returning to Dyer’s claim that there is “an almost palpable smell of death” about university campuses, a critic were to remark that “almost palpable” is nonsense—in that you can either smell something or you can’t and if you can’t how could you know that you almost could?—would that critic be against life, because he was pedantically deflating Dyer’s lively rant? Or would he be on the side of life because he was reminding us of how things really are and what the words actually mean? Certainly the campus where I teach is full of young people, often in each other’s arms, usually far too busy with life to be bothered about literature. The only musty smells are in the library stacks.

Discover Great New Writers and the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prizes

The 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize winners have just been announced, and among them two recent Discover Great New Writers selections, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. by Jacques Strauss (Holiday 2011), and The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka (Summer 2012).

Pollution Tourism: Andrew Blackwell On Visiting the World's Not-So-Hot Spots

The author of "Visit Sunny Chernobyl" on experiencing some of the world's most toxic places.

Susan Sontag on Movies: For Interpretation

1. When I read the recently published second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, which are filled with references to movies, I was reminded of an old (albeit virtual) quarrel I had with her. Coming up in the seventies as a movie-lover through Jean-Luc Godard’s films, I found Susan Sontag’s famous essays on his work (a 1964 article on “Vivre Sa Vie” and a 1968 essay on his films to date) unsatisfying. Sontag wrote about “Vivre Sa Vie”—his 1962 melodrama about Nana (played by Godard’s then-wife, Anna Karina), a shop girl and aspiring actress who leaves her husband and, unable to make ends meet, turns to prostitution—as if it were a closed system. She treated Godard like a formalist master, like the son of Robert Bresson and the cousin of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais, and criticized him for wedging into the film a conspicuously personal reference (a lengthy quotation from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” which links Nana’s story to the real-life relationship of Godard and Karina). Sontag described Godard as a onetime practicing critic but didn’t bother to talk about his critical ideas, the movies he loved, or the way that his films were inspired by those movies—in large measure, Hollywood movies. Sontag ghettoized much of classic Hollywood under the rubric of “camp” (famously, in her “Notes on ‘Camp’”), just as, around the same time, Pauline Kael ghettoized the same movies by calling them “kitsch.” In fabricating a Godard who satisfied her conception of a high European modernist, Sontag elided his critical perspective, the politique des auteurs (or “auteur theory”), which recognized the artistry of some commercial filmmakers working in relative anonymity in the studios and considered them the peers of any artists, in any art form. She willfully ignored the New Wave’s passion for movies by Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller and Stanley Donen, as well as the young French filmmakers’ admiration for these Hollywood artists’ outsized personae. But I revisited Sontag’s early essays on Godard with renewed curiosity after reading this latest installment of Sontag’s journals, which cover the years 1964 to 1980. It turns out that this new volume provides a surprising roadmap to the development of Sontag’s thinking. What she writes there gives us the background to her strangely, anachronistically narrow views on the cinema—and also shows how central to her identity as a critic, and even as a person, those views were. In her journals, Sontag keeps voluminous lists of movies she watched, and she had an impressive habit (though not one that would be unusual for cinephiles of my acquaintance). She saw lots of movies of all sorts—for instance, she lists twenty-nine that she saw between September 17 and November 12, 1965, including such new ones as Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat,” Preminger’s “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” and Richard Lester’s “Help!”, and, in revival, Josef von Sternberg’s “The Last Command,” Fritz Lang’s “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” and Jean Renoir’s “The Lower Depths.” In the week of December 3, 1965, she saw either eight or eleven movies (depending on the import of a break in the list). But she had hardly anything of note to say about the work of classic American filmmakers, and I suspect that the reason is to be found in another list she provides—“Movies I saw as a child, when they came out.” It’s a list of fifty, including “Citizen Kane,” “The Great Dictator,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Notorious,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Casablanca,” “The Strawberry Blonde,” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Her critical approach to Hollywood movies—that is, essentially ignoring them—shows that she couldn’t rank commercially produced and vulgarly marketed weekend amusements of her youth alongside Picasso’s Cubist masterworks and Beethoven’s quartets. This explains another jolting and indirectly self-revealing journal entry about movies, from the same year: “0 Degree” films e.g. B-films—no formal elaboration; instead, the violence of the subject Medium is transparent Godard and the others of the French New Wave didn’t worry about the studios’ internal classification of movies as A-movies or B-movies; the only reason why a critic such as Sontag would even bother watching B-movies in 1965 was that those filmmakers, and a generation of their successors, had identified great directors and great works of art to be lurking in those despised provinces, and found them to be anything but formless and transparent. Sontag knew there was something important about such movies, but they belonged to her less sophisticated younger self, so she relegated them to the category of “camp” and treated them like a realm apart—and ignored their contribution to what she considered the true cinematic art of the day, Godard’s films. 2. I am for interpretation. The very title of Sontag’s famous essay “Against Interpretation,” which also became the title of her first collection of essays, is inimical to a useful way of watching movies, whether Hitchcock’s or Godard’s. Sontag asserts that “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today,” and cites, as examples, Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game.” She can’t find any Hollywood movies to list, because, in fact, the best Hollywood directors neither seek nor achieve transparence, but create elaborate symbolic systems by means of extraordinary artifice. When Hitchcock shows a tight whorl of hair on the back of Kim Novak’s head in “Vertigo,” he isn’t displaying the craft of hairdressing but creating an erotic web, a genital substitute, to ensnare James Stewart’s idle officer. (And, later in the film, he does display the craft of hairdressing—to dramatize the cinema’s, and his own, fetishistic obsession with artifice.) When she does deign to mention Hollywood directors, she misunderstands them, lumping them in with the studio system at large and pressing them into the confines of her critical preconception: In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cukor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other directors, have this liberating anti-symbolic quality no less than the best work of the new European directors, like Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” and “Jules and Jim,” Godard’s “Breathless” and “Vivre Sa Vie,” Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” and Olmi’s “The Fiancés.” It almost seems as if, in praising “directness,” Sontag were putting the immediate pleasures of pop movies beyond serious discussion and then assimilating ostensible art films to the same norms. But, of course, Sontag does take films, and, in particular, Godard’s films, as objects worthy of in-depth discussion—though she ignores the extraordinarily complex symbolic dimension that he condenses into his films (and that he has discussed openly, in interviews, starting even before “Breathless” was released). She completely overlooks the symbolic element that ignited imaginations of the great Hollywood directors—especially that of Howard Hawks, who was one of the greatest of modern symbolists in any art form. (Has anyone ever thought of a dinosaur bone the same way since seeing “Bringing Up Baby”?) Instead, unable to shake her first-order childhood viewings, she wanted to believe what she saw. Godard’s films of the sixties are made to be interpreted; they’re produced as collections of fragments meant to be picked apart and reassembled, filled with extravagant ranges of references, and in desperate need of extrapolation and intuition. They’re open-ended symbolic collections of the first degree, and his vast range of public appearances and interviews furnished viewers with something of a special Godard lens—the artistic equivalent of 3-D glasses—for the interpretation of his films. For instance, the Poe recitation is only one of a panoply of symbolic elements in “Vivre Sa Vie,” starting with the hairdo that Godard gives Karina’s aspiring actress: the dark bob that Louise Brooks made famous. Sontag’s critical credo, from “Against Interpretation”—“the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means”—reveals why she missed out on the essence of the art of the great American directors—and of their greatest acolytes, those of the New Wave, and, in particular, Godard. By contrast, the criticism that Godard wrote in the fifties, like that of his friends and comrades at Cahiers du Cinéma, was uninhibited by the strictures of aesthetic prejudice; it was open, ecstatic, enthusiastic, vituperative, anarchic, and personal. In discovering the inner worlds of such directors as Hawks and Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann and Douglas Sirk, his writing foreshadowed in tone and substance, in insolence and depth, in rapture and creative fury—and in interpretive freedom—the movies he would make. It brought the full range of his knowledge, experience, and passion to bear on movies; and it didn’t leave out the character and the personae of the auteurs themselves. To interpret is to write freely. Sontag’s resistance to active criticism is of a piece with her formalist advocacy (as she wrote in the 1965 essay “On Style”) of “the “autonomy of the work of art” (what about the autonomy of the artist, the viewer, the critic?); of art as “stylized, dehumanized representation”; and, as she wrote in the journals, against “the bourgeois myth of the artist.” But the politique des auteurs is perhaps the ultimate enshrinement of that “myth” as well as the biggest story in the modern cinema—a story that the New Wave told as critics and then enacted as filmmakers. They achieved the definitive personalization of the cinema; they experienced it with an extraordinary intimacy and they evoked that intimacy by discussing their connection with directors. In 1964, Sontag wrote, in her journals, “This is the first generation of directors who are aware of film history; cinema now entering era of self-consciousness”—but didn’t concern herself with the content of that consciousness. Why did she resist that experience? 3. Godard, as a young filmmaker, was movie-mad in another way. He didn’t solely admire or imitate certain formal aspects of Hollywood movies he loved, but also their gestural, verbal, even sartorial styles—and, strangely, Sontag doesn’t bother with this, either. For instance, Sontag refers, in the 1968 essay, to “the formal impenetrability of the plots of Hawks’s ‘The Big Sleep’ and Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’” without noting that Humphrey Bogart’s air of cool insolence is the propulsive center of “Breathless” or that Godard was fascinated by the rudely lowbrow, even apocalyptic, yet stylish violence of “Kiss Me Deadly”—and also learned from that movie about the grafting of literary and musical quotations into a roughneck context (Aldrich’s adaptation of Mickey Spillane features Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and poetry by Christina Rossetti). Yet, as the journals touchingly show, Sontag was movie-mad too, as she wrote there in 1967: Those hundreds of movie stills on my walls. That’s populating the empty universe, too. They’re my “friends,” I say to myself. But all I mean by that is that I love them (Garbo, Dietrich, Bogart, Kafka, Vera Chytilová): I admire them; they make me happy because when I think of them I know that there aren’t just ugly leaden people in the world but beautiful people; they’re a playful version of that sublime company to which I aspire…. For me, they’re reinforcements! They’re on my team; or rather, I am (hope to be) on theirs. They’re my models. They guard me from despair, from feeling there’s nothing better in the world than what I see, nothing better than me! … Sontag found her own models of cool remoteness and control in the movies. And, strangely, her critical project was as radically personalizing as was Godard’s—but in lieu of actual intimacy and self-revelation, in lieu of speaking in the first person, she conjured a persona. Her colorless, flavorless, odorless, quasi-academic prose was a sleekly alluring mask that, in turn, reflected a brilliant young woman’s striking, worldly, knowing, infinitely remote, infinitely alluring persona. (That may be why she mistakes Godard’s cinematic intimacy for formal distance.) She was the auteur among critics; her writing was the synecdoche for her very self. Her opposition to interpretation locked criticism into a self-abnegating passivity, abstemiousness, and austerity (as if borrowed from a work by one of her heroes and models, Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”: “I always wanted you to admire my fasting”). The “erotics of art” that she endorsed in the last line of “Against Interpretation” wasn’t a lust for the work of art itself but, rather, signified the critic’s own erotic aura. Instead of “interpreting” a work, it would suffice for her to anoint it with her approval, and thereby elevate it to her canon of contemporary cynosures. She turned criticism into a performative gesture, a stylization of desire akin to that of Garbo or Dietrich. Just as neither Garbo nor Dietrich could love the boy next door, so Sontag couldn’t embrace the popular art at hand—pop movies, pop music—without fatally dispelling her exotic aura. She loved, but couldn’t unite her intellect with her love. She couldn’t speak of her pleasures; in her journal, in late 1965, she wrote that her “biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, The Supremes) + the music of Al Carmines”; yet there’s no trace of this demotic passion in her essays. She couldn’t write about rock stars because she was, in effect, becoming one. She couldn’t personalize movie directors because she was becoming a movie star. Imagine the truly radical impact Sontag might have had on her cultural circles, on her times, if she had considered and praised actual rock stars, or Jerry Lewis and John Wayne and Joan Crawford, or Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli. Photograph by Bob Peterson//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

“The Lola Quartet,” by Emily St. John Mandel

At the satisfying conclusion of Emily St. John Mandel’s “The Lola Quartet,” the exhausted protagonist, Gavin Sasaki, contemplates the suburbs at night as he drives north from Florida. He sees “a continuous centerless glimmering of lights, shadows of palm trees on parking lots, malls shining like beacons. . . . None of the cities had edges anymore, just a long slow reach across landscapes.” Read full article >>

The Real Great Escape by Guy Walters – review

The story of mass murder during the second world war was travestied by the filmIt takes courage to demolish a cherished icon, and when that icon is the film The Great Escape, saviour of many a strained family Christmas, the iconoclast needs steel nerves worthy of the escapers themselves. But that is what Guy Walters achieves in his new study of the second world war's most famous mass breakout, which, far from being a rehash of an oft-told tale, is a clear-eyed inquiry into a myth that does not stand up to examination.What Walters claims is missing from the film, with its jaunty theme tune and boy-scout characters, is that this was essentially a story of mass murder. His focus is not so much on the heroic ingenuity of the PoWs tunnelling themselves out of their camp, but on their ultimate destination. Fifty of the 76 escapees were summarily shot by the Gestapo on Hitler's orders, and only three (none British) made a successful "home run" to Blighty. Was the sacrifice really worth it, Walters asks. His answer is a resounding "No".The central figure in Walters's story is the escape's inspiring leader, Sqdn Ldr Roger Bushell (played as "Roger Bartlett" in the film by Richard Attenborough). Bushell was a driven character: charismatic, determined, stubborn, perhaps a little crazy. The son of a mining magnate in South Africa, idolised by his mother, he had an English public school and Cambridge education. He drove fast cars, dated "popsies" and excelled at skiing. Characteristically, he tended to ski over obstacles in his path rather than around them. A skiing accident gashed his face, which lent his appearance a sinister aspect.Though neglecting his studies for sport, Bushell was no fool; he was proficient in several languages and, despite an indifferent degree, was called to the bar and got several murderers off capital charges. He learned to fly as a hobby, and when war came, found himself commanding a Spitfire squadron. After downing two enemy planes, he was himself shot down over France and captured.Bushell made two initial escapes – on the second occasion, accompanied by a Czech fellow flier, he reached occupied Prague and spent several months hidden by a Czech family. However, in the manhunt that followed the 1942 assassination of SS overlord Reinhard Heydrich, Bushell's hiding place was betrayed. The Czechs who had sheltered him were shot, and Bushell himself was roughly handled by the Gestapo.After this experience, he could have had no illusions about the ruthlessness of the Nazis, and his suffering seems to have sharpened his already intense hatred of his tormentors and his desire to escape them.Arriving at Stalag Luft III, the huge new camp built for allied flying officers in a gloomy Polish forest, Bushell instantly initiated his plan for a mass breakout, starting three simultaneous tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry, on the premise that if one failed and another was discovered, then the third would surely succeed. It says much for Bushell's drive and leadership skills that the vast organisation required to dig the tunnels, dispose of the conspicuous yellow sand displaced by the digging, and to manufacture an enormous array of clothes, passes and other documentation for 200 escapees remained secret.Walters's description of the build-up to the breakout makes nail-biting reading. Bushell knew he was risking death, and realised that the vast majority of the fellow escapees – most of whom spoke no German and still wore uniforms unconvincingly disguised as civilian clothes – stood no chance of getting away across thick snow. Bushell justified his grand plan, however, by arguing that hunting such a vast number of escapees would divert German resources from the war. Walters shows, though, that the escape did nothing whatever to hinder the German war effort.Along with indicting Bushell's irresponsibility, Walters reveals the extent to which the camp was effectively controlled by its inmates. It was nominally run by senior Luftwaffe officers who had sympathy for their charges and feared the encroaching power of the Gestapo. On a lower level of command, the poor quality of the lesser German guards made them susceptible to bribery and blackmail.By this stage in the war (1943/4) Germany was running short of resources, and the prisoners, kept supplied by generous Red Cross parcels, had more food, drink, tobacco and other creature comforts than their guards. Many of the aids used in the escape – passes, uniforms, stamps – were genuine rather than forgeries, smuggled into the camp by suborned guards. On those impervious to bribery, pressure could be exerted by blackmail, which was ruthlessly applied by the "Kriegies" (inmates) if they discovered some transgression committed by their guards, or a weak point in their defences – such as an infatuation for a Kriegie.Walters underlines repeatedly that the Germans at the camp, from the commandant Von Lindeiner down, were explicit in warning the Kriegies of dire consequences if they were caught on the wrong side of the wire and fell into Gestapo hands. Bushell disregarded these warnings, and for this, Walters finds him culpable for his own murder and those of his comrades. The great escape, he sadly concludes, was a great folly.• Nigel Jones's Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London is published by Windmill.HistorySecond world warNigel Jonesguardian.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

Railsea by China Miéville – review

China Miéville's powerful adventure is a delightWhat kind of novel might someone produce if he had been influenced by writers such as Joan Aiken, the Awdrys, Daniel Defoe, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Strugatsky Brothers and Spike Milligan? The answer is Railsea, China Miéville's latest book, a wildly inventive crossover/young adult fantasy with elements of SF and trains, lots of trains, all done with the kind of brio of which most writers can only dream.Those are only some of the names listed in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. Melville's influence is the most immediately obvious in a story that features a captain's obsessive quest for a great white beast, but others come to mind. The gothic weirdness of Mervyn Peake is definitely in there, but the bottom layer of this particular palimpsest might well be Frank Herbert's Dune and its giant worms. Or Tremors. Or maybe Mad Max … None of this is a bad thing. Lesser writers are often overwhelmed by the anxiety of influence, but Miéville has an imagination of immense power.The great hunter is actually the captain of a train, one of the many endlessly crossing the "railsea" of the title – for the surface of this world is covered by an intricate network of railways. Beneath them the earth (or "earthsea"?) heaves with spectacularly dangerous predators – colossal insects, carnivorous rabbits, and whale-sized "moldywarpes" or giant moles, including a cunning and elusive white one. Complex as this might sound, it's always credible and consistent.Our hero is the pleasingly named Sham ap Soorap, a young man apprenticed to the doctor of the mole-hunter's train. Sham is drawn to the life led by the cool scavengers who search for "salvage". A chance discovery plunges him into an adventure of abductions and rescues, chases and escapes. He makes friends and loses them, and goes on a quest that takes him to the edge of his endurance – and that of the railsea itself.A bare plot summary does the story little justice, leaving out most of the things that make the book a great read. Fantasy and SF writers often struggle to create rounded characters, but teenager Sham has plenty of appeal, and everyone he meets is memorable. There's also loads of humour, plenty of action sequences, and enough bizarre violence to keep horror fans satisfied.Yet for all this, the book's chief glory is its prose. Every sentence is packed with wit, strange but appropriate neologisms, and jostling clusters of consonants that are there for no other reason than sheer delight in language. Some paragraphs are almost too dense, and could be quite a challenge for younger readers.A challenge, but worth it. Once I'd tuned into the rhythm, it wasn't long before I was happy to let the story rattle along on its rails with me clinging desperately to the caboose. The only fault I can think of is that it finally coasts into the buffers rather than crashing into them, but that's probably just to let you catch your breath before the sequel. I'll cheerfully buy a ticket for the next ride.Children and teenagersScience fictionFictionChina MiévilleTony Bradmanguardian.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

Great Gatsby: a story for the modern age

F Scott Fitzgerald's novel dissecting 1920s America is being filmed again, with a new trailer out today.