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| Meltdown by Ben Elton Distance might lend more weight to Ben Elton's riffsTopical fiction is incredibly difficult to do. Although lead times aren't what they were, newspapers and magazines traditionally cover the now, with the job of books being to clarify what on earth happened after the dust had settled. With notable exceptions such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Neuromancer – both books which ended up shaping the eras they represented – most successful "contemporary" books arrive several years after the events they depict. What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's brilliant satire on Thatcher's 80s, was released in 1994; Phillip Hensher's A Northern Clemency, which recreated the taste of the 70s, was a Booker shortlist choice in 2008; and David Nicholls's fantastic Labour boom-years comedy One Day only came out this summer. Martin Amis's promised novella State of England may disprove this view (as Sebastian Faulks's One Week in December did not), although advance word of its Jordan-bashing, a tired red dwarf in the dying throes of its celebrity, suggests possibly not. Ben Elton's new novel is as topical as it is possible to be; in fact, too much so. Elton, so brilliant in so many ways, always retains an element of being the wee smartypants of his class, unable to understand why the other kids don't like him for shooting up his hand and shouting out the answer before anyone else. His recent contemporary novels, such as Dead Famous (satirising Big Brother) and Chart Throb (riffing on X-Factor), worked well as closed-system, small-scale slices of UK culture. But in Meltdown he scattershots bankers, New Labour, London lifestyles, cash for honours, Notting Hill nannies, private schooling, immigration and the G8 concert of 2005, and struggles to involve us with any of it. This is the London of the Evening Standard's ES magazine, as hackneyed as someone making jokes about people with knives outside their big house in Hackney, which this book also does.It follows four unpleasant chums from university: Henry, a Labour MP who gets done for expenses; a rude rightwing fake toff called Rupert (who sounds very like Jilly Cooper's timeless Campbell-Black, but devoid of the charm) who buys a peerage and gets pilloried for retiring with a huge payoff after running a large bank into the ground; Lizzie, a gorgeous lifestyle goddess; and Jimmy, a merchant banker who aims too high and ends up penniless in his five-storey Notting Hill mansion (though apparently not penniless enough to consider renting out any of its 30 rooms).It's hard to see who we're meant to sympathise with. The most evil character, Rupert, is the only one who speaks any sense ("we're all bloody hypocrites: having condemned half the planet to living in abject misery to support what we see as a basic lifestyle, we then expect to be able to strut about in Hyde Park boasting about how caring and generous we are at the same time", he says of Live 8). Or is it not- that-bright insider-trader Jimmy and his saintly wife Monica, who say things like "charity is the new rock'n'roll" and donate £1m to asylum seekers when they can't afford to buy their own children shoes?Any other novelist who stopped the narrative every two chapters to hold an inane discussion on whether to send your child to a public school or to digress on overpriced crisps would be unbearable. But because it's Elton you somehow don't mind; he's got to get in his little bit of politics, and the funny lines make it enjoyable, even as the characters themselves steadfastly refuse to be anything other than mouthpieces.The problems of writing a novel-length work to a newspaper deadline become more apparent, however, when the platitudes just aren't fresh enough. There are observations on parenting which feel recycled from Blessed, the short-lived parenting sitcom; the villain has an altercation over how he puts his food in the fridge, echoing Elton's famous sausage routine.But eventually, the greatest problem turns out to be the risk of just plain getting it wrong. The book is up to the minute with its echoes of Fred Goodwin and the Commons expenses scandal. But it went to press before it became clear that the banks, shorn of competitors such as Lehmans, would come roaring back like tigers; and that it's business as usual these days in the Bollinger bars of EC2. If Jimmy had just hung on for a couple more weeks, none of the confusing arson plot shenanigans would have been necessary.The book, though quite funny and extremely readable, is not at heart a novel at all but a collection of stand-up material, dinner party arguments and anecdotes strung together by having "he said" typed on the end of every sentence. Newcomers to Elton's novels should start with the very funny and sharp Popcorn; those looking to know what went on in the crash should stick to the papers or Robert Peston; and we true state-of-the-nation novel fans should probably just hang on in there till about 2018.Jenny Colgan's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend is published by Sphere.FictionJenny Colganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested read Faber, £9.99A rehearsal room at the National Theatre, set up as WH Auden's Oxford rooms in 1972Carpenter: I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men . . . We stand on their shoulders to survey our lives . . . (As Donald, the actor playing Carpenter) . . . Yes?Kay (stage manager): I'm afraid the director can't make it today.Fitz (actor playing Auden): Are we doing the sucking off scene today?Henry (actor playing Britten): Have you bought in a cake?Fitz: Did you see my Lear? I was marvellous.Kay: Oh shit! It's Neil. The author.The Author: You're not going to cut more of my words, are you?The Digested Read: More than you would ever have imagined.Kay: Shall we start again from when Carpenter arrives at Auden's lodgings?Carpenter: I had come to interview Auden for a biography I was writing . . .Auden: I suppose that's as good a way as any of setting the scene, but I still feel the audience might find it contrived.The Author: Stop picking on me and leave my text alone.Carpenter: Can you tell me why you stayed in America during the war?Auden: You're at it again, dear boy . . . (As Fitz) I've lost my place . . . Oh yes . . . (As Auden) It was because I was in love with Chester. (Clock strikes 6.30) Is that the time? Take your trousers off.Carpenter: Why?Auden: Because you're here to let me suck your cock.Carpenter: But I'm with the BBC.Auden: My point entirely.The Author: Oi! I didn't write that line.The Digested Read: I'm sorry. I thought anyone could join in.The Bed: They can. I'm Auden's bed.Stuart: And I'm the rent boy. Though I may be rather more middle-class than you were expecting.Carpenter: Shall I say something didactic about the acceptance and practice of homosexuality in the 1970s now?Auden: I'd rather you just let me suck his cock.Carpenter: Yes, yes. Did you know Britten was in town today? He's having trouble with Death in Venice and I thought you might be able to help him.Auden: Caught you doing it again . . . But never mind, show him in.Kay: It's your cue, Henry.Henry: These biccies are good. (As Britten) Have you seen the Spenders?Auden: Everyone's seen the Spenders. But how can I help? I am rather out of fashion now, you know. I just write cosy poems. I hate almost everything I've ever written. It's just a habit now.Britten: The people of Aldeburgh still love me but the last thing I composed that was universally liked was The War Requiem. Now I'm struggling with Aschenbach. People say it's the same old story. They don't like it. Boyish innocence corrupted.Auden: But of course it is.Britten: It's not. Aschenbach is seduced by the Ideal of Beauty.Auden: You are deluding yourself. You must tell it as it is. Let the music do the work for you.The Music: Benjie loves us. We will serve him to the end.Donald: I hate the fact I'm just sitting around here on stage. It's obvious to everyone my character is just a device to hang the story around.Auden: I won't deny it. And the play has been much more involving since Benjie and I were allowed time to discuss our poetry and music. So, if you don't mind, we'll return to matters of truth, artistic freedom and talent's desire to self-question and destroy itself with age.Stuart: That's what you think. I want my voice heard. God stand up for the rent boys who serviced the artistic greats.Carpenter: Good for you. You understand the biographer perfectly.Fitz: Can't we end with some of Auden's poetry?Stuart: No chance.The Author: What have you all done to my play?Kay: I think we'll stop here for today.Digested read, digested: The Habit of Artifice.Alan BennettJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested classic Arrow Books, £8.99When Tusker Smalley died of a massive coronary on the last Monday in April 1972, his wife Lucy was having her blue-rinse set by Susy in the Seraglio Room on the ground floor of the Shiraz, Pankot's new five-star hotel. His body might have lain unnoticed for longer than half-an-hour had not his dog's howling disturbed Mrs Lila Bhoolabhoy, the owner of Smiths, the hill station's rather older hotel in whose lodge the Smalleys resided. Unable to deal with the situation, due both to her great status and vast size, she despatched her husband to complain.Mr Francis Bhoolabhoy had been running the hotel for several years before Mrs Bhoolabhoy decided to make him her third husband. Though delighted at the unexpected conferral of wealth and occasionally heartened to be summoned to his wife's bedroom to arouse her passion, his greatest pleasure was reserved for Monday nights when he and his good friend Tusker met over a bottle at the hotel.Yet Billy Boy, as Tusker chose to call him, was not looking forward to this evening's encounter after his wife had earlier forced him to write a letter terminating the Smalleys' lease, a missive that the servant Ibrahim had delivered, and his wife's latest command merely brought forward that awkward situation.Tusker had first been taken seriously ill some months earlier, but had refused to go to hospital with a swift "Bugger bed" and had chosen instead to tackle head-on the debacle of the uncut grass."Day Barkle? Night Barkle? Yes, Sahib," muttered Ibrahim, uncomfortably aware that many of the Indian characters seemed to have been lifted off the set of It Ain't Half Hot Mum, yet unable to stop himself.For her part, Lucy wondered whether she and Tusker had also not been set up as comedic expat stereotypes, he the old Colonel unable to utter much more than a laconic "Ha!" and she his put-upon wife, but for the moment her mind was on other things. She recognised Tusker was on borrowed time and was keen both to save him distress and to make sure their affairs were in order."See if you can get us another mali to cut the grass," she ordered Ibrahim. "But don't let Tusker know I'm paying for it.""Harrumph! Things aren't what they used to be," Tusker grumbled. "Make me a poached egg before I have a snifter with Billy Boy, Luce old girl!""Oh look, Tusker, I've had a nice letter from the Laytons in England harking back to events in the Raj Quartet," said Lucy, "and they've asked if we can have a good friend of theirs, a Mr Turner, to stay. He's interested in talking to people who stayed on.""Bugger Britain! Bugger the Raj Quartet!"Lucy allowed Tusker to continue expleting to himself for Mr Turner's imminent arrival allowed her time to tell the story of her relationship with Tusker and to develop her own stream-of-consciousness technique whereby she would imagine herself to be having a conversation with Mr Turner while only delivering the bare minimum by way of punctuation and paragraphing. So, Mr Turner, since you mention it, I would have liked to have come back to England after the war but Tusker scuppered that choosing instead to become a box wallah in Bombay, holding back like he always had done, especially that time he denied me the opportunity to perform as an understudy, but that's not the worst of it though I can't mention what the worst of it was because I'm holding that back for nearer the end."Enough of that muttering to yourself, old girl!" Tusker growled. "Isn't it time for our big set-piece?""You've held me back all your life never even thinking about how the other wives looked down on me for knowing shorthand and we're both getting on now so I need to know how I will be provided for if you go before me. Worst of all we don't even know any white people as all your friends are black.""You're pissed, Luce old girl."Mr Bhoolabhoy had watched enviously as Lucy's character had developed from Mrs Tufton Bufton to something more tragic in the space of 40 pages. Yet even though he too was now to be allowed his moment in the sun, he understood his role was to remain a figure of fun."You may service me tonight, Management," Mrs Bhoolabhoy had said, unpinning her sari to reveal her sweaty rolls of flesh."Very well, Ownership," he had replied, surprised to find he had the stirrings of an erection."That's all. You may go now," she said distractedly once he had finished. "I have to meet my accountant to finalise the deal to join the Shiraz consortium."Mr Bhoolabhoy should have been pleased to have been released from this humiliating encounter, but as he made his way to the churchyard he realised there was to be no respite even in introspection as Scott turned his thoughts to visions of Susy's bottom as she played the organ and Kama Sutric memories of his night of passion with a good-time dancer in Ranpur. The guilt, the guilt! And now the guilt of knowing his wife was planning to throw the Colonel Sahib and Mrs Smalley out of their home to develop the Shiraz. "You quite surprised me in the churchyard," said Lucy resuming the mantle of narration. You see, Mr Turner, I was a vicar's daughter working for a law firm in London when I first met Tusker, he was visiting from London and he seemed so exotic and accomplished and I envisioned a proper military wedding but it was not to be and I've since come to realise he is a man quite without ambition and after he retired from his box-wallah job in Bombay 10 years ago, we returned to Pankot where we've been hanging on ever since.Lucy returned to the lodge to find a letter from Tusker. "Dear Old Girl, you asked me about your prospects, well you will have a pension of £1,500 and there's £2,000 in the bank so you will be able to return to England if you want. I know you wanted to return but I always felt we didn't have enough money and I was too old to do anything new and too young to retire. You've been a good wife, love Tusker."As Lucy held this, her only love letter from Tusker, to her bosom, Tusker held the letter from Mr Bhoolabhoy to his as he fell to the ground. Lucy's upper lip remained stiff as Tusker was interred. She thought back to the unmentionable thing that Tusker had done, how he had spent the money that might have taken them home on gambling, drink and the fancy woman with the mildly racist name of Mrs Poppadoum. She thought too that it might be quite nice if she was to invite a coloured person to dinner for the first time. And then she thought she'd probably go back to Blighty.FictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A New York Get for 'Gatz' Elevator Repair Service's six-hour show is cleared for landing in New York. feeds.nytimes.com |
The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander Tom Holland assesses a memorial to the first and greatest epic in European literatureInterminable though the Chilcot inquiry might seem, it has nothing on a far earlier attempt to make sense of a ruinous invasion. In the earliest days of their history, so the Greeks recorded, a city in Asia by the name of Troy had been besieged by their ancestors for 10 long years, captured, and burnt to the ground. Why? Responsibility for the conflict was pinned on Paris, a Trojan prince whose abduction of Helen, the fabulously beautiful daughter of the king of the gods, had set in train a truly calamitous sequence of events. Not only Troy had ended up obliterated, but so, too, had the age of heroes. War had consumed the world.No wonder, then, that the Greeks should have been torn between a desire to find some meaning in this terrible conflagration and a suspicion that it had never had any meaning at all. In the 5th century BC, the historian Herodotus concluded that "the utter ruin of the Trojans, and their annihilation, had served to demonstrate to humanity how terrible crimes will always be met, courtesy of the gods, with a terrible vengeance". Elsewhere, however, he reported an entirely contrary view: that the rape of Helen had been barely a crime at all, and that the Greek response had been grotesquely disproportionate. The implication of this was potentially most unsettling: that the destruction of Troy, far from demonstrating the workings of a divine order, reflected instead a chill and unheeding universe. "Why should I call to the gods?" Such was the question that the Athenian tragedian, Euripides, put into the mouth of the queen of fallen Troy in his tragedy, The Trojan Women. "Long have I raised my voice to them, but they do not listen."When the National Theatre staged the same play in 2007, the director, Katie Mitchell, was perfectly explicit about the mirror she felt that the death agony of Troy might hold up to the present. "World events," as she put it, "lead me to the Greeks." So also have they led Caroline Alexander, in her new book, to the primal representation of the Trojan war: Homer's Iliad. The first and greatest epic in European literature, it has never ceased to be interpreted in the light of the contemporary. Alexander's claim that it is "as resonant today – perhaps especially today – as it was in Homer's Dark Age" has a two and a half thousand-year-old pedigree.Yet that does not make it any the less convincing. The entire history of warfare over the past century, so Alexander argues, is to be found prefigured in the pages of Homer's epic: from the phantom bowmen who supposedly shadowed the British retreat from Mons in 1914 to the American servicemen dragged by their heels through the streets of Mogadishu. That "combat trauma undoes character" is a lesson which can be applied equally to the plain of Troy and the streets of Fallujah. Even the environmental ruin that modern warfare has invariably brought in its wake, so Alexander suggests, is foreshadowed in the Iliad: for when Achilles, the deadliest of all the Greek heroes, advances into battle, a divinely sent fire follows in his wake, "parching the plain, drying the land, and burning the many corpses".Above all, however, what Alexander distinguishes in Homer's epic is an attitude to warfare that would do credit to anyone who marched against the invasion of Iraq. A poem that back in the 19th century was seen as the very thing to instil martial virtue in the future rulers of the British empire is recast as history's first protest song. After all, as Alexander justly points out, the conflict it commemorates "established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause". Its consequences were nothing but destruction and misery. Even Achilles himself, the glorious and terrifying hero of the Iliad, knows in his heart that there is no glory in life worth the blank dullness of death. When we meet him in Homer's sister epic, the Odyssey, it is as a ghost who declares flatly that he would rather be a slave in the land of the living than "a king over all the perished dead".This, in Alexander's somewhat forced reading of his character, makes him a peacenik – albeit one with an occasionally murderous temper. Yet the truth is surely grimmer. "The life of a man," Achilles declares bleakly, "can be neither retrieved, nor stolen, nor bought." All very existential – and yet it is precisely his consciousness of how precarious life is that prompts Achilles not only to live it to the full, but to do so by ending the lives of others. Even when he chooses not to fight, his principal motivation is a brooding desire to see his former comrades wiped out. It is the very pointlessness of war, freely acknowledged by Achilles, which enables him to grace his own life, not with meaning, but rather with a blaze of integrity. Such is the keynote of what has proved to be his deathless fame.The War that Killed Achilles is certainly a worthy memorial to Homer's poem: compassionate, urgent and unfailingly stimulating. Yet it is hard to escape a nagging feeling that the image which Alexander sees reflected in the Iliad is too much her own. The Iliad is indeed, as she claims, an "evocation of war's destruction"; but it is also repeatedly complicit in the sense of joy that can accompany slaughter. If Homer is our contemporary, then that does not prevent him from being simultanously, and terrifyingly, alien. "The true story of the Iliad", as Alexander subtitles her book, is more ambiguous, perhaps, and more unsettling, than she is willing to allow.Tom Holland's Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom is published by Abacus.HistoryHomerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |