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| Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy Set in the 1960s, the final novel in James Ellroy's 'Underworld USA' trilogy reflects the here and now, writes Christopher TaylerJames Ellroy often tells interviewers that he has no interest in current events, but even he seems to feel that the stars are in alignment for the publication of Blood's a Rover, the closing novel of his "Underworld USA" trilogy. This vast enterprise, which started appearing 14 years ago and now runs to nearly 2,000 pages, depicts 14 years of American history – from 1958 to 1972 – with a tight focus on conspiracies, murder, madness, corruption and racial hatred. When Ellroy launched the series with American Tabloid (1995), right-wing paranoia about the Clinton presidency added wind to his sails, and with Obama in the White House conditions are even more favourable. Racially charged hysteria and accusations of communism are the ideological small change of the power players in these books. In a note appended to advance copies, Ellroy writes that "this is a book for these times!" It's also filled, he says needlessly, "with my trademark craaaaazy shit".Ellroy began his trilogy after finishing the quartet of Los Angeles-set crime novels that made him famous, in which plotlines concerning serial killers, police corruption and shady political manoeuvrings gradually thicken and merge and turn out to be connected by long-buried master-crimes. Two of the LA books have three main figures who take turns as the focal character, and all four of them incorporate real-life people and events into the carefully organised layers of fantasy. American Tabloid and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (2001), use similar narrative machinery to build detailed backstories to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The plots' strings are pulled by J Edgar Hoover, the Mob, Howard Hughes and the CIA, but the main emphasis is on Ellroy's beloved "bad white men" – the rogue cops, shakedown artists and conflicted Mafia lawyers who work for the main players – and the prices they all pay "to secretly define their time".As for the "craaaaazy shit", it comes in several varieties, served up in changing proportions from book to book. Apart from the basic building-blocks of Ellroy's world – acts of extreme violence, quasi-Oedipal sexual obsessions, litanies of entertainment-world sleaze – there are two principal areas of craziness. One is Ellroy's writing style, which mixes telegraphic terseness with hep-cat "rebop", old-time cop-speak and other high-impact registers, heavily seasoned with sexual, religious and ethnic insults. Though less extreme in some ways than Ellroy's White Jazz (1992), The Cold Six Thousand has the unusual distinction of being made hard to read by the shortness of its sentences, which mostly come in at four words – one of which is always likely to be "nigger", "cooze", "hebe", "fag" or "slope". This amplifies the other unsettling effect: the odd blend of amused relish and hardboiled blankness with which the characters' activities are viewed. Writing from inside the worldview of his killers and casual-to-committed right-wing extremists, Ellroy rarely feels a need for explicit condemnation.Blood's a Rover initially looks like more of the same, though Ellroy has dialled the terseness back to American Tabloid levels in the interest of reader-friendliness. This time round, only one of the main characters was equally prominent in the previous book. This is Wayne Tedrow, an ex-cop, dope chemist, assassination conspirator and newly minted parricide. (The Cold Six Thousand ends with him arranging for his stepmother, with whom he's in love, to beat his dad to death with a golf club; most readers will agree that the old man had it coming.)Wayne has landed the job his father wanted as Howard "Dracula" Hughes's right-hand man in Las Vegas, and is also in hock to both Hoover and the Mafia bosses. Despite his extravagantly justified reputation as a racist murderer, however, Wayne is a tormented soul who believes in civil rights and dreams of finding better ways of interacting with black people than killing them or selling them heroin to fund third-world coups.Next up as a focal character is Dwight Holly, an FBI agent known as "The Enforcer" who also played a part in the MLK hit. Dwight's new job is to slip a provocateur into a minor black nationalist movement to further Hoover's plans to discredit the civil rights cause. Finally, there's Donald "Crutch" Crutchfield, a low-rent surveillance artist and "dipshit kid" with an Ellroy-like past and strong voyeuristic tendencies. At first, Crutch – whose name and some of whose attributes have been borrowed from a real-life acquaintance of Ellroy's – comes across as merely filling the now-traditional "junior partner who'll wise up and turn nasty" role. But the centre of his operations, Los Angeles, and his peeping-tom obsession with two mysterious women, slowly introduce a fevered, personal note that has more in common with the LA novels than with The Cold Six Thousand's sometimes rather dutiful slog along the historical timeline.This note gets stronger as the book progresses, perhaps because Ellroy is no longer constrained by the need to work up to a keynote assassination. Watergate, he's said, has been over-done, and too many of the participants are still alive and lawyered-up, so the trilogy's climax relies more on imagination. The immensely complicated and skilfully orchestrated plotlines contain most of the usual ingredients: heroin, psychopathic Cuban exiles, a cab business used as a crime hub, and a Mob attempt to replace the lost Havana casinos, this time by building in the Dominican Republic. There are walk-on parts for Nixon and Reagan as well as more recent obituary subjects: "Bill Buckley snitched neocons. Chuck Heston snitched potheads." On top of all this, there's also the fallout from an unsolved armoured car heist and the murder of an LA hate tract magnate. Everything seems to circle back to some emeralds and a woman named Joan Rosen Klein, who gives the book's antiheroes a shot at redemption.Joan, aka "the Red Queen", and her friend Karen Sifakis, Dwight Holly's part-time lover, turn out to be Ellroy's spokespersons for the left. And though Joan is nearly as compromised as the numerous rightwing characters, Ellroy finally makes it clear that his sympathies are with her and what she stands for. Under her influence, Dwight contemplates writing a confession that sounds a lot like Ellroy's novel: "A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are all dead. Let me tell you how." In an unexpected metafictional twist, Joan and Dwight start planning a violent event that will break the story wide open, which they discuss like novelists ("It densifies every level of our subtext"). We're also offered a partial explanation for the novel's narrative idiosyncrasies, though not an especially plausible or satisfying one.These developments make an interesting departure and help close the trilogy in a surprisingly sweet way. (Sweeter, anyway, than The Cold Six Thousand's last lines: "His father screamed. Blood sprayed the panes.") It must be said that Ellroy writes terrible diary entries for his radical left intellectuals, who all think in an interchangeable, polysyllabic voice: "Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused"; "Our goals are both inimical and fully synchronous." And while it's good to know that he disapproves of "puerile Feds fucking the disenfranchised for kicks", it's still more fun to read the narrator's demented epithets for parrots ("The cocksucker bit his hand and flew off") or the Dominican elite ("light-skinned beaners" who "grooved on their Spanish roots").The upheavals of the 60s – Ellroy's ostensible subject – are mostly presented here as an epidemic of hipsterism that has even Nixon saying, "On the QT, baby", and some readers might feel that this is as it should be.In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best – when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting – he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself.James EllroyFictionChristopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
You review: The Twilight Saga - New Moon Do you agree with the Twihards that New Moon is the film of the year? Or is this supernatural romance strangely bloodless?Poor old Chris Weitz. Once considered a promising film-maker, round about the time he successfully transformed Nick Hornby's pleasant and enjoyable novel About a Boy into an equally pleasant and enjoyable movie starring Hugh Grant and that kid from Skins, he now finds himself working as a hired hand on film number two of the Twilight saga, the hugely popular but strangely bloodless series based on Stephenie Meyer's romantic books about a schoolgirl who falls in love with a vampire. The critics are predictably nonplussed by a movie that stretches to more than two hours, at least half of which is the celluloid equivalent of hanging out with a female Kevin the Teenager.Heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) only gets a few moments of happiness at the beginning of the film before events unfurl to leave her lovelorn and miserable as abstinent bloodsucker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) hotfoots it off to Italy in an attempt to provide her with a normal life. In his absence, she strikes up a friendship with her newly buff childhood pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who harbours a supernatural secret of his very own. "Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made Twilight, the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure," writes the LA Times's Kenneth Turan. "Weitz makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg's capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel's demands give much of New Moon a marking time quality.""There are some entertaining things about New Moon: Stewart is developing as an actor in a way Pattinson isn't, and there are droll scenes in which some characters go and see films," writes our own Peter Bradshaw. "But the franchise is looking a little anaemic.""Under Weitz's direction, the actors have gained some confidence, and this chaste love triangle among creatures of the night has all the requisite looks of tortured longing," writes The Telegraph's Tim Robey. "What it misses is any animating pulse: we just wait and wait for the bleeding obvious."Of course, none of the above is really catering for New Moon's target audience, so perhaps a fairer representation would be the reaction from fans who attended the film's first public screening in London's Leicester Square last week. Skip forward to around the 40-second mark in the video below for a battering of youthful enthusiasm. New Moon, for me, is a marginal improvement on its predecessor, if only because Pattinson, an actor whose technique consists entirely of a sort of fixed, narcissistic pout and sullen-toned delivery, is absent for much of the movie. Stewart, in the pivotal role of Bella, actually does pretty well with very little material to work with. It's been clear since her beautifully understated turn in Greg Mottola's excellent Adventureland that she has the ability to play these type of damaged but enigmatic characters without resorting to histrionics.Ultimately, however, New Moon is just way too long, and despite the odd visual flourish from Weitz – a shot in which a painting of some vampires comes alive is a nice touch – this is basically Dawson's Creek with more blood and teeth: enjoyably vapid entertainment for a hungover Sunday afternoon on the sofa, perhaps, but hardly worthy of a big screen outing.I also have a major problem with what seems to me to be Meyer's ruthless exploitation of foetal teenage emotions. The story seems to encourage young people to hold on tight to their first love, no matter how much of the rest of their life is left in ruins. By the end of New Moon, as an intelligent 18-year-old, Bella surely ought to be girding her loins for some form of higher education and a whole new world of adventures. Instead she is angling to be turned into a vampire herself so that she may spend eternity with her undead lover. The film's objectionable suggestion is that it is acceptable to make major life decisions when one is barely out of one's teens.What did you think of New Moon, if you caught it over the weekend? Are the critics right to dismiss it? Or are you siding with the legions of teenage fans for whom R-Patz and K-Stew can do no wrong?Stephenie MeyerScience fiction and fantasyBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
If there's one genre you have to read before you die it's the travel book Guidebooks, celebrity memoirs, activity-based books, travelogues, travel blogs, coffee table whoppers: travel has a ferocious grip on the books market. Here's a guide to the guidesLonely Planet Publications was set up in 1972 by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who trekked across Asia during a time when trekking and Asia were perilous and terrifying in equal measure, parlayed their experiences into a bestselling book and parlayed that success into a publishing empire of guides for the miserly and dreadlocked.That empire recently sold its 100-millionth copy: proof of the ferocious grip travel has on the books market. It has somehow established itself as an entire genre, rivalling chick-lit, self-flagellating memoirs and plodding thrillers about Vatican conspiracies in the hearts of undiscerning readers and end-of-year publishing house balance sheets. In common with those, most travel books are superficial, solipsistic and as artistically accomplished as the average dog fart. They are not, however, all the same. Here's how they break down:Standard guidebookDescription: Provides factoids on accommodation, tours, sights, shopping and other trivialities for lazy or timid visitors. Usually printed on glossy paper.Sample paragraph: "Should you be caught up in a frenzied riot during your time in Jakarta, make your way immediately to your country's embassy. Once inside, relax with one of the native beverages, and think about what a great story you'll have to tell Andy and Rhona on your return."Hip guidebookDescription: As above, but aimed at trendy, wannabe-alternative types, who stay in dingy campsites instead of nice, warm hotels. Full of useless information such as where to get a henna tattoo – and which sexual acts can have you imprisoned – in Montevideo.Sample paragraph: "Should you be caught up in a frenzied riot during your time in Jakarta, consider yourself fortunate to witness the valid cultural expression of a wonderfully passionate race. Feel free to hurl a Molotov cocktail at the riot squad.""Before you die" guidebookDescription: As in "one hundred places to see/things to do/ways to bore everyone else before you die". Enjoys particular currency around epochal events or dates, eg the millennium, or your 40th birthday.Sample paragraph: "No 73: eating baboon ears while dangling upside-down inside the Ulan-Patang cave in Western Sumanesia. You may have tried Sainsbury's new range of baboon ears at home, but nothing compares to the real thing."Activity or theme-specific guidebookDescription: Woodland walks, pilgrim routes, "follow in Genghis Khan's footsteps"-type deals, family-friendly nude beaches, pervert-friendly nude beaches, etc.Sample paragraph: "Il Castello di Mucho Agonia is one of the high points of the Inquisition Trail. The splendid Moorish-influenced building contains many original torture instruments, including the Iron Maiden and thumbscrews. Staff are happy to torture you and provide a keepsake photo."TravelogueDescription: Account, generally in diary form, of someone's travels somewhere. About as interesting as that sounds. Sample paragraph: "June 14: Bought ticket for Bruges at Gare du Nord. Ticket-seller unfriendly: railway staff are the same all over the world. Looking forward to seeing Belgium. I've heard it's quite like Holland, only more Belgian."Travel blogDescription: As above, but published contemporaneously for an incestuous internet readership of fewer than 10 people.Sample paragraph: "June 14: Beko222, got that email. Thx!!! Bought my ticket for Bruges at Gare du Nord. Ticket-seller unfriendly: railway staff are the same all over the world – check out my friend's blog on the subject: http://blogworld.unfriendlystaff/moanytosser.html LOL!!! Looking forward to seeing Belgium. I've heard it's quite like Holland, only more Belgian. CU L8R! J J'Quasi-literary travelogueDescription: Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Paul Theroux et al, who meld the literary and journalistic worlds to reasonably interesting but quite disorientating effect. Sample paragraph: "Far-gone cats crazy for kicks tumbling down that golden highway toward the ocean and God knows what whiskey and revolver dreams of the open road and God's dark holy country most righteous groove into the black heart of that black-topped highway leading to the ends of the bounteous earth and her dark belly to hold dusty broken travellers tumbling that cold locomotive to death and infamy.""Quirky" travelogueDescription: Two seriously smug tossers drive a borrowed car around Australia. Alternatively, one likable but irritating non-tosser hitchhikes across Alaska for a bet.Sample paragraph: "Little did I know, when I agreed to dress in drag and skateboard from Kabul to Kandahar, quite what strange looks I'd get from the locals! The men here seem a bit more traditional than at home, but a few beers and a tune from my trusty guitar, and we'll all be the best of friends!"Ethnically sensitive memoirDescription: Westerner with severe guilt complex about colonial wrongs lives with "native" tribe to attain empathy, cultural insight and subsequent book deal.Sample paragraph: "The Murengi-Batami people of Lower Botsaneka are truly remarkable. Subsisting on nothing but grubs and each others' underpants, their Weltanschauung is refreshingly inimical to that of a cuisine and undergarment-obsessed west."Celebrity memoirDescription: Rich cretin sees a bit of the world.Sample paragraph: "I never realised just how huge elephants are until I saw some while filming in India! They're massive!! One pooped into Ridley Scott's car – with Ridley still in it! Hilarious!!!""Whoops I've lost my luggage" bumbling memoirDescription: Genial, retired old duffer rambles on about the places he has visited since the end of the second world war. It's meant to be funny – and out of compassion, you really want it to be funny – but it never actually is funny.Sample paragraph: "But when I got there, I twigged that my suitcase was at the wrong hotel in the wrong country… and I was locked inside it! 'You've done it again, Shelby,' I said to myself, as I began to fight for air."Coffee table whopperDescription: Beautifully presented but absolutely soulless pictorial homage to whatever: pristine lakes, bustling cosmopoli, picturesque hiking ranges, toothless crones in oddly inauthentic-looking peasant dress smiling/grimacing at the camera, etc. etc.TravelDarragh McManusguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The trouble with Twitter | James Harkin Far from delivering a 'wisdom of crowds', social networking sites have created only a deafening banalityIn 2003, in an elaborate joke on New York's media-savvy, empty-headed hipsters, a journalist called Bill Wasik sent around an anonymous email suggesting that they congregate at a department store at the same time and stare at a rug. The event was an enormous success, and became the world's first documented example of a "flash mob". By the end of the decade, however, the joke had turned sour, and was on all of us. Faced with any kind of group activity, our first response is: do any of them know how to use Twitter?How did we get here? In the last decade, ideas about how society works have been treated to a glamorous new outing. It all began in the year 2000, with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's beautifully crafted bestseller The Tipping Point. Gladwell argued that, given the right kind of push, ideas or products can suddenly gain traction and pass around from person to person like a virus. In its wake came a slew of new thinking about how information and ideas cascade around the place and gather momentum. Then there was the influential idea that we can raise ourselves to a kind of collective intelligence – the so-called "wisdom of crowds" – by arriving at our decisions independently and punching our best guesses into a computer.Most of these new ideas took their cue from the time we've been spending online. At a time of rapid change in the way we're communicating, that's hardly surprising. It helped that many of these new ideas-entrepreneurs made excellent writers and talkers, capable of expressing their theories with more flair and less pomposity than the traditional homme sĂ©rieux. It would be churlish not to admit that there was something in their ideas, too. As Rage Against the Machine can now testify, online is a fantastically efficient way of sending a message out, and taking a pop at established industry authorities.But the hard part is to find a message worth sending – it's not good enough, as the internet gurus do, just to blow hard about the joys of a new medium. One of the most embarrassing features of recent British political life is the unseemly haste with which our politicians and their wonks have chased after the latest modish ideas book. They have listened rapt as a succession of breathless internet evangelists told them weird and wonderful stories about young people who were using Facebook and Twitter to organise a whole new kind of politics.It wasn't long before the same ideas were being used as a lens with which to understand problems in other countries. From Iran to Moldova, it was claimed, a new generation of activists had armed themselves with Twitter and were using it to fight political repression. "You cannot have Rwanda again," argued Gordon Brown in June, referring to the "Twitter revolution" in Iran. "This week's events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known."It all turned out to be wildly overcooked. Among activists and dissidents, Twitter and other social networking sites were useful in getting messages out of the country, but they turned out to be just as handy for the authorities who were trying to track them down. In any case, since only a tiny number of Iranians use Twitter – a mere 0.027%, according to a forthcoming report from the British Council – it was never going to be much use in organising demos. In retrospect, our fascination with Twitter said much more about us than about them.Now that the American neoconservative idea to export democracy and universal values to the Middle East at the barrel of a gun lies in ruins, all we have to offer the Iranians is Twitter. It might end up doing more harm than good, both abroad and at home. Societies come with their own delicate rhythms and inner workings, and can't be explained as a virus or a bit of information coursing through a network.As we approach a general election, middle-aged politicians who hang out with their chums on Twitter instead of knocking on doors are only going to reinforce the distance they have put between them and their public.Thankfully, there are now the first stirrings of a backlash against the cult of social media. In his forthcoming book, You Are Not a Gadget, the American computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality Jaron Lanier will defend authorship and individual creativity against the deafening banality of the online crowd. For some time now, the Belarussian blogger Evgeny Morozov has been hammering away at the myth that social media is necessarily a good thing for political activism.On these pages, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, admitted that the "decentralised collective intelligence" of bankers staring at computers was worse than useless when confronted with a real crisis in the markets. Even Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, has poured eloquent scorn on the cybernetic clarion call that all information wants to be free.A popular thirst for understanding how society works is one of the promising developments of the decade just gone. But in the absence of anything more solid to work with, we've been happy to stare at our own narcissistic reflection in a shiny new medium. Maybe in the coming decade we'll think up some ideas worth passing around.Computer science and ITFacebookTwitterInternetRage Against the MachineIranMoldovaBelarusMalcolm GladwellGordon BrownJames Harkinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser Antonia Fraser's eulogy to her husband, Harold Pinter, impresses Blake MorrisonAmong the souvenirs found in Harold Pinter's desk after his death was a placemat from a dinner party during which he'd been banging on about Âpolitics. "Darling – You are right," Antonia Fraser had scribbled on it from across the table, "So SHUT UP." The plea might seem to confirm the received media image of their marriage: he combative, cantankerous, a rougher-up; she genteel, discreet, a smoother-over. But the more interesting fact is that he kept the note, in a spirit of rueful self-awareness, perhaps, and in tribute to the woman who not only knew him better than anyone else did but knew when to tell him – if ever so sweetly – to put a sock in it.Her memoir of their 33 years together, drawn from the diaries she kept and amplified by retrospective commentary, quietly dispels a number of myths. The first concerns their relative social positions when they met. She was posh, well-connected, the daughter of Lord Longford but, as the wife of an MP, Hugh Fraser, and with six children to bring up, not spectacularly rich – since the age of 21 she'd earned her living by writing. Meanwhile Pinter had long escaped his working-class, East End background and was living in an enormous six-Âstorey house in Regent's Park Terrace; that first night he offered her a lift home in a white car with a chauffeur – his habitual mode of transport. She'd had flings before but didn't expect to leave her marriage. He'd had two serious affairs – with Joan Bakewell and with the pseudonymous "Cleopatra" – but remained protective of his increasingly alcoholic wife, ÂVivienne Merchant. The speed of events and the depth of their feelings came as a surprise. "Joyous, dangerous and unavoidable," Pinter called it. "I love Harold, I adore him," Fraser wrote in her diary, "but I wonder whether I am capable of uprooting myself for anyone? Do I have the courage?"She did, though not before a scene worthy of a Pinter play, in which she first confronted Hugh then summoned Harold round, only for the two men, drinks in hand, to discuss cricket and Proust while she fell asleep on the sofa.To those who know only the early plays (Max on his wife in The Homecoming: "It made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face"), the Âpicture of Pinter as romantic lover will come as a surprise. "It may sound like a woman's magazine, but with you I have found happiness," he told her. With touching conventionality, he sent flowers, bought expensive gifts, phoned obsessively, and wrote Âpoems as courtly as those of Sidney or Spenser. There was no let-up when all legal obstacles were removed after five years and the ardent wooer became a husband; nor five years after that, when the marriage was "convalidated" in a Catholic chapel. Uxuriousness can breed contempt, but Pinter's Âpassion was undimmed. "I'm the Âluckiest man in the world" remained his mantra.Since his public image was that of a tyrant, Fraser is keen to emphasise his domestic amenability: "house angel, street devil", as she puts it. Estranged from his own son, he was good with her children and grandchildren, provided he kept a distance and they kept the noise down. Loud voices enraged him (regardless of the volume of his own) and his quirks included needless money worries and phobias about flies and heights. When not writing, he could be gloomy ("Sometimes melancholy spreads across the waters of ÂHarold's life like black water lilies"), and in one of the few rows recalled here she reproaches him for enveloping her in his gloom. There might have been other rows, but for her forbearance. An indulged only child ("Mrs Pinter confirms that they never had another because Harold was so difficult"), he never understood why people were sometimes less enthralled talking about his work than he was. "I felt a bit sleepy," the diary records of a tour in Germany. "Not so Harold, who continued to sit against the window, a dark silhouette, discussing No Man's Land till long after I remember."That's as tart as Antonia Fraser gets: this is a love story, after all. She admits they had their differences politically, best exemplified by a day in July 2005 which she spent happily in Downing Street with Cherie Blair while he angrily indicted Tony as a war criminal in front of an audience at the Royal Court. But on human rights issues they were in accord, and even religion failed to divide them, he having "a deep sense of the spiritual, hence his love of poets such as Eliot". Pinter's view of himself as a poet first and foremost is something she rightly emphasises. Even his working methods showed it: snatched images, scribbled notes, frenzied bouts in the small hours, then the long, slow grind of Ârevision. That there's more poetry in his plays than in his poems isn't the point. A passage like the following from No Man's Land is firmly in the lyric tradition:Do you ever examine the gullies of the English countryside? Under the twigs, under the dead leaves, you'll find tennis balls, blackened. Girls threw them for their dogs, or children, for each other, they rolled into the gully. They are lost there, given up for dead, centuries old."In principle I can't bear it when Âartists' wives say 'It was all me . . .'" Fraser writes, and her memoir refuses to play that game. She records Pinter's exchanges with fellow playwrights (Beckett, Stoppard, Simon Gray), traces the evolution of plays such as Betrayal and Celebration, and offers some sharp observations ("the half of Harold which is not Beckett is Hemingway"), but doesn't claim to be a muse or amanuensis. "Harold calls me his editor. Not so. I was the midwife saying 'Push, Harold, push', but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway." There's even a suggestion that he might have written more plays had they not met: "Happiness is not dramatic," he once told her. But after the misery of his first marriage, it was a bargain he didn't mind making.Those hoping for bedroom tattle will be disappointed. The book is intimate without being confessional, and on certain subjects – Pinter's estrangement from his son, for example, or her children's initial reaction to the break-up of her marriage – she prefers to say nothing. But she's not so discreet as to be dull, and there's a lot of humour. There always was humour in Pinter, where reviewers saw only menace and gossip columnists only rage. Though no wag or wiseacre, he could be witty when he chose, as shown here in a telephone exchange with Steve McQueen ("Don't shout at me, Harold, I'm not your butler." "I don't shout at my butler"), or in his response to his wife's excitement at reading Charles II's handwritten letters ("Yes, that's how I feel about old cricket scores"), or in his description of Merchant's enigmatic silences ("which played better on the stage than at home"). There was even humour of a kind, towards the end, when people rang up asking for tickets to see him in Krapp's Last Tape: Â"Harold's mildest response: 'I am not a fucking box office.'"The last seven years of his life were overshadowed by illness. Yet there was triumph, too – not so much in the award of the Nobel prize in 2005 (though he was thrilled by that, having assumed he'd missed the chance because of his politics) as in his determination to keep going, as a poet, actor and critic of American (and British) foreign policy. In intensive care three weeks after the announcement of the Nobel, he made the sound of the death-rattle. But he recovered to give his powerful acceptance speech, Âperform as Krapp, and attend a throng of new productions of his plays. The account of his stubborn courage is very moving."No flowers on my grave," he hissed after seeing dead cornflowers on ÂLarkin's. His wishes have been honoured in this book, which is less flowery than most elegies have a right to be, one year on. He had already approved the diary entries he'd read as "a great record of – us". Still, he couldn't have known that Fraser would include his poems to her, including the last one, written 18 months before he died, which begins: "I shall miss you so much when I'm dead". Pleased with it at the time, for its inversion of the usual order of things, he'd surely be delighted to find it heading the last chapter. He might even forgive her for misquoting Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb", since her version of it might serve as the message of this book: "All that remains of us is love."Blake Morrison's new novel, The Last Weekend, will be published by Chatto & Windus in May.Harold PinterTheatreBlake Morrisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |