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| Roald Dahl funny prize goes to 'disgusting and horrible' tale Philip Ardagh's Grubtown Tales: Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky takes award designed to put the fun back into readingA "disgusting and horrible" story of a smelly man in an oddball town, Philip Ardagh's Grubtown Tales: Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky, has won the Roald Dahl funny prize.It is one of the three Grubtown books he has published this year, which introduce younger readers to a cast of fantastically named characters, including Farflung Heaps, Constable Gelatine, Acrid Scorn, Mango Claptrap, and the repulsively stinky Manual Org whose breath smells of "two-thirds of a pickled raw herring, a pickled onion, eleven gherkins and one jar of sandwich spread (one month past its sell-by date)"."Noddy and Toytown, it isn't," said Michael Rosen, the former children's laureate who founded of the prize as part of his efforts to put the fun back into reading. "It was really rather nice that it is so disgusting and horrible. Disgusting is good because children are constantly being cleaned, whether it's their rooms, bodies, minds or speech. There is perpetual pressure on children to clean up and one of the nice things about a book like this is that it does the opposite and revels in filth – it gives children a space to invert what is going on around them."Philip Ardagh, better known to the children he meets on his school tours as "Beardy Ardagh" for his impressively mad-professorial facial hair has written more than 70 books for children but, like the late Roald Dahl himself, has never been awarded a major literary prize."It was an extraordinarily strong shortlist and I really didn't expect to win. Except that my book is better than theirs," he said, having pointed out that three of the judges of the prize have beards and that perhaps it was all a conspiracy.Ardagh beat a strong shortlist which included the comedian David Walliams with his debut book, The Boy in the Dress, illustrated by Dahl's former collaborator Quentin Blake, and former children's laureate Anne Fine with Eating Things on Sticks.Judge Andy Stanton, whose Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear won the inaugural prize last year, revealed that the judging panel was split over the choice of winner."I think we were looking at gags per page which is definitely a prime consideration in a funny prize. The standard in the competition was very high this year and panel was a little split when deciding the winner but that's the hard thing about comparing funny books – humour is subjective. The whole shortlist was fantastically strong with very different types of humour. Grubtown was wacky stuff, and then there was Ribblestrop by Andy Mulligan which is very dry and English and has a very classic feel about it, and then David Walliams – very much a sad, sweet sort of funny. It's a case of pick your favourite brand of laugh," Stanton said."But all the scars have healed and it was all very amicable and a lot of fun. There's nothing like discussing funny books for four hours with lots of funny people.""It was great fun and lots of kids helped with the reading," said fellow judge Bill Bailey. "I was looking for the funny, and Philip Ardagh's Grubtown had it, on every page. I've always been a fan of Roald Dahl and people have started to point out that my wife and I have begun to resemble The Twits … I was amazed by the diversity and humour and imagination of all these books. The books when I grew were up were all quite quaint and generally involved rabbits getting hurt. Humour taps into kids' imaginations, it helps them to think laterally."In the category for children aged six and under, the winning book was Mr Pusskins Best in Show by Sam Lloyd. It tells the story of story of a grumpy but loveable cat who is desperate to get his paws on a trophy for the Best-Looking Pet at the beauty show.Philip Ardagh and Sam Lloyd were awarded with cheques for £2,500 and a bottle of wine from Roald Dahl's personal wine cellar at a ceremony in London.Roald DahlChildren and teenagersAwards and prizesMichelle Pauliguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
What to say about ... Nation With its curious mix of panache and piety, Terry Pratchett's tropical fantasy meets a tsunami of abuse from the criticsOn Tuesday evening, all the critics went to the National with party hats on. Being theatre critics, and mindful of their incognitos, they were imaginary hats, of course, but no less sincerely worn. They were off to see this year's big Christmas family show, a tropical fantasy from Terry Pratchett that rejoices in the awesome name of Nation. Everybody hoped that it would follow on the rich festive form established by its predecessors War Horse, Coram Boy and His Dark Materials."Sad to report, then," Benedict Nightingale says in the Times, "that Mark Ravenhill's adaptation … doesn't quite match their power, imagination or invention … The narrative can be confusing, the political correctness irksome, and much else … wishful and sentimental." And indeed the play, which concerns itself with the juxtaposed coming-of-age stories of South Sea islander Mau and his shipwrecked Victorian consort Daphne, does sound rather curious."Mau and Daphne feel like crude counters in an exercise in politically correct sermonising," Paul Taylor complains in the Independent, which is not normally too bothered about that kind of thing. "[And] a lot of the show," he continues, "with its banal grass-skirted song and dance and its civic studies slogans … lapses too easily into pious proclamations."To nobody's surprise, this PC piety was not popular either in the Daily Heil, where Quentin Letts got cross for the silent majority. "For its Christmas family show, the Royal National Theatre has come up with a play containing death, witch-doctors, post-colonial guilt and some bad language," he fulminates. (Note that pointedly indignant "Royal".) "The whole thing seems horribly misconceived, owing more to clumsy propaganda than Yuletide entertainment."And even the Telegraph's anonymous reviewer, who came about as close as anyone to loving Nation, found time to put the boot in. "There are moments when the South Sea islanders singing and dancing in their grass skirts resemble the kind of cabaret act you might encounter in a five-star Hawaii hotel," says the person I suspect is Charles Spencer. "The puppetry seems crude in comparison to War Horse; and Adrian Sutton's music is both undistinguished and instantly forgettable."So in the end, the play's excellent design (by director Melly Still) seems to be the only straw left for all involved to cling to. "Ravishing," is Taylor's word for it. "The visual impact is considerable," is what Nightingale has to say. "It is all staged with a hectic panache," pronounces the Guardian's Michael Billington, who is otherwise quite open about having no idea of what was actually going on. "Still and her co-designer, Mark Friend, have created a stage dominated by three translucent screens through which we glimpse floating corpses, swimming dolphins, predatory man-eaters." Which sounds like carnage to me. Perfect for the kids, in other words.Do say: You know Britain's colonial history? Sorry about that.Don't say: Look, if everyone's forgiven the Germans already, surely we can forgive the Victorians too?The reviews reviewed: If I want to be preached at, I'll go to midnight mass.Terry PratchettTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco Is there still life in the list?Even the most ardent lovers of ancient literature tend to steer clear of one section of Homer's Iliad. This is the poem's second book, which is euphemistically known as "The Catalogue of Ships" – but is in fact dominated by a 350-line list of the various Greek forces that made up the "coalition of the willing" in the invasion of Troy. ("Fierce Ajax led the Locrian squadrons on . . . Euboea next her martial sons prepares" and so on, and on.) Most readers find it hard going, and skip it.In The Infinity of Lists Umberto Eco sings the praises of Homer's "Catalogue" and of a vast range of other lists in western culture. (He hardly draws on the east, beyond referring to the numbered list of a Chinese restaurant menu.) At the very beginning of European literature, Eco argues, Homer offered us two ways of seeing the world. On the one hand, there is that open-ended list of military forces, with all its indeterminacy and hints at infinity. On the other, later in the Iliad, there is a description of the magnificent shield, which the god Hephaestus made for Achilles, with the whole of the cosmos (from the stars in the sky to the sheep in the fields) represented within its frame. This is "finite form", a closed and bounded world, with nothing outside it and no possibility of addition or accretion. Eco leave us in no doubt which style of representation he prefers: the boundless list.Not that there is very much of Eco in this book. Like his recent On Beauty and On Ugliness, The Infinity of Lists is really an anthology – this time of textual and visual lists (from Homer to Salvador DalÃ) – with some commentary from Eco interspersed, amounting to perhaps 70 out of 400 handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated pages. Little more than a short essay, it is nevertheless a characteristic product of this extraordinary writer and polymath: learned, sparkling, insightful, provocative, packed full of intriguing and arcane information (I was particularly taken with the cranium of the 12-year-old John the Baptist supposedly stored among the religious relics in a German cathedral). But, equally characteristically, it does not quite convince.Eco has a capacious definition of the list. Different parts of the anthology focus on museum collections (museums share the sense of the infinite, because they are always adding more objects), on the pleasures of excess (Rabelais has the starring role here) and on the idea of the painted list (largely still-lifes, or images of ghastly massacres, where the viewer knows that there is more, and perhaps worse, going on beyond the frame of the painting). He has trouble finding any example of a list in sculpture: "It is hard to imagine," he concedes, "a statue that conveys an 'et cetera', ie one that suggests it may continue beyond its own physical limits." But he manages to include music. Ravel's Bolero is his favourite candidate for a musical list: it could, after all, just go on and on for ever.But throughout the book one particular worry nags at Eco's enthusiasm for the sheer profusion of meaning and the uncontrollable excess, which he sees as the defining feature of the list as a genre. For lists, as he admits, can also act to order, control and exclude. In fact, among students of literacy, the list is often seen as one of the main by-products of the invention of writing – and with lists come not so much an infinity of possibilities, but rule and orthodoxy. It is, for example, only when a culture can list its kings that it can enshrine a fixed view of its own history. A list of cities, territories or rivers, which Eco can find "dizzying" in James Joyce, is also one of the foundations of imperial control.To get round this, Eco draws a distinction between "practical" lists and "poetic" lists. The practical kind, such as inventories, shopping lists or lists of dinner-party guests, has a quite different function from the poetic: no one wants a potential infinity of guests arriving to dinner, and no one wants a library catalogue suggesting that the library holds books which it does not. In fact, this kind of list is very similar to the "finite form" of Homer's shield because, in Eco's words, it "confers unity on a set of objects" and is defined by those things in the real world to which it refers. But are poetic lists always so very different from this? Indeed Homer makes it clear that his list of leaders and ships is finite, and that no others went to Troy. Eco wriggles awkwardly on this point: "Since Homer cannot say how many men there are for every leader, the number he alludes to is still indefinite."My own nagging worries are rather different. Has Eco actually succeeded in breathing life into the list? And is he entirely serious anyway? Going back to the Homeric catalogue, even after Eco's enthusiastic analysis, I still found it very hard going. But when I discovered him, in an interview, choosing the Telephone Directory as his Desert Island book, I wondered whether the whole project was not, after all, slightly tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps the joke is on the reader for taking Eco's eulogy of the list seriously.Mary BeardUmberto Ecoguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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