TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| The Pour: An Invitation to Read, Sniff and Taste Six new books about wine can help the reader to better understand what’s in the glass. feeds.nytimes.com |
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett | Guardian bookclub Week two: rulesWhere there is magic, there are rules. Fantasy fiction is pedantically attentive to the rules governing its characters' powers, and the dangers that test them. From Dracula to The Lord of the Rings, fantasy heroes triumph by understanding the strict laws that govern the supernatural. Once a novelist has freed him or herself from life's physical laws, once a novel is no longer bound by what the 18th-century pioneers of the genre called "the probable", you need to know the rules by which characters operate. Novels with magic in them give over an inordinate amount of time to such explanation. The Harry Potter books are dedicated to discovering the laws that govern the behaviour of Death Eaters or the exact location of Horcruxes.We know that moment in Dr Who when the Doctor hurriedly explains the pseudo-scientific logic by which some minatory alien operates (and by which it can be defeated). In Pratchett, this is parodied, naturally. When Dr Hix, head of the university's Department of Post-Mortem Communications, explains to the good-hearted but unintellectual Glenda that there is a way for the skilled magician to look into the distant past, he offers to explain the magical science behind the feat. Does she know Houseman's theory of the Universal Memory, describing how "what we call the passage of time is in fact the universe being destroyed and instantly rebuilt in the smallest instant of eventuality . . .", and so on. She is in a hurry to save the day, but finds herself trapped by an academic bore and his unintelligible theoretical elucidation of his apparently necromantic powers.Pratchett vies with those inspired hunches that lead the heroes of fantasy literature to outwit the fates. When Nutt, the brainy stooge to the foolish wizards of Unseen University, who works in the lowest rank of the university's servants, asks his friends to help discover his unspeakable secret, it is in mocking imitation of psychoanalysis. Following the advice of Von Kladpoll in Doppelte Berührungsempfindung, he realises that he can perform an analysis on himself, and, adopting a Viennese accent, he does so ("Now, tell me about your mother, Mister Nutt . . ."). Nutt begins the book as a soi disant goblin but discovers that he is really an orc, the most despised and feared species in Discworld. Death, who invariably makes a berobed, sickle-holding appearance in each Pratchett volume, has earlier visited him in hospital and condemned him to an "interesting life". So he is fated to redeem his nature.The suspicion that the author can make things up on the wing is strengthened by Pratchett's refusal to use chapter divisions or headings. (A couple of Discworld novels do have chapters, including the previous one, Making Money. But here they are used to parody the ways in which classic novelists use them to exercise their omniscience.)It is no wonder that some of the characters in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals seem obsessed with rules of their world, as if trying to reassure themselves that some providence shapes their stories. Trev is a good-hearted yob who might have strolled in from the Queen Vic. ("Under all that gab, you're a decent sort," Glenda observes.) He respects above all "the rules of the street". He has never read a book, but he knows that the taloned female creatures that appear (the Furies) have prescribed limits on their powers: "I don't think you're allowed to touch us . . . I think you 'ave to obey the rules." "There have to be rules," Ridcully, archchancellor of the university, says to himself after he has told his fellow wizards that there is to be no gorging or smoking before the big match. But of course he makes an exception: "There has to be a rule for them and a rule for me." (He has a secret food and baccy stash.)Most individual Discworld novels are dedicated to the mockery of some special field of human endeavour, and here it is both academia and football. The academic wizards of the Unseen University are made to train as a football team for a confrontation with Ankh-Morpork United. The use of magic is to be suspended for the afternoon and the players must learn to obey someone called "the referee". Vetinari, the benevolent despot of Ankh-Morpork, makes it plain. "There must be rules, my friends. There must be. There is no game without rules. No rules, no game." But football is as mysterious as wizardry. On the eve of the big match, the Rules Committee is trying to prevent slackers from hanging around near the opponent's goal by framing an "off his side" rule. Naturally the big match is won by our team when Glenda recalls a special regulation (No 202) that allows for a substitute object to be used when the ball is lost. "We are going to stick to the rules. And the thing about sticking to the rules is that it's sometimes better than cheating." As in po-faced fantasy fiction, the virtuous triumph by discovering some glitch in the rules. "It's a fossil, but it is a rule, and I can assure you that no magic was used."John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.Terry Pratchettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Clintons subject of explosive new book An explosive new book about former President Bill Clinton says independent prosecutors were prepared to indict him and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for their roles in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky affairs. cbc.ca |
Wunderkind comes of age Long described as the enfant terrible of the literary novel, the author of London Fields and Money has now turned 60. Yet his new book – the 12th – reveals that, far from losing his youthful outlook, he has rediscovered itNext month sees the release of The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's 12th novel. Like heavy snowfall, the publication of a new Amis novel has become a kind of established media ritual.Everyone knows the rules of the game: the writer will argue that his work holds a mirror up to the culture, while the culture responds by inviting the writer to take a look in the mirror. But over the years, this exchange has slowly evolved into something less reflexive and perhaps a little more reflective.For Amis has increasingly taken to studying the image looking back at him and, in the process, he has become his generation's most astute documentarist of ageing and a symbol of the accelerating passage of time. Having begun his literary career at the precocious age of 23, Amis enjoyed a prolonged youth stretching deep into his thirties. Not only was he young, he also looked young – short and slim with the full lips and piercing eyes of a Caravaggio model. Rare was the profile that didn't refer to him as an enfant terrible, even in his forties.These were the years of Success and Money, titles that worked equally as ironic social comments and accurate personal assessments. Money even boasted a character called Martin Amis, a novelist with an enviably cool lifestyle and a daunting intellectual hinterland.It was meant to toy with media-shaped perceptions of Amis, but the truth was that the real Amis did lead a kind of male fantasy life. He did play tennis each day, snooker with Julian Barnes and poker with Al Alvarez. He had slept with everyone, read everything and he did speak pure prose in a voice seemingly made out of champagne and roll-ups.Then came middle age, complete with the full-option crisis package – divorce, parental death, mortal dread and dental surgery. It all suddenly seemed to whizz by in a blur of censorious headlines.Now the wild child of London letters is 60. And perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he looks his age."Keith was now well launched on the bullet train of the fifties," Amis writes in The Pregnant Widow, "where the minutes often dragged but the years tumbled over one another and disappeared. And the mirror was trying to tell him something." Not since Snow White have mirrors been so vocal. The message they have to tell is that getting old takes its toll. Amis is too much of a satirist to mourn his lost youth – he can leave that to his male critics and female fans – but discovering older age, we gather, is scant recompense for the loss.Still, if the joke with Yellow Dog, the poorly received 2003 novel, was that Amis had dropped the enfant and was just plain terrible, then The Pregnant Widow is a return not just to form but to more juvenile days.It tells the story of Keith Nearing, a bookishly bright and carnally propelled young man who spends the summer of 1970 in an Italian castle with a group of tumescent friends, male and female, just at the moment that women began to explore their new sexual liberty.The title refers to Alexander Herzen's comment that in killing the past order before giving birth to the new, revolutions leave a pregnant widow. The expectant widow in this novel is feminism, which, according to Amis, "is still in its second trimester... I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child".The news that Amis has turned his attention to feminism is not something that feminists will necessarily greet with air-punching celebration. In the past, and indeed quite recently, Amis has been accused of misogyny. It was said feminist judges ensured that London Fields, which featured a nymphomaniac seeking to be murdered, never made it on to the Booker prize longlist.And last year, Amis drew criticism when he noted of the public interest in Katie Price that "all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone" – though it probably says more about the dislocation of feminism than about Amis that mocking the cult of Jordan is deemed worthy of rebuke.In one way or another, Amis's subject has always been sex, particularly the male view of sex, and therefore of women. At the same time, his method has remained extravagantly and grotesquely comic. In novels like Money, he pioneered a baroque-pornographic style to depict the sexualisation of the contemporary world. It was one of the aspects of Amis writing that his father, Kingsley, found unappealing."Sex is a fascinating area," Amis senior once explained, "but it's harder than he thinks. Nobody says that fiction should be able to discuss everything; he thinks he can do it, but I wonder if he can."Though extremely close, father and son were natural antagonists: Martin was an anti-nuke Labour supporter, Kingsley a Thatcher-loving Conservative; Kingsley was a reckless adulterer, Martin the devoted family man.But the differences have faded or closed with age. Amis did what he said he'd never do and left his first wife, Antonia Phillips, following his affair with Isabel Fonseca, who became his second wife. Then it emerged that he'd fathered a daughter, Delilah, during a youthful liaison. Lately, Martin has even begun to bear a physical resemblance to Kingsley.And now it seems that the son has his own doubts about writing on sex. Keith learns in The Pregnant Widow that you can't write about sex because "authorial omnipotence" is too much for the limited sexual potency of the "male creature".The observation appears to be stamped with the author's approval because Keith is obviously based on him. Versions of other real-life characters, including Amis's close friend Christopher Hitchens, the late poet Ian Hamilton, AJ Ayer, are also awarded walk-on parts.The one most pregnant with meaning is based on Amis's late sister, Sally. It is well known how Amis, the child of a broken home, almost became a school dropout but, with the help of his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, went on to gain a first at Oxford, dazzled at the New Statesman and the Observer and enjoyed international renown as a novelist.Sally's tale is altogether less inspiring. She waged a long struggle with alcoholism and depression and died, aged 46, in 2000. She was also, says Amis, "pathologically promiscuous". He recently called her "one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution".Originally, Amis intended to write an explicitly autobiographical novel but gave up after several years of work. Instead, he divided the concept into two novels. Amis is apparently now working on the other section, entitled State of England, and promises to include a lottery-winning criminal called Lionel Asbo. If it sounds like a parody of an Amis character's name, then perhaps that's the price of originality. So distinctive is his style, its circular rhythms and comic beats, its verbal elegance and brutal slang, and so galvanising was its initial impact that there is a sense in which he is destined to ape himself. After all, everyone else has.In 2006, Amis returned to England, having spent two-and-a-half years living in Uruguay. It took him a while to regain his social bearings. "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence," he noted. "I didn't feel like I was getting more right wing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place."Following the exposure of a plot by Islamic extremists to blow up transatlantic aeroplanes, he made some wildly ill-conceived remarks, suggesting that the Muslim community "will have to suffer" – "curtailing of freedom" and "deportation" were mentioned.He subsequently withdrew the comments, explaining that they were said in the heat of the moment, but the damage was done and, for some observers, racism and Islamophobia could be added to the old charge of misogyny.Such was the line taken by the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, who accused Amis of having become his father. If the literary theorist had a point, he lost it in a self-righteous diatribe that may have owed its ire to the fact that Amis had landed a well-paid position as professor of creative writing at Manchester University, from where Eagleton was about to exit as professor of English literature.The move into teaching confirmed a profoundly anti-reactionary quality in Amis: his interest in what comes next. A seasoned sceptic he may be but he's not really an old cynic. He tends to see social collapse around every corner, yet he remains committed to the new.Amis is strong on describing the world and weak on plotting a story. This is not, as is commonly argued, because he is a stylist but, rather, because he is a moralist. Instead of narrative drive, he seeks universal significance. Sometimes, he strains literally for it with astronomical descriptions and sometimes he achieves it with effortless aplomb.There's a sort of reverse bathos operating in Amis in which he slips from the empty epic to the comic sublime. At such moments, and there are plenty in The Pregnant Widow, no one better understands the cosmic joke that is humanity. Nor is anyone as funny telling it.Martin AmisKingsley AmisAndrew Anthonyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
from The Prelude, Book VI by William WordsworthThat very day,From a bare ridge we also first beheldUnveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grievedTo have a soulless image on the eyeThat had usurped upon a living thoughtThat never more could be. The wondrous ValeOf Chamouny stretched far below, and soonWith its dumb cataracts and streams of ice,A motionless array of mighty waves,Five rivers broad and vast, made rich amends,And reconciled us to realities;There small birds warble from the leafy trees,The eagle soars high in the element,There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf,The maiden spread the haycock in the sun,While Winter like a well-tamed lion walks,Descending from the mountain to make sportAmong the cottages by beds of flowers.Imagination— here the Power so calledThrough sad incompetence of human speech,That awful Power rose from the mind's abyssLike an unfathered vapour that enwraps,At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;Halted without an effort to break through;But to my conscious soul I now can say—"I recognise thy glory:" in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealedThe invisible world, doth greatness make abode,There harbours; whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being's heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort, and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be.William WordsworthPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |