Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape)

Having seen Ian McEwan interviewed on the Book Review programme, I had heard him explain that the ending of Sweet Tooth would suggest a whole different story and so I was bearing that in mind all the way through, wondering which were the elements of plot or character that would shift around in the final pages. It is a novel full of fictions and consideration of the condition of the fictional. In a world of secret agents, literary types and thorough outlines of the stories of one of its main characters who is a writer, there are many layers of possibility.

But then McEwan also readily mixes into his fiction a large helping of real people and events- the current affairs of the early 70’s, Ian Hamilton, Martin Amis - which is thoroughly accurate. Having thought we were in 1976 because Roogalator were playing gigs in pubs, I find that, yes, he’s right, Roogalator were formed in 1972 and obviously playing pub rock in 1973 when the novel is set. But the best bit of observation is probably Serena Frome’s sister’s boyfriend and his crashingly dull devotion to cannabis,

he was doing that inexcusable thing that men who liked cannabis tended to do, which was to go on about it

used here to make Serena think he’s being deliberately boring to get rid of her because he wants to be alone with her sister.

It’s a brilliantly done scene. It is Serena’s paranoia that makes her think that.

And we are not delayed too long with explicit ruminations on literary theory, of passing interest as they are, like when Serena discusses her reading of contemporary literature,

I wasn’t impressed by those writers…who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and that there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway.

In the final chapter the story does fold back into itself beautifully. One gradually sees what is happening and enjoys the way it turns around. Our sympathies don’t change much, I don’t think, because the characters have somehow inevitably been made so attractive. I immediately wondered if I’d been impressed by a simple trick, one that other readers will find too easy to foresee, but I’m not sure they will and it’s me that decides whether I liked it or not. It’s at least as good as McEwan’s best work, in Atonement and Chesil Beach, and as good as anything I’ve read for a long time.

Who is Ozymandias?

John Fuller, Who is Ozymandius? (Chatto & Windus)

John Fuller's book is one of those very welcome treatises on reading poetry, discussing some of the problems encountered by readers, strategies used by poets and offering some possible solutions. In it, he takes a number of poems, both well-known and not quite so well-known, and finds out what they are about.
His approach is to regard poems as puzzles for the reader which certainly much twentieth century work can be and some before that, too. The reader's enjoyment is, he says, in the solving of those puzzles. Except, for me, I don't think it is and if I want a word puzzle, I go to The Times on Saturday or The Observer on Sunday. I don't mind not understanding a poem completely and wonder if I did if I would sometimes like it as well as I do when I enjoy the words, their music and also some of the mystery. And by no means all poetry is difficult enough to qualify for Fuller's level of interpretation.
Of course, if a poem is too difficult then one either needs a guide or you can leave it to stew in its own wilful obscurity but I don't spend much of my time struggling with interpretation. And neither would Fuller's book help because it doesn't offer a system of how to unlock the puzzles but provides answers from his enormous range of reading and knowledge, what with him being Emeritus Fellow at Oxford University, which is not a resource we all have.
So, once a book has set off in a direction that I don't want to go, it is doubly hard for it to recover. As Fuller shows us how he has decoded various difficulties in Modernist and Romantic poery, I am only half interested and half impressed. But, taking various themes on literary allusion, reference points, problems with titles, speakers, readers and text, there are numerous worthy passages to appreciate. Most striking is his analysis of Jabberwocky, which is a reading that we weren't offered at school, and the answer to the question in the title is 'Napoleon' in Shelley's canonical sonnet.
It is comforting that many of one's doubts, as both writer and reader of poems, are commonplace to one so highly qualified and Fuller is a sympathetic if fearsomely high-minded in his commentary. But although of use in places and immaculate in its scholarship throughout, if one doesn't like the premise then the argument is unlikely to bring you round. The book doesn't convince me that this is a way that I, at least, can enjoy literature.

Jeanette Winterson - The Daylight Gate

Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate (Hammer)

I often have trouble suspending disbelief in fiction. If the writing isn't involving enough to carry me with it, I find myself simply contradicting the narrative when it tells me that this happened or one character said such and such a thing. No, it didn't. No, they didn't. You're just making it up.
I know that a severed head can't speak and a number of other things that Jeanette Winterson claims happened in this novel couldn't have and yet I was quite happy to go along with the idea. Witchcraft has been in decline since 1612 and most of us don't take it quite as seriously as James I and his Protestant fanatics did but Winterson's economical prose here brings it vividly, luridly back.
The ways and means of orthodoxy in 1612 put witchcraft and catholicism together as twin evils with which to accuse their victims and create the climate of fear and repression that governments like. It was much like George Osborne's economic policy is now. And The Daylight Gate is as much about the exercise of power as it is a gloriously grisly picture of suffering and abuse. Again, a little bit paradoxically, although the story is dismal and unrelentingly grim, one enjoys the writing rather than sharing the torment.
Lancashire was where Catholicism had retreated to, as far from London as they could get and so, coincidentally, that was where all the witchcraft went on as well. Winterson brings in a further strain of unlikeliness in having Shakespeare return to the Houghton estate where he may or may not have spent his late teens tutoring the young of the old religion but it's all in the context of a great little book that will make a television adaptation or a film sooner rather than later, one would think. A book so apparently full of contradictions works here exceptionally well, a literary horror, a polemic and a profound study of human nature.

Top 6 - Julia Copus

The latest renewal of the Top 6 feature here marks the move of Julia Copus from the category of poets I know about and like into the echelon of favourite contemporary poets.
Her new book is a highlight of this year in poetry and her work very much the sort of thing that finds favour in this modest backwater of the literary world.
Her first book, The Shuttered Eye, isn't represented in this selection. It was a fine debut but not many writers have produced much that is going to be regarded as their best work by the tender age of 26. I think the poems become 'tighter', more accomplished and more convincing in the second book, In Defence of Adultery, and without having chosen an outright number one among her poems just yet, I'll begin with the title poem of that.
With none of the vainglorious striving for effect or showy cleverness that betrays too much poetry, it is understated in its building of instances of how infatuation feels until undermining the more difficult situation of adultery with the admission that,
Sometimes we manage
to convince ourselves of that.

She's good at that and does a similar thing, observing the nuances of romantic attachment, in A Short History of Desire, in which the fashions change through the ages but the meaning remains the same. It's good on rhythm and its own internal music. There's something Lumsdonian one can sense in poems like this- not a conscious borrowing, I'm sure, but a kinship that represents one of the ways that good poems are being written in English in the current moment. It is a comparison one can take further in Moderate Restaurant Clatter, the second loudest of four poems under the title Playing it by Ear that have designated decibel levels. The last seven lines are on the same rhyme. The expert handling of syntax and rhythm (as often in Copus poems) make it a pleasure to read more than once. It's hard to say how much such things occur naturally or how hard it has been worked for but once it happens, it repays indefinitely.

I have only just mentioned the new volume, The World's Two Smallest Humans, below, and my opinion of the best poems in it haven't changed a great deal over the last few days. Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden is likely to become a long-term favourite, quietly moving and moving quietly towards its achievement of considering the passing of time and of everything. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. More than just 'mundi', really.
There are candidates to challenge Miss Jenkins for her place in this list, that form that Julia Copus seems to be the very best at, but we will stick with the rule that only six items can be mentioned in a Top 6 and not use it as an excuse to include more.
Ghost completes the half dozen for its last lines, mainly, admittedly.
There's every chance that the next three books of poems will add enough great poems to make an update of this selection a much more difficult job in several years' time but it will be a job to look forward to. Julia Copus is exactly the poet that is required at the moment and if she wasn't there we wouldn't know what we were missing. 

Avant

Tonight's Prom celebrates the centenary of John Cage. I might give it a go. Without him being probably among my Top 100 favourite composers, I have some time for him and his like, that is, those 'experimentalists' who contributed something worthwhile to the canon.
It had seemed to me that it had gone quiet on the 'avant' front. It certainly doesn't seem to be the headline-grabbing initiative it was when Carl Andre's bricks appeared in the Tate or, in the smaller world of poetry, Bob Cobbing and his concrete friends made amusing noises to each other's great approval. It had seemed to me that the much-vaunted 'plurality' of poetry by now had allowed us all to accept that anything was possible, that everybody could be allowed to get on with their own projects and the post-avantistes could be allowed to get over themselves.
There was all that, plus the fact that the falling off of interest in the Poets on Fire internet forum meant that I'd heard enough, had my say and didn't feel any further need to ask questions of the self-promoting differentness of post-avant apologists. By all means, they can do their stuff, let nobody stand in their way. If they can interest anybody else in their difference, good luck to them, but we are over 'difference' for its own sake by now. What we'd prefer to see from them is something, anything, that's 'any good'. There's been Mina Loy, Erik Satie, John Cage, e.e. cummings and all but it is over a hundred years old now. I shouldn't have been able to say of Matthew Welton's last book, a couple of years ago, that it made me nostalgic. It was allegedly new and ground-breaking but it only made me wish the Vietnam War could be brought to an end. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, there's more to life than being a retro tribute act.
So, now I'm reading John Fuller's book, Who is Ozymandias, another of those guides to reading poetry by one highly qualified to explain it. The Professor's idea is that poetry presents puzzles to be solved by the reader. And yes, it can. But I wouldn't be reading much of it if that was the point of it. It certainly can be difficult but I don't feel the need to solve the puzzle to enjoy it and, in fact, enjoy the unresolved part of it more in many cases because once everything is explained I worry that some of the magic might be lost. I like the music and the words for their own sake and, quite honestly, so few of us have the range of learning of Prof. Fuller exhibited in his exegeses here that we might as well try to solve The Listener crossword as read a poem.
Fuller's argument hasn't so far convinced me but, interestingly, although convinced that puzzles are the basis of poetry, he only takes a few pages to nod vaguely towards John Ashbery's work before taking only a few more pages to give that deliberately difficult school of poets a badly-disguised ill-tempered dismissal, ending,
There is much that is inevitably eye-glazing about that sort of thing.
And yet, up to that point, the Prof. has been enjoying difficulty.
So, it was long overdue that I investigated the latest pronouncements from one of our more self-promoting avant poets. A bad one, I'll admit, whose name and magazine I won't give the dignity of mentioning here.
He's still banging on about how difficult it is in his line of artistic endeavour. The point of him doing it still appears to be simply that he is different to his betes noirs in the mainstream - and it is Simon and Seamus that seem to annoy him the most. Rather than review work by those poets he admires, he'd rather continue to advertise his own outsider status. Well, you are not outside, matey boy, there is no outside any more. It's a wide church and we are all in it, it's just that you are too far up your own back catalogue.
It is apparently so difficult being him because he often encounters scorn and ridicule from mainstream poetry people who say things like, 'it's just chucking words on a page'. But he rarely takes the trouble to tell us how and why any of his fellow travellers have done worthwhile work. We are just left outside in dismal ignorance of the genius we are not clever enough to recognize. 
What I thought I might do is submit some poems to his magazine, just words chucked down on the page, under a very old nom de plume, and see if they got published but it's an unworthy trick and I can't see if his magazine is still going or not. But, never mind, let's do it here. It won't take long.

From A Sequence

13

forlorn spark-plug,
no gingerbread reticence
intoned against the itinerant
gnomes of the broccoli

syzygies, once vowelless
belatedly exhaust the clock

but madrigals erupt
separately where hydrangeas
; modigliani-
ich bin ein Mülleimer

sputnik grief encouragement
waving like ptarmigan mice

--

I take it all back. It looks like I'm quite good at this. I'm going to be post-avant from now on.

Julia Copus - The World's Two Smallest Humans

Julia Copus, The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber)

Just about my favourite of the (far too) few new poems I've read this year so far is this from Poetry Review, http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/lib/tmp/cmsfiles/File/review/1022/1022%20Copus%20Miss%20Jenkins.pdf
Miss Jenkins has appeared in a Copus poem before and the 'out and back' form of this poem is one she has used previously, too, and so one feels not only that this is genuine and authentic, it is also admirably done, with its formal structure becoming apparent gradually, well, just after halfway actually. And it appears here, it being such a good marketing idea to have a poem in Poetry Review when you have a new book coming out.
Julia Copus's poems have a resilient delicacy, a gentleness that is always supported by cogent lines of thought, sure syntax and a thoroughly well-made quality that, poem by poem, gives a reader confidence to know that it isn't going to go wrong, it is going somewhere worthwhile and one will be carried to a satisfying conclusion.
The poems at the end on the subject of IVF treatment wouldn't usually suggest themselves to me as subject matter within my range of interest but are completely convincing in making the point that a good poem will be good irrespective of their theme. For instance, on the somewhat unlikely image of a pregnancy testing kit,
and beside it the silvery ghost of a second line

willed into being - frail as the arm of a sea-frond
trailed in the ocean - but failing to darken or turn
into more than a watermark.

Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden is a poem to return to time and again, its short and long sentences beautifully modulated between the intimate and the immense. Heronkind is a tighter statement of free verse. The Particella of Franz Xaver Sussmayr is four poems on the role of Mozart's student and helper in those difficult days of 1791 that will, I'm assuming, reveal more on subsequent readings. There will be several of those, and of the whole book, one in which each poem looks as if it will be worth further consideration. It is a wonderful set of poems that, if she wasn't already, establishes Julia Copus among the front rank of her generation of poets.
I'm sure this book will appear on many prize shortlists and win its fair share of those awards.
See you in Cheltenham, then.

Music from the Eton Choirbook

Music from the Eton Choirbook, Tonus Peregrinus (Naxos)

Most of the Proms I've been to have been remarkable. Most were selected because they were expected to be. And one that will remain in the memory for as long as any was The Sixteen who performed Robert Wylkynson's Jesu autem transiens. that builds from the solo voice to 13 before reducing back to one.
It is given a further very welcome outing here by Tonus Peregrinus in among other late C15th and early C16th pieces from the Eton Choirbook which we might suppose was a sort of pre-Reformation Now That's What I Call Music compilation although I do hope others will find a more appropriate parallel than that.
It is in Wylkynson most particularly that we might think we hear the coming of Thomas Tallis and Spem in Alium a few generations later with its woven texture and surge of activity. This release would be worth the purchase if that was all it contained but there is over 70 minutes worth of music preceding it, too.
Walter Lambe's Nasciens mater for five voices is lambent when lambency seems very much the desired effect since the text succinctly tells us the remarkable story that, 'Not knowing a man, the virgin mother without pain gave birth to the Saviour of the ages'.
As was previously celebrated on the Naxos recording of the Oxford Camerata's Spem a few years ago, the recording here is exceptional, Richard Davy's St. Matthew Passion not much like Bach's but with rich solo parts emerging from the plainchant structure and John Browne's Stabat Mater a plaintive grief from which, of course, redemption comes.
It seems a long time ago since Naxos began with their range of budget discs, many by artists you might not have heard of. They have come a long way since then but still don't charge the earth for their product. Just for once, I wish they had. I'd have gladly paid more if the tiny black and white reproductions of pages from the songbook had been full-page and in colour. But the music is in colour, I can promise you that, and I'm not even synaesthetic.

Glimpse

Glimpse 

For how long can one linger on a glimpse

-the slack, wandering thought of a moment

in pursuit of a disappeared ghost 

that washes around in its own silence

as rich as velvet and a luxury

deeper than the lush soil of cemeteries 

while light that from the furthest decayed stars

was on its way when the species began

but will not arrive until it is gone.

Olympic Bag Boggling

Olympic Bag Boggling, August 5th, Swindon.

Neither the weather nor six of the world's finest bag-bogglers could come between world number 1 (me) and a date with destiny as the Olympics reached a crescendo of excitement in the Swindon Bogglarena.
The pitch had remained covered during a morning of changeable weather and the event looked in doubt until a gap in the showers allowed a start to the action.
For those who have only so far caught up with archery, fencing, judo and sailing, Bag Boggling consists of two players aiming a tennis ball at a brick and scoring one point if they hit it and two points if they knock it over. First to 10 is the winner and the tournament is always a straight knock-out.
This year's summer competition naturally became an Olympic event and the result was Gold for me, Silver for my neice, Laura, and Bronze for my mother, Mary.
And, so, after all, it has proved that the Olympics can be a success. In no particular order, my favourites have been Victoria Pendleton's keirin, Mo Farah, Jessica, Bradley's time trial, etc but it's been better than one could have thought. Radio 5 will need a lie down at the end, though. There must be a limit to the hysteria one insists on generating, and for how long, and if nothing else comes out of these games, an immediate ban on interviewing sportspeople straight after events needs instigating.
Otherwise, who would have thought it. Well played.
(Thanks to Laura Chadwick for photographs)