Fair to Middleton

There were a few options available for what to read next and I chose Stanley Middleton's Holiday, borrowed from my dad's extensive collection of Stan books, with him having been a teacher at father's school if not actually having had the chance to instil further literacy directly into my family. Uncle Don, my dad and I all wrote novels, of sorts, it could just about be said. Uncle Don was taken up by Hamish Hamilton, my dad's novella was a moving period piece and I finished a distant third, just grateful to have completed the course.

Holiday was joint winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, sharing it with subsequent Nobel Prize winner, Nadine Gordimer, and ahead of short-listed Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge and C.P. Snow, so it did well for itself but quite possibly deserved to.

The English seaside resort is a classic setting for the likes of Patrick Hamilton, Brighton Rock and John Cleese and Connie Booth and Stanley Middleton makes great use of it as a place of nostalgia, class distinction and the artificiality of manufactured good times because, of course, dysfunction is the main issue.

Whether the book now seems so much of its time, if not of a time before that, is because it is, because it was meant to be or because it is Middleton, is less obvious now. He was always 'genteel', with the more gruesome depths of psychology explored by D.H. Lawrence, for example, only implied beneath the respectability of affluent good manners and the requisite appreciation of music and literature that pass for 'education'. But, to be fair to Middleton, having read a few of his other books, it is in Hoilday that one can see more clearly that he knows what he's doing and that the gentility might be his natural habitat but that it is also the object of some irony, that it is not his fault and that he understands. He might not be as mild as I thought he was and there is an art beneath the sometimes almost wooden prose,

'You mean,' said Fisher,'that you're not judging her for anything she's actually said or done, but that she reminds you of some people whom you consider disreputable, and you therefore think she's something of that nature.'

Surely nobody in real life would ever construct such a sentence in conversation. It's Middleton all over, whose characters are forever making judgements on each other behind their backs. But I entirely take the point even if in such passages, Stan loses any claim to irony and just says, or lets his characters, say what he thinks.

The good things about Hoilday easily outweigh the reservations and it's not easy to think of books about which one has no rservations at all, they're only human. It's been a pleasure.

If it were entered into this year's Booker Prize, what chance would it stand. None at all. But, being somewhat dated myself by now, I might well prefer it to whatever they give the prize to.

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There have been a few minor anniversaries this year. The slightly delayed celebration of 50 years of Portsmouth Poetry Society is recorded here,

PPS at 50 

I simply had to be at the Wedgewood Rooms for the 50th Anniversary Tour of reggae legends, Black Uhuru, except that the Home Office didn't allow them the visa which surely sounds like some kind of infringement of human rights, not least because I get the price of the concert ticket refunded but not the booking fee. That's £2.25's worth of an atrocity when I take such care not to be the victim of scams.

Local period supergroup, The Consort of Twelve, mark 40 years on 11 Sept in Chichester with this programme,

Consort of Twelve

which it would surely be madness not to go to and, least significantly of all, but important to me,

2 August 1972 was my first ever attempt at a bike race. 31.37 for 10 miles, aged 12, on the Newent Road from Maisemore north of Gloucester. It is the first of only thirty time trials recorded in my comprehensive, ironically titled, file My Brilliant Career but I didn't have any other careers I enjoyed more.

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And, Breaking News,

Vol. 1 of the Bach Cello Suites by Pavlos Carvalho is now available,

Pavlos Carvalho - Bach vol. 1

Good things eventually come to those who can wait and we have done. One could fill a shelf with recordings of that music and I would if there were world enough and time to give them all proper attention but Pavlos is on order, should be here soon. Listening to them will be the easy bit, thinking of something that sounds wise to say about them is a good reason to decide that appointing oneself as local music writer wasn't such a good idea after all.