|
Saturday, 07 November 2009 12:50 |
|
THE FINAL FORTY... and more.
Various people reviewing the book have criticised my final choice of 40 books I could not be without and which would be my final forty, if those are all I would be allowed. But of course I could compile another 40 and another and another. Attention was drawn to the final forty in the book itself being predominantly 19th and 20th century and perhaps a rather conservative selection. What, nothing European ? Nothing edgy ? Nothing modern ?
But these were meant to books I will always want to turn to and invitably the selection was conservative.
However, there are plenty of other books I would love to have on my shelves forever, so I am going to put up a few here from time to time. Here goes with the first - more later. And if you read your way through these during the coming winter you would have a rich bookfest.
TEN OF ANOTHER FINAL FORTY.
IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT, A TRAVELLER. ITALO CALVINO
THE RADETZKY MARCH. JOSEPH ROTH
HOTEL SAVOY. JOSEPH ROTH
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. DOSTOEVSKY
PERE GORIOT. BALZAC
A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY.. TURGENEV
THE BARRACKS. JOHN McGAHERN
STONER. JOHN WILLIAMS
CLOUD ATLAS. DAVID MITCHELL
THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT. ALBERTO MANGUEL
|
|
Sunday, 01 November 2009 13:07 |
|
TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION by P.D. JAMES (Bodleian Library 12,99) is a handy
little book, handy-sized hardback containing 160 pages of history, summary, observation, revelation, explanation and good sense. If you want a resume of the genre, with sensible opinions and some general 'rules' this is the book for you. I say 'rules' and P.D. James certainly offers some and they hold good for her kind of detective story one which relies on having a finite number of suspects, a closed circle setting, the careful placing of clues and a denoument which may - or may not - spring a surprise though they do not hold good for most other kinds of crime fiction. And as she says, genius can get away with anything.
There is a good clear run-through the origins of the detective story, beginning with Dickens and Wilkie Collins and moving straight to Conan Doyle. She is excellent on the Golden Age, roughly between 1918 and 1950 but there is no nostalgia about P.D. James's judgments. She does not long for everything to revert to the days of Christie and Marsh, Sayers and Tey and Allingham, greatly though she enjoys all of those writers. She knows times and policing have changed out of all recognition, that crime novels have become more realistic and altogether darker, that the Private Detective has long gone and with him his side-kick - Watson, Captain Hastings, Bunter et al. Collaboration between police and amateur is no longer possible or desirable. I don`t think she gives Raymond Chandler quite his full due and I would have liked her to cover the new wave of American crime writers more fully. But the best of this book is the seriousness which she reveals as lying behind her own crime fiction, the moral reasons for the writing of it - though she does not dismiss its value simply as diversion and entertainment. She is good on the nature of murder, on why it is a unique and a uniquely contaminating crime, how its effects spread out way beyond the victim and the guilty party, how it changes lives and how even a passing encounter with it can never be forgotten.
'Detective fiction is in the tradition of the English novel, which sees crime, violence and social chaos as an aberration,virtue and good order as the norm for which all reasonable people strive and which confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe.' There are plenty of illuminating quotations here, not from but about the genre, some of which other writers will certainly want to tuck away for future reference.
Those who do not read crime may still get much of interest, much food for thought, from this excellent, compact book, packed as it is with good things. It might even give them a taste for it. Those who do will find that it backs up their reading, explains much and provides a handy reference work. And for writers of crime fiction, whether they agree with everything P.D. James says or not, it is a must-read, if for no other reason than that she is the best of us all.
|
|
|
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 18:07 |
|
THE SPYING GAME
Spies are endlessly fascinating, spy books, both fiction and non-fiction among my longstanding best reads. Burgess, Maclean, Philby, the Cambridge set of 1930s spies – there are rows of books about all of it and one of the best, about one of the most enigmatic, chilling yet mesmerising characters, is Miranda Seymour’s fine biography of Anthony Blunt. Read that and you still don’t get much closer to knowing what made the man tick – but you do get a bit.
I have The Defence of the Realm. The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane) on my bedside table and next to read. Spying has always gone on and always will but the great period of interest is surely the time of the Cold War, between 1945 and 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall.). Spying is probably of even more crucial importance today though it will have changed quite a bit with the rise of the new technologies, but its literature is inevitably sparse and it does not have the romance of those years which are now becoming history.
And spying is romantic -though don’t ask me to define why. Spy novels are romantic, though they are not ‘romances.’
The Master is, of course, John Le Carre, the man who made the Spy Novel Literature, and brought good writing, masterly scene-setting, brilliant characterisation and excellent plotting to the genre and who has kept it there for 50 years. The George Smiley books are classics of the 20th century novel.
But there are spy writers now. Henry Porter is a rising star. But the one who will outshine them all, if his future books are as good as his last, is Charles Cumming. His first books were promising but one did not know quite how much better he might become. A lot of writers start with promise and the promise fizzles out. There has to be one book which makes the required leap from Promise to Achievement and Cummings has written that one, with Typhoon (Penguin 7.99) It is set in Hong Kong in the year of the handover from British to Chinese control – the night of that handover, the monsoon rain, the line-up of dignitaries on the Royal Yacht, the parties onshore, the feverish excitement and high tension, are conveyed so well one cannot believe Cumming was not there - (he wasn’t.) In the middle of it all is his anti-hero, Joe Lennox, whose new story this is. Then there is his CIA friend, his beautiful girl, and the old man who emerges from the sea with a demand to see the Governor, into whose ear alone he will spill his secrets.
The atmosphere of Hong Kong and of China itself, the teeming streets, shops, restaurants, bars, the beauty, the smells, the danger, the way it is all somehow backlit in an eerie, neon light, the tension – and the history, as well as the spying, these are all packed into this well written, cleverly plotted and gripping book which is worthy of Le Carre himself – and that’s saying something. |
|
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 08:13 |
|
It is always tricky finding something to read when you are writing yourself. If I am writing fiction, I tend to read non-fiction or classics I know well, if non-fiction, I can safely read new novels and old. The point is that unless you are more self-aware and self-disciplined than I am, you catch the style of the author you are reading, especially if they have an especially distinctive one. I read too much Muriel Spark and early William Trevor when I was writing the novels of 40 years ago and it sometimes shows, though I did not realise it at the time.
Proust is another whose style can be caught like swine flu.
When writing crime novels I need to be even more careful. I enjoy both the homegrown ones – P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell and the Americans, especially Michael Connolly, Patricia Cornwell, Dennis Lehane and as much, if not more, the greats of the early 20th century in the USA. – the greatest of all being Raymond Chandler.
|
|
+ MORE
|
|
