Obiter Dicta

Tuesday, December 20th

I said I would write something of my books of the year.

            I haven’t read a great deal of new fiction this year but what I have read I’ve enjoyed. By and large. The stand-out novel for me was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Funny, insightful, provoking, reflective – everything that a good, thoughtful piece of writing should be. The flawed narrator device rarely worked better. And the main female character, Veronica, is beautifully portrayed. She initially annoyed me as, say Miriam in Sons and Lovers annoys me, or Mildred does in Of Human Bondage. But the denouement had me turning back and reading the whole damn thing right through again, so that I could look at Veronica in a completely different, ie, not phallocentric, way. Brilliant.

            I wasn’t surprised that it won the Booker. I read two more of the short list for that: The Sisters Brothers and Pigeon English. I liked both of them well enough but neither over much. The Sisters Brothers starts off well but ended up, to me, like an overlong spaghetti Western. I liked the adolescent characters of Pigeon English and the ending. But it dragged on a tad for me. It could have been done with being 5000 words less. Or fewer. Or both. Similarly, earlier in the year I read Bed, the first novel by journalist David Whitehouse. It’s about a young man who gets so fat, he can’t leave his bed. Simple idea and beautifully done. But I felt it could have been shorter. Clever idea, though, and an engaging style.

            I read three big literary biographies this year, two of which are Edith Sitwell by Richard Greene, and GK Chesterton by Ian Ker. (If I ruled the world, the name Kerr would always have two R’s. On pain of execution.) Both made me turn to writers I had either read very little of (Chesterton) or had read and found not especially to my taste (Sitwell.) The Sitwell biography is, by a league and a length, the more readable of the two, and I grew to like Edith very much. I re-read the Collected Poems and found a great deal that I now enthuse over – especially among her later poems. ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is astonishingly good. The poems for the atomic age – ‘Dirge for the New Sunrise’; The Shadow of Cain’ and ‘The Canticle of the Rose’ are almost equally powerful. But I found delights in the earlier, more mannered, work too, among the ‘Bucolic Comedies’ and ‘Façade’, although reading too much of these at one sitting is like being force-fed Parma Violets. Parts of ‘Gold Coast Customs’ are worthy too.

            Chesterton is a writer I have only skimmed. The Man Who was Thursday and some of the Father Brown stories to be precise. His writing is not much to my taste, although there are felicities abounding in Thursday. This biography is hard going sometimes, with a tendency to the windy and the wordy. There were long passages I just ignored. But Chesterton turned out to be a person I liked immensely – although I have little in common with him – and I will read more of his work. Hopefully, more of his essays and journalism. (The last writer I grew to like via his biography, like that, was Sir Walter Scott.)

            But the big lit biog this year was the new one of James Joyce by Gordon Bowker. Not the massively detailed labour of love that the old Ellmann biography was, this one at least has some new slants on the great man’s life and I devoured it in a week. I will reread Ulysses in its entirety yet again in the New Year. But first I will read Finnegans Wake in its entirety again. I’ve done it once before, in the centenary year of his birth. But its time to walk the multiverse of genius again.

            In poetry, the only book I remember buying is The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. As I’ve said elsewhere, this poet is the finest stylist writing in English just now. Better even than the great Heaney, and that’s saying something. The fact that she’s Scottish, female, gay and the Poet Laureate just fill me with delight. And so does the collection. The poem about the death of the last survivor of World War I, ‘Last Post’, is stunning.

            And my book of the year is the scintillatingly brilliant How To Be a Woman by the journalist Caitlin Moran. It’s sparky and sassy, extremely funny, heartbreaking and perceptive. And, along the way, it reminds us of the importance of feminism, of how we should never lose sight of its aims, even as we celebrate its successes. One of the few books ever that I wish I’d written. Although I never could have. Read it and see.

Women are the other half of the sky…

Okay. That’s it. No more dicta, obiter or otherwise, before New Year. Apparently, I have all sorts of media interviews and photoshoots lined up to coincide with the launch of The Locked Ward between then and now. I will tell of you of them anon.

Till then, my friend, think of the world…