Bringing down the House

At Television Centre, they've been waiting for the clocks to go back, so that as soon as British Summer Time has choked its last, they can slam a Victorian novel adaptation into the DVD player and punch 'play.' Bleak House was a hit three or so years ago, so how about... um... Little Dorrit?

Little Dorrit? What next? Dombey and Son? Barnaby bejesus Rudge? Don't say it too loudly, but Little Dorrit divides opinions, like a big opinions knife. I have a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it, because very few people can say they met their wife through a novel (unless they're, say, psychotic and have misread the fact/fiction relationship dreadfully), and Little Dorrit was that novel. In summer 2005 I was invited over to the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long examination of a different Dickens novel each year, and that year it was - oh, you guessed. Anyway, I went over to talk about Victorian detective fiction; I came back with the kind of long distance relationship that made me feel I was in a Channel 4 lifestyle drama and meant that the next two years or so were largely spent in airports. I also met Miriam Margolyes out there, which just heightened the low key surrealism of the whole week, along with seeing people reading Terry Eagleton on the beach. But what was striking was the number of people at the conference/shebang who admitted that they didn't really like Little Dorrit that much. The plot is kinda murky, the imprisonment metaphors are laid on a bit much, Amy Dorrit is one of those heroines that a certain kind of reader finds utterly irritating (not me, but I know people who would readily send a spaceship crewed by Amy, Esther Summerson and Little Nell into the heart of the sun - it could be another Star Trek spin-off). As for me, Dorrit is admirable but not particularly lovable - it's more Dombey and Son than Bleak House. It may be significant that the characters I find the most compelling are Maggy, partially because of her self-reflexive love of narratives, but also for the way Hablot Browne has illustrated her, a round eyed stare that conveys her feeble mindedness (to use the Victorian phrase) but also provokes immediate sympathy; and Tattycoram, more of whom later. And is it really coincidence that Little Dorrit appears on our screens at the height of economic crisis? The Merdle financial fraud subplot seems to be the most compelling reason for adapting it, at least as far as the papers are concerned. I don't know how long it took to make, but surely someone in the drama department at the BBC knew more about the economic climate than most.

So, is it any good? My hopes were not rasied by the continuity announcer promising that "Dickens' work comes to life now on BBC1", as if literature were some corpse awaiting revivification from the golden hand of television. Saying that it's better than 97% of the rest of television doesn't really mean much any more, as the medium has become the new poetry - massive cultural potential, but virtually impossible to get right (and even House, the goggle box's best offering of recent times, has its weaknesses - the slightly repetitive plots and its obsession with the "Everybody Hurts" montage, whereby at the end we see everybody thinking about what happened here today). Much like the novel, the televisual Little Dorrit invites admiration but defuses involvement. Part of the problem is the familiarity with the BBC's 'prestige drama' format, and indeed the title sequence offers a bewildering range of famous names, all in the tiniest typeface ever used on television (it's called Victorian Drama and it's set in 0.0000000000000000000004 point) and highly derivative of the opening to Bleak House three years ago. Accordingly, most of the episode was spent identifying the faces rather than the characters. There's Bill Paterson and Janine Duvitski! Matthew MacFadyen's at the door! Sue Johnston and Alun Armstrong are downstairs! The guy from The Vicar of Dibley pops round, and the keys to the Marshalsea are held by that bloke who looks like Kenneth Connor, but it can't be Kenneth Connor because Kenneth Connor hasn't looked like that for years (primarily because of death), so it isn't Kenneth Connor, but you recognise him anyway. You know the one I mean - the one who looks like Kenneth Connor. The one thing more predictable than the stellar casting is the sop to up and coming talent in the lead -last time, Anna Maxwell Martin was probably best known for being Lyra in the National's His Dark Materials, before becoming face-changing space-dreaming Esther Summerson; this time, it's Amy who's been given to a relative unknown, Clare Foy, and consequently she seems to be more of an actual character than the rest of them.

To be fair, I'm being a little harsh. MacFadyen is shaping up well as Arthur, Tom Courtenay is showing everyone else how it's done, and Andy Serkis as Blandois shows great potential (I'm not sure how authentic that French accent is, but then again that suits the more performative side of Blandois' character, and anyway Serkis captures the magnetism of the man beautifully). My initial resistance to the appearance of Alun Armstrong again so soon after his turn as Bucket in Bleak House was overcome at the end of the episode, when I was reminded of Flintwich's doppleganger, so Bucket's regeneration (so to speak) seems appropriate. Maxine Peake (who, to her credit, I didn't recognise at first) is also an intriguing Miss Wade. Which leads us to the stunt casting - in 2005, we had Johnny Vegas as Krook, which kind of worked; this time, we have Freema Agyeman as Tattycoram, and it seems to be a train wreck from the off. I imagine the Dickens traditionalist mafia will be indignant that Tattycoram is now black, and there does seem to be an undertone here of poking the Daily Mailers, which is perfectly fine; the problem lies in the fact that making the character black brings up intriguing questions of the consequences for social interaction, which the script completely ignores. Although no reactionary, Dickens was not famed for his progressive racial politics, and the casting seems entirely at odds with the writing. It's fine to make Tattycoram black, but nobody else on screen seems to have noticed that she is. It doesn't help that the character has been terribly underwritten and that Agyeman is struggling to make the part work - the effects of psychological bullying just come across as stroppiness. Trailers for subsequent episodes suggest that the intimations of Miss Wade's lesbianism, subliminal in the original, are going to be accompanied by fireworks in the screen version and footage of trains going into tunnels... um... perhaps footage of a tunnel being built right in front of another tunnel? What is Sapphic visual shorthand nowadays, anyway?

Acting aside, the direction and set design is a little jarring. Victorian London looks less like Victorian London than Dickensworld (TM) - where the hell is everybody? Where's the visual onslaught of posters and bills? Where did all this space come from? For a story all about imprisonment, the actors are swimming in acres, and there isn't much of a sense of enclosure when it requires a panning shot for Arthur to get from one end of a room to the other. With the exception of a couple of shots of Amy, everyone appears in middle range, and the only hints at the theme of the novel are a few hackneyed shots through prison bars (Blandois in prison) or arches (Miss Wade and Tattycoram). I'm hoping the earlier episodes have set up this sense of space in order to break it down later on, but that may be too much to expect. Similarly, the direction often seems intent on making Andrew Davies' (oh, he adapted it, but you knew that already) script ridiculous, which occasionally it is; both are equally guilty in the scene where Mr. Meagles declares that they are imprisoned "in Marseilles, of all places!" and then cuts to a tricolore immediately afterwards - where do you think they are? (No, not Lyme Regis, which is what it looked like).

Ah, it's easier to pick holes in stuff. More fun, too. Ultimately, Little Dorrit is good, but not great, and I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it's probably worth your time. It's not Bleak House, but then again, what is? Bleak House, obviously.

Xeroxy Music

There I am in Blackwell's, looking around to see if the reading list for my module has magically transformed itself into a stack of actual books for actual students to come in and actually buy (answer: I don't think so, although I did see a pile of Bleak Houses; although every Blackwell's at every university is obliged to stock a pile of Bleak Houses. Or Bleaks House, I don't know), when I caught sight of the retooled Oxford Classics, and in particular their new Middlemarch. That looks familiar, I thought, for reasons I won't insult your intelligence by only hinting at right now, if only because this website's limited options for displaying pictures have given the game away from the start (i.e. the Russell T Davies effect). Yes, the same slightly plain, grey garbed, "I'm a governess and no mistake" woman was on the cover of the very same copy of Jane Eyre that I was already carrying (it's Daniel Macnee's "Lady in Grey," in case you wondered). What does this mean - that Dorothea Brooke was Jane Eyre all along? Was Sherlock Holmes really Casaubon? Did Lydgate turn into Rambo? You never saw them in the same room together.

Ah, books and their covers. Despite the turn towards a more cultural materialist perspective in criticism, the relationship hasn't really received a great deal of academic attention, probably because everybody knows that apparently you can't judge the former by the latter. Although in some cases, you can; the worst novel I've ever read also had the worst cover, best described as the personnel of a pub covers band (possibly called Xeroxy Music) badly photoshopped around a solar eclipse (which was at least partially relevant to the plot). I'm naming no names here, but it's the only novel I know of to be set at my old institution, the University of Exeter; the honour isn't so much a poisoned chalice as a McDonalds coffee spat into by Richard Littlejohn. In any case, book covers are far more interesting and culturally interesting than cliche would have you believe. When I'm in the US, a normally bland bibliopolis such as Borders becomes fascinating, because of the (often baffling) difference in cover art for the same novel on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Auster, for instance, gets treated much better over there by Penguin, as opposed to Faber's gloomy and grainy intimations of Americana for the UK market (and there's a better typeface in the US, too). The design for Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is also much better stateside: a largely blank silver cover with the barest hint of reflection, looking directly at it and seeing the word GOD superimposed on your fuzzy mug somehow suggests Dawkins' argument more acutely than the UK version of a red explosion vaguely reminiscent of a nu-prog album. Sometimes, the differences are more subtle; the cover of Ian McEwan's Saturday in the US is really just a close-up of the back of the British cover, no doubt because many American readers won't be familiar with the British Telecom tower (the UK cover for Saturday is curious anyway, being a rather literal staging of the first chapter and therefore a bit like a Pan's People dance number). In other cases, the British versions are better; buy Haruki Murakami in the US and you're entering a whole world of crazy kitsch, rather than the more studied minimalism here, while crime fiction in America still tends to favour design that's unthreateningly populist, as opposed to the rather more cryptic Colin Dexter covers that have been around here since the mid nineties. And talking of crime fiction, I'm still hugely fond of the original Faber cover for P. D. James' Devices and Desires as a strangely haunting image, although I can't remember that much about the actual novel.

Back to the nineteenth century - there are definite trends to be considered. Buy Thomas Hardy in Penguin Classics in the nineties (where most of mine date from), and you'd almost certainly get a medium-to-long shot of landscape. Nowadays, it's medium-to-close images of a single person. Does this mean the way we read Hardy has changed, from a recognition of the importance of place to his work in character study? Dickens seems to have gone the other way - from one or two people on the covers a few years ago, to today's extremes - either moody empty spaces (Bleak House, Great Expectations) or crowded scenes from the original text (David Copperfield, Little Dorrit). As for George Eliot, designers seem to go back and forth as to whether it's the social setting or the individual character who really carries the reader's attention. Middlemarch is a place - Middlemarch is a state of mind...

The Rumble in the Lambeth Palace

Iain Sinclair once said (actually, he said it right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZw4Ym5U28) that television simply isn't suited any more to the documentary format. There's simply not enough space for the material that needs to be included in any in-depth discussion. Before I get irate e-mails about my use of spatial metaphors to discuss television ("SIR - Is it not the case that television is a temporal phenomenon..."), consider the fact that an hour's documentary really boils down to a script of about sixty pages, double spaced, and which includes all kinds of visual and effect cues scattered among the actual intellectual content. How much can you actually cram into an hour's documentary, once you've dealt with all the slow-mo, speeded up footage of people walking across a bridge on the Thames, and zeitgeisty blasts of Coldplay?

(A brief pseudo-digression (pseudo because I haven't really got to the main subject of this week's doughnut, although you've probably already guessed that it's the final episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin): in the clip mentioned above, Sinclair mentions how a documentary on J. G. Ballard failed to engage with the man's work in any depth, and reduced the contributions of those such as Sinclair to snippets barely totalling a fistful of minutes. And yet... Ballard's reputation has always baffled me, especially the regard in which he's held by far better writers, such as Will Self and Sinclair himself. I can see how his earlier work might have shaped the development of science fiction, but his most recent novels have been banal doodles around the themes of modern society and violence, the kind of thing Chuck Palahnuik did with Fight Club, although Palahnuik clearly didn't feel the need to keep writing the same novel. If you're a J. G. Ballard and having trouble writing your next novel, why not try this one? Make your protagonist a white professional male, who leads a relatively dull life until some kind of explosion/terrorist attack/murder/general outburst of violence at a local industrial estate/airport/shopping centre involves him/his wife/partner/ex-partner. During the investigation into the mayhem, your protagonist gets deeper into a cabal of middle class types whose lives have become so affluently boring that they only feel alive through acts of violence. End with moral ambivalence aplenty, the hero almost seduced by this argument, ooh, perhaps the spectre of violence lurks within us all and our Starbucks lattes. Das End.

There. I've said it.)

Anyway, the shortcomings of television as a documentary medium had a big parade this week, with the third instalment of Richard Dawkins' series The Genius of Charles Darwin. I criticised the last episodes for a lack of historical context, which at least wasn't as much of a problem this week, since Dawkins decided he was going to ditch the content (except for a brief interlude on Darwin's own religious crises) and go after religious types instead. As such, there wasn't a great deal to complain about, since it's always fun to see the man tussling with 'science' teachers who honestly believe the Earth is about six thousand years old, or creationists who keep repeating that all they want to do is 'open up the debate,' as if the will to argument were on a par with actual evidence or theoretical credibility (how far, I wonder, would I get if I wanted to 'open up the debate' that Shrewsbury is a myth perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher, who lives in my foot?). But, fun as it is to goad people who believe that the eye is perfect while peering through lenses an inch thick, it didn't deserve nearly an entire episode of a series purporting to be about Darwin himself. The fact that such goading went on for far too long was clear from the editing of the discussion with three school teachers about the responsibilities of teaching science and challenging religion; while Dawkins went on about kicking religion in the 'nads, the teachers began exchanging slightly worried glances of the kind they might bandy about if confronted by a drunk at a bus station, with the result that he began to lose a bit of ground with the viewers. The programme nearly lost it altogether when Dawkins faced the camera and declared resoundingly that "If you're a relativist, you're a massive dickhead" (well, not quite like that, but almost). What, any kind of relativism? Dawkins certainly has a good case to make, but not when he ditches nuance in favour of grandstanding, and there was too much of that over the course of three episodes apparently about Darwin.

Similarly, the effort to cover so many angles (that is, to fit in a smattering of nutbars as well; covering the angels, perhaps) meant that the curse of the television documentary struck again, inasmuch as everybody got two minutes. That's OK when you're talking to a man who believes god is better than scientists at explaining the origin of the universe because scientists weren't there (and, worse still, wears a 'hilarious' t-shirt proving god's existence through equations denoting science) because more than two minutes and you'd be pummelling the screen in outrage, but what is the point of driving all the way to visit Daniel Dennett for a brief conversation which really only retreads Darwin's "There is grandeur in this view of life?" (which Dawkins quoted in the first episode anyway)? And who else thought that the meeting with Rowan Williams was poorly served by being condensed into a couple of minutes betwixt adverts for hair conditioner? This surely deserved its own programme (if only because they'd managed to book Williams in the first place), ideally on Christmas Day in an attempt to liven up Channel 4's otherwise leaden anti-yule scheduling. Instead, we got Dawkins being annoyed by a metaphor, further conversation on which would have been fascinating, if we hadn't been obliged to leap into the car and drive to Dan's house afterwards.

Ultimately, then, The Genius of Charles Darwin was a disappointment, primarily because Dawkins couldn't keep his mind on Darwin and kept wandering off to poke at religious types. Of course, the critique of religion is right there in evolution, but Dawkins seems content to live up to his reputation as megaatheist (somehow I think hyphenating that term would dilute it). Ironically, in doing so he's rapidly leaving behind his work in science, by getting fixated on telling us what isn't there, instead of what is and thus letting the absences speak for themselves. As speech theorist ("say what you see") Roy Walker once said, it's good but it's not right.

Dawkins' Doughnuts

So, part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin. Last week I bemoaned the lack of historical depth to Richard Dawkins' account of evolutionary theory. Did things get better this week? Well... not really.

Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.

And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.

There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.

Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?

Finally, some Darwin; or, What Would Terry Eagleton Do?

Hello all. Apologies for the two-month hiatus, but these last two months have been somewhat busy. Off to the US for much of June, various conference dates (as keen readers will already know) in July, and now a relocation. Yes, as of 8th August, the Doughnuts are moving from the terrorist's medium sized city of choice, Exeter, and up to Newcastle. In the meantime, however, I'm sad to report a muffin retraction. You'll remember a few months ago how I congratulated the Continental Airlines ground staff at Gatwick for their service in getting me good seats, with the cry of 'muffins all round'? Unfortunately, Continental's response on my return to the UK at the end of June was to act with such incompetence across two continents (starting with ineptitude and hungoverness at Oklahoma City, going on with massive inconvenience at Houston, and ending with startling rudeness at Gatwick) that I doubt there will ever be muffins for Continental again.

Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).

Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.

I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"

Tour dates 2008

Something of a makeover this week, doughnutfans; since the day after I adorned the top of this e-journal with my strange double-exposure photo of scenes of Exeter (c. 2001) the city was caught up in the war on terr'r (to use George's pronunciation), I thought something more immediately Victorian might be appropriate, not least because the Victorian content suggested by the title hasn't been much in evidence so far this year. More to come in the forthcoming months, honest. I really can't wait to get hold of a scanner and share with you the late Victorian/Edwardian delights of The Doings of Vigorous Daunt, Millionaire, a kind of prototypic James Bond who first appeared in the Harmsworth Magazine at the turn of the century. The illustrations are great, marauding tigers and revolvers all over the place. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with Sidney Paget's image of John Watson from Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" in volume two of The Strand Magazine, 1891. Those of you wanting more gloss on this image should see what I said about it in Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.1 (2007). Ah, the distinctive aroma of self-promotion. While I'm about it, anyone in the academic business who wants to say hello (and to moan about the lack of Victorian stuff so far this year) can do so at any of the three forthcoming conferences I'll be speaking at in the next few months.

Firstly, there's Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film at the University of Portsmouth, 14-16 July 2008, where I'll be presenting on urban myth and Edwardian crime fiction, in particular Marie Belloc-Lowndes' novel The Lodger. Although we tend to associate urban legends with twentieth century popular culture (and in particular fifties Americana onwards, I would guess), there's a persuasive case that such stories were all over nineteenth century popular culture, and certainly by the time Belloc Lowndes took a hearsay story about Jack the Ripper and turned it into fiction in 1912. It's probably a little on the late side, but you can book your front row seats here.

Secondly, and in the same week, a rare hometown gig; Artistry and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Exeter, 18-20 July 2008. This one is a development of the research area I unveiled at Birkbeck back in October, magic and conjuring in Victorian fiction. Like that paper, there'll be some Dickens in there, but this one is more generally about Victorian conjuring's internal struggle with its aesthetic status (is it an art? 'Yes,' says David Devant and other successful fin de siecle magicians; 'um maybe' says the public; 'Hell no' say the arbiters of high culture, but they obviously say it more politely). Expect side discussions of spiritualism and perhaps a bonus bad Derren Brown impersonation.

Thirdly, and finally for now, off to Leicester for Victorian Bodies: Touch, Bodies, and Emotions, 1-3 September 2008. Although last on the list at present, this one is part of my primary research project, being a cultural history of London Underground (those of you who have been paying attention to a psychotic degree will remember I mentioned this about fifteen months ago). Here, I'll be looking at how the establishment of the Underground in the 1860s gave popular culture a new space for fear, unease, and general terror, in particular in John Oxenham's 1897 crime serial A Mystery of the Underground, a story apparently so terrifying that readers refused to travel by underground. Or so Peter Haining argues, although I'm finding actual evidence for this rather scant (itself an interesting point; why are we so keen to accept narratives of terror about the underground?). Tour T-shirts to follow, featuring rockin' John Watson; yours for thirty pounds each.

Billie Piper at the Gates of Dawn

I've kept away from Doctor Who for long enough this year, but last week's episode was a goad too far; when they start poking about in detective fiction and table-rapping Agatha Christie, then I'm compelled to comment (the same would be true of the Dickens episode a few years ago, except that this site didn't exist then). "The Unicorn and the Wasp" was fairly characteristic of the series so far this year - nothing dreadful, but nothing you'd want to watch twice, either. The first half promised an interesting dialogue between the Christiean world (admittedly, a version of her novels collapsed into three dimensional Cluedo, which is at least two more dimensions than the 1990s televised version) and a huge murdering wasp; the second half, unfortunately, took a banality pill and revealed that the giant wasp was really a shape-shifting alien creature hiding in the guise of a vicar, and that all this craziness was the real reason for Christie disappearing for a while. Add some strange directorial decisions (how best to convey that Christie turned up again as an amnesiac at a hotel in Harrogate? Ah, we could have someone say it, and then cut to Christie looking confused beside a big sign saying THE HARROGATE HOTEL. Whaddya think? Too subtle?) and some rather rushed narrative twists, and the results safely veered away from the potentially fascinating collision of genres so interestingly threatened at the beginning.

I was reminded of two things watching this; firstly, Gerald Heard's 1941 crime novel A Taste for Honey, which I'd just been asked to endorse for a forthcoming reprint. Here the murderer breeds a particularly aggressive type of bees, who fatally attack anyone who comes into contact with a certain substance. On paper (well, on a website) it sounds silly, but the tone is such that the interaction between the almost science-fiction elements and the crime narrative work rather well (as I said, it's a cross between G. K. Chesterton and John Wyndham). This is where "The Unicorn and the Wasp" could have been heading, although the fact that the wasp in question was huge lends the potential of a Magritte-esque surrealism. Instead, the second thing I was reminded of while watching it was Timothy West's performance in Tales of the Unexpected back in the 1980s, where West gradually turns into a bee, complete with interspersed 'buzzes' in the dialogue. It wasn't a particularly effective narrative trick then; the fact that it was reproduced almost exactly in nu-Who doesn't make it any better, no matter how flashy your CGI is.

The Christie book titles crammed into the script didn't help, either. By the end, I wondered why they hadn't included someone called Evans, so he couldn't be asked something, or a classic Doctor Who countdown heading towards zero, or maybe a depressive called Cypress. While we're on the subject, why are Doctor Who's historical celebrities almost always literary figures (except for Queen Victoria in the second series)? I would like to see this as an underlying message of "Hey kids - reading is cool!", but I also suspect there's a hint of "Hey kids - reading is historical!", notwithstanding this episode's revelation that people will be reading Christie well into the year five million (and still with the freaky 1970s book covers, too). Perhaps next series, we could see Jimi Hendrix defeat Cybermen at Woodstock, or perhaps Syd Barrett and daleks. Actually, anything Doctor Who can come up with is probably fairly pedestrian compared to the kind of things that were running through Syd Barrett's head. But it would allow for an episode crammed full of Pink Floyd references: "You people are animals!" "We're on the dark side of the moon", "go at 'em, hearty mother!" It would be better than all the sinister corporations and gas creatures we're getting week after week, anyway.

"Hey George - High Five!": Laurie Anderson, Homeland

As promised earlier, a review of Laurie Anderson’s Homeland, which I saw at the Barbican Theatre last Friday. But before the main feature, a support act: a few words on the Barbican itself. My, it’s confusing, isn’t it? Not being completely familiar with the city end of London, a walk from Old Street soon turned into a confusing labyrinth of signs for the Barbican Centre, but all pointing in slightly different directions. This is obviously why they include a map with the tickets. Secondly, once you’ve found it, finding the appropriate entrance seems to be a matter of luck. And finally, once inside, you’re in a cultural centre of mezzanines and staircases designed by M. C. Escher. Finding the right auditorium was easy enough, but I’m sure I walked past the same ticket desk three times on the way to the toilets.

Now for the main event (and, incidentally, cheers to the Barbican/Anderson for a free programme, rather than the £10 gouge for jewellers adverts it usually is nowadays). Homeland, a song cycle on the themes of the ongoing war and national security, is stripped-down Anderson – the multimedia stuff has gone (hell, today Powerpoint makes everyone multimedia), and apart from the instruments, the stage is bare except for a couple of hundred small candles and lightbulbs hanging low from the ceiling, in much the same way as Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet in 2004. Typically, Anderson is not interested in rock artist ‘at last, here I am’ posturing; barely after the stage lights come up, she and the three other musicians stride on and get started. And Homeland starts brilliantly; violins competing with the rumbling bass of the groove electronics which, as promised, dominate the performance. And then there’s the voice. She sounds exactly as she does on disc (unsurprising, since apparently Bright Red was recorded with one of the most expensive microphones available), and pretty much looks the same too (no surprises in height here). The opening section, based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, moves between spoken-sung meditations on the birth of memory and a time before there was land, and a floating haunting chorus which she delivers effortlessly. Moving into ‘Bad Man’, here come the politics, the angry references to war and bombings. Anderson's status as an American - a New Yorker, no less - allows her to rip into US foreign policy with a vehemence that might seem like lazy prejudice coming from Europeans. Apparently a group of people walked out during Thursday’s performance – what did they expect? “Hey George – high five!” This is actually rather dark stuff (and as a whole, the work resembles the heavier stuff of Bright Red replayed in the style of Life on a String, in particular the pulsating electronics on “My Compensation” and “One Beautiful Evening”), and one wonders where the humour has gone. Oh, here it is, in “Only an Expert,” familiar now from numerous YouTube appearances and the closest Homeland gets to a lead-off single. But on the whole, this is serious stuff, performed passionately; Anderson really does seem disbelievingly upset at where her country has been and where it's going.

As a collection of Anderson’s new work, Homeland is compelling; as a coherent performance essay on the themes of security, information, and nation, however, it’s slightly less convincing. There are some brilliant lines (eyes "like dead stars, their light trapped in time”; similarly, the reflection that what makes the stars wonderful is that we cannot damage them, although we’re reaching for them nonetheless), and a few clunky ones (some sections of “Only an Expert”). Homeland and other stories might have been a better (if clumsier) title, because the promise of the opening section to offer an intriguing interplay between myth and the current state of the world doesn’t quite come off, although the Birds song’s thematic opposition of sky and land recurs a few times throughout the piece. ‘Heart of a Child,’ seemingly about the death of Anderson’s father (again, back to Bright Red and Life on a String here) is moving, but feels out of place. 'The Underwear Gods' (those huge people on billboards - 'always in their underwear') is funny (and the closest Anderson gets to Philip Larkin) but also seems like a sidestep. The best parts are when Anderson gets back to storytelling, and - yay! - the voice modulation comes out again when the mike gets dropped a few octaves for her to take on a male persona, acting as a kind of chorus. We're never quite sure whether this is another character in a sometimes wayward concept album (someone rueful about his own experiences in the intelligence industry, perhaps), or Anderson herself (there are brief references to working for NASA, an even briefer visual nod to the video for 'O Superman'). But these are some of the best bits, when the intellectual rock concert veneer splits open to reveal the performance art beneath, and lines such as 'Your silence will be considered consent' and 'there's trouble at the mine' gradually take on sinister undertones. There were only two of these interludes; frankly, I would have liked more, because of their potential to knit the whole piece together. But the performance ends almost as well as it begins, with "The Lost Art of Conversation," an analysis of modern alienated relationships (a bit like a pared down version of String's "Broken"), and the encore is wonderful; Anderson alone on stage playing a brief violin piece, weaving between the candles and constantly watching the audience.

Ultimately, Homeland is a superb collection of stories, but a ropey novel; the music is often fantastic, the performance compelling, but there's little sense of progression over the ninety minutes. This may, of course, be because in performance you only get to see it once, and Anderson's work is usually best appreciated after a few listenings. It's going to be released as an album next year (again, a measure of her difference from everybody else in HMV - who else would even consider touring a whole year before a release, taunting the bootleg gods?), and it'll be interesting to see if the whole thing survives as a double-disc bonanza, or if a more coherent, edited performance emerges. Either way, I'll be queuing up outside 'Music Solutions' for my copy in 2009.

What's that? You want a star rating out of five? It's not the Radio Times, fercryin' out loud. Oh, OK: ****.

In English, Brainiac

At about this time last year, I wrote a mini-essay on the imminent death of Doctor Who. And, aberrations such as Steven Moffatt's "Blink" aside, the series seems content to wander in time and mediocrity. So far this year, we've had a plot about weight loss pills that was anorexic, a so-so Pompeiian runabout, a rather better but thematically hackneyed slaves in space affair (although some rather nice direction did a lot to raise it above the competent), and last week, Doctor Who and the Narrative Autopilot. Just thinking about it is tedious, so I won't.

Instead, let's consider television for grown-ups. Ah, a new series of House is here. I say new – I’ve actually already seen three episodes as part of the in-flight entertainment on the Continental flight I mentioned a few weeks ago. Without wishing to reinforce lazy gender stereotypes (although clearly here, I do), why do Continental’s film choices have to be so obviously, well, gendered? On the flight out, the choices were Bookclub Romantic Comedy Slush and Childcare Romantic Comedy Slush, while on the way back the options were Boom Boom Smashy Bang and Witless Sports Knockabout. Do they think the US is gradually filling up with the ladies (in Houston?), while antler-locking males are hotfootin’ it to Gatwick? At least someone had the sense to rack up a few episodes of what is one of the few dramas worth watching at the moment, and which also makes it truly laughable that Torchwood is supposed to be for adults. True, the plots are often silly (she had a koala mite in her ear all the time!), but the scripts should make Russell T. Davies weep with sheer inadequacy. After all, you need to be more than competent to make the cantankerous genius model of narrative work nowadays, but House does it.

Channel Five have their mitts on it at the moment, having shaken their sharks and Nazis phase (tonite – when shazis attack), and at the beginning of the year were promoting it with Numbers (sorry, Numb3rs. You know, like Se7en or all ‘Genuine Vi4gra’) as ‘clever television.’ The idea is that both centre around intellectual heroes (and remember, in the world of television the monarch of public intellectuals is Carol Vorderman), but that’s really as far as the similarities go. A telling distinction is that while House refuses to feature a regular character whose function is to scratch his (always his) head and say “In English, brainiac,” Numb3rs is crammed full of expositionary dialogue in which the Byronic genius outlines a vaguely relevant mathematical theory, before using it as an excuse to draw a circle right in the middle of the map the FBI types were all looking at. Of course, genuinely mathematics related-crimes are few and far between, leading the writers to rely on two annoying tropes. The first is the opening sequence's banal speech that "We use math every day..." Maybe, but only in the same sense that we use physics, linguistics, biochemistry, cultural studies - in fact, pretty much anything you like - every day, and they don't get their own glossy cop show. The second is the amazingly flexible definition of mathematics, primarily in the fact that one week our hero will be working with imaginary numbers, the next with turbulent flow, which makes as much sense as J. Hillis Miller, P. I being about Dickens one week and Piers Plowman the next.

There are also consequences for narrative. It seems that mathematics and detective fiction should naturally go together; there are tempting connections to be made between investigative paradigms, the solving of problems. In practice, however, the marriage is often a misjudgement of Liza Minelli proportions. The mathematician narrator of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man never really shows us his analytic stuff; Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders is fairly dire (and, christ on a pedalo, they've made it into a film), offering us a supposed mathematical genius who is stumped by a child's puzzle and, bizarrely, no real reason for why this mayhem should be happening in Oxford and not, say, Nuneaton. The good news is that the novel is full of ciphers; the bad news, they're the main characters. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that while maths and detection look good together, behind closed doors they have marital arguments of, well, Liza Minelli proportions. Modern crime fiction insists on focusing on the psychology of crime, its individuality. Critics of the genre are rapidly growing tired of all the Foucauldian disciplinary pessimism and returning to the genre's embrace of the romanticist troubled soul as the root of criminal mystery. This isn't to reinstate some tired argument that science doesn't capture the mysteries of human consciousness, just to say that crime fiction and determinism don't get along, because if criminals turn out to be so predictable, then pursuing them is simply dull. And this is where Numb3rs is behind the game; whenever Charlie suddenly realises that the criminal's movements can be determined and - the real kicker - predicted, as if the psycho were a variable rather than an actual person, then it's time to turn off. Who needs psychology or depth of character when you have graph paper?

Terminal disease

Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.

One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.

The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.

As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.

The Californian Bookselling Massacre

Bad news this week, bibliophiles (at least, those of you in Northern California). A paltry week or so after adding the link for Woodland's Next Chapter bookshop over there to your left, comes the news that the shop is to close. Read all (or rather, in internet friendly newschunk format) about it here, thanks to the Sacramento Bee:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/775661.html

All right - but we'll still be able to go to Bogey's Books in nearby Davis for second hand literary goodies, yes? Well, no:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/487057.html

Thanks again Sacramento Bee, bringer of depressing news, although it's also nice to see that this counts as news, rather than the minutiae of football that constitutes important information over here. I suppose the BBC might have covered this, but only if they had a programme about it to publicise. And I thought the licence fee was there for a reason, i.e. to avoid incessant corporate advertising and rip-offs of ITV talent shows. Ah well.

But this is beside the immediate point. Naturally (since I wouldn't be writing about it otherwise), these closures are saddening, since these two shops in particular formed a large part of my time in Yolo county (also: apricot pie from Raley's, though not their fried chicken, which is of British standards; cobbler from the Memorial Union at UC Davis; and In-n-Out. Honestly, I'm only overweight by the smallest medically defined amount). The Next Chapter in particular will be missed, since my wife and I lived a few blocks away from it, and it contributed a good many of my memories of Northern California. For instance, finally finding a copy of Georges Perec's A Void (all right Oulipo purists, La Disparition) there. Or just English amazement at being able to go second hand book shopping at eight in the evening (once you get back here, opening hours seem somehow prudish, and late night opening once a week before Christmas is no longer the glimpse of stocking it once might have been). And the smell of the place, a combination of books, coffee and, just to stop that being a hackneyed combination, American wood. It did, after all, use to be a hardware store. And yes, American wood smells different, as does the slightly differently sized paper. Hell, the whole country has a hint of cinnamon about it, especially the airports. As for the bookshop, I always intended to pop back once I'd got a proper academic job and pick up that set of E. W. Hornung they had ($15 a volume is pretty good, but not quite on a graduate student salary). For now I'll just have to get round to reading the copy of Roy Vickers' The Department of Dead Ends I got for $2.50.

Bogey's wasn't quite so central to my Californian life, but still pretty important (and useful for picking up some John Dickson Carr as well).For some reason, the memory of walking there one evening after a day spent in the library at UC Davis in December 2005 has particularly stuck in my mind, like a Wordsworthian 'spot of time' but with slightly better weather. I even sold them a few books as well, but not very good ones (I suspect my copy of Mick Jackson's Five Boys was still there at the end), so maybe I should feel a little complicit in the closure. Or we could just blame Borders around the corner. Yeah, let's.

They're American planes, made in America.

The last couple of months have seen me take a couple of technological strides (well, shuffles) forward. Earlier this month, on a research trip to the British Library, I finally got myself an Oyster card. Like anybody else new to this system, I spent the next few days in a fug of self-satisfaction at saving money, perfecting my Oyster Slap (the nonchalant yet forceful placing of the wallet against the yellow pad when passing through the gate) and guffawing inwardly at those still fumbling with their card tickets, waiting all that time for the barrier to take the card and spit it out again. I was, of course, aware that real life Lunnoners were similarly guffawing at me last year, and will indeed miss the cardboard Underground ticket (its dimensions making it somehow perfectly suited for bookmark duty), but as with any other popular technology, there's a pervasive sense of "How could I have been so arse rippingly stupid as to carry on with the old stuff?" Paper tickets, VHS, portable CD players... bringing me to the second (or, chronologically, first) technological leap - the MP3 player, which I adopted in December. For the moderately frequent flyer, this constitutes a whole revolution in carry-on luggage. No more stuffing the seat pocket in front of me with a CD player and a couple of fabric clams containing the best prog-, art- and classic rock the 1970s has to offer (you try Bach on a plane), leaving no room for one's knees, and even then forcing one to have already taken out the superfluous magazines and duty-free brochures already in the pouch, and putting them in your neighbour's pouch before he or she arrives (then feigning ignorance when they pull out the in-flight film guide and seven copies of Sky Mall tumble out as well). No more juggling all that stuff - just a tiny silver thing that fits in the pocket. And so it was that one of the best moments of last year (after getting married, 'f course) came right at the end, flying to Oklahoma City on New Year's Eve. Having scored the holy grail of economy seating (exit row, window seat) thanks to the quite superb Continental check-in staff at Gatwick (muffins all round), the final approach into US airspace was undertaken to the equally dramatic soundtrack of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in its compressed digital glory. It was difficult to be precise, but I'm fairly sure that we entered the US just as the track ended and as I had semi-intended (look, it can get boring up there). That was good. What was better, however, and which came as a rather more unintended surprise (as surprises tend to be), was that the next track, immediately after entering the States, was Laurie Anderson, "From the Air."

Which brings me to the subject of this week's (um, month's?) doughnut, Laurie Anderson. Anderson is somewhat prominent in my head at the moment, not only because of her taking a significant chunk of my MP3 player at the moment (incidentally, it's not an Apple, more of a clementine), but also because I've just bought tickets for her new show, Homeland, at the Barbican this May, and am hugely excited, because despite the centrality of performance art to Anderson's career, I've never seen one of her performances. The theme of Homeland is America’s current preoccupation with national security, which at first I though was something of a retread of old concerns, until I actually thought about it and realised it’s not something that crops up in her earlier work (there’s a possible exception in “Night in Baghdad” from Bright Red, perhaps). Rather, the World Trade Center attacks and everything after have been retroactively superimposed over the songs, most obviously the 1982 ha-ha vocoder fest “O Superman,” Anderson’s most famous piece (“Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America”). The 2007 re-issue of Big Science (1982) rams the point home with uncharacteristic bluntness, the back cover showing the twin towers themselves. “From the Air,” the piece that accompanied my aerial entrance in the US, is narrated by the captain of an aircraft which is about "to attempt a... crash landing." There's a silent 'uh' implied before "crash." It's that precise. And humorous too, when the Captain's instructions to the passengers rapidly devolve into a game of Simon Says. But the reason why this song was so perfect as a soundtrack for entering America was not only the plane setting (it is, after all, about a crash, so perfect in the slightly masochistic sense that it re-establishes that the big turbine thing just outside your exit row window seat is also what your entire world relies on), but the album's evocation of America as a whole, a technologically sated society from the cities to the slightly indeterminate out-of-town zones wonderfully evoked in the title track of Big Science. There's more aural precision here: "Big Science" gradually becomes "Big Signs," which puts me in mid of the towering neon to be found on most highway sides in the midwest. So while Anderson hasn’t yet directly tackled the idea of Homeland Security, it’s always been there in the background, since her work has obsessively explored the idea of what it is to be American, or at least be in America. This may be why her last album to date, 2001's Life on a String, got some rather mixed reviews, since it opens out the sound to include influences from the slightly oddly named 'world' music, and some of the tracks move away from Anderson's characteristic concern with postmodern experience to present meditations on the theme of Moby Dick. I actually quite like Life on a String, particularly the emphasis on the violin, although the lyrical flirtation with cliche will have alienated some; 'Dark Angel', with its rather banal observation that maybe material possessions don't really count for much, is better left out altogether in favour of 'My Compensation,' 'Statue of Liberty,' and the beautiful 'Pieces and Parts.' In fact, I was listening to these an awful lot when flying to the US in December 2006. From the air, indeed.

The Doughnuts: End of Year Literary Awards

No Guildhall setting, BBC4 coverage, or public intellectual punditry; but similarly, no forced smiles in defeat, or Richard and Judy. Let's crack on.

Best New Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

A new author to me, anyway (by the way, few if any of these awards are actually going to reflect the white heat of publishing in 2007 - does this look like the website of one who can afford hardbacks that aren't from a remaindered shop?) and still alive, which is the other rule for this category. Last year was a closely run race; first it was going to be Liz Jensen, then D. M. Thomas, then Christopher Priest stole it right at the end of 2006 with The Prestige. Then, in a weird symmetry, Ishiguro shows up three days later with the first novel of 2007 and sets the benchmark for everyone else to not quite meet. Another win, then, for the 'Is it science fiction or not?' subgenre, as Kaz escapes the fame shadow of The Remains of the Day with a near-future tale of growing up in an organ-harvesting facility boarding school (perhaps a bit like Billy Bunter in Logan's Run). It combines a rather moving mournful tone with hot-damn readability, and although the plot resolution is not quite the killer punch it could have been, that's not really the point.

The also-rans:

Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (runner up)
A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Best Neo-Victorian Novel: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

A slightly, almost dementedly, specific category, but this kind of thing is my bag. Faber doesn't count for the category above (he won in 2003, after all), but this would have been a strong contender, and now sits at the centre of my module on NeoVictorian fiction. An academic colleague of mine described it as "more intelligent than anything Sarah Waters wrote," which is a little harsh, but then again Faber's recreation of the Victorian novel seems more instinctual and direct than Waters' sometimes self-conscious updating of nineteenth century tropes (the sensation novel in Fingersmith, and Affinity is soooo Foucault, or at least so I would say if in a Berkeley coffee shop). I'm also loath to recommend a book as a mathematical relation of pages involved to reading time, but nine hundred pages have rarely passed so quickly. It wins int he face of some tough competition from the aforementioned Byatt and Kneale, moderate challenge from Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and laughable muppetry from the 1850 sections of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Best Victorian Novel: George Gissing, New Grub Street

Re-reads are disallowed, to prevent Bleak House winning five times a decade, so I'll have to confess to not having read some big Victorian titles (it's OK to do that, they published a hell of a lot). A fantastic portrait of late Victorian publishing which, because this is Gissing, is laced with naturalist misery and privation. Similarly, a startlingly prescient account of post-PhD career paths in the humanities and probably too depressing to read before the interviews start appearing.

Best Novel: Ian McEwan, Saturday

For a while, McEwan has been the David Bowie of literature; famous, influential, interdisciplinary, and with a prodigious output of works characterised by being fantastic except for some annoying flaw, a chapter or plot development that seems out of step, that doesn't quite work (now come on, do you really listen to Heathen from beginning to end? Aren't you slightly annoyed that "Slip Away" is the third track, leaving the rest of the album somewhat anticlimactic?). Saturday, finally, is the McEwan novel without the "yes, but...". I know some people have complained about the penultimate chapter's implication that all it takes to reform criminals is poetry (good liberal humanist thinking there, and accordingly the poet in question is Matthew Arnold), but that scene just somehow works. But what is really nice is the way the reader inhabits the mind - not the brain - of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a committed materialist, so that our very access to his thoughts becomes a kind of challenge to his particular brand of scientific positivism. There's also some marvellous writing (yes, the BT tower is "seedy and municipal" by day) which is stylish but not grandstanding (I think Martin Amis would make this tiresome). Some may find the debate over the Iraq war clunky, but Perowne's ambivalence towards these events makes for an interesting perspective and corrective to auto-outrage. Finally, to those reviewers on amazon.co.uk who found the novel irritatingly smug and middle-class - I'd probably stay away from novels about neurosurgeons who live in Fitzrovia if I were you.

Worst Disappointment: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Quite a packed field, this year. The term 'disappointment' is also crucial; had this been 'worst novel,' then Paul Auster would have run off cackling with award-winning glee thanks to Travels in the Scriptorium. Here, an amnesiac (charmingly called Mr. Blank) wakes up in a bare room to be visited by - you'll like this - characters from Auster's other novels. Is Mr. Blank the figure of the artist? Is it Auster being visited by his own characters, complaining about how they've been treated in much better novels? Is it us, the reader? All these questions and more are- no, it's just dull talking about it. Walks in the Wankery may count as a disappointment in the context of Auster's other novels (and it does have the distinct feel of a writers' block exercise that mistakenly got sent to Faber and Faber), but since another colleague of mine had already warned me about it, it doesn't quite measure up. Similarly, Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park missed out because I didn't finish it, and I'm not that unfair. A 'thriller' based in the largely ignored by fiction milieu of affluent black Americans, this was a tedious affair undone by a narrative voice that put me in mind of Morgan Freeman doing a really bored narration. There are also some astonishingly crass moments, such as when the central character literally sees red when he thinks of white injustices to the - sigh - 'darker nation,' and chess references that have the subtlety of Jim Davidson swinging a wrecking ball bearing the face of Bernard Manning at a big sign saying 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' (talk of white men interfering with the progress of black men, black men blocking other black men...).

But this distracts me from the year's biggest let-down, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a novel which has inexplicably received an almost universal adulation, although I suspect most of this comes from goth girls or those who think that Fighting Fantasy books count as literature. I was reading the 'Author's Preferred Text,' which did nothing to excuse some really clumsy sentences, or the fact that even though this story has been through two or three different versions, it seems as if Gaiman is making it up as he goes along (oh yes, there's an angel down here... she's a bad angel... and hell is in there too). Similarly, Richard Mayhew is simply too absent as a central character, and so uselessly bemused it's amazing he isn't killed in the first hundred pages (the fact that he's named - or so I assume - after the Victorian urban explorer Henry Mayhew is the best part of the book, and that's a gag only Victorianists are going to get). But there are two more serious problems with the novel. The first is that Gaiman's idea of London Above (that is, normal, full fat, four star, actual London) is painted in such broad strokes that we don't get a sense of how weird London Below actually is by comparison, or how it might relate to the world we know. It's as if Gaiman wrote a novel about a city with no other experience of it than one of those glossy guidebooks sold at tiny newsagents in the West End (obviously, a friend bought the brochure and sent it to him in, I don't know, Burkino Faso). The second is the political aspect of the narrative. The original television series was based on the idea that the homeless are, effectively, invisible, as we walk past them every day without offering any recognition. This is a potent way of putting it, until you then decide that the homeless are invisible because they live in a world that is actually far more exciting and interesting than the one we live in, where they have super adventures and implicitly despise the humdrum lives of the affluent. Hurrah! Bang! and the social problem is gone! Admittedly, one character towards the end of the novel says to Mayhew that the homeless don't live in a fantasy world - they freeze to death in winter. But that's it - one sentence, potential for a rather darker narrative brushed aside in favour of whizz-bang swordfighting. The review on the back of my copy says that Neverwhere is what Franz Kafka and Terry Pratchett would produce if locked in a cell together. I imagine Kafka went straight to sleep and Pratchett decided to see what he could come up with in fifteen minutes. Before, of course, fashioning a paper-mache head and hollowing out the grille at the back of the cell with a broken-off spoon.