Sunday 1 November 2009

Limited Edition

Last week in Waterstone's in Portsmouth, I saw one of the most forlorn sights the literary world has to offer - the book signing by an author of whom nobody's heard. A couple of years ago, it would seem that one only got a book signing in Waterstone's, Ottakars (remember them?), Dillons (remember them?) or W. H. Smith (remember them? They used to be a bookshop?) through a certain level of fame and wrangling by publishers. Nowadays, when the internet offers anyone a potential audience of millions and notoreity, you can turn up with a table in the middle of Waterstone's, no matter how small your readership, how large the type, or how hideously photoshopped the cover. Unfortunately, embarrassment tends to ensue. It's difficult not to feel sorry for the guy sitting alone at the table, tapping his pen absently to pass the time, but nor do you want to make eye contact. Earlier this year, in Newcastle, a similar thing happened, except that this time the author seemed to have brought his family with him, and by the time I popped in in the afternoon, he was sending his wife out into the shop to try and cajole punters into showing some interest. I doubt, somehow, that Ian McEwan does this.

My point here is not that such events should be the reserve of the super-popular: after all, J. K. Rowling sells far more than Iain Sinclair; sales alone are no indicator of literary worth. But what is of some concern is the focus on fame rather than achievement, of wanting the book signing event before putting in the work that will make it worthwhile. While living in West Jesmond in Newcastle, I had the misfortune to live above a guy who believed himself to be some sort of musician - that is to say, he was a competent guitarist, a weak vocalist, and with just enough artistic ambition that his output made James Blunt look like Marilyn Manson. He had, of course, a website, which consisted of a brief list of performances and a significantly larger merchandise section, which offered a range of t-shirts, badges, and mugs bearing his name (the funniest was the 'limited edition' lyric sheet, of which only 100 had been made, apparently. I imagine 98 of them are still in his flat, or have yet to be photocopied). It made me wonder what was more important - whether the publicity facilitated his music, or whether (more likely) the music was a means of getting his name on a t-shirt.

Finally, and on a related matter, I've found myself drawn into this year's X Factor and in particular the debate on John and Edward, who seem to be hated by the studio audience (possibly because of the startling resemblance to the double take brothers from Harry Enfield's TV series in the early 1990s). Unfortunately, the audience don't seem to understand that they created John and Edward; they may be awful, but that's what you get when any vestige of criticism is shouted down. You couldn't do better! He deserves to have his name on a t-shirt! Where's your name on a t-shirt? Every time Simon Cowell is booed for pointing out something ws rubbish, John and Edward grow larger and stronger. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your masters.

Sunday 18 October 2009

Burning Pandas for Fuel

Sorry about that - another long pause, as quite a bit's happened in the interim. The main news is a move to Portsmouth (home of the country's angriest market florist, it seems) to start a full time post at the university. That's taking up quite a bit of time at the moment, so there's not been much opportunity to keep up with things here. I'll try and be a bit more productive in the future, honest.

To business. In early 2006, I saw George Galloway give a talk at the University of Exeter. I was by no means a Galloway fan, but thought that it would at the very least be interesting (at least, as interesting as the fact that Respect, who had organised the event, wanted the names of everyone who attended. Had anyone at the front desk read G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday my pseudonym wouldn't have lasted long). George actually turned up half an hour late, and when he inevitably ran out of time the meeting moved from the lecture theatre onto the lawn outside the Northcott Theatre, standing on a bench while surrounded by listeners. How radical, we thought. How kinda Pankhurst. Towards the end of the question and answer session, a friend of mine came up to me and asked "Is it still propaganda if you agree with it?"

An interesting question. While largely agreeing with the perspectives under discussion, I was slightly concerned with Galloway's tendency to respond to difficult questions (why don't the projections of the Iraq election support that thesis, George? What's with the Portugese villas, George?) by implying that the matter was irrelevant or the questioner was ignorant of some other crucial factor and manipulating the crowd against him or her (that said, no effort was required with the guy who asked if the BNP cared more about the British people than Respect did, since this drew an almost comedically exaggerated gasp from the rest of the audience; Galloway's response on the uselessness of nationalism was superfluous). I could appreciate much of Galloway's position; it was the means of getting there that was problematic. A year later, I'd encounter the same problem reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but this time in starker terms. Dawkins' conclusions were easy to agree with, but not the sometimes shallow rhetorical moves; I was still an atheist, but not because of these arguments. I agreed with it - but did this absolve it of propaganda?

I ask this because I've just seen the latest "Act on CO2" advert, and despite agreeing with its broader argument, my immediate response was to want to burn a panda for fuel (incidentally, did you notice the sad panda toy beside the bed? I didn't until the second viewing). At whom is this advert aimed? Those already aware of climate change don't need convincing; those who see it as a leftist fantasy will read it as literally confirming their belief that it's all a fairy story. Most of those inbetween will be put off by how wretchedly manipulative it is, from the music to the weeping cartoon animals to the big CO2 monster to the blaming of 'the grown ups' (children, of course, have nothing to do with carbon dioxide, as they subsist entirely on the ambient radiation of cuteness until the age of 12 years and ten months). A hugely complex debate becomes reduced to "Turn on a light = drown a dog." Perhaps it needs to be like this - simplistic in order to get through. But if so, show us consequences with some actual referent - news footage of real flooding, examples of declining species - not something mediated through the subjectivity of children and unambiguously meant to induce guilt. I fear that the government have wasted their money on something so unsophisticated as to convince nobody and annoy the rest of us.

My other fear is that, in writing this, I'm shoring up a conservative scepticism of climate change - certainly, many of the criticisms I've found online have come from those who believe it's all a big conspiracy (raising tax money for the government usually seems to be the justification here - not sure how my taking the bus or not leaving lights on raises tax revenue, guys, or the implication that anything cooked up by the powers-that-be would win out over any alternative put by the energy companies). But, as I've argued elsewhere, the ends of the environmental argument are so compelling that the means - any means, like those ludicrous EDF adverts made out of 'recycled film' footage (I'd like to think they're joking here, but I suspect they take the green validity of this claim absolutely seriously) or this new advert - seem to be beyond criticism. So yes, it's still propaganda even if you agree with it. And if you don't agree with me, I'll drown five dogs.

Monday 25 May 2009

May of the Penguins

A bank holiday weekend of museums, this time. First of all, the opening day of the Great North Museum on Saturday. We had to go for two reasons: firstly, they're been working on it around the corner from my office ever since, well, ever since it was my office; and secondly, the winsome young girl on the posters all over the Metro threatens to scream and scream until she's sick if you don't. A more considered write up will have to wait until the place isn't so incredibly busy; walking into Newcastle at lunchtime, it was encouraging to see that the queue reached all the way out of the museum grounds and round into the university (the one place you're usually guaranteed to see a queue reaching out of a door in town is the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Northumberland Street; I'm not being facetious, it's actually true). The exhibitions on Hadrian's Wall and ancient Egypt aside (well, not aside, they're very good), the main focus is on natural history and taxidermy in particular; owls seem to be the favourite, which is fine by me (to anyone reading in Norman, Oklahoma - pop into The Library pub and say hello to the stuffed owl who lives there). Admittedly, the prevalence of stuffed animals makes the occasional appearance of a living reptile in a box somewhat surprising, as if they weren't sure whether to go for the full reptile house display or not, but it's all very well laid out. There's also a replica dinosaur skeleton and a planetarium, which we had no hope of getting into on Saturday, but which we'll be going back for. I haven't been in a planetarium since Jodrell Bank c. 1990, me.

Then on Sunday, to Gateshead for the "70 Years of Penguin Design" exhibition at the Shipley Gallery. Firstly, though, a comment on the interior of Gateshead Metro Station before someone decides to rip the whole thing out, because they really shouldn't. Yes, it's dated, but there's a period charm to it, rather like the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3, of which Gateshead is weirdly reminiscent. If you ever have a dream in which you're at the Heathrow tube station and it looks familiar yet unfamiliar, as if all the elements have been somehow shaken up into some kind of architectural anagram, then you're probably at Gateshead Metro. In fact, it's intriguing how the different parts of the Metro are shaping up as various tribute acts for sections of the London Underground. Gateshead is the Piccadilly line, with hints of the Victoria; the all new Haymarket is clearly going for the Jubilee look, albeit without the platform doors (which I never liked anyway - I like a bit of edge on my tube); Jesmond is the Circle/District, whereas West Jesmond is clearly some prosperous Metropolitan line suburb. Monument (Newcastle), ironically, bears little resemblance to Monument (London).

Well, it's intriguing to me.

Anyway, the Penguin exhibit. The title of "70 Years of Penguin Design" was somewhat baffling at first, until I realised that this exhibition has been touring for the last four years and should therefore be called "70+4 Years of Penguin Design," catchy as that isn't. Some very nice material on the development of the logo (from its dancing days to a more sedate, regal stature) and striking mounted displays of orange, blue and green Penguins (this last turning into some kind of private Panini sticker transaction for me: "Got... got... need... got... need"). A particularly nice exhibit showed the various incarnations of The Great Gatsby over the years, and made the curious point, seemingly obvious but which had never occured to me before, that whereas music (at least, popular music) is pretty much inextricably linked to a certain cover image for the rest of its cultural life, the marketing identity of the written word is much more changeable, and even where book covers become iconic (the Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance), there's a sense that eventually a new cover has to be designed precisely in order to overthrow such visual dominance. More theoretical discussion of why this might be the case was passed over, but I'm sure I'll come back to this in the near future.

Comprehensive as the exhibition was in some areas (gratifyingly, green Penguins and the development of the Marber grid), there were some curious omissions. There was a big display of the Penguin 70 range to celebrate the 70th anniversary, but barely a mention of the Penguin 60s from 1995, which were surely much more influential in popularising the pamphlet style publishing which Penguin have capitalised on so much in recent years. Most strikingly, the Classics range wasn't even acknowledged as existing beyond the 1960s; lots of material on the roundel design of the original version from the 1950s, including the strangely humorous error on the cover of E.V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, which shows a boat with both oars and full sails, but not a single black spine of a later publication in sight. Since the recent redesign of the classics range in the last five or so years has been the most striking innovation to folks like me - and, let's be honest, to most of the people who go to this exhibition - this seems a little odd, not least because it's in changes like this that Penguin lead the market (or did you think Oxford's rebranding of the World's Classics series shortly afterwards was coincidence?). However, there was a nice display of some splendidly 1970s covers for J.G. Ballard, all looking like stills from a Terry Gilliam animation (and one including the image of Mickey Mouse on a television screen - I imagine that was a copyright nightmare) and an interesting survey of how far the orange/green bars look of the original paperbacks has infiltrated publishing and popular culture more widely. Oh, and we got lovely free bookmarks as well. If you're at all interested in publishing or just want to see some occasionally freaky covers from the 1970s (especially on the Pelicans), go and see it if it pops up near you. Go on, pick up a - no, I'm not going to do that.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Conference Pairs

Time to roll out what I only half-jokingly refer to as the tour dates for the summer. Only two, really, so less of a tour and more of a line between two points:

May 15th sees all the fun of a conference without the bother of a hotel for the seemingly obligatory hometown paper (cf. Exeter, July 2008) for the Crime Studies Network in the North symposium, Crime Studies: Facts and Fictions. It's free, so if you want a good seat, I would e-mail Malcah Effron at Newcastle University to book your place.

Then, July 20-22 sees me in London for the University of Reading's Narrative Dominions, a conference based around the forthcoming volume four of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. I hear that the chapter on the detective story is the most awesome six thousand words ever published.

Talking of publishing, it's been a good year for reading fiction so far. I don't mean all those shiny new novels in Waterstone's, the darkly comic portraits of modern life and the like, but somehow finding time to get through the 280-odd novels that comprise the fiction waiting list on my shelves. Highlights so far have included Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (honestly, the heroic cheese sentence made me laugh out loud. You'll have to go and read it now, won't you?), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (not quite as out there as it thinks it is, though), and in particular John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, which so far looks pretty secure as this year's best novel. The middle ground includes Patrick Suskind's Perfume (nice, but with the weirdly inescapable flavour of the middlebrow bookclub about it - mmm, the taste of condescension there), Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (an excellent and convincing discussion of socialism and often quite moving, but a little on the flabby and repetitive side as a novel), and Paul Auster's latest variation on a theme of metanarrativity, Man in the Dark. And then the badlands; Ian Rankin's The Flood is a little too obviously the frst novel he had published, and the slightly too self-congratulatory foreword to the new edition proudly notes how expensive those 1980s first editions now are; Malcolm Pryce's Last Tango in Aberystwyth is the same joke as his first novel - now with half the characterisation, but the same great fractured paragraph taste! Then there's James Wilson's The Dark Clue, a turgid attempt to write a sequel to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, notable solely for the front cover recommendation of "Read 50 pages and you'll be gripped," surely the most backhanded literary compliment ever paid (I made it to about 90 pages, before the utter lack of forward movement and the ridiculous caricatures of historical figures such as John Ruskin put paid to any idea of actual literary fun). And, dare I say it, Pat Barker's Regeneration. You heard me. Pat Barker's Regeneration. That'd be Booker Prize winning Pat Barker, y'know, but I'm afraid I found Regeneration a bit too diffuse - expecting a closer focus on the encounter between W. H. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon, Barker throws in a bunch of other weirdly diffuse characters (Prior, who I hear takes over in the rest of the trilogy, seemed particularly incoherent) and a habit of explaining her metaphors in case you wus too dumb to get it (the subtext of Rivers' self-examination towards the end is practically nailed to the reader's forehead). Oh, and the horrors of war. Except that we all know that war has horrors, so you've got to make your horrors really horrific to escape the kind of cliche inherent in the very idea of 'the horrors of war'... which Barker doesn't. What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

And finally... did anyone else hear Christopher Caldwell on Start the Week this week? Did anyone hear his question to Monica Ali about the problems of writing a novel that addressed an atomised society, such as today's modern world apparently is? (We're so cool today, see. So atomised, modern, liberated. We done liberated us from the Victorians). Did anyone else goggle when he used Dickens as an example of an author concerned with the local? Did anyone else shout "So what the hell was Bleak House* about then?" at the radio? What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

* Or Our Mutual Friend. Or Little Dorrit. Or - hell, any of them.

Friday 3 April 2009

A Disembodied Eye

Despite my stunning analysis last month, Britain continues to fear Google Maps Street View. The most astute criticism came from a poster on the Independent message board who thought it an invasion of privacy because "you can see if my car is outside or not." Indeed, we're all sitting ducks for burglars once they've set their time machines to eight months ago. The craziness continues apace:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/7980737.stm

I was fortunate enough to be in Broughton at the time, as it so fortunately happens, and the scene was something like this:

10.00 am. The Google Car passes through Broughton. Some villagers cower in fear of the petroleum beast, before seeing the logo on the side ("Go Ogle") and realise there is pseudosurveillance afoot. A mob forms with rapid speed.

10.15 am. Torches are distributed and the villagers circle the car, hoping to regain their souls from the black box on top. The driver tries to explain the purpose of the cameras but is mauled with copies of the Daily Mail.

10.20 am. The police arrive to mediate, but now the mob is shouting about how their rights not to be photographed are being violated, and in broad daylight, too. One woman screams "I am being raped by the gaze!" Several villagers mishear "gaze" and a homophobic faction splinters off to beat up anyone holding a copy of the Guardian or who owns a musical CD which is neither a) by Andrew Lloyd Webber or b) loosely based on the oeuvre of a classic rock band. A march appears around the corner, led by a group of six year olds being pushed forward by their mothers, bearing a banner that says "Children should be heard and not seen."

10.45 am. Village leader Paul Jacobs gives a statement "I don't have a problem with Google wanting to promote villages... I don't mind them taking pictures of the street, but that shouldn't include my house. I mean, you can clearly see that I have a dreamcatcher in my window." A journalist turns to look and is promptly shrieked at for daring to point his eyes in that direction. Then he realises that the journalist is from the BBC, which is much more respectable than a grubby internet compay, so allows them to film the house for millions to see. After all, there's images of your house and images of your house.

12.00 pm. A wicker effigy of the Google logo has been constructed and one of the drivers hauled inside. At noon exactly, the Wicker Google is set alight.

12.34 pm. Noel Edmonds descends in his helicopter, having sensed that a civic outrage is in progress. "Britain has gone bonkers!" he proclaims from his ready made orating stage "If we join our minds to defeat this intrusion and order it cosmically, so it will be! We will also bring Noel's House Party back for another series." Noel loses the sympathy of the crowd here, and his helicopter is attacked as ungodly. Edmonds escapes only thanks to the quick thinking of his batman, Keith Chegwin, who scoops up Edmonds and shoulders his way though the melee.

1.36 pm. With their torches, the villagers pursue the Google car to the edge of a Romanticist cliff, while some early afternoon low cloud gives the village a strangely German Expressionist cast. The mob eventually force the car off the cliff, unaware that the car will actually return in The Bride of Google Maps Street View.

2.17 pm. The villagers return to their homes, glad that they have beaten off the spectre of people seeing them. But for how long?

That's how it happened.

Saturday 21 March 2009

A Street View to a Kill

Apologies for that title; last Sunday weirdly had the theme of San Francisco. In the morning, I finished reading Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (finally - it's been in the waiting pile since 2000); stumbled across a documentary on City Lights bookstore on Radio 4 in the afternoon; and then dropped by the second half of A View to a Kill in the early evening, just in time to see the oddly unengaging car chase with the fire engine, having missed the nonsensical namedropping of the movie's title in the middle. Still, that's my favourite bit, not least because at that point Christopher Walken and Grace Jones are looking across San Francisco Bay and directly at Berkeley, which is where I got married. The rest of the film is best forgotten, though.

I begin with Northern California because I've spent the last couple of weeks e-trotting around the place on Google Maps Street View. Let me avoid equivocation on this point: I love Google Street View. At the beginning of February, and feeling more than usually nostalgic for my erstwhile hangouts in Woodland and Davis, California, I thought I'd look up a few features on the map and the satellite pictures, maybe see the roof of our old apartment or Raley's, the supermarket where the apricot pie is good and the fried chicken isn't. When Google Maps instead offered me the opportunity to, goddammit, effectively walk about the place with 360 degree vision, I was so surprised and delighted that I may have sworn out loud. Addiction followed quickly; I covered pretty much all of central Davis (although I was slightly disappointed that the University isn't covered, presumably because it's state property) and Woodland, before moving on to Norman, Oklahoma, and various other familiar places. Thus, the sudden surge of interest in Street View this week, with the launch of a limited UK version, seems like old news. I be surfin' the zeitgeist like a culture, um, surfer.

Inevitably, there has been criticism from privacy groups and some sections of the press. I caught sight of an article in Metro yesterday in which the story title screamed something about GOOGLE SPYWARE, which pushes the definition of spyware somewhat (would you have guessed that it's published by the Daily Mail? Well, yes). Google have, quite rightly, pointed out that all images are taken from the perspective of public property, and that you don't see any more than you would actually walking down the street. Critics cite the case of the man spotted going into a sex shop (again, the outrage connected with this leads me to suspect that Metro and the like may have their terms confused again - you can't actually buy sex in those places, guys. It's not like pick'n'mix) or images of accident victims. But what if I'd seen those people myself, in person, as I was walking in the street? Would it be wrong of me to have seen them? Would there be hysterical press coverage of "SPYWARE IN YOUR HEAD - These so-called 'eyes' give their users the ability to 'see' up to fifty metres..."

The problem lies in our changing conception of public and private. I'm currently reading Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, the central argument of which is that gradual social change since (roughly) the nineteenth century onwards has eroded our sense of acting and being in public, and of being involved with strangers in ways that aren't characterised by discourses of fear and suspicion. Put another way, we have become increasingly internalised; psychological rather than sociological, personalities rather than acts or relationships (and Sennett is particularly interesting on this with regard to sexuality; there's a connection here with Foucault's argument about the creation of the homosexual as a human type, rather than a set of acts, but I'm not going to go into that now). In terms of physical environment, public space has similarly become eroded; postmodern architecture tends to regard open space as something to be moved through, not experienced in itself. Public space is something we suffer in order to reach the goal of our private space; our homes, our office, or our cubicle. At best, there may be a few benches where you can eat a sandwich before getting back to Microsoft Excel.

I'm only near the beginning of the book, so can't say any more about how the argument develops (I'm hoping there's a car chase and a wisecracking chimp, though). But it seems to me that the Street View debate suggests that our public spaces have become privatised, or at least they have when they're up for grabs on the internet thanks to an international corporation (perhaps, then, privatised in both senses). When I'm walking in the street, I can't honestly expect to move through space entirely unregarded (indeed, if I walked through Newcastle shrieking "DON'T LOOK AT ME!", the opposite would probably happen. At least, for a second or two). Being in public means we're going to be involved in interactions with others, however brief or negligible, whether we like it or not, and no amount of MP3 earphone social-buffering is going to change that (incidentally - while in a number of malls in the US this December I noticed that absolutely nobody was audially isolated in this way; again, different uses of space). Likewise, if I appear in the background of someone's photograph of the high street, am I justified in punching them in the throat for capturing my image on their lightbox of tricks? Probably not.

Now hang on a minute, you're saying. It's all very well beating up the Daily Mail, but what you're suggesting here is justification for a CCTV nation that won't sit well with any self-respecting Independent reader. Who do you think you are - Noel Edmonds? But the crucial point is that whereas CCTV is interested in what people are doing right now, Street View isn't interested in either 'people' or 'right now'. There's no temporal dimension. You may be annoyed that you've been seen popping to Spar in your parachute pants on 27 July 2008, but it's hardly surveillance of your ongoing life, simply an enigmatic moment frozen for the world to see (and remember, they could have seen it for themselves anyway just by being there, they just couldn't afford the air fare). Maybe that's where some of the animus has come from; we're in there, but just as background. Maybe we don't like being second fiddle to a load of buildings and, you know, stuff. Most of the images I've seen seem to have been taken early in the morning, with hardly anyone else around. Maybe it's a training programme for the survivors of the apocalypse (who have, of course, already been chosen). Incidentally, looking for evidence of when the images were taken is also fun - the billboards outside cinemas provide valuable clues (Davis seems to have been mapped about a month after I left, and Woodland two months after that).

There are other implications, of course - I'm interested, for instance, in how this is going to impact on our ideas of travel, since long haul flights are now morally comparable with embezzlement of an orphanage, and if seeing a city online becomes in any way a replacement for actually seeing it in person - but that's another story for another time. I'm off (that is, staying here on my sofa) to gawp around Northern California some more.

Thursday 8 January 2009

The Doughnuts 2008: End of Year Literary Awards

Let's head over to Bermondsey High Street KFC and see what Kirsty Wark has in store for us... if you've forgotten the rules, see last year.

Best New Author: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

This was a close one – the runner up was Milan Kundera for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I finally got around to reading in May. But Franzen gets the big prize this year for two reasons; firstly, he didn’t blow things with a banality fest like Kundera’s Immortality (more of that one below), and secondly, Kundera’s novels are a little too obviously narratives illustrating pop philosophical points, which for Alain de Botton readers makes them, like, the best thing ever, but only really very good to the rest of us. There’s philosophy in The Corrections, albeit jokes about literary theory, but not at the expense of the novel or the characters, who I still remember as people six months later (as opposed to say, ‘the guy who represents individualism’). And it’s also very funny, in the sense of being genuinely amusing and not just ‘darkly comic’ (is anybody else sick of that phrase?). The Lithuania plotline is the novel’s weak point (as a dozen Amazon readers have pointed out), and I found the opening chapter a little dismaying in its “I’m writing a literary novel, me,” tone, but get beyond that and it’s superb (or ‘generous,’ as nearly everyone says on the back cover. What do they even think that means?). He also does the sentient faeces plotline with more subtlety than South Park, too.

And the others? Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares was impressive in making it bearable to be in the company of an utterly repulsive character, but ultimately came across as not much more than The Singing Detective rewritten by Bret Easton Ellis; Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked was so-so but never really delivered the denouement it promised, and included popular fiction’s least involving car chase (and, if I was paying attention properly, something of a plot hole towards the end).

Best novel: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Well, if Jonno hasn’t scooped this one as well. I’ve already talked about it above, so let’s look at some of the runners up. Paul Auster came close with The Music of Chance (and, to a lesser extent, The Book of Illusions), making up for the abysmal Travels in the Scriptorium at the end of last year. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was a good follow up to the excellent Saturday, although not quite the masterpiece everyone else thought it was. By contrast, Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog was nowhere near as bad as the reviewers would have you believe and was really quite funny in places (is this what happens in one’s thirties? Literary fiction starts to be actually funny? Will I now find Kingsley Amis as much a hoot as everyone else seems to?), which was also the case with Iain Sinclair's Landor's Tower. Christopher Priest’s The Glamour was very good, and much closer to The Prestige than the rather disappointing The Extremes and The Separation. However, I’m still hugely impressed by The Corrections, so there it is.

Best NeoVictorian novel: um, nothing.

Nope, I didn’t get around to reading any this year, not least because I was too busy reading the actual Victorian stuff. I may have to rethink this one as a category, partially because NeoVictorian novels are fashionable and I'm a curmudgeonly type who ditches things as soon as everyone else likes them (poker, for instance, which was so much fun until about five years ago).

Best Victorian novel: Wilkie Collins, The Two Destinies

This one is just going to get more and more obscure as the years go by, simply because rereads aren’t allowed (as I said last year, if they weren’t it’d just end up being Dickens, continually). I suppose it could have been George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, but if I’m going to have mesmerism and the like, then I’m going to have dancing cats as well.

Biggest Disappointment: Caroline Clive, Paul Ferroll

Again, lots of competition here. Milan Kundera followed up the superb The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Immortality, and in doing so made good on his thesis that convincing fictional characters are ultimately undesirable by putting on a spread of cardboard philosopuppets dancing around a set of unconvincing ‘insights’ – the only reason it didn’t win this one was because I didn’t finish it (see my comments on Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park last year). The same goes for Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, which I realize is some kind of heresy, but it simply didn’t give me enough reasons to continue beyond the first fifty pages (ironically, David Bowie’s The Buddha of Suburbia was very much in evidence on the ol’ MP3 throughout the year). Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin also falls into the disappointment category on the basis of the towering praise it’s received (one of the best novels of the twentieth century? No, it isn't). There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I found it uninvolving and the supposed ‘twist’ a laughable get-out to cover the fact that all of Margaret Atwood’s characters sound just like Margaret Atwood. In similar vein, there’s nothing particularly bad about Angela Carter’s Wise Children, except when you’ve already read Nights at the Circus (I see that Wise Children is now an A-level text, continuing the tradition of picking something from a first rate contemporary author’s second string, cf. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time). But the prize this year goes to Caroline Clive for Paul Ferroll, one of those ‘forgotten’ Victorian novels which – can I say this? – was probably forgotten for a very good reason, i.e. it’s a mess. Apologists (and there are a few) argue that Clive’s style represents an interesting challenge to the conventions of high Victorian realist narrative and the limitations of popular genre, but I’m just reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer says there’s no moral, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. Morality was certainly a key factor in the novel’s reception - Victorian reviewers were mostly annoyed that Clive refused to condemn her central character for being a murderer – but this is a bunch of stuff and nothing more, one where potentially interesting plotlines emerge only to be dismissed a few pages later (the crazy arsonist butler and his unprompted confession, for instance, needed some development). But ultimately, I know that if I struggle through nineteenth century crime fiction (and I’ve read a bit of it), then there’s something wrong. Hell, I even like novels with dancing cats (see above).

Coming up…

As I write, 2009 has already got off to a good start with Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo and Man in the Dark (wow, almost up to date); the latter shows a considerable improvement from the dreadful Travels in the Scriptorium (although the brief reference to that novel was not particularly welcome), but Auster is getting slightly too comfortable in his ‘man of letters in emotional crisis tells stories – one of which is tantalizingly incomplete - to ease his pain’ armchair. I’m not making any promises here, but I suspect this may be a year for Americans – in addition to Auster, I have my eye on Don Delillo, Marisha Pessl, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (sitting on the waiting shelf since 2002). Come back in twelve months and see if I was right.