The Doughnuts 2009: End of Year Literary Awards

As always, not what's been published this year, just what I got around to reading. You think I'm made of money?

Best New Author: Don Delillo, Underworld

This was close - it was almost Salman Rushdie with The Satanic Verses. Both novels have their faults, although I suspect that with Rushdie I was at a disadvantage thanks to my frankly shaky grasp on Islamic theology. But Delillo edges it on the basis of some superb writing, not least the sixty page prologue to Underworld, describing a single baseball match. Of course, it helps that this particular baseball match is the final of the 1951 World Series, and that Delillo's cast here includes Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover.

Oddly enough, it's easier to point out Underworld's flaws than its strengths (or maybe that's just me). The most obvious is the fact that Delillo is a better literary stylist than a convincing delineator of character; the central pair of Nick Shay and Klara Sax are, well, just a little bit dull. Having now read White Noise as well, it's clear that Delillo's characters are really just mouthpieces for versions of Delillo (I'll probably have more to say on White Noise later in the year, but for now, I'll just note that he writes some of the most staggeringly perspicacious children in literary history). In terms of plot, since Delillo's somewhat expansive theme is the last 50 or so years of American history, it isn't the kind of novel that depends on the forward movement of narrative; in fact, the predominant movement of Underworld is backwards, opening (after the prologue) in the 1990s and ending (before a postmodern epilogue, of course) in the 1950s, the prose becoming increasingly fragmented as memory fades. This isn't a fault, of course, but those looking for a narrative hook to pull them through 827 pages will be disappointed. So, you're saying, if the characterisation of the main players is suspect, and the narrative diffuse, why does it scoop the big prize? Underworld is by no means perfect; it sometimes meanders and perhaps too obviously has its eye on 'greatness' (or possibly GREATNESS). But when it works - and that's most of the time - it's outstanding. Ironically, given the historical scope of the thing (and its physical presence as a book very definitely makes it a 'thing' - the physical mass of it is thematically appropriate), the best sections are those in which tiny moments of time come under extended narrative inspection. The aforementioned baseball game and immediate aftermath, about four actual hours, takes sixty pages; the thoughts of a street punk immediately after shooting a man, a second or two, take up a compelling page; and, in perhaps the best section, a couple of minutes of home video, potential evidence in a murder case and obsessively replayed on the news, is dissected with a detail that makes Barthes look like Littlejohn. Put another way, Delillo's theme is 'real time'; distorting it on the page, but also wondering about the 'real' time of history. Ultimately, Underworld is not consistent, but it can be awesome.

Best novel: John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

A crowded field this year, thanks to some excellent novels around March; Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Nausea is the runner-up here, a brilliant evocation of alienation (which also includes a hilarious moment about ordering cheese heroically). Objectively, it might even be better than Toole, but my instinct is to go with A Confederacy of Dunces, not least because whereas Nausea's origins are clearly in the intention to fictionalise existential philosophy, Dunces is less easily characterised. Put another way, whereas Sartre wrote a manifesto, Toole wrote a novel (I suppose I'm just suspicious of blatantly philosophical fiction, which is after all why Milan Kundera lost to Jonathan Franzen last year). Toole also has the edge inasmuch as while I don't remember Sartre's characters in any detail (although this is perhaps the point), Ignatius Reilly is still in here. I'm not as convinced as others are that the plot comes together that neatly (Burma Jones never seems that integrated into the whole, but then perhaps that's the point), but it's damn funny, not least Ignatius' sabotage of Levy Pants and his habit of shouting at the screen in cinemas. Baton Rouge will never sound the same again.

Biggest disappointment: Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

A clear win for Franzen here, partially because of the ease with which The Corrections took the top prizes last year. The weak part of The Corrections was the Lithuanian sub-plot, the events of which seemed cartoonish and unconvincing; in The Twenty-Seventh City, the bad news is that it's all Lithuania. The plot is that the St. Louis of the mid-1980s appoints a female Indian chief of police, Jammu, who then gains increasing control of the city through a complex conspiracy of psychological terrorism, murder, local politics and the like. Sounds like a brilliant black comedy of city politics at the height of American conservatism, right? Sadly, no. It's scuppered by murky plotting and characters who can't bear the weight of the psychological scrutiny Franzen would perfect in The Corrections. It's never quite clear why Jammu acts in the way she does, or precisely how she manages to gain influence over city politics (I know little of how American cities are run, but I imagine that the chief of police has little to do with taxation decisions). Sequences of events are weirdly compressed; one character thinks he might apply to the police academy and a few months later, he's typing reports in the precinct. It's not quite clear if Franzen is trying to represent the actual St. Louis here, or some alternative world where things work slightly differently (not in the science fiction sense; rather, in the way that Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters takes places in an 'alternative' London), but either way, it's unconvincing. Throw in a couple of sentences that shouldn't have escaped an MA seminar in Creative Writing, and you've got a bunch of perfectly good reasons why this went unpublished in the UK until after The Corrections.

(The closest competitor, incidentally, was Pat Barker's Regeneration. I understand that this is some kind of heresy, but I couldn't help but feel that it reduced the horror of the First World War to the status of truism (he had his head in a cow! Yuk!), while the final chapters crassly spell out the subtext for the hard of reading).

Coming up...

Last year, I predicted that 2009 would be when I finally got around to Delillo, and I was right; before I start congratulating myself for predicting my own choices, let's remember that I was wrong about Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Quantum Physics and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which are still both waiting patiently. At the moment, 2010 most obviously looks set to be a revisiting of much of Dickens, with a bit more Delillo thrown in (White Noise, Mao II and Cosmopolis in particular). I'll probably also get around to Christopher Priest's The Dream Archipelago in the next twelve months, although the snippet I read immediately before Christmas didn't promise great things. But hey, perhaps I'll be wrong again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet

A week into my latest California trip, and there have been none of the anticipated Curb Your Enthusiasm high-jinks I mentioned a few weeks ago. So instead, I’m going to talk about books and (stage) magic, and hope that maybe I'll get into a bizarre confrontation in the next eight days or so.

I was pleased to see that The Prestige was one of the film choices offered on the plane. Somehow I didn’t find the time to see this at the cinema, which can only mean that I’ll never find the time to visit the cinema again, since if any film was meant to appeal to me it was surely this one, with its inspired blend of the late Victorians, stage magic, and David Bowie. It perhaps didn’t help that I’d been put off by lukewarm reviews from friends, or maybe I was afraid that something combined of so many delicious ingredients could all too easily turn out to be a horrible mess, like finding a fillet steak stuffed in the middle of a chocolate fudge gateaux. Finding this film on the plane was also something of a pleasant coincidence, since on my last US tour (literally a tour this time, taking in the airports of Washington Dulles, Philadelphia, Chicago O’Hare, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles LAX, San Francisco, and Sacramento (where I learnt that customer service at NorthWest Airlines follows a formal structure of a) theft, b) hiding, c) lying, d) suggesting that I am lying, and e) indifference)) in December, I had been reading Christopher Priest’s novel upon which the film is based. I had started reading it in Heathrow Terminal 3 (the site of last weeks’ entry, doughnut fans), and got about a hundred pages into it before boarding. Incidentally, when boarding the plane, I decided I’d had enough of historical conjuring for the moment and stopped reading, in order to watch The Illusionist instead, a film with similar conjuring themes but which deserves some sort of award for the most frenetic final two minutes of narrative (a bit like the end of The Usual Suspects but instead of just being able to walk normally after all, Kevin Spacey also gets out a sack containing the heads of every character to have appeared in the film, including that of the detective who’s just been interviewing him). The Illusionist is a good film, but an oddly muted one since nothing about it seems particularly original, from its plot twists to casting Rufus Sewell as the bad guy. Once I’d watched it, I wanted to get back to Priest’s novel, which seemed to be developing into something quite different. Unfortunately, an annoying thing like the MLA convention got in the way of finishing it as quickly as I would have liked, and there are probably more atmospheric places to read the final pages than the foyer at the Philadelphia Sheraton. Nonetheless, it is a superb piece of storytelling which I recommend to anybody who’s bothered to read this far.

Achtung! Spoilers ahead!

(Well, maybe not really, but I once knew somebody who, while watching films he already knew the end of, would make various comments throughout which while seeming to him cryptic and veiled hints, were to the rest of us glaring premonitions of what was to come. So during Planet of the Apes we would get “Oh yes, they’re so very far away from Earth,” or perhaps “It’s hardly as if they’ve got the Statue of Liberty around the corner.” It was the social equivalent of the bit in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo where a few pages have a hole cut through them so you can see what’s going to happen before you actually get there (Albert Angelo is another highly recommended novel, and easily found in your local Waterstone’s as the first part of Johnson’s Omnibus). So, if you don’t even want to receive obvious hints or perhaps semi-spoilers, I should go somewhere else for now.)

To what may prove the dismay of some of my friends, I also liked the film a lot, and I think this divergence of opinion has something to do with narrative expectation. I suspect The Prestige will become known as a ‘twist’ film, the kind of movie judged solely against its ability to conceal the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow’s head was really a ghost, or something similar. Having already read the novel, however, the film would have to be something more than already knowing all the secrets. And, you know, I think that it was. My friends complained that the film’s twist was too obvious, that there were far too many clues. Admittedly, there are parts which are handled clumsily; Christopher Nolan should surely have known better than to have heavily made up and virtually mute characters appear momentarily on screen, but otherwise get mentioned a lot. But that doesn't seem to matter somehow, because the film's main twist is in many ways so obvious that it almost doesn't qualify as a surprise - and yet, when it comes, it still has a surprising quality. It also helps that the story is sufficiently strong that, given sufficient production values and quality of acting (which are both evident here), it can withstand most of the more common indignities of adaptation. There are changes both significant and subtle here; the modern day strand of the novel has been dropped to good effect, while a slightly more low key alteration in the plot (regarding the effects of Tesla's invention) makes the whole thing even more sinister than Priest's already satisfyingly macabre original. The attempt to delve into the history of magic is laudable - the inclusion of Chung Ling Soo is a nice touch and for those us familiar with the field, a nice foregrounding of later events - although it does trip the film up at times (one character mentions the 'sawing a lady in half' trick about twenty years before it first appeared). If there is a failing, and one which I think may account for some of the more lukewarm reviews (rather than the 'twist' or otherwise which most people seem to have focused on), it's that the film is not quite so good as the original novel in sliding from one genre to another, when the sleights of hand turn into science fiction. There is time and scope in the novel to make the change gradual and persuasive; the film also does it well, but I suspect many may be unconvinced by the switch.

So, The Prestige (in either format) is highly recommended. And certainly more so than Deja Vu, one of the other film choices. This is one of those conceptual thrillers Hollywood is so fond of nowadays, but unfortunately let down by the fact that its concept is a crock. An absolute crock.

Live from Heathrow

"I like a man who stays put": Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Those of you who have been paying attention will know that yesterday I was speaking at the "Science Fiction and the Canon" conference in Cambridge. More about that soon, but for now there are more immediately appropriate things to talk about.

This particular doughnut comes to you from Heathrow Terminal 3, bare hours before the US leg of the tour (as I insist on calling it) begins. The queue for the security gate is the longest I've seen here, streaming all the way out of departures and no doubt well past the most disappointing Garfunkel's in London (chocolate cake can have many flavours, but surely onion isn't one of them). The queue is so big that people with more than two hours to wait before their flight are being asked not to join it. It's strangely heartening to see, especially since certain quarters of the media are treating long-haul airline passengers with the warmth and welcome usually reserved for paedophiles. I'm not a climate change denier (seeing George Monbiot take apart David Bellamy on the news a few years ago was a delight), but at the same time I'm intrigued by some of the subtexts of environmentalism. Whereas it once seemed a heterogeneous bunch of concerns, now it seems (in the popular media at least) concerned with the monolithic threat of CO2 emissions. Yet political stances always have their own ideological emissions, and the stuff coming out of environmentalism's exhaust is a weird kind of New Parochialism. So, while no doubt the Independent would frown on my transatlantic flight today, I don't really have a choice - I can't cycle to Northern California. But then, surely I have a choice of whether to go or not? Why should I? How far did the food in my kitchen travel? Why take 'unnecessary' journeys?

In the last few years, we've been introduced to two theoretical concepts: "food miles" and the "carbon footprint," both of which explicitly or implicitly attack the idea of not staying put. "Carbon footprint" in particular is as manipulative as anything Roland Barthes analysed in his Mythologies, with its central thesis that bourgeois myth operates by making the political or cultural seem natural and given. "Carbon footprint" seems to be the perfect example of culture masquerading as nature, with the added implication that it would be best if one left as few footprints as possible, of any kind. Travel, they used to say, broadens the mind; now, it's antisocial behaviour. I also wonder if there's a connection between the still quite recent democratisation of air travel and the middle-class media now deeming it unfashionable. This might explain the intriguing links recent writers of fiction have made between anarchism and the rejection of mobility. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club features a memorable sequence on the disorienting experience of air travel, the procession of airports which all look alike. J. G. Ballard's Millennium People is closer still; dealing with an affluent anarchist set, the novel begins with an attack on Heathrow.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm Jeremy Clarkson (as my friend Gareth Edwards has pointed out, the real life Alan Partridge). I don't drive, I use public transport, and agree that inefficient transport should be made as unattractive as possible where there are viable alternatives (why, really, would you need to fly within the UK?). And maybe my theoretical posturing, my 'New Parochialism,' is only going to get me in the Neophiles column of Private Eye. After all, the New Parochialism isn't so new after all. Developments in transportation have always been viewed with suspicion. Some of the crazier religious Victorians thought that building the London Underground would awaken Satanic forces; as my forthcoming (that is, forthcoming in the academic sense) cultural history will show, the Underground network has regularly been portrayed as a pathological space of danger, fear, and monsters. The bombers of July 7th 2005 drew on exactly these tropes, consciously or otherwise, just as the World Trade Center attacks borrowed the aesthetics of the action film, and grimly punned on the American emergency services phone number. And the anti-travellers of Fight Club and Millennium People have their ancestors in Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth century work A Voyage around my Room, and the Victorian French decadent Des Esseintes in Huysman's A Rebours (setting off for England, Des Esseintes gets no further than thinking about what being in England would be like). What goes around, comes around - so perhaps you'd be better staying at home.