one and a half cheers

the pre-publicity for sebastian faulks' new book and bbc2 series "faulks on fiction" has been in the manner of german troops massing on the russian border in 1941 prior to operation barbarossa: steady and clamorous.

faulks kicked off hostilities with three portraits in the "telegraph" on jeeves, fagin, and becky sharp. good choices, what?

the jeeves piece was perfect; concise and exact, the tone just right. score: a hit.

the attempt to essay becky sharp was awkwardly done. faulks insisted on calling her a hero, in the masculine sense, which isn't quite the thing. sharp is tricky, though. too tricky for her creator, thackeray, at any rate. faulks' mistake is to see sharp as an admirable character, like tom jones. she isn't. she's selfish, immoral and opportunistic. though she's certainly the best thing in the novel by a long way. score: a technical draw.

unfortunately things come unstuck with fagin, whom faulks also wants to excuse from moral censure. it won't do. fagin is the worst of villains. a corrupter of youth who deploys an ingratiatingly mannered politeness to ensnare oliver into a life of depravity. there's a good reason dante's design of hell accords a worse fate for frauds, conspirators and corruptors than thieves or murderers. score: a miss.

let's hope the series makes it way to oz. (we had to wait almost 2 years for the "extras" christmas special, and we're still waiting for "fantabulosa").

thin stew

the booker prize has been doing business for 40 years. that's 40 years of heaping over-praise on very modest (and sometimes very bad) novels. now they're soliciting the public's opinion as to which of the prize-winners is the best. but there's a hitch. none of them are literature of the first rank.

in "sesame and lilies" john ruskin momentarily broke off denouncing modern life (a favourite subject of his) to draw a distinction between books of permanent value (like jane austen's) and those which are merely topical or readable (salman rushdie's—though then only sometimes). he called them "books of all time" and "books of the hour".

the problem with the booker prize is that it celebrates a barren period in english literature. despite the hub-bub, and the champagne-and-smoked-salmon of self-promotion, the booker prize has unearthed no "book for all time". or anything even close. so the survey of public opinion is futile.

much better to be honest about things, and withhold the prize until something of substance is written. however long that takes. but, then, the booker prize doesn't exist to celebrate art, but to encourage sales. so who cares?

happy birthday

last week billy bunter, of greyfriars school, turned 100. he is one of the great characters of english literature, as impressive and estimable as any of dickens heroes. (for an outline of the bunter phenom see george orwell's celebrated essay "boys' weeklies".) bunter is swell: fat, greedy, lazy, skiving, deceitful, covetous and unintelligent. though, i confess, he doesn't make quite the startling impression he used to. that's because everybody's obese nowadays. that's not his fault.

comfort reading

one of the more accurate ways of ascertaining one's favourite books—one least susceptible to voter fraud, shall we say—is to declare which books we like to re-read; which books we tend to read again and again when either tv is too stupid or the brain is too lazy to grapple with anything new; when we desiderate something pleasing and familiar. something cosy.

these are my 10 comfort reads:

t. s. eliot, "the waste land: a facsimile and transcript".
j. d. salinger, "franny & zooey".
simpsons comics.
alan bennett, "forty years on".
p. g. wodehouse, "the code of the woosters".
john henry newman, "apologia pro vita sua".
a. e. housman, "a shropshire lad".
kenneth grahame, "the wind in the willows".
dickens, "the pickwick papers".
george orwell, "essays".

coom on, our valerie

it's been almost 20 years since valerie eliot published the first and only volume of t. s. eliot's letters, covering the period 1898-1922; taking us up to (but not including) the publication of "the waste land". and since then—nothing. except, occasionally, she totters out on to the pages of "the times literary supplement" to rebuff the cretinous charge of eliot's anti-semitism. meanwhile i've been stopping here, not doing much, waiting for the second volume. hurry up, old thing.

when less(ing) isn't more

doris lessing is this year's nobel laureate. ho-hum. i'm happy to say i've never read one of her 39 books, or even peeked inside. it's very pleasing. you know, i may just inscribe that achievement on my curriculum vitae: "no lessing here".

the nobel prize for literature is a queer thing. in 1970 the prize went to alexandr solzhenitsyn for detailing the horrors of communism. the very next year they gave the prize to pablo neruda who did his utmost to establish the very communism solzhenitsyn had previously described. strange, don't you think?

the prize itself is generally supposed to recognise literary excellence. but that's a misapprehension. the actual remit for the award specifies someone "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". there's the troub. under that criteria t. s. eliot—the outstanding literary talent of the 20th century—is ineligible. but he got it anyway. in 1948. he was too good to ignore.

anyway, why lessing? for perseverance, perhaps? or, more likely, because there's no real brilliance around anymore.