Summer’s in retreat but I still managed to spend most of my last Nottingham Sunday afternoon in the allotment, reading Stanley Middleton’s final novel A Cautious Approach. Meticulously edited by Philip Davis, it brings to an end the 45 novel career of my old friend. Odd, for the first time, not to be able to discuss it with him afterwards. But odder still that, for 13 years, I was able to talk about novels with a writer 40 years my senior, one who I read with huge admiration before I’d begun to seriously write myself. The new novel is beautifully written and, as so often with Stanley’s novels, contains unexpected scenes that shift your perceptions of the characters. Like nearly all of his novels, it’s…
Nice to find myself (under my Twitter handle, Canfan) quoted in full on page 17 of today’s Guardian Review digest of the reader comments about the Booker longlist. For anyone interested who can’t be bothered to trawl through the long or short version, here’s what I said. ‘The Mitchell is brilliant, I think, and would be a worthy winner, but I agree with Joe Thomas: McGregor’s Even The Dogs is an outstanding read, formally audacious and stunningly written. Did Bloomsbury nominate it? If so, perhaps the bleak subject matter put the panel off. I read it in one sitting.’ (The Guardian retained my misspelling of Jon’s surname, which I added an ‘a’ to.’ Oops.)
A couple of years ago, the cartoonist Brick and I came up with a two page comic strip for the magazine Tripod. It’s about the nature of comics and graphic novels and has since been reprinted elsewhere in part and full. I’ve used it in my own university teaching. Now we’ve decided to make it available for free. You can find it on the downloads page of this site (or read online here). As an added bonus, above is a key to one of the panels that Brick did for English Drama Media magazine, while below is part of an introduction that I wrote for that reprint. Enjoy. There’s an old saw saying that ‘if Shakespeare was alive today, he’d be writing soap operas’. What…
I don’t go for stories about animals. You’ll hunt in vain for animals in my novels, or even pets. As for stories narrated by animals, put it this way. Paul Auster’s novels since Moon Palace have been variable but the only one i don’t like is Timbuktoo, which is told by a dog. It’s far too cutesy. So I’ve not read Michael Morpurgo’s The War Horse, which is narrated by a horse. And I had no interest in seeing the play based on it, though I’d heard good things about the songs in the production, by John Tams. However, my partner and I had a London day out planned, primarily to see the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain (it’s wonderful and we went round…
Above is the cover of the Achuzat edition of my novel about literary forgery The Pretender, copies of which arrived this morning. What’s that parrot about? Think about it for a minute – the narrator’s first significant literary forgery is accomplished on a 1920’s Royal typewriter. My first novel in Hebrew! After Tuesday’s lousy effort at photographing Broken Social Scene (see below) I didn’t take my camera to Jackson Browne and David Lindley on Thursday. I was reviewing the penultimate show on their European tour for the Nottingham Evening Post. I’d seen the second show on the tour, and it was OK, but shambolic in places. The gig never really took off, and Browne refused to play the song that I named the novel after…