World Book Night 2012 at Manor House Library

There was a good turn-out at Manor Park Library, and I spotted some reading-group members among the standing-up throng. They should have come earlier, I thought. But they'd been vulturing in the adjoining room, where the giveaway books were laid out. By the time I got in there it was almost bare. Never mind, I enjoyed the delicious home-made snack - canapes, they've been called at other minglings I've attended. Especially memorable were tiny jerk vegetable patties and spiced mini potato- cakes. Shame I was off the wine that day, because there was plenty of that.

I did pick up a YA book that a reviewer had brought to swap. She confirmed it would be suitable for my granddaughter, who is fifteen. I'll report on that later.

I took Mrs Fry's Diary, by Stephen Fry, which I blogged about earlier, Hot Kitchen Snow by Susannah Rickards, whose short story class I attended last year, and   Butterfly Tears, by Zoe S Roy, which I reviewed myself  -inspiring stories by a Chinese woman who'd emigrated alone from Hong Kong to Canada.  These books disappeared pretty quick, too.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

The title refers to an anachronism: 'Failed in London; try Hong Kong'. 'Old Filth is a nickname that the main character. Sir Edward Feathers, acquired during his distinguished career as a judge in the British outpost.

I didn't think I wanted to read a book about a 'rich as croesus' ex-colonial recently retired from Hong Kong to live in Dorset, but it was a local library reading group choice. By chapter two I was hooked, as the old man is stumbling around in the snow, having locked himself out of his remotely-located house and forced to seek help from a hated neighbour (why he hates him we are to learn).

Sympathy grows as he reminisces about his childhood in Malaya (as it was then) where his colonial administrator father leaves him in the care of local villagers when his mother dies shortly after giving birth. Aged five, he's separated from the only person with whom he's bonded - an older girl of his foster family - and sent on the long voyage to England. We learn this was the usual fate of thousands of so-called 'raj orphans' - traumatised by the separation and supported through prep and subsequent public schools by only by monthly cheques.

The narrative switches between the extremities of old age and scenes from a lifetime of interacting with a host of unusual characters, that encapsulate 'a whole period from the glory days of the British Empire, through the Seond World War to the present and beyond'. For me, it's the quality of the writing plus the exploration of a complex character and his relationships that makes the book such a compelling read.

Published in 2004, the book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005

An Unfortunate Encounter : Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

I enjoyed reading  the Lewisham Library Crime Reading Group's  choice for March. It's a shame I missed the discussion because the book raised issues worth talking about. The meetings are lively, and this is a thought-povoking book about  the random killing of a family in a remote Kansas farmhouse.

Having recently read James M. Cain's 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice the group were familiar with depression-era drifters and the notion that chance encounters could lead to mayhem. You could argue that the murder committed by that story's anti-hero was as much a crime of passion as a act perpetrated  for material gain. In the case of In Cold Blood, however, the motive, one might say, was purer : in 1959 a pair of ex jail-birds follow  a tip-off  about a wealthy landowner who keeps a safe in his house. But the safe doesn't  exist. Much of the drifting after the crime is  motivated by the wish to evade capture. Capote's detailed journalistic style is ideally suited to telling the tale, switching at first between victims and criminals and later gruesomely fascinating in its descriptions of life on Death Row

I watched the 1967 film on DVD. It depicted  the different personalities of the two young men , Perry Smith and Dick Hickok. It was also clear to me that the real reason  the family had been killed was that the men were wound up by a desire to appear 'tough' to one another - particularly the younger  Perry, whom Dick impressed by the swagger and confidence that made him such a successful conman. It's amazing that in the days before cheque guarantee cards shopkeepers were  so trusting. Passing dud cheques was called 'paper-hanging' .

It's remarkable  that Truman Capote, writer of the very different  Breakfast at Tiffany's and played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the 1995 film , was capable of such a such feat of journalism. He read about the case in the newspapers in 1959 and then went to interview the men in jail, as well as reading witness statements and trial transcripts. The church-going backgound and daily routines of the respectable Clutter family contrasts with the lifestyle of the two men, and the recreated dialogue is utterly credible.  The writing style seems on the surface  curiously flat and factual -  more effective and engaging  than a more sensational approach. The meeting of the two men, their crime and the aftermath are made to seem as inevitable as the meeting of the Titanic and the iceberg.

Buried too deep: John Sandford's crime novel:  Buried Prey

All last week I was  on a demanding immersion course in Spain, so I put the  lacklustre nature of the first half of this book  down to tiredness. After page 200, though, when the killer's point-of-view was introduced,  it suddenly picked up. It was no effort to  finish it during the  return journey.   I was all ready next day, it being the  third Saturday of  the month,  to discuss it at  my local  crime readers' group.

Maybe it would have helped if it hadn't been the twelfth book in a series with a particular Minneapolis-based detective;  the author was assuming a certain amount of groundwork. But, as a newcomer, why should I be interested in Lucas Davenport, who seemed a bit of a wuss in his wool suit,  most unsuitable, ha-ha, as it happened,  for kneeling in mud. This was activity much in demand in his line of work.

To make matters worse it's a cold case - two small skeletons surface during land clearance and they turn out to belong to Lucas's first case, when he thought his colleagues had named the wrong killer but he lacked the authority to follow up his hunches. Not only has reader no stake in the case, not having known the victims, who are sisters, but  their  mother turns out to be a callous publicity-seeker, bizarrely launching a career on the back of her  TV appeals.  It's only when we get to know the killer, still at large, that the reader's attention is engaged.

It made me think about the role of the serial detective  in crime fiction, of which publishers are much in favour. In a sense these adult novels resemble  popular children's series;  the same central character or gang, whether Tracey Beaker or Harry Potter or (giving away my age) The Famous Five, is  already known to the reader. For adults, whether it's Sherlock Holmes, Ian Rankin's Rebus or Val McDermott's Tony Hill, the effect's much the same - the burden of interest falls on the plot. Granted  we want to know how our hero/heroine's  singular  abilities will help  solve the crime, but the focus must always be the nature of the events.  

This isn't  necessarly a bad thing, although style and wit are always welcome, but it means the action should take hold of the imagination early on.  Otherwise, even loyal fans begin to yawn and newcomers may not persist - unless, of course  like me they have an incentive that's quite extrinsic to the book itself.

An Everyday Story of Bindle Stiffs: Of Mice and Men at the Brockley Jack Studio.




As a teenager, I read Steinbeck's 1939 American novel, The Grapes of Wrath , for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, with astonishment. Steinbeck's empathy with an 'underclass' was almost unknown in English novels, where working class characters were used for comic relief or appeared as villains. There were plenty of servants, of course, since most novels were set in middle or upper-class households.

George Orwell was about the nearest English equivalent to Steinbeck, but there was something inauthentic about an old Etonian pretending to be down and out. In novels empathy with workers was almost nonexistent; failure to make it up the class ladder was generally ascribed to personal moral decrepitude. It's a view that's recently become popular again, but it only began to be challenged in English novels in the late 1950s.

The story of the Joad family's epic journey across the American dust-bowl derives from an era when few authors dared suggest that human institutions might be faulty. The recognition, let alone celebration, of humanity among ordinary working people was a literary novelty in England in the 1950s, although DH Lawrence's 1913 autobiographical 'Sons and Lovers' and some of his short stories had come close.

Of Mice and Men, as the title suggests, works on a smaller scale. Seemingly a portrait of two men locked into a toxic co-dependency, the theme of the sustaining power of dreams and their fragility is reflected in the setting: a rural workplace.It's a far cry from The Archers.

I enjoyed this production at The Brockley Jack Studio. It seemed superior to the 1939 film classic starring Lon Chaney and the 1992 Gary Sinese-directed version with John Malkovitch.

I appreciated the ten minute drive to the Brockley Jack and the easy on-road parking. What I didn't like was not hearing the starting bell or any announcement in the bar, which extends to a room round the back. As a result my companion and I crept into into the back row of the crowded 50-seater theatre after stumbling up creaky steps. I've never been so glad of an interval to stretch my legs.

The play continues until September 24th and my review appears on the Remotegoat website.

Homeswaps and Holiday Humour

As a teacher, I was blessed with plenty of holiday time but not much money, so homeswaps were the ideal solution. I registered online every year with a company called Intervac and browsed their international catalogue.

I never initiated a request, because so many people wanted to come to London and responded to my entry. So for years we swanned all over Europe and Scandinavia, and even the UK - anything from a long weekend to a fortnight. I didn't go to America because somehow a tiny flat in Lewisham, even with a Peugeot 6 thrown in, wasn't fair exchange for the usual American offer of a vast ranch and a Chevrolet.

I'd recommend homeswaps to anyone who needs a nudge to keep their place up to scratch. Another advantage is you get to investigate a range of reading matter that's in situ, so to speak.

My recent homeswap with my nephew and his family in my home town of Preston can roughly be summed up as: 'We got the rain; they got the riots'.




Although the wet weather put paid to visions of basking in a suburban garden, I did a lot of reading. From ten-year old Alfie's bookshelf, in his Liverpool F.C.-themed bedroom, I selected Diary of a Wimpy Kid, complete with tiny cartoon drawings dotted among the paragraphs - a sort of cross between Adrian Mole and EE Molesworth for younger children, with a touch of Dennis the Menace thrown in.It was unputdownable.



Only the week before, during an ill-starred drive to Whitstable on a hot afternoon, we'd decided to travel north by any means except car. On the five-hour coach journey I chuckled and laughed through Mrs Fry's Diary, the funniest book I've read in a while.

The premise is that it's written by a fictional Mrs Fry, completely ignorant that husband is a 'celebrity'. Since the real Stepehen Fry is quite open about being gay, it adds to the humour that she has so many children that she can't count them and is constantly pestered by her randy partner. She thinks he has an ordinary job - until a friend tells her she's spotted someone who looks like her husband on TV. Apart from the comic situations, the double-entendres and misunderstandings made me laugh on every page.




The third humorous book I read, Ian Sansoms Mr Dixon Disappears, was much more low-key. When I picked it up in a charity shop before I left I was attracted by its theme, the disapearance of a department store owner, It's self-deprecating mobile librarian narrator and the Irish setting also appealed. It's just the thing for a wet holiday, although some of the eccentic characters in the peripatetic plot began to pall towards the end.

One tip about homeswaps, though: after you've dismantled your workspace and made up the spare beds, don't do as I did and mix your library books in sacks identical to ones containing books for charity shops and then take them to store in the garage.

The Art of Serendipity: Vermilion Ink by David Su Li-Qun and Diana Gore





Earlier in the year, I was asked to review a book about an Italian Jesuit, Guiseppe Castiglione, who was a court artist in eighteenth century China. I was a bit daunted, because my recent reviewing had been restricted to short story collections and plays. However, I really liked the book, so I enjoyed reading and summarising the chapters, until I was interrupted by a hospital investigation that went wrong. It took weeks for me to recover enough to write the review. (I wasn't to know when I signed the consent form, but it wasn't a good idea to be in the middle of anything)

One link for me was having seen Castiglione's portraits and depictions of animals and birds, in Edinburgh and London galleries. I'd even bought the catalogue at the first one. The three emperors the artist worked for were Manchus, whose cultural influence was evident in the part of northern China where I worked in 2003-4, another link. I was fascinated to read about Castiglione's sometimes gruesome experiences at the hands of the moody rulers, against a backdrop of China in troubled times. Not much was known about him except that he had a profound influence on Chinese painting and met a lot of opposition, partly for religious reasons.

I was struggling to give the review some contemporary relevance, and conscious that the date of the book launch was at hand. Then, by chance, I visited an exhibition at Somerset House, about contemporary artist Ai Weiwei and found a link: not only is Ai WeiWei also an artist who's fallen foul of Chinese authorities, but his Circle of Animals installation at Somerset House is based on an original design by Castiglione.

I posted the finished review to Dimsum, the website for Chinese in the UK, happy, and relieved, to be able to report this to the authors.

You can read the review here.

It was good to read yesterday that Ai WeiWei has been released from detention.

Comfort Reading



A Monday hospital admission last month made me reach for something to distract me over the weekend. Nothing on my shelves promised an instant solution, but a Saturday afternoon trawl of Penge charity shops did the trick.

I'm a great fan of Stephen King, especially since I read his autobiographical On Writing. The blurb of Gerald's Game leapt out at me- a woman is manacled to a bed in a woodland cabin five miles from the nearest neighbour. Why? How is she going to escape? Suspense, surprise and the usual admix of gruesome detail kept me riveted until Sunday night. I sent it off to my sister yesterday, because I know she likes thrillers.




I knew I needed something for the inevitable hours of waiting once I was in there. I'd aready spent two half days in prelimary visits, where four hours waiting was fitted around ten minutes or so with consultants and check-up nurses. With an arrival time fixed for 7.30 on 18th April, there was no knowing the order in which I'd go down to theatre.

Luckily, I had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger's classic study of teenage angst, presented to me by my English teacher when I was fourteen. Troubled protagonist Holden Caulfield is expelled fron boarding school for 'flunking' everything except English and the book charts his meanderings as he delays arriving home before his parents receive the news. It's hard not to empathise with his irritation at the 'phoniness' of the people he meets and with his own sense of helplessness. And yet it's so funny it makes me laugh at every page.

I'm wondering what my grandson thought of it.



If you've read the previous blog entry you'll know I woke to hear a surgeon tell me things hadn't gone to plan and I'd have to stay in longer than expected - for at least another night.

The after-effects of the anaesthetic meant I couldn't read, but I'd brought a walkman with me. I'd found a boxed set of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads for £3 in the Cancer Research shop. Again, very poignant and yet funny studies of the human predicament, read by excellent actors including Alan Bennett himself. My favourite is Patricia Routledge as the busybody who finds a sense of purpose only when she's sent to prison.

I'm saving it as a present to my friend who lives in Hull but works abroad. You obviously don't have to be a Yorkshire person to appreciate the stories - I read recently that Alan Bennett is a 'national treasure'. For once, I could agree.

Literary Links: Orozco at the Tate Modern



It came as no surprise to learn that Mexico-born Gabriel Orozco studied for a while in Madrid. Transforming ‘found’ objects in an often surreal way that echoes Picasso, from an elliptical billiard table to a sliced-up Citroen, Orozco has all the master’s playful inventiveness without the macho posturing and sexual obsessions. At the same time Orozco’s very Latin-American religious sensibility is signaled in the iconic skull that appears on the exhibition poster, and in his fascination with decay and detritus. His sense of transience comes out particularly in works that include vehicles.




The show is well-curated, starting in a low-key style and leading up to the more complex pieces. The captions and displayed introductions are clear and helpful. Entertainingly bizarre items encouraged laughter, as in a tangle of bicycles, welded together and upended, photos of paired yellow scooters and tins of cat-food perched on water melons, the cut-in-half car and the displaced lift. I loved the chessboard and the quirky obituary headlines, also the interactive billiard table, although I sympathized with gallery staff’s anxiety about possible injury from a red billiard ball suspended on a wire.





The photos and money bills overlaid with harlequin circles were seemingly elegant comments on the mainly sporting subject matter, while similar patterns isolated and presented against differently coloured background conveyed a Paul Klee-like grace. They had the surprising quality of seeming both controlled and random.

Hanging sheets of dryer-fluff in the installation called ‘Sills’ I took at first glance to echo back-street washing lines but at closer range they are creepy, like dusty remnants of shrouds. Walking beneath them is a powerfully sinister experience, as is viewing the complete floor space of another room littered with discarded shreds of car-tyres, some big enough to have come from tractors.




Orozco’s art celebrates the man-made in gritty urban life and his transforming ‘interventions’ emphasize the symbolic in everyday objects. There’s a clear sense of the world as a system of signs that links Orozco to medieval symbolist art. His genius lies in perceiving and performing the tweaks that make deeper meanings emerge, a touch of the ‘magic realism’ that informs Latin American Literature.

The Gabriel Orozco Exhibition is at the Tate Modern until April 29th

What makes them Modern? Guy de Maupassant: The Best Short Stories




I was delighted when a book of short stories was the month's choice for my local reading group. For a while now I've been reviewing books for The Short Review Website and this seemed an ideal candidate.

'one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents' says Wikipedia, but I'm not sure what makes a short story modern.

Is it length? Many of these are quite long by today's standards, enough for the protagonists to take journeys through the countryside by horse-drawn carriages, to refresh themselves at country inns and maybe fall in love. Many, if not most, too, have a distinct moral messages, where more recent examples tend to ambiguity. The characters are individuals rather than types, sometimes said to mark a change from traditional tales. Sometimes, though, the line between portraying a bullying military type and a believable person doing his duty is not clearly drawn.

Perhaps it's the existential pessimism of the stories that mark them as modern. The cruel tricks of fate and the futility of human efforts to avoid them is a dominant theme. A modern outlook discards the certainties of faith and a confidence that virtue will be rewarded. In 1880 that was a shocking realisation that marked out Maupassant for criticism. In 1893, after a very troubled life, he committed suicide in a mental asylum.

My review appears in the March 2011 Short Review website.