Gosh! How unkind...

In his engaging, informative, unsettling collection of essays on recent history, Reappraisals (New York, The Penguin Press, 2007), Tony Judt passes judgment on a number of warmongers and charlatans, including nice Tony Blair. The importance of Tony's earnest tone is neatly caught by Judt: "He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what. He is not so much sincere as Sincere."

On keeping one's own voice

John Coltrane, listening to Stan Getz, is said to have said, "Let's face it: we'd all play like that, if we could". I know how he felt. Yet how often one thinks, as one listens to some great maestro murdering a piece of music, "I never could hope to play like that, and if I could, I wouldn't". Such arrogance is needed, at times, to keep your own voice alive.

Absolute, not relative

"There are no difficult violin pieces. Either you can play it, or you can't" -- Nathan Milstein (quoted on Yossi Zivoni's website).

What's worth writing about?

Disjunctions of the world,
contradictions of the heart.

The power of words recalled

One of the most affecting books I've read in recent years is EXTRACTS FROM THE RED NOTEBOOKS, by the English journalist Matthew Engel. It's his personal scrapbook of quotations on many topics, and words spoken by and about some individuals who have shaped our world for good or ill. The saying themselves are often witty, or appalling, but it is their sequencing and juxtaposition that give the book its cumulative punch. The idiocy of Bush Jr, the saccharine ooze of nice Tony, the yapping and flapping of Thatcher and her acolytes, are beautifully caught in a sprinkling of words, none of them wasted. Most of the time, Engel's chosen quotations show a gentle but devastating sense of humour, proving that the power of a joke or an anecdote is largely created by the listener who knows when to laugh, or cry. The book was compiled and published to raise money for teenage cancer (from which his son Laurie Engel died, aged thirteen). It's still on sale at Amazon. See http://www.laurieengelfund.org/

A sample of EXTRACTS FROM THE RED NOTEBOOKS, quoted from Adam Sisman's biography of A.J.P. Taylor: "One don who had criticized Alan [A.J.P. Taylor] for his journalism was asked to appear on television for the first time. The invitation specified the fee. 'Thank you for your kind invitation, which I am delighted to accept,' replied the don. 'I enclose a cheque for £35.'"

Reincarnation: A Poem

I want to come back
As Natalie Clein's cello,
Aged 231 and still doing nicely.

[Form: Hypermetric haiku.]

Similarly unique?

Matthew Quick's fiction debut THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, featured in Publishers Weekly on June 30, 2008, featured the following accolade from his publisher Sarah Crichton: "Quick has this buoyant, one-of-a-kind voice that is unlike any voice I've read. I just kept thinking 'Nick Hornby'."

Michael Connelly's THE OVERLOOK: Classic crime novel with political insight

At a time when many novels (even good ones) are too long, too self-indulgent, Michael Connelly's THE OVERLOOK (2007) was a delight. Harry Bosch faces a kidnap and murder case with frightening political implications. An innocent woman has been trussed up by blackmailing terrorists while her doctor husband was forced to steal radioactive materials. Are Al Qaeda plotting a radiation attack on Los Angeles? Who can stop them? What means are justified? In taut, clear steps the investigation builds layer upon layer of alarming evidence: the terrorists are about to strike, while the police, the FBI and the local Homeland Security czar jostle for position in the race to stop them. Much lower down the food chain, Harry Bosch, wandering through the case in his own speculative style, manages to pull the whole teetering construction inside out by noting a few insignificant local details -- at which stage the book collapses into an old, simple, true pattern. This gem of a story shows why crime writing, more than most other genres, can expose social realities and illusions. The blindness of paranoid politics in Bush's America is beautifully caught. It's all done with brilliant plotting and lightness of touch: there's no hint of political preaching, no heavy ideological message. Without equating post-9/11 America with Soviet Russia, it might be interesting to compare THE OVERLOOK to a much gloomier story, "An Incident at Krechetovka Station," in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES. These very different stories show the demands of the individual against the needs of state security. And in their different ways, they show why we need fiction to understand what's going on.

The Wrong Kind of Critic

I had to read 85 books, as a judge for the 2007 CBI Bisto Children's Book Awards. A weird experience. You hack your way through stuff that you'd normally put back on the bookseller's table. You also get to enter compelling worlds. You read great books, and some less so. Good ideas that didn't quite come off. Bad ideas that did. And what do you learn? Obvious things, really. For a writer of genius, genre can be the springboard of imagination. For lesser writers, or condescending types, it's a straitjacket. Plus, it's astonishing how far you can get in the marketplace by sticking to the bleeding obvious and hammering out trendy messages with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. Good stuff also makes its way through the marketplace, now and again.
At its best, young people's fiction has an amazing emotional reach.
Of course the idea of competition distorts everything. Life is not a competition. Neither is literature. But prizes are newsworthy, so competition must be good.
Reading 85 books takes time. More time than you can easily spare. As the pressure mounts, you feel yourself turning into the wrong kind of critic -- the demi-semi-clever kind who swallow books whole and spit them out half-digested, the ones whose heads are filled with the clamour of their own judgmental clichés. Worse still, you find yourself sympathizing with the hostile reviewers of your own work. They didn't like your book; they were forced to pretend to read it; the review is their revenge. Others liked it, but didn't get it.
W.H. Auden confessed, “When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.”
We came up with a pretty decent shortlist. And there was some wonderful stuff that didn't make the final cut. In children's books as in other fields, Irish writers can be world-class.