LaRose

We have a small branch library in Much Wenlock, and we’re lucky to have that. As with the arts, education, health and social services, the traffic is all in the direction of austerity. So when I get into that welcoming little building I don’t rely on what happens to be on the shelves. I’m usually picking up a request I’ve made, where I’ve read a review and they get the book from somewhere else in the county.

But this time was different. Short of things to read, I idly trawled the shelves, and found LaRose, by Louise Erdrich, and thought I’d give it a try. It’s just brilliant. The outline is staggering, though apparently based on a real incident. A man aiming to kill a deer finds that by accident he’s killed the sone of a friend and neighbour. Drawing on Native American custom, he decides that the way to atone for this is to hand over his own son to the other man’s family, for them to bring him up.

An outrageous premise, but she makes it totally believable, and gripping throughout its fouyr hunded pages. On the way, she takes in family tensions, teenage sex, the development of tribes over generations, the delusions of revenge and conspiracy, amid the background of current US politics. Erdrich is a poet as well as a novelist, and it shows. I can’t remember having enjoyed a book so much in years.

Fame at last

I’ve been entering poetry competitions for a while, and relative to many I’ve been lucky - I can produce a list which makes me look quite successful. But I know that the price of those few successes is a much larger number of failures. Last year, for instance, I sent out thirty poems in January-May, and has no success with any of them.

So it’s great to record what may well be the peak of my poetic career. On Saturday, February 3rd, at the Dugdale Centre, Enfield, David Constantine presented me with the first prize in a competition he’d judged - out of 1000 entries. That’s good enough in itself, but what I’m even more impressed with is the quality of the judge.

I’d heard the name, but to my shame knew very little in detail - though I discovered a lot through frantic googling between being told on Monday night and travelling down on Saturday. He’s a celebrated poet, winner of the Queen’s Medal (and there’s only one of those each year) as well as being a world-class translator of poetry. He’s also a lovely, decent human being who’s brilliant at talking about poetry, how it works and why it matters. This surely is as good as it gets.

The Post Office Scandal

It is astonishing, as Gaby Hinsliff writes in today’s Guardian, that it takes a play to make people notice the Post Office scandal. Yesterday I sent a poem about it to Culture Matters, and they posted it; but I sent the same poem to them two years ago, and it sank without trace. The facts, and the outrage, have been clear for years, so what does it take to actually change things?

More than you’d think. A few years ago, you’d have said that the Williams report was the solution to the scandal of Windrush. A detailed tough analysis of what went wrong, with clearly defined solutions as to how to put that right. Priti Patel accepted those conclusions in full.

But now, does anyone remember what they were? Suella Braverman wasn’t impressed, dismissed Williams as “not set in stone”, and cancelled some of the work it had begun. Sunak didn’t seem to mind. Labour didn’t seem to notice. Our fearless independent media somehow found other topics far more interesting. The Amnesia industry is alive and well.

The Booker shortlist

The Booker has always been controversial, and I can see why there are risks involved in turning the writing of novels into a competition, in the damage it does to books not selected etc etc…but it’s still hard to resist the pull of getting involved in focussing on a few books that serious readers have decided are worth our attention.

This year’s list, in particular. There was the initiual curiosity that two of them were written by Irish Pauls, but beyond that silliness was the fact that both The Bee Sting and Prophet Song were compoulsive reads. I had them from the library at the same time, and was gripped by both, but in very different says. I ended up buying a hardback copy of each as Christmas presents, one for my son, one for my daughter. And who got what was another interesting internal debate…

So I enjoyed reading an extract from a blog published in The Guardian, where the writer was comparing their responses to these books, and wondering which of the two of them was more likely to win the prize, and why…and then the realisation that this blog was written in Gaza, and by the time I was reading it the writer could well have been killed.

The Bee Sting

What do the Irish put in their water? A couple of weeks ago I raved about Paul Lynch’s novel “Prophet Song”, and now Paul Murray, also Irish, comes up with “The Bee Sting”, also deservedly on the Booker shortlist, but completely different.

Superficially, it’s a classic family novel - like Middlemarch, like The Corrections. It’s over five hundred pages, and it follows each of the four members of a family, gradually unpeeling the layers of the family onion. But it’s also totally modern, exploring in turn, and (to me at least) with total conviction, the inner lives of each of the family members - male and female, young and old. There’s switches and dark secrets, and a complicated plot, but I’ve found it a pleasure to read, and now I’ve finished there’s the painful ache left by a stunning book. I may well reread it in the future, but never again will I discover it for the first time.

Prophet Song

The world goes to hell in a handcart, so I retreat to my warm cocoon, watch documentaries and mubi films, listen to music, and read library books. And just at the moment, there’s some stunning stuff around. The blurb for Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song”, for instance, describes the creation of a future dystopia similar to the work of Orwell, Burgess and Attwood.

Which is plainly ludicrous. Except that it’s not. This contemporary novel about how ordinary life in Ireland sinks into an authoritarian nightmare is totally believable. As I read, I can see how little it would take for us to become former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, wherever. the pieces are all in place, and the crude, powerful oversimplifications which drive violence and repression are on the news every day.

It’s deeply domestic. A mother, trying to bring up four kids on her own, when she doesn’t know what’s happened to her husband. The pressures of surviving day to day, of feeding, keeping clean, staying safe, when bit by bit all the things which keep us sane are being wrenched away. Lynch puts us in that position, makes us care, as we long for this family to get away - but all the time we know that it would be ludicrous to expect a happy ending.

The Masque of Anarchy

Five years ago, if you’d heard that a politician had quoted from Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy, you’d have laid money that would be Jeremy Corbyn. It is very much his kind of poem - a powerful vision of extremes, with the oppression of the poor by the rich eloquently calling out for justice.

So it’s something of a surprise to find that Suella Braverman quoted from the poem, in her tirade at the Conservative Party conference. I don’t know if she’s a regular reader of Romantic poetry, but it’s not hard to imagine some young aide sniggering at the cheek of adopting one of the great radical poems, just to wind up the opposition.

In Braverman’s vision, there are the many and the few, but “the many” are her and the other downtrodden Tory members, suffering from the impact of a hurricane of migration, while “the few” are the woke intelligentsia, in their ivory towers, who preach decency and humanity while not actually having to suffer the consequences. There’s no recognition that she and her party are in power, having totally failed to deal sensibly with immigration for the past decade.

Succession

Finally, the end of the road. I have finished watching Series 4 of Succession, and I’m not sure I could ever put myself through that again. But it’s certainly been an exciting ride, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

For those who haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, Succession is a US TV series (but with signficant Brit involvement so far as the writing is concerned) about a rich,powerful family - not a million miles, it’s rumoured, from the Murdoch clan. So immediately it has those seductive, ludicrously expensive trappings - luxurious settings, planes, helicopters, endless fleets of limos. The cost must have been eye-watering.

but whle it has that exotic “what must that be like?” appeak, it also has the “oh yes, I know about that” buzz of family and maried life. Children bullied by their father, but weeping at his funeral, really not at all sur of who they are, but haunted by the feling that thy’re meant to be a powerful success - despite clear, repeated evidence that none of them could hold down an important job by being competent and reliable. All the tone and trappings of power are they; they just aren’t any good. Quite how they’ve managed to make this distasteful spectacle funny, moving and full of suspense I’m not sure, but that’s what they’ve done.

Don Paterson

When I was fitter and younger I’d always go to Ledbury Poetry Festival. I’d go through the programme, and try to find a day where it would be worth driving for 75 minutes, going to three or four events spaced out over the day, having a lunch in a pub garden, and driving back in he evening. Now that looks like hard work, and in any case I couldn’t find a day-full of evens. So I settled for the easy life, booking into a Don Paterson reading on zoom.

It was well worth it. He’s dry and entertaining, a thoughtful analyst of poems as well as a skilled and versatile practitioner, and by the time he’d finishd I knew I had to have his latest collection “The Arctic.” It’s a real mix, some music and impenetrable Scottish dialect, but also a powerful confrontation of contemporary themes - Brexit, Covid, climate change. Back in the day, I was often told that poetry shouldn’t try t deal with politics, but for some reason that isn’t the orthodoxy any more.

Even better, Paterson sometimes deals with the old currency - regular forms, short lines that rhyme, tight four-ling stanzas that build up steam. Jonathan Davidson, who was interviewing him at Ledbury, seemed to regard this as a lovable eccentricity, but to me it was a vindication of something I’ve always known. Of course, regular forms shouldn’t be compulsory, but you’d be crazy to ditch them altogether.

Time to Think

That’s what books are for. A month ago, I wrote some comments about a TV documentary called The clinic, about the GIDS unit at the Tavistock. It was serious and constructive, avoided a lot of the obvious traps, and represented a fair range of views. But in an hour, it couldn’t tell the full story. A Guardian review suggested that this had actually been achieved by the Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes, in her book “Time to Think.”

They were right. As a person of leisure, I could order the book from the library, read most of it in a day, on two three-hour train journeys to London and back, and I’m now considerably wiser. First, there’s the issue of management. Polly Carmichael didn’t appear in the TV documentary, and refused to co-operate with the writing of the book, but over the course of Barnes’ extensive enquiries her role becomes clear - she’s a pleasant, concerned professional who wants to look after her team, and listens to what they have to say. She just doesn’t do anything about it.

Another issue, not sexy, not conducive to good television, is record-keeping. What happens to these kids after GIDS stops seeing them? How many of them who transition to another gender regret it, or actually seek to have that process reversed? Nobody knows. Sure, it’s difficult work and they’re under pressure and the demand is growing all the time, but keeping track of the effects of your treatment surely has to be part of the job.

There’s a lot more, but no space for it here. But if you’re interested in what happened at GIDS, you have to read his book.

The Sixth Commandment

I didn’t want to watch “Best Interests” because it was about parents of a seriously ill child; so many opportunities for sentimental indulgence, empty rage. But then I read the reviews, and realised this was four hours of superb drama I’d be crazy to miss.

The same applied to “The Sixth Commandment.” Serial killer who gets close to vulnerable elderly peple, and then tries to kill them? No, not my scene, thanks. But then I read the reviews.(How lucky we are to have catch-up). Of course. It’s not about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s done.

And this is done by Sara Phelps, who achieved the impossible by getting me to show an interest in something by Agatha Christie. She’s very thoughtful, very clever, and her dramas have the distinguishing mark of dramatic quality - they take each of the characters seriously, show hat’s happening and how they’re thinking and feeling, rather than focussing on the only one that counts. If you don’t believe me, fine. that’s what catch-up is for. Check it out for yourself.

Buying Books

As Keynes apparently said “Of course I’ve changed my mind. When circumstances change, you change your mind. What do you do?”

Which is a consolation when I occasionally feel guilty about the amount of money I spend on books. I’ve always bought books. I have thousands of them, and know for certain that most have virtually no resale value, so my kids will inherit a huge store of knowledge which will be more of a pain than a profit. Five years ago, I sort of decided I wouldn’t buy any more books, unless I really had to.

Then Covid came along. I went to a ton of zoom poetry events, often featuring poets at the other end of the country, totally new to me but writing stunning poems. And how could I best support them? Answer: by buying their books online.

The worst of Covid has gone, for now, but I continue to want to support poets, and the easiest way to do that is to order their work from the local independent bookshop, Pengwern in Shrewsbury. And when I get there there’s often something tasty which I haven’t heard of, but award myself as a freebie, for supporting the good cause. Which is how I came across “The Music of Time”, by John Burnside. It’s a stunning survey of European poetry over the last hundred years - an incredible display of knowledge and enthusiasm. I’d never heard of it, but feel privileged to have come across it, and share that buzz by lending it to friends

Remembering Martin Amis

Reading the obituaries for Martin Amis really did take me back, to a time when I thought - quite a lot us thought, actually - that he could be the most exciting writer in the UK today. That was, admittedly, alongtme ago. He was always very male, brittle, combative, but briefly the energy and feel for language seemed briefly to make up for that, to make it matter a bit less. I can remember storing “Money” along with my favourite hardback novels, the select few I’d hang on to for the rest of my life. And then, in lockdown, came the time to put that to the test, and actually start reading it again. I didn’t take long. how n earth, I wondered, could I really have thought this was so special? When I compare how I feel now about Sarah Waters, Jennifer Egan, Jim Crace I’m just astonished that there was ever a time when I thought Amis deserved to be up there. Like others commenting on his death, I dare say I’ll happily go back to the memoirs and the collected essays, but I don’t see me re-reading a Martin Amis novel any time soon.

Matt Hancock

You remember him…During lockdown, he was the one who insisted that his arms were around the care homes, night and day. Canny sceptics like John Crace in The Guardian, were impressed by his announcement at the covid briefings that they’d be honest about it if they got things wrong. At the time I thought he was crazy to trust Hancock’s word. You only got to be in that cabinet if you’d told lies about Brexit, so why should he suddenly assume that they would now be starting to tell the truth?

Nothing Hanock’s done since has raised him in our estimation. No, we didn’t really think he was being a celebrity in the jungle to promote the cause of dyslexia, and donating 3% of his fee to that cause justified our scepticism. But what we have now, courtesy of Isabel Oakeshott, is a detailed running commentary of just how vain, incompetent and deceitful he could be. He was, of course, an idiot to trust her with anything serious, but the important political question is how any Prime Minister could appoint such a fool, and then allow them to stay in office long after they’d demontrated their unfitness for the role.

A Quiet Triumph

This was that rarity - a bookshop purchase. I went into collect something else, browsed through the shelves, and picked up a book I’d never heard of. I hadn’t read a review, there were no blurb quotes on the cover, and it was more expensive than most but hey, I treated myself.

I’m so glad I did. Smart Devices, by Carol Rumens, is a collection of fifty-two “poems for the week” from The Guardian. She picks the poems, and writes about two and half pages of commentary, and that’s it. But it’s just a brilliant primer for poetry analysis, as well as an introduction to a wide range of poets and poems.

I’d heard of a few of them, but not most, and it’s obvious that Rumens is reading voraciously all the time, frequently referring to other poems in a particular poet’s collection. There’s a massive range of style, tone and form, but the constant elements are Rumens’ enthusiasm for what she’s reading, and the intelligence she brings to bear. Why she isn’t celebrated in e same way as J Bell or Jane Commane I don’t know,but she should be.

Finishing in style

So that’s it - the end of Happy Valley. But what a way to go. It’s been classy all the way through, from only releasing episodes a week at a time (old-fashioned water cooler telly, no selfish binging on your own) to Sally Wainwright’s insistence that this is it. No, the BEEB will not be allowed to milk this particular cow for ever (cf Line of Duty).

To someone who’s written a lot of plays, it was also a wonderful celebration of dialogue. You don’t have to have collapsing buildings, hours of gunfire. What you need is two people talking, with conviction, saying how they feel. The grizzled woman cop, enjoying telling the young man who’s abused her daughter and others that this is where he gets off. But also him telling her that she’s old and bitter, and had no right to conceal the fact he had a son. And of course, they’re both right.

When that confrontation is over, there are pieces to be picked up. Catherine realises that she’s been over-protective, that her grandson is a young man with a reasonable curiosity about what his father was like, and that her sister may not simply have been weak and stupid in helping him pursue that. In a weaker, cruder drama she’d have apologised, and the two sisters would sink into a saccharine embrace. But this is Yorkshire, where they do things differently. What the characters say is brilliant, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff which can’t be put into words. Just brilliant.

Happy Valley

I can’t be doing with cop shows. Most of them are formulaic and unconvincing, even when hey try hard. “Without Sin” looked promising, had good actors, but I couldn’t get beyond the second episode. It’s all about Vicki McClure, minor characters and plot are twisted around, so as to provide further twists, without any concern for detail or consistency.

But “Happy Valley” is different. Sally Wainwright knows about crime and its effects, but she also knows about people. Like everybody else, she has a flawed cop as a central character, but they don’t just loom around looking significant. They also have warm, genuine colleagues who say “You’re hard work”, and mean it.

Above all, she’s brilliant about families, and what goes on within them. For some reason, TV thinks the greatest compliment it can pay successful writers is to allow them the expensive compliment of a large-scale police raid (see the decline of “Line of Duty”). But what’s rivetting about “Happy Valley” is the tension between the two sisters, and how that intricately affects all the people around them. Even if there wasn’t a crime in sight, this would be brilliant.

Selective News

We all heard the outline story. Rishi Sunak is helping out at a hostel for the homeless, and he asks this man if he wants to get into finance. How stupid can you get? Insensitive, out of touch Tory, thinking everybody’s just like him. Until you actually get to read the conversation. Dean asks Rishi if he’s sorting the economy out. He says he’s trying to. Dean says that “best for business.” Rishi asks if he works in business, and offers him some fruit. No, Dean says, he’s homeless. “But I am interested in business.” Dean says he likes finance, that if finance does well, so does the rest of London. So it’s not entirely silly that Rishi asks if that’s something he’d like to get into.

No, it’s nothing like as simple as the outline version, and that’s the trouble. What we’re often fed is the most dramatic story, the one with the simplest moral, but to get that often means touching it up a little, and missing out important details. Yet another reason - not that I was struggling to find one - why the effort and expense of going through my paper copy of The Guardian feels like a worthwhile investment.

Glory

When a young black writer is said to be “out-Orwelling Orwell” in their mash-up of “Animal Farm”, you’d expect the eyes of aging white readers to roll - but they shouldn’t. NoViolet Bulawayo - yes, there is a clue in the name - is smart and supremely talented, and “Glory” is one of the best books I’ve read this year. After 150 pages I was thinking “Get on with it - at least Animal Farm is clear and short…” but by page 400 I was knocked out. It’s creative, funny and passionately angry - a massive demolition job on the corruption that seeps through the history of of Zimbabwe. Quite what she does and how she does it is hard to describe, but then I don’t want to do it for you - I want to say get it from the library, like I did, and see if her magic works on you the way it did on me. I hope so.

TraumaZone

I’m so glad Adam Curtis is there. for years on end we hear nothing about him, but then he resurfaces with the latest piece of intelligent television, doing something that’s very different from what’s normally served up, but which will stimulate and provoke in a way that is all too rare.

I remember previous series on advertising and politics, but nothing prepared me for the latest - TraumaZone. This is a seven-hour (yes, you heard that right: seven episodes, one hour each) series about the recent history of Russia, showing what it was like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy in the Soviet Union. And it’s all old footage. Mostly from BBC camera operators, sometimes reporting on very mundane, everyday stuff.

It jumps around between different parts of Russia, from important political events to trivial routine to comic, eccentric stuff that you can hardly believe, but the editing is brilliant. It’s not dull, it’s quick moving, and it has some really witty juxtaposition of material that seems unrelated but turns out not to be. There’s no spoken commentary, but there’s some simple, devastating captions which make sure that you get the point of what’s going on. And the long-term point is how grim it was for most Russians to be alive at this time, and how plausible it seemed that Putin might be offering a route out of despair, after the chaos of what preceded him.

We watch Yeltsin move from being the heroic saviour of free Russia to being a drunken fool, and it’s all there in the footage. He must have sat though hours and hours of really boring stuff to come up with this tantalising selection of snippets, but it’s brilliant to watch.