The World According to Alistair Wye. Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize? reviewed by Jack Degree



Who's Afraid
of the Booker Prize?

Not to be confused with the stage play of the same name (and by the same author), the plot of Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? centres on computer-science graduate Alistair Wye, hired as amanuensis to celebrity novelist Marshall Zob. One of Wye’s first tasks is to sift through an archive of computer discs, stored emails, fax printouts, and handwritten letters and postcards. That task forms a part of Zob’s project in gathering material for a commemorative volume celebrating the life and work of his recently deceased mentor, John Andrew Glaze. Secretly, Wye also starts and maintains a personal diary, recording his reactions to life in proximity to a literary celebrity. The novel, much of whose subject matter is owed to the communications revolution, is about vanity, avarice, egotism, and self-seeking publicity. It is serious in intent, and also remarkably funny.

The narrative leans heavily on modern communications – email and so on – yet is never far from its epistolary roots. It extends the form to dramatic new limits, blurring the relationship between cult figure, messenger, reader, and it tests traditional rules of plot and composition. One of the book’s many underlying ironies is that, cast in the modern world of advanced communications, it has much in common with its eighteenth-century precursors, without being in any sense a historical or costume drama.

The world according to Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize? is bewildering and comic, ruthlessly examining the nature of fame and reputation, and is territory where literary research is transformed into something more akin to sordid detective work. The narrator Wye isn’t always the person he seems. As he works through Zob’s archive, he discovers secrets Zob would rather he left unearthed – often with hilarious consequences. Nothing is fixed for very long. As the plot unfolds we are forced to question whose side we should be on – on Wye’s, the tormentor, or on Zob’s, a man marred by paranoia, when the rest of the literati seem to conspire against him.

Cowlam is adamant his novel is not a roman-à-clef – he tells us as much before we have an opportunity to ask. There are strong hints that it is therefore a roman-à-clef, with the tantalising prospect of yet more to be culled from the author’s work and experience – if much of it may best be left unsaid. He excels at irony and the depiction of social mores. He inhabits his characters in a multitude of voices. He imitates their differing writing styles. He finds in modern media the perfect vehicle for his considerable talents. Most of all, he shows us Marshall Zob, fraud, demagogue and technophobe, and a writer destined to be blanked under the weight of his own commercial hype.


Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize? is published by CentreHouse Press. See Amazon purchase options: USA, UK.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, Dramatic Reading, Pushkin House, 26 June 2012, reviewed by Peter Cowlam

The Nabokovian filter over the coup Morn has successfully repelled is that of aesthetics rather than political discourse, with the distortions of social unease just a spectre to be poeticised over. It is Morn, who is secretly the King, who has delivered what Tremens, the revolutionary leader, could and would not – four years of peace and prosperity. That figurehead of revolt, played by Peter Eyre in a breeze of world-weariness, has ensured his survival only in feigned denunciation of himself – at least as the action opens – having entered a tacit pact with the King, whoever that personage is. The sole image the people have of their monarch is masked, such as that appearing on coins of the realm. His royal presence permeates his nation through pageant and ritual, while his carriage is probably empty when out on official procession, explaining why its blinds are permanently drawn. That veil on the actuality is what facilitates the King’s other life as Morn, a man free to walk the city and judge the mood of its market squares, and know what his people think.

To Tremens – a man who deplores previous ages of revolution – that amorphous concept of ‘the people’ is all a wasted effort. History’s worst outcome has been the elevation of the common man, whose gift to the world is the debased culture a long issue of Nabokovian characters has subsequently debunked and satirised. Tremens is not motivated politically to deliver a better world, which disposes of the need the play might have to engage with revolutions, with why they occur, and with how new leaderships emerge in their aftermath. Tremens carries with him a brand of Schopenhauerian insistence on blind will, a force infusing everything, one that reduces all before it to poetic, romanticised ruin. In Ganus, a fellow-revolutionary, who has escaped exile, who is on the run, who has come to believe the revolution was a mistake, there is an absence of that true calling. Perversely nihilism has its own optimism, when Tremens adds that ‘somehow I sense…hidden within him…that spark, that scarlet comma of contamination, which will spread the wondrous cold and fire of tormenting illness across my country: deathly revolts; hollow destruction; bliss; emptiness; non-existence’ [I.1, ll 320–25].

Morn’s is not the only disguise. Ganus, in his conjectures of adultery, agrees to attend his wife Midia’s soirée, made up and costumed as Othello (Othello, consumed by jealousy and suspicion). Once there he gets himself quietly drunk in a corner, having to put up with Morn, the central guest, who shows as a force for good with a lightness of touch and a poet’s sensibility. He happens also to have infatuated Ganus’s wife, Midia, who is played with chic scheming astuteness by Emily Sidonie. There are other things Ganus has to tolerate. The century (the twentieth) is characterised as a northern country (like Zembla, one assumes, ‘a distant northern land’), a remoteness of visions, bombs, churches, golden princes, revolutionaries in raincoats, and blizzards. Ganus/Gradus suffers also the revolution’s poet, Klian, a coward ultimately, and a man locked into ancient structures, where genius cannot thrive without the eroticisation of its Muse. Other outpourings are from Dandilio, a rationalist buffoon, who has defined human happiness according to scientific theory. The tragedy of Mister Morn is his flirtation with Midia, Morn challenged to a duel when Ganus can stand it no more. In the drawing of lots to establish who will take the first shot, that etiquette is subverted by Tremens and Dandilio, who engineer matters in Ganus’s favour. The King’s bodyguard and confidant later lets him know who Morn really is, but he’s saved the bother of committing regicide when Morn elects to shoot himself. Easier to say than do. Morn, a force for life, now rues his liaison with Midia – ‘a shallow woman’, he says – then in an abrupt volte-face is prepared to sacrifice his kingdom for her. When he flees, renouncing his kingship, Tremens urges his rebels to further destruction. When Ganus thinks the King is dead, he is quiescent; when he learns he is not, he vows to kill him. By now he’s fully in the Othello role, but without make-up.

So these self-deceptions perpetuate themselves. Morn without his kingdom wastes in lassitude, conforming less and less to the cult that has given him artist status. Midia is exquisitely bored, both with him and with the rebellion, whose destruction hardly touches her consciousness. She throws him over, in favour of Edmin, the King’s confidant, a man whose presence has the air of apology. Into that debris of human relations Ganus arrives, at the point where Midia and Edmin have just eloped. He aims his pistol at Morn just as Act IV’s curtain falls.

Act V. ‘The people’, that amorphous entity above, fight back against the rebels, because it’s rumoured the King isn’t dead. Dandilio has worked out who Morn really is. Soldiers close in. Klian pleads for his life, and says he will serve the King. Tremens and Dandilio philosophise ludicrously. All ends ambiguously, with Morn declaiming the illusory nature of statecraft, then receding into the night, either to shoot himself, or end Morn’s delusion once and for all and resurrect himself as King.

Therein is also the curse of pseudo-democracies.

§

Written in the winter of 1923–24, The Tragedy of Mister Morn first appeared in book form in Russian in 2008. Its verse translation into English is by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan.

The Mix Up, the Rhythm Factory, 22nd April 2010, reviewed by CP James

One of those instant drawbacks of freelance journalism is that the events you must cover are very often not the ones you wish to write about. On the morning of the 22nd I phoned round all my tame editors at the capital’s newspaper offices, and asked what, if anything, I could do for them – I’d a few bills to pay, and not much by way of spondulicks coming in. The first, a very old friend, said ‘Please, nothing about the election!’ Those prime ministerial TV debates, and the surprising Clegg phenomenon, had got practically every hack in Christendom on the hustings circus, telling us everything from the precise sprinkling of sugar on Mr Cameron’s breakfast grapefruit to the Machiavellian truth underpinning Lord Mandelson’s latest public utterance. I would have to say everyone else I phoned took much the same view, until someone – not unconnected with The Guardian – suggested I take a little trip to the Rhythm Factory, a music venue in Whitechapel, and report on the evening’s events there, where it was rumoured Pete Doherty would be putting in a surprise appearance.

Well, surprisingly, Pete Doherty didn’t (put in a surprise appearance). Instead we had the Mix Up, a showing of up-and-coming talent on the music scene, in a venue space suitably blacked, but radiant with spots and strobes, and a procession of latter-day jongleurs strutting their stuff on stage. These ranged from Sam Ward, with his CD launch, ‘alternative, ambient, guitar and bass’; Andy Mathew, a reggae and soul singer; guest act and punk knockabout Corporal Machine and the Bombers; the smooth sophistication of Salary Man, in a tight rock-jazz-soul suit; and finally to J-Soul, a Dilla-inspired beat-maker, with soulful electro beats from his debut EP Electric Formulas, who at the night’s end had a decibel count halfway to the stars, and a clutch of devotees hogging the dance floor.

It was as I said to one of my editors on the morning of the 23rd: ‘Yeah – much, much better than the election…’

Kisses on a Postcard, by Terence Frisby, reviewed by CP James

Playwright, actor and director Terence Frisby’s most famous play is There’s a Girl in My Soup, the West End’s longest running comedy. He and older brother Jack, aged seven and eleven respectively, were WWII evacuees, in the Cornish hamlet of Doublebois, where they lived with ‘Uncle Jack’, a former Welsh miner with good old-Labour views, and his warm-hearted wife ‘Auntie Rose’.

The brothers remained in Cornwall for three years, and fully entered the rural life there, whose outstanding personalities ranged from Miss Polmanor, a starchy Wesleyan Methodist, to Miss Polmanor’s charge Elsie, a highly sexualised teenager, who succeeded in getting herself impregnated by one of the many American GI’s billeted here throughout the course of the war.

As a kind of watermark permeating the whole living texture of this charming wartime memoir is the benign presence of Uncle Jack and Auntie Rose, two very warm-hearted, gentle and generous people, for whom Jack and Terry’s well-being is uppermost – one imagines not automatically the fate of child evacuees in wartime.

The story has previous incarnations as a play, Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late, and as a stage musical based on that play.

What critics and bloggers have said:

‘Terence Frisby has done something difficult: he has made good times and good people more fun to read about than any melodrama, in a book that leaves one feeling grateful and happy.’ Diana Athill

‘I will say it again, a lovely lovely lovely book.’ Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover

‘Frisby’s book is an antidote to those misery memoirs which crop up everywhere.’ Stuck in a Book

‘Perhaps the best sign of how enchanting this book was to me, I didn't want it to end.’ Banter Basement

The video promo was put together from the first ever production of the musical, performed at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple in 2004.

A Painter's Revenge: RB Kitaj and the Tate War, by Kasper

Can a painter fight back against hostile critics and 'win'?

In 1877, James Abbott McNeill Whistler took umbrage over John Ruskin's comment in Fors Clavigera, the art critic's journal, that Whistler was 'a coxcomb' who asked two hundred guineas for a picture and had flung 'a pot of paint in the public's face.'

Whistler sued Ruskin, and after an infamous trial, prevailed, winning damages of one farthing. Whistler emerged psychologically damaged and financially burdened from having to absorb court costs.

With RB Kitaj, it was slightly otherwise.

Over a decade ago, in 1994, RB Kitaj, American expatriate painter and resident of England for nearly forty years, was awarded a large retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, an honor accorded few living painters.

Kitaj had enjoyed just and consistently favorable treatment from English critics before. But surprisingly, the critical reaction to Kitaj's lifetime opus was overwhelmingly negative, even former supporters of his art as well as a cadre of new detractors flinging raw insults his way.

He was judged 'pretentious', 'pseudo-intellectual', 'a name-dropper', 'a poseur' (for his assumed identity of the persecuted 'Diasporist Jew') and 'full of Hemingway/Gauguin bullshit'.

The Diaspora, as Kitaj conceived of it in his 1989 pamphlet on the subject, was a wide-open refuge for outsiders, and welcomed feminists, persecuted blacks, homosexuals and Marxists, as well as Jews.

In this manifesto, as in his 'prefaces', explanatory glosses for his paintings, Kitaj had trespassed into the territory of art critics who reserved to themselves the linguistic definition of his work. RBK even went so far as to characterize recent paintings of his as belonging to his 'late style', a loosened departure from his earlier, more naturalistic work.

It was not for the artist to proclaim anything about his own style, the critics glared back: such taxonomies were for them alone to formulate.

Coupled with this critical rancor was an irreversible personal tragedy for the artist: his beautiful and talented wife, Sandra Fisher, died at age forty-seven from a sudden aneurysm about the time of the Tate show. Kitaj, who had been in America as his mother slowly ebbed away and died under his hands, rushed back to England just in time to see Sandra into the next world.

His paintings for nearly the next ten years are, in some ways, a commemoration of his and Sandra's love together -- diaphanous expressionist yearnings for his forever lost, angelic muse.

But before the moving images of Sandra and the artist pictured in erotic duets came the 'revenge paintings'.

Kitaj refers to this period as the Tate War.

One work in particular, exhibited first in the Royal Academy (London) show of summer 1997, 'The Killer Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even' (1997), implies that the strain and ignominy from the art critical onslaught may have been a partial cause of his wife's death.

The painting is based on Manet's famous 'The Execution of Maximilian'(1868) and quotes other modern masterpieces: Picasso's cubist portraits, Duchamp (in the parody of RBK's title as well as formal elements), and of course, Manet.

The critic is pictured as a bulbous, pulsating tick-like entity, whose yellow ticker-tape tongue is scribbled with the phrases: 'yellowpress kill, kill, kill the heretic always', 'kill heresy'. The 'monster critic' is in the process of being executed by a duo consisting of Manet himself and Kitaj the painter, whose head is represented by the Hebrew character for his surname.

Kitaj attributed part of the critical salvo he suffered to '...garden variety anti-semitism...' since he has taken Judaism, its critics, prophets, tormentors and geniuses, as his subject matter in recent years. 'The Killer Critic...' is banded with a 'predella' of paperback books at its bottom; one cover reads: 'An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism' by James Parkes. A quotation by Paul Celan, a Jewish poet harassed and tormented by the Nazis, streams down a weeping angel blazoned on the 'RBK executioner'.

And thus Cleveland, Ohio-born Ronald Brooks Kitaj, reincarnated as the British Diasporist vigilante RBK, sought to even the score for a betrayal by his adopted country.

Belittled (like Whistler) for selling 'empty' and 'bloated, pretentious' canvases for outrageous prices, Kitaj concluded his swipe at the critical establishment by pricing 'The Killer Critic...' at £1,000,000, a price he quickly received.

In 1997 he returned to America and Los Angeles to paint and draw pictures of bungee-jumpers and lovers in automobiles. But Kitaj had never been one to blench from hanging a picture of God's back next to one of baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax.

The 'Sandra Series' and other visionary, brightly colored works followed. Finally Kitaj was able to rejoin his children and begin to live a normal life.

Still a crusader at nearly seventy, Kitaj doesn't turn away from a scrap. 'When someone shoots, I shoot back,' he declares.

And his Diasporism still shows itself in odd ways, though he has retreated a bit from his original 'Manifesto' of 1989.

He still names himself a 'Jewish artist' and tries to represent the Diaspora as all-inclusive:

'I'm right behind black people who want to use their negritude (he says fiercely), I'm right behind them.'

Maybe it seems a bit unrealistic or politically skewed to make such a declaration as a privileged white man, a world-famous artist, very comfortably well-off and living in a large house in the hills of Westwood that once belonged to the actor Peter Lorre.

Today Kitaj does paintings of his private swimming pool, which he calls 'My Walden'.

But unlike Whistler, he has come away emotionally damaged but freshly defiant from his confrontation with the killer critics. His work is still crisp and original, perhaps a bit looser but even more resolute and mature than before.

(Note: I am indebted to Brendan Bernhard, David Cohen and Marco Livingstone for some facts and quotations in this article.)

See other articles by Kasper. Learn more about Kitaj.

Zadistically So: Christina Colquhoun recalls a lecture at the Royal Society of Literature by a palely fired Nabokovian

All these various waves about how to pronounce Nabokov remind me of a lecture I went to last year held by the Royal Society of Literature in London. I should have written to the List at the time [NABOKOV-L], but I thought the lecture was so god-awful that I hesitated in spitting too much unnecessary rancour out into cyberspace. The, in my opinion, truly overrated Zadie Smith had decided to talk about Pnin. Her preamble opened with: 'There are many ways of pronouncing Nabokov...' Hmm. Funny. I thought there was only one. 'And I have chosen...' She listed some 'alternatives' and proceeded rather haughtily to inform the audience that she had chosen 'Naba-cough'. Ms Smith then read out from a prepared bunch of papers for forty minutes in a mind-numbing monotone. By her own admission Ms Smith is not a Russian speaker nor does she have knowledge of any foreign language, which showed up as a substantial impediment to her 'approach' to Nabokov (this may seem obvious, but I hadn't realised quite how much it really means).

What Good Are The Arts? by John Carey, reviewed by Bob Mann

In The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), John Carey offered a much-needed critique of the tendency among nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and writers to dehumanise their fellow-beings while constantly asserting their own superiority.

In his new book he goes a lot further. Looking at the history of aesthetic theory and the pronouncements of philosophers and scientists on the nature of art, he concludes that it is all so contradictory and solipsistic as to be meaningless. In the end, everything is personal preference. If I think something is a work of art, it's a work of art for me. If you don't, it isn't for you. Nothing more can ever be said. As soon as I start claiming that the artworks I like are better, more profound or more universal than the artworks you like, because I am more sensitive, perceptive and intelligent than you are, we are on the slippery slope that leads to the death camps.

Carey's respect for so-called 'ordinary' people, and his scorn for the precious and pretentious, is admirable, like his fury at the guy from Covent Garden who claims that 'opera is difficult'. What is hard, he raves, about sitting in plush seats for three hours and listening to singing? Although I love opera, I agree: in most people's experience of life, it is well down on the list of 'difficult' things: however convoluted the plot, there's a synopsis in the programme; the language may be foreign, but as you can't make out the words anyway, it hardly matters; the emotions are so simple and blatant -- love, hate, anger, grief, joy -- that a seven-year-old can follow them.

And yet...much as I admire this book, I have problems. Carey quotes the appalling Bill Buford to suggest that there is no difference between the rapture experienced by Manchester United hooligans rampaging and pillaging in Europe, and the joy I experience from Beethoven's Ninth. I have to believe that there is a difference, and that my experience is ultimately better and more valuable.

Carey does admit that studying literature can be beneficial, and any parent may agree that if bored sixteen-year-olds were to sit down and read a book occasionally, they wouldn't need to drink themselves stupid with vodka every night (but not being a parent I won't go there). A stimulating and humane book, anyway.

What Good Are The Arts is published by Faber. This review first published in the November 2005 issue of The Finger.