We all Live in a Welsh 'Submarine': review, dir. Richard Ayoade

Joe Dunthorne's debut novel, Submarine, is a playful display of linguistic pyrotechnics in which the reader gasps at (and yet is curiously involved in) the increasingly weird behaviour of its narrator, Oliver Tate. Tate is an uber-literate adolescent who views his life as if it were a play or a film; his attempts to win the lovely Jordana, whilst saving his parents' marriage, fill the reader with a kind of shameful prurience as he makes inspections of the parental bedroom, leaves menacing post-it notes, and plots to kill pets. He is a twentieth-century Holden Caulfield, calling everyone else a phony without realising his own phoniness. But you still kind of like him.

Richard Ayoade (whom some of you will recognise as Moss from The IT Crowd) makes his directorial debut with this film adaptation. It stars Craig Roberts, the adolescent du jour who was recently seen in an episode of Being Human in which he played, well, a geeky and confused teenage vampire; and Yasmin Paige as the red-coated Jordana.

What the book captured so well was the weirdness of adolescence: you don't know who you are, you don't recognise the people around you; you are affected by things like books and films in ways that you don't really understand; but hopefully you grow out of it in the end. Thus one was prepared to forgive Oliver his lack of basic human empathy because his brain, like all teenagers', was fizzing and expanding. In the film, Oliver presented a blank, pale, vampiric face (which Roberts does a sterling job of) to the world, moping around in a duffel coat, making decisions to bully people in order to be cool. The loopy fun of the book was compressed. The plot too, it turns out, is actually very slight: so slight that Ayoade felt compelled to signpost the beginning, middle and end with (albeit stylish) cards: 'Epilogue', we were told at the end, and thank goodness we were because there was no other way we could have guessed, so lacking in compulsion was it.

The film was shot beautifully, but only in the way that most 'coming-of-age' films are shot. There was lots of running around on the beach, and sitting in derelict factories - adolescents are drawn to the liminal - but there was really quite a lot too much of that sort of thing, more like a music video really. One curious thing too, which shouldn't bother me, but does (mostly because of the book) is the time period. Dunthorne is a little younger than I am, therefore he would have been fifteen in the late nineties: I had a mobile phone when I was sixteen. But the world of the film seems to be more like the late eighties (which might just about be explained by Ayoade's age - he was a 1977 baby). (One very very minor point is that the Oxford World's Classic edition that Oliver gives Jordana has a cover that could only have been published in the last few years. I cannot believe that I noticed that, but I did. Never mind. I'll go now...) This shouldn't matter, but it does, for the niggling reason that we are supposed to be watching someone real. As such it seemed too stylised - perhaps as it was unsure of its subject matter.

There were some well-observed character touches, in particular Oliver's mother who played a repressed housewife perfectly; a mystic who thought he could see auras was funny but unbelievable.

A well-crafted film then, well aware of its directorial heritage (with nods to Don't Look Now) but one that felt more like a series of polaroids documenting an embarrassing teenage camping trip. In the end, with Oliver and Jordana standing at arms length in the sea gazing at the sun, I felt that the film didn't even begin to explore the promising depths that a submarine offers. (And I wonder whether that reflects upon the book itself.)

Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman: review

Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy
(Short Books, £20)

Thomas Wyatt’s poems are, for Nicola Shulman, like circuit boards: make the right connections and they light up; get it wrong and they lie inert. The Henrician court was a place where poems were actual physical objects which were passed around, just as lovers would give each other hearts. (The court comes alive in Shulman’s account; a place full of blusterers and sycophants, of brilliant wits and gallants and of fulsome fools).

She argues convincingly in this erudite yet elegant study that Wyatt’s poems are codes – supremely artistic ways of expressing ‘grievance, reproach, disappointment and unrequited desire.’ The people who received the physical object of the poem would know the keys to unlocking the texts; that is why to later generations (she says) the poems seem flat. Her analysis is graceful and intelligent, in particular a reading of ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’, which traces a hidden message about Anne Boleyn, and one where she shows how Wyatt’s ‘latinesque compression’ reveals another layer of meaning.

Shulman has a gift for detail and for vivid phraseology; Henry Howard was chiefly known for ‘being fabulous’, for instance, while Henry VII is imagined ‘hosing down the fires’ with his account book under his arm. Her usage of punctuation is particularly to be commended: here she is on Francis Weston, the youngest of the men arrested on suspicion of adultery with Anne Boleyn – “‘but young, skant out of the shell’, and his life is well described in the debts he died owing: to his fletcher, his embroiderer, his tailor, his barber, his groom, his sadler, his shoemaker; to the woman who provided the tennis balls; to the top court goldsmith, for losses at cards and dice to such as Francis Bryan, Thomas Wiltshire, the King.’ The list in itself conjures up such a moving and poignant image of this wet-behind-the-ears boy, living, loving and party-going, gaming and hunting; one can see him stroking his horse’s head as its new saddle is fitted, or considering designs for a necklace to be given to a sweetheart, or laying his cards down and nodding politely as the King wins at cards again (which, for me at any rate, immediately conjures still further a picture of Queen Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter, in Blackadder, playing ball with Lord Percy: ‘Who’s Queen, Percy?’) Back to the punctuation: it’s those elegant semi-colons, adding weight to ‘the woman who provided the tennis balls’, gently emphasising this unknown personage whose life added to the gaiety of Weston’s, and who would no doubt be deeply affected by his death. The image of Weston stays with me particularly, across the centuries. He was collateral in a near-psychotic game of politics, his new arrows left unsharpened, his saddle gathering dust.

The complexities of Henrician intrigue are laid out by Shulman in easily comprehensible fashion so that even a novice such as I can grasp them; and through it all stalks Wyatt, a man of ‘deepe wit’ whose poems express such turbulence, though so carefully composed. This finely considered, silver-veined biography is a decorous and wise monument: now,as Shulman provides the right circuitry, his poems will spark up for us all.

There is also an excellent index with entries for 'cats, evidence of altruism', and 'pomegranates as political statement.' What more could one want?

The Liberators by Philip Womack, read by Tim Bruce: review

legousi d'hos tis eiseleluthe zenos
goes epodos Ludias apo chtonos
zanthoisi bostruxoisin euosmon komen

An outsider has come, they say,
Howling out enchantments: a sorceror, from Lydia.
His hair smells sweet, his golden curls like lightning. (The Bacchae, Euripides, lines 233-235, translation by PW.)

Unlocking the inspiration for any book is an impossible task: there are usually several strands, some of which the author may not be aware of until even years after he or she has finished a book. But one cornerstone of The Liberators was always The Bacchae. In it, Pentheus refuses to believe in the avatar of Bacchus (pictured, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, by Simeon Solomon), and meets a bloody death, torn apart by his own mother. Thus was born the idea of a positive force misused for evil.

The dramatic origins of The Liberators were brought to the fore of my mind as I listened to Tim Bruce reading it (six CDs, six days). The recording opens with my translation of the lines from the play which describe the arrival of Bacchus - a stranger with golden hair who promises enchantment. (I was very glad that they chose to do this; not least because one of the reasons I wrote The Liberators was to bring Ancient Greek to children in a digestible form).

One listens to an audiobook as if one were a child: entirely. Thus the scenes that I wrote appeared in my mind in glorious detail. In fact, I think I am going to hire somebody to read out my manuscripts to me as it makes one alive to nuance in a way that is impossible when you are reading it on the page, or even (as I sometimes do) reading it out loud.

Tim Bruce's voice is rich and mellow, capable of ranging from a very haughty Olivia Rocksavage, through the looser tones of the teenagers, to Strawbones' fake cockney, and Julius' harsh, barbaric accent. Strawbones shifts nicely from charismatic to monstrous. One thing that was very effective was the way that Bruce made the ecstatic cry of the Liberators sound. In his hands (as it were) it was a lilting, quasi-religious song, with two long, descending tones. I'd always imagined it as a fiercer, more brutal sound, but it was chillingly good.

Bruce also conveyed brilliantly changes of pace; Ivo's meeting with Julius in his flat was terrifying. It is also rather wonderful to hear the faint crackle of the recording, as if the static makes it authoritative and real.

Hearing the book has also made me notice things I hadn't before; for instance, Ivo's breaking of Strawbones' painting after he's destroyed the Liberators is a manifestation of rage that he should have controlled. There are still lessons to be learned; it's not all finished yet. But, as Ivo thinks as he approaches the end, 'there is a pattern in the world, there is a way into the future.' Listening to the book has been immensely rewarding and enriching; the syllables flowed over me warm and exhilarating. I hope that all who hear it will enjoy it too.

Together, in a Horse Hospital, with Henry Hemming

Bloomsbury is a place redounding with literary associations - so I won't mention them. Henry Hemming held a rousing knees-up there last night, in the Horse Hospital, which is, actually, a horse hospital - or at least it used to be, there weren't any ill equines there, that I could see at any rate, but there were some sausages (hopefully not made from horses), wine and sliced vegetables, which is all one really wants from a launch party (especially the sliced vegetables).

Henry (pictured here with another Henry, artist Henry Hudson, at my launch party for The Liberators, last year at Willa's) was launching his new book, Together, which rather neatly fits into David Cameron's Big Society. Far from becoming fractured and separate, he argues, we are actually joining more societies than ever - cake-making societies, badge-making societies (there were lots of badges there), badger-loving societies, societies for people called James, clubs for people who like rainy Mondays, and so on (I may have made some of these up, but no doubt they exist somewhere.) Henry's books have so far included Misadventure in the Middle East, a lovely, warm account of his journey around Iraq, Iran, Syria and many other countries with a few artist friends in a truck called Yasmine, and a book about English eccentrics which featured Pete Docherty, King Arthur and the Marquis of Bath, amongst others. It will be intriguing to see where his next journey takes him, and I wish him the best of luck with his new book.

Cancel all your plans... The Liberators Has Become An Audiobook

It's been a quiet few days, of reading, watching the third series of Being Human and (at last) writing. Not much excitement of the literary variety, until this morning when I went out into the streaming sunshine and found that a parcel had been left for me. Parcels are, usually, not very exciting, after you've opened them at least, but this one contained a shining, fresh, new-born copy of the Audiobook of The Liberators (pictured in its glorious tangibility, and published by the excellent Oakhill Publishing). I rushed straight to put it on - it's playing now. The entire reading time is 7 hrs and 30 minutes, which is about the length of Being Human. Tim Bruce, who reads it, has been in all sorts of things, including one of my most favourite recent films (Bright Young Things), and has a marvellous voice, precise and well-modulated. Once I've listened to it all I'll write a longer piece, but for now the excitement has to be passed on... I've just heard him read Blackwood instructing Ivo and it has actually made me shiver, on this bright day.

Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome by Kathryn Tempest: Party

Yes, and in a small club off the Charing Cross road there were indeed scenes of Verrine proportions this evening, as classicists convened for the launch of up-and-coming academic Kathryn Tempest's debut book, Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome. The Phoenix Club is the haunt of the louche and the lush: Cicero would perhaps not have felt very comfortable in such surroundings, and would probably have made a disapproving speech about it the next day in the forum (well, unless Marcus Caelius Rufus was there, of course, in which case it would be classified as Youthful Fun and to be encouraged.) He would have enjoyed the symbolism of the Phoenix, though, as he himself was constantly reinventing himself to fit the circumstances of political life. One can forgive him his epic poem celebrating his own achievements (thankfully lost to posterity): one thing that comes through all his speeches, and from all the stories about him, is that he was an unfailingly good man; and that is indeed a rare thing.

(Verres, if you remember, was a very naughty praetor who liked to be carried around by slaves in a litter with rose-petal stuffed cushions; I don't know whether the cushions in the club were actually stuffed with petals, but they were certainly very comfortable.)

The book itself looks like it's a readable and erudite account, for the general reader, of Cicero's life and times. I look forward to reading it, and (with any luck) will post a review of it anon. Until then, I pour a libation to Cicero's shade in Elysium, where I have no doubt that he rests, probably telling anyone who'll listen about the time he saved Rome from the evil Catiline...

And yes, it is true, that classicists always throw the best parties...

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