Breakfast with Oksa Pollock

A fine start to the day: breakfast with the authors of the internationally best-selling children's book series about a girl called Oksa Pollock. In an underground room at the Covent Garden hotel, we ate quail's eggs benedict, bacon sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and miniature blueberry muffins. The book is published in England by Pushkin Press, who are also launching their first children's list this year.

The Oksa Pollock series has been translated into 26 languages already, and English is its 27th - as the authors, a pair of delightful ladies called Anne Pilchota and Cendrine Wolf pointed out, it is a dream for them, as the series is set in London. It concerns a young girl who discovers that she has magical powers; and that her family has been exiled from a magical, parallel realm.

The book was initially self-published (there are echoes here of the Eragon series), with the authors hawking their novel around bookshops in a wheelbarrow, although the novels had arrived at the Covent Garden hotel via more conventional means.

Bienvenue, Mlle. Pollock, et bonne chance!

Emerald Fennell's Shiverton Hall: review

Emerald: blood-chilling

My chum Emerald Fennell’s debut, Shiverton Hall (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 249pp) takes its cue from the lineage of horror films, with shades of It, as a poor boy from North London receives a strange offer of a scholarship. He must battle not only with human evil, in the form of snobbery, but also with the supernatural forces that cluster around his new abode. All in a day’s work, naturally. A classic setting – an old country house, now a school – gypsy curses and imaginary friends coming to life provide an atmospheric backdrop to a blood-chilling story that’s perfect for reading under the covers.

The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann's crazy fairy tale

I went with the lowest of expectations to see The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann's film version of F Scott Fitzgerald's book. I'd read a number of so-so reviews, and had been given personal recommendations ranging from the indifferent to the positively dismissive.

We saw it at the Dalston Rio, a cinema swathed like a theatre, where Gatsby cocktails (well, cocktails labelled with character names) were on sale. I went in, armed with a "Gatsby" - a gin and tonic (large) - prepared for the worst.

And in a sense my feelings, and those of the world, were confirmed. What this is, is  Fitzgerald if Walt Disney had taken the helm. Leonardo di Caprio is a fairy prince offering vast wealth and pleasure; Daisy is the princess trapped by an evil wizard or king, who  trips out at night to the other realm, wearing out her dancing shoes.  When you first see di Caprio, and he all but fizzes with magic dust, my yelps of laughter could be heard throughout the cinema. How long would it be, I wondered, before they all broke out into song? The princess will never be tempted by the empty promise of magic; she will retreat into the apparent safety of her prison. And so she does.

It was strange, too, to make Nick (a jug-eared Tobey Maguire) into such a cypher. In the novel there are at least hints of his character; here he was simply, totally, in love with Gatsby, a vehicle to transmit the truth behind the glamour. And Jordan Baker, such a brittle, malevolent presence in the book, here just loomed about looking like she was permanently embalmed. But then, with the personality of Gatsby exploded from a few lines (all that is needed in the book) into the fleshy-faced persona of Leonardo di Caprio, there wasn't much room for anything else.

There were some lovely touches: those parties! Nick being left on his porch in nothing but his underwear; also when Gatsby fills Nick's house with flowers, awaiting Daisy. "Do you think it's too much?" he asks Nick. "I think it's what you want," is the answer. Gatsby agrees. Of course it is.

The problem is that Luhrmann has made a fairy story out of a fable. He's taken a morality tale rooted in realism and transported it to the realm of fantasy; by trying to inject it with some historical resonance (the Wall Street crash, etc.) he in fact simply makes it more unreal. All that tinsel and glitter fades the moment you've seen it: like fool's gold, or a fairy's spell at dawn; behind the glamour, there is nothing but an empty promise.

Marcel Theroux interview for The Telegraph

Theroux: gentle

On this wet and cold May morning, warm yourselves up with my interview with Marcel Theroux. We talked Dr Johnson, doppelgangers and eternal life. His new novel, Strange Bodies, is out now. Read the interview here.

C S Lewis biography by Alister McGrath

I've reviewed Alister McGrath's new biography of C S Lewis, author of a now ignored epic poem called Dymer - oh, and something called the Narnia series. Read it here.

James McAvoy in Macbeth: review

Macbeth is a bloody play, there's no doubt about that. From the opening speeches - "What bloody man is that?" - and the captain's gory image of his "gashes" crying for help, all the way through to the usurping, murderous King's end, it's not one that lets violence happen offstage.

But it is also a play that contains poetry, and stillness, and contrast; and in this, Jamie Lloyd's relentless production at Trafalgar Studios was a touch lacking.

The action took place in a claustrophobic, bare, post-apocalyptic setting in the round, with the actors frequently breaking out of their space into the audience - James McAvoy's furious Macbeth entered rushing on his knees, whilst the porter addressed a puzzled playgoer. The setting played on the "tale told by an idiot / full of sound and fury / signifying nothing," as we were treated to something almost Beckettian in its starkness; and yet the players were constantly rocketing about the stage, spitting and screaming as if they were always on the point of death.

Everybody was covered in blood, most of the time, which (as my companion, who hadn't seen the play before) didn't do much to help identify who was who. Because of the constant barrage of decibels and speed of the speeches, the sense and beauty of the poetry was indeed reduced to sound and fury.

The production borrowed tropes from horror films: masked murderers, a zombie-like Banquo's ghost, severed heads and trapdoors (which sometimes tipped into absurdity.) And that is a problem of genre, because Macbeth is not a horror film, and reducing it to a simple matter of gore piled upon gore robs it of any sense of grandeur.

For we never got a sense that Macbeth thought about his actions. James McAvoy is an engaging actor, and clearly enjoyed strutting about the stage, packing the performance (quite literally) with some guts; but he was a psychopathic Macbeth, one for whom violence is all, not one who equivocated. Similarly, Lady Macbeth was so insane from the beginning that when she did go nuts you hardly noticed. The text was cut up too: the shock of the prophecy about Dunsinane wood was immediately spoiled by a cut in to the English soldiers being ordered to pick up trees.

Mark Quartley's Malcolm was a welcome point of calm(ish); and Jamie Ballard's Macduff produced the most emotional moment in the play, with Shakespeare's devastating line - "All my pretty chickens?" He showed a father's sheer grief and terror at the death of his family beautifully. If only he hadn't spoiled it all by screaming his revenge.

The largely young audience clearly enjoyed this Macbeth, and I suppose if enough teenagers go away thinking, well Shakespeare isn't that bad after all, then that must be positive. But I can't help wishing that the matter of the play had been allowed to breathe a little more, that the poetry had been allowed to sing. Macbeth himself becomes a poet, after all: "Light thickens / And the crow makes wing to the rocky wood." Yes, this is a play of seething terror and blackness: but blackness, in order to function properly, needs light.

Donald Antrim review for The New Humanist

Happy Easter one and all, and for your weekend reading, I give to you: my review of two Donald Antrim novels, The Hundred Brothers and Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World. Read them here.