Reviews: How to Teach Classics to Your Dog in Wunderdog; The Arrow of Apollo in Argo.

 Today we give thanks for the existence of specialist magazines. The brilliant Wunderdog has reviewed How to Teach Classics to Your Dog; and Argo, the magazine of the Hellenic Society, has reviewed The Arrow of Apollo.

Leonie Breeds in Argo was very perceptive about The Arrow, and finishes her kind review: "As you read, you find yourself immersed in a fastmoving but well-structured plot. This is a book to be enjoyed."

June 2017 Children's Round Up for Literary Review

Here's a link to my latest round up of children's books, for the June 2017 issue of Literary Review. Read it here.

Summer Children's Book Round Up for Literary Review

Morning,

I've done my Summer Children's Book Round up for Literary Review, which features:

The Nest by Kenneth Oppel
Queen of the Silver Arrow by Caroline Lawrence
The Otherlife by Julia Gray
Chosen by Lucy Coats
Eliza Rose by Lucy Worsley
The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman
Erica's Elephant by Sylvia Bishop
Louie Lets Loose! by Rachel Hamilton
The Dragon and the Nibblesome Knight by Elli Woodward and Benji Davies.

You can read the whole piece here. 

Books of the Year 2015

It's been a busy year, what with writing The King's Revenge and The Double Axe, and plotting the latter's sequel; not to mention other projects and the demands of that thing called Life. Nevertheless I have been reviewing and reading steadily, and these are the books that have particularly caught me over the last year. 

Benjamin Wood: literary thriller

Fiction

It may seem odd to start with an omission, but I've been much looking forward to Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, and alackaday have yet to be able to start it; it's first on my list for this year. On to what I did read: Benjamin Wood's second novel, The Ecliptic, was an intelligent and able literary thriller about art and the processes of creation. Tessa Hadley, always elegant and finely-tuned, discussed family politics in The Past, full of gorgeous moments humming with delicacy and power. However strange Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant may have been, it was still intriguing in its use of the Matter of Britain and its understanding of humanity and memory. For pure enjoyment there was Martin Millar's The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies, a clever romp set in ancient Athens; and David Mitchell's bonkers horror story, Slade House, featuring transdimensional immortals that eat your soul. Also splendidly entertaining is my friend Catriona Ward's terrifying Rawblood, a post-modern Gothic mash up which will have you checking behind your shoulders on even the sunniest of days. Rock on!

Children's and Young Adult Fiction

It was a good year for children's fiction, led by Sally Gardner's The Door that Led to Where, a moving account of a damaged young man who finds solace in time travel. Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree is her finest novel to date: a delicious mixture of thrilling revenge narrative, feminism, natural science and askew realities. Philip Reeve's Railhead is a slick space opera with hints of Blade Runner, seeing a young boy, set to steal from the imperial family, discovering something much more dangerous at play. Cressida Cowell's How to Fight a Dragon's Fury was a perfect end to a much-loved series, taking its place amongst the classics of children's literature. And The Story of King Lear by Melania G Mazzuco, in Pushkin Press's "Save the Story" series, was a dark, moving version of what is, in my view, Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. 

Recent Non Fiction

I haven't read much non-fiction this year, being engaged upon a wade through Robert Tombs' magnificent The English and their History, but I did finally manage to get to Sandie Byrne's The Unbearable Saki, a fine biography and critical study of the soigné short story writer, which suggests that the apparent effeteness of his heroes is in fact all a part of his conservatism. I must also recommend The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, which I reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement - edited by Daniel Hahn, it makes a useful and entertaining guide to a field of literature expanding in many interesting ways.

Recent Fiction

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is funny, tender and skewers modern life with glee. I became obsessed, briefly, with Robertson Davies, devouring The Cornish Trilogy and The Deptford Trilogy in a matter of weeks, and I thoroughly recommend them to anyone looking for a hearty, brainy feast. Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake is rather an extraordinary piece of work: told in a shadow version of Anglo Saxon, it follows a displaced Saxon as the Normans begin their reign of terror.

Recent Children's Fiction

I missed all the fuss about Kevin Brooks' The Bunker Diary when it won the Carnegie: it's a marvellous book, threatening, menacing, involving; its ending may be bleak but that is an inherent part of its structure and composition; it is by no means gratuitous. Melvin Burgess' Junk is a brilliant account of two teenagers who become heroin addicts: convincing, funny, scary and poignant, it both conforms to and breaks the boundaries of children's fiction. I've also been feeding my Catherine Fisher addiction, hoovering up Corbenic - surely a minor masterpiece of Arthurian fiction - and Incarceron, which features a mysterious prison and a world controlled by computers to resemble a medieval castle. Splendid, and Fisher should be much more widely known and read. 

Classics

By far the best classic I've been reading this year is George Eliot's Middlemarch; but, on January 2nd, I have still got 100 pages to go, so I can't really count it. Turgenev's Spring Torrents and Fathers and Sons are both beautiful novels; the one infused with youthful spirit; the other with an elegiac tenderness. I would also count Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker as a modern classic - its weird post-apocalyptic visions stayed with me for days, nay weeks, afterwards.

Classic Children's Fiction

Elizabeth Taylor's Mossy Trotter was a funny, exquisitely observed story about a little boy's daily travails (including being forced to have a birthday party). And I cannot believe that I have got through life so far without having read Alan Garner's Elidor - superb, sharp, strange, a take on Childe Roland that throbs with mysterious and electric power. Similarly, Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners is a violent, unflinching account of how children act when they are not observed. I always return to Ursula Le Guin, and have been using A Wizard of Earthsea to teach: I re-read it this year, and it is still one of the most thoroughly imagined, firmly-constructed, wise and vivid pieces of fiction for the young that there are. Out of 12 students, only one liked it, which rather shocked me - this book came before Harry Potter, and is so much more interesting, thematically, than its shadows. Finally, I re-read Ted Hughes' The Iron Man with a young boy not particularly interested in reading - the effect on him was as if a spell had been cast - we read it together, without stopping, for an hour, totally absorbed in its galactic, poetic struggle. 

Autumn round up of children's books

Here's my autumn round up of children's books for the Telegraph. Read it here.

When Mr Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan: review

Hello all, I've reviewed When Mr Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan for The Guardian. Read it here.

Fay Weldon's Habits of the House: Downtonmania

Weldon: dark and slick

Hello there, I've reviewed Fay Weldon's new novel, Habits of the House, for The Telegraph. It's one of a batch of country house novels that have appeared recently, which Jenny Diski has magnificently skewered in the London Review of Books. Weldon's book is slick and darkly tempered - check out my review.

The Lower River by Paul Theroux: Daily Telegraph

Hearts of darkness

Good morning, chaps. On this grey and dull morning, inject a bit of the swampiness and hotness of Africa into your lives - read my review of Paul Theroux's The Lower River, which is set (mostly) in Africa, on The Daily Telegraph. The picture is of Rupert Graves and Kristin Scott Thomas, who star in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust - which is one of the literary grandparents of this novel; as is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.



 

Literary Review, June issue: Children's Round up

What ho. I've done my summer round up for Literary Review - the June issue is out now, with a beautiful cover featuring Edmund Spenser. There's plenty of goodness in the magazine, including a review of Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies. And a book about The Only Way is Essex. Or TOWIE, as I believe it's known. I've reviewed a feast of writers - Eva Ibbotson, Frances Hardinge, Conrad Mason, Derek Keilty, Philip Reeve, Prentice and Weil, Sally Nicholls, Celia Rees, and Gill Lewis. Check it out, chums. It's not online, so haul yourself to an actual real life newsagent. You won't regret it.

Review: The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer

What ho, I've reviewed Simon Mawer's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky for The Telegraph. It's about a young woman who parachutes into France to work as a spy during the Second World War. Check out my piece here.

 

The Blockade Runners by Jules Verne: review

Jules Verne: Not just science fiction

Ahoy me hearties: I've reviewed Jules Verne's little-known The Blockade Runners for The Observer. Check it out here. He was a great favourite when I was small, though for his more common works - I had a beautiful hardback edition of 80 Days Around the World, which gave me much joyful pleasure.

Silver by Andrew Motion: Review in Literary Review

Hello, and a very Happy Easter to one and all. I've reviewed Andrew Motion's Silver, a sequel to Treasure Island, for the April issue of Literary Review. It's a fascinating book. The issue is a great one, too, with an incisive Foreign Parts section, and a lovely piece on the artist Prunella Clough, amongst other things. Check it out, my friends.

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones: review

Pip pip chaps, I've reviewed The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones for The Daily Telegraph. Read all about it here.

The Adolescent Fever Dream of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford

Incest is best

There's nothing like a Jacobean tragedy for lust, incest, and hearts on sticks. Especially the latter. Cheek by Jowl's flabbergasting production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is an uber-tragedy, a slick, serpentine nightmare-machine where everything happens at a thousand miles an hour and under manic, bright strobeing lights. This is what would happen if you boiled tragedy down to its purest essence. It's what the witches make in their cauldrons in Macbeth.

The text has been sliced down to its bare bones - there is no bumptious suitor subplot here. Everything is focused on the affair between Annabella and her brother Giovanni. The stage represents many places at many times, but is always Annabella's bedroom, giving the impression that the whole thing is a sordid adolescent fever-dream draped in posters of True Blood.

Lydia Wilson's Annabella goes from sweet, ipod-bouncing ingenue through lustful demoness to final repentance with ease and poise, her presence always  balanced, and never, though she is often physically thrown about the stage, out of control - until, crucially, at the end. Her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon) has a fanaticism to his lust, convincing himself with philosophies and books that he is right, even in his most psychopathic moments. He strides around in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, recalling Ben Whishaw in Hamlet; the character himself like a depraved, cut-price version of that delaying prince in his more vengeful moments.

The rest of the cast fit seamlessly into the nightmare. There is Soranzo (Jack Hawkins), seemingly a man of good reputation, but in reality as corrupt and whimpering as anyone else. Putana (Lizzie Hopley) wins out as Annabella's conniving maid, playing her with all the world-weariness of an East End gangster's moll. No matter, says she, if a girl gets the fit upon her then father or brother - it's all one.

Characters remain on stage even when they are not there, or even when dead, acting as a weird kind of chorus, a set of Eumenides, sometimes in suits, sometimes barechested, dark ghostlings of a disturbed mind. The simple set has two doors - one that opens into freedom; and one that enters into a white tiled bathroom. If you go into that bathroom, you're not going to come out of it happy. Or even alive. This was perhaps the most effective thing about the production - that the goriest moments happened in that clinical room, thus heightening their power. There were some fine touches, as when Soranzo, trying to reconcile Annabella after he's found out she's pregnant with another's child, buys her baby clothes; or when a leather-clad man arrives suddenly to seduce the nurse Putana into giving away who the father is.

The play eschewed the final lines of Ford's text, which provide the title: "We shall have time / To talk at large of all; but never yet / Incest and murder have so strangely met. Of one so young, so rich in nature's store, / Who could not say, 'tis pity she's a whore?" In a production such as this, the rhymes would have been jangly; the nervous audience would have guffawed. Instead, we were left with Giovanni, spattered with his sister's blood, holding her heart in his hands as her ghost reaches towards him.

Whether manically dancing, or stylised into heaving piles of flesh that resembled paintings ('The Wreck of the Medusa" at one point; the Sacred Heart at another) the cast gave their all to it. This production was full of apocalyptic energy, of a decadent entropy that pulled everything out away from the centre, out of control, into chaos. We are lucky that we can turn the lights on, and escape from that crimson-tinged bedroom. We can flee the nightmare-machine - but only just.

In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs: review

What what, chaps. I've reviewed Peter Hobbs's elegant In the Orchard, the Swallows for The Daily Telegraph. Catch it here. I saw Peter speak several thousand years ago,  when I began my literary career at the Folkestone Literary Festival, about his first novel, The Short Day Dying, which I admired greatly; I also reviewed his short story collection, I Could Ride All Day on My Cool Blue Train for The Tablet. This is a powerful and beautiful novella.

Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher! Review

Six dead Romanians; a night out on the town with a beautiful floozy; a tattoo with a secret in it; a midnight kidnap; a psychopathic Geordie; and Rex Hammer, a man so cool he once managed to sink the Lusitania and bang Rita Hayworth (I think) in the same afternoon - these are just a few of the fantastically loopy yet recognisable features of Humphrey Ker's rocket-fuelled one-man show, Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher! at the Soho Theatre. It's basically like the Eagle but with swearing and magical swastika jokes (don't ask). And a talking dog.

The setting is the 1940s, and Ker plays the eponymous Watson, a soldier who is rather a likeable cove - both brash and vulnerable - sent by high command to tell the audience how he came to have his SS-smashing sobriquet. There are some well-observed asides, as when he's in a cab ("And I knew it would be quicker to cut up Ladbroke Grove, but I didn't say anything because he's a cabbie and I'm posh.")

There is a plot which drives the show like an amphetamine-crazed Vietnam veteran in a monster truck rally. The son of an architect, Watson's the only Romanian speaker left in England after a spate of mysterious killings. The deaths jettison Watson into a lunatic world of double crosses and derring doers.

It's a gallumphing ride, and Ker's boisterous and best strength is the ability to bring to life the galaxy of characters that Watson meets along the way. There's the aforementioned psychopathic Geordie, who trains Watson in the art of killing: "If someone comes up to you and says 'that's enough', you're doing it right." Or you can slit your victim's throat and whisper in his ear, "real creepy like." There's the marvellous Rex Hammer, who arrives after his weekend long leave still in white tie with a couple of female film stars making out in the back of his limo. "You're all right, homo," he says to Watson.

There's Joanna, the Southern ingenue who might be hiding a terrible secret (who Ker brings to life with just a little skip of his combat-trousered legs.) And there's the dog - Uncle Trevor - who would give the one in The Artist a run for his money.  Best of all (to my mind) were the Nazi fans of a magician that Watson had to impersonate (it's too complicated to explain) - Ker got perfectly the mixture of awe and embarassment, made all the more piquant by the fact that the fans were savage jackbooted soldiers who'd kill at the drop of a hat.

Inventively silly, joyously ridiculous, and yet with a plot line that wouldn't look out of place in an airport thriller, this is beautifully crafted and craftily bonkers, revealing both Ker's obvious love of the genre and his playful twisting of it. And Stephen Fry was in the audience too. You're all right, Ker!

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips: review

King Arthur: a lost play?

What ho: I've reviewed the excellent The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips for The Daily Telegraph. Read it here, then go and buy it IMMEDIATELY. A blissful meta-fiction that was one of my books of the year.

 

Spectator review of Tessa Hadley's Married Love

Hadley: Elegant

Pip pip. I've reviewed Tessa Hadley's short stories for The Spectator. Her novel, The London Train, was one of the best of last year.

Scream 4 and the nature of horror

"How meta can you get?" is something that people in Scream 4 say. A lot. Most critics, when it came out last year, thought that it could have been, er, well, a bit less meta and a bit better. Which was a shame, since Scream (directed by Wes Craven and written by that most savvy of scribblers, Kevin Williamson), stands as a biting comment on horror films - and yet, as a truly biting horror film itself. Scream 2, with its film within a film (Stab, starring Tori Spelling, and retelling the events of Scream) succeeded; Scream 3 was, though it had lost its bite, still enjoyable as practically a screwball comedy. They all followed the practised ruts of a horror film though, in which an external force causes mayhem for a while, but is tamed and neutered. They do, though, like revenge tragedies, bleed into each other; and like revenge tragedies, it's very hard to stop the cycle. The Oresteia did it by chaining the Furies up underneath a statue of Athena - but you can't do that with mask-wearing pyschopaths, can you? There just isn't enough room.

So what of Scream 4? Well I would argue that it has found a way to end the cycle. The meta-ness takes many forms. There has been a Stab franchise (they are now on the sixth - or seventh - outing; nobody can quite agree). Sidney Prescott (an always effective Neve Campbell), the original survivor of all three films (boy she must have some scars, says someone wryly), has emerged from the darkness to write a memoir of her experiences, and returns to her home town to give a reading. Gail Weathers, the fast-talking reporter, is now married to dopey Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette), and unable to write her own novel (having written the book that Stab was based on). Meanwhile the highschool students act out versions of Stab, hang up ghostface masks in reference to the original killers, and even have their own Stabathon, where they watch all the films in one go whilst brandishing fake knives.

The pacing of the first two thirds is uneven; new characters are either goofy (such as Dewey's deputy and Sidney's assistant, one of whom dies [the wrong one, in my opinion]) or unbelievable, like the high school geek who records his entire experience on a webcam nailed to his head. Imagine Peepshow, but with added toilet time. Mercifully we get none of that. The death scenes are not particularly frightening; and there is hardly a batsqueak of suspense. But it's still enjoyable, as a curiosity.

Until the final reel, that is, when a surprise is sprung upon us in true Wes Craven style. The film becomes a mordant, affecting response to the horrors of social networking and the vapid need for fame, with echoes of Nicole Kidman's To Die For. As a film, it's entirely clued up (with references to mobiles, Facebook, Twitter and so on) - but these references are not merely window dressing. They are part of the texture of the whole, and essential to the success of the film.

The last third, when Sidney is running for her life, then becomes almost better than the first three films put together. The tension, entirely lacking, suddenly appears like a noose around the neck.  Everything is called into question: love, family, friendship; the nature of celebrity, the desire for an admired self. Nothing is sacred in Scream 4. Which makes it, perhaps, closer to the bone than any of its predecessors. And in the final scene, after the film has quietly managed to laugh at itself, you're left feeling troubled, not cleansed; and that, surely, is what a horror film is meant to do.

As the final credits roll, the horror is rooted deep inside the viewer, much as it is when you read of true crime. There is nowhere left for the Scream series to go. In its meta-ness it returned to the beginning; but it's also carved out an end.

Review of The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay

Francesca Kay: elegant

I've reviewed The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay for The Daily Telegraph, a novel about madness and religion and motherhood. See what I thought of it here.