Reading Lists

 

I've written a short piece about reading habits at universities for The Spectator. Read it here.

30 Best Children's Books for The Independent

I was asked to choose the 30 greatest children's books for The Independent. A very hard task indeed, but here's the list.

Harry Potter and The Goldfinch: How they are related

Warning: Doesn't move

So I've finally finished Donna Tartt's mostly enjoyable The Goldfinch, which weightily discusses the purpose of moving art around. It has been widely reviewed, obviously, and its relationship to the Harry Potter series (which has got moving art in it) has already been noted. The more I think about it, the more I believe that Tartt is saying: you've had your Portkeys and your spells and your wands. True magic lies in the things that man makes.

Here, then, is how they are related.

The Goldfinch

Orphaned boy with glasses & scar

Parents killed, one in terrorist attack, one in accident

Sent to live with horrid relatives

Finds solace with wise older man

Falls for bright ginger girl

Has goofy, slightly irritating friend

Gets his kicks from magic drugs

Dates the wrong girl

Has an enemy called Lucius

Moves a painting around

Finally defeats "evil"

Nickname: Harry Potter

Published by Bloomsbury, then Little, Brown
 

Harry Potter

Orphaned boy with glasses & scar

Parents killed in wizarding terrorist attack


Sent to live with horrid relatives

Finds solace with wise older wizard

Falls for bright ginger girl

Has goofy, slightly irritating friend

Gets his kicks from magic

Dates the wrong girl

Has an enemy called Lucius

Has paintings that move around

Finally defeats evil

Nickname: Harry Potter

Published by Bloomsbury, then Little, Brown

Why J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy isn't surprising

I've written a short piece for The Telegraph about J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy. Check it out here.

10 Most Difficult Books: Which ones have you read?

Djuna Barnes' Nightwood is on the list

The Millions have published a list of what they regard as the 10 Most Difficult Books of all time, based on a variety of factors including length, syntactical complexity and abstraction. You can look at the list here. I've read three - Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, which I have been re-reading intermittently this year; Jonathan Swift's A Tale of A Tub, although it was a fair while ago; and Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the inclusion of which has caused most commentators to raise an eyebrow. I really ought to have read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; as for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, I'm not sure I'm ever going to tackle it. Nightwood is another one I should have approached - it's mentioned in an Edward St Aubyn novel:  Patrick Melrose carries it around in his pocket, along with Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, which, in imitation, I carried around in my pocket, although I never got round to reading it.

I'm not sure I agree with posting lists based on difficulty - who can say with any certainty what is difficult or not? Some might say that reading the Bible is difficult; what about reading The Aeneid in Latin, or Lucretius' De Rerum Natura in English? It is, of course, entirely arbitrary, as it's only really based on what the choosers of the lists have themselves read. So is there any point in it at all? Some people find some things difficult; others don't. The point is that we should all challenge ourselves to read the unfamiliar, to grapple with things that are beyond our reach - until those things become in themselves easy. It's like being an athlete or a concert pianist. Some are content to paddle in the tepid waters of Harry Potter and E L James; I'd argue that we should all push ourselves further. Only in this way do we grow. Otherwise we just stare at shadows, flickering on the back of the cave, unaware of the beauties and joys that exist outside. If anything, this list should make us all look behind us and into the light: it may be blinding, but through it, beyond it, there are universes to explore and inhabit. Although maybe not Finnegans Wake.

Harry Potter Studio Tour

I've reviewed the Harry Potter studio tour for The Daily Telegraph. It was relatively severely cut, so I'm pasting the original below.

The Harry Potter studio tour nestles behind houses that look like those in Privet Drive (the street where Potter is practically imprisoned by his repressive family, the Dursleys). The most interesting thing about the tour is not that everything from the films is present, correct, and beautifully rendered – which it is. It’s not that the entrance hall is antiseptic, with an unprepossessing café and a temple to merchandise (where it wasn’t the prices that galled me so much as the baseball caps. Really?). Incidentally, you can also buy butterbeer - and I don't know what they put in it, but it had me babbling uncontrollably for at least half an hour.

Whilst you are prepared to accept that you are actually walking down the skewed Dickensian charm of Diagon Alley, where shop fronts spill over with intriguing magical goods, you’re also constantly made aware that you’re on a studio lot. There are barriers –  the clinical sort that you get in amusement parks, not velvet ropes. There are too many excitable people bursting to tell you exactly how the sets were constructed. I watched a little boy cornered by one, who told him that the books in Professor Dumbledore’s study are actually bound telephone directories. “No they’re not! They’re magic books!” I almost said. It struck me that explanations could have been left until the end, for those who wanted them.

But more importantly, the proximity of those all-but-pebble-dashed houses highlighted that everything in Harry Potter is an extension of something in our, real world. You would have thought that when, in one of the most magical moments in children’s literature, Harry Potter receives a letter telling him that he is a wizard, he would enter into a world that is entirely different and new.

The most interesting thing about the tour is that it isn’t, and he doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong. Fans of the films (which I count myself among) will thrill to the sight of the entrance to Hogwarts as it suddenly appears behind a screen. The Great Hall is awe-inspiring, with everything, down to the boars-headed jugs, lovingly crafted. It achieves the thrill of wonder – and recognition – that the films, at their best, create. The rest of the sets are exquisite, with a precise attention to detail that is a joy to encounter. My heart thrummed with excitement at seeing copies of The Quibbler, hand-make magic books, boxes of wands, the Knight Bus, Buckbeak the hippogriff – at everything. I was both moved and enchanted.

This, however, is not a different world. Harry Potter’s universe, in both magical and non-magical parts, is a cartoon place that draws its strengths from the way that it apes us. The sets on this tour are all real places taken to their logical conclusion. The Gryffindor dormitory, where Harry and his chums spend most of their lives, is the ideal version of a dormitory: four poster beds, a large stove (on which, charmingly, a pair of socks has been left to dry), trunks and a Manchester United duvet. 4 Privet Drive is the ür-Privet Drive. The gamekeeper Hagrid’s hut is entirely folksy; Dolores Umbridge’s study is an exaggeration of a lady’s boudoir; the Gryffindor common room is the quintessence of manor house comfort. The wizards’ world, made flesh by the films, is ours: distorted, yes; but ours all the same.

The wizards are meant to have little or no knowledge of our non-wizard world – and yet they use some everyday objects and don’t understand others. One can’t help thinking that if wizards were really wizards, why would they need all this paraphernalia? Because in Rowling’s world, wizards are not really wizards. (“What?” I hear you splutter.) There is none of the terrible self-examination of Ursula Le Guin’s Ged, in The Wizard of Earthsea, for example. What they can do with “magic” is arbitrary, with little logic or consequence.

The Harry Potter stories distil these ideal forms into a powerful tale of good and evil, accessible because of its derivative nature. But there is nothing challenging, or truly uncanny here. The dark wizard will always be defeated, because his power is ultimately meaningless. That’s what the studio tour brings home: it’s extremely enjoyable, but as passing as the oversugared taste of butterbeer.

Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, in the Telegraph

I've tidied up my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, for the Daily Telegraph, which is available here.

Exclusive: Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two: I hate giving stars, but this is definitely a ten out of ten

I was lucky enough to attend David Heyman's screening of the new Harry Potter film in Leicester Square. There was no fuss: after a brief reminder of Voldemort's taking of the Elder Wand (from a superbly modernist grave containing Dumbledore), we were straight into the action. The texture of the film itself is startlingly convincing: gone is the faint cheesiness of the first two films. We are in a world whose strangenesses and darknesses are ever-present.

Snape: not evil after all

What really sets this film apart, making it (I think) possibly the best of the series (excluding The Prisoner of Azkaban, and perhaps The Goblet of Fire), is the attention to detail. Hermione changes into Bellatrix Lestrange at one point (to go to Gringott's Bank), and Helena Bonham-Carter superbly conveyed Hermione's sulkiness and quavery expression, at one point doing such a convincing impression of Emma Watson that it spookily seemed that she might actually really have changed shape. There is wit, too, among the darkness: a bleeding Neville Longbottom, having seen off a ravening horde of Voldemort's supporters, and having almost fallen to his death, pops up cheerily with a 'well that went well.'

I must admit that, being slightly sentimental, I was weeping quietly all the way through. What this film does is enhance Rowling's slightly clunky prose (which made her last two books a disappointment for me), so that the epic touches which she was unable to convey by writing are writ large on the screen. The last battle at Hogwarts always seemed faintly ridiculous to me: here it is genuinely terrifying, with battered schoolchildren fighting desperately against screaming Death Eaters. The deficiencies of Daniel Radcliffe's plankish acting vanish as we meet what is truly the heart of the series: there is darkness in us all, and we must all fight to overcome it.

We learn, too, about the exceptional loyalty and devotion of Snape to Harry Potter's mother, Lily, and of Dumbledore's realpolitik. There is a beautiful scene, when Harry is looking in Snape's memories, which I think was the best in the film: a young Lily makes a flower grow in her hand, but her sister calls her a freak. Hiding in a tree trunk nearby is a young Severus, who blows a leaf to her. It is sun-filled and dappled and touched with a sense of wonder and loss and brimming with the sadnesses of human relationships. It delicately haunts the mind long after, and even now thinking about it I am filled with emotion.

There are some superb set pieces, too: the escape on a damaged, maddened dragon from Gringotts, whose wings and claws drive gouges into London's rooftops; an eerie, white King's Cross; and the film never lets up on energy, drive and spirit. It's an excellent piece of work, and as David Heyman himself said, it's not the end, but the end of a beginning.

Read my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One

My First Birthday

Quick! Whilst he's (you know who I'm talking about - The Boss) looking the other way I'll try and get a word in edgeways. Hello and welcome! I'm Philip Womack's Blog - Hah! He won't like that - he hates the word blog, flits around calling it 'Web-log', as if anyone does that. He's been using / misusing / desecrating me for one whole exact year now. He's a good enough master, on the whole; still, he hasn't done anything to celebrate my first birthday... He might at least have got me a re-design. Is that too much to ask? Sometimes I dream about becoming more than a mere, simple, clod-hopping blog. Perhaps one day I could, like chrysalis to butterfly (doesn't that just sound like something HE'D write), become a website - or, dare I even think it, a multi-platform user-friendly interface... Excuse me for a second, I am sorry. I'd better be quick. I can hear him rummaging around in the drawer looking for a pen. Imagine - he still uses pens!

You might think that I'm quite articulate for a one-year-old, but we blogs grow up fast. I now have 27 'followers' - twenty-seven! - only one of whom is related to The Boss, and only twenty-six of whom were physically bullied into following. I have had over 1,500 visits a month. My visitors are unpredictable in their likings; though most of them (don't tell The Boss this) tend to be searching for Philip Womack, quite a lot of them stumble across me by accident (I won't mention exactly what words you were searching for. I'm not that kind of blog).

In the past year The Boss has written on anything from A A Milne to Zurich; I've allowed him to indulge his penchant for classical literature and to show off about everything he's been writing. He's written a book called The Liberators, which was published just before I was born, and which he has been systematically and endlessly promoting; he's continued to write for The Daily Telegraph, The Literary Review and The Financial Times and sundry other papers, and has just started being involved with Port. He's visited several schools; his book's been reviewed in papers from the School Librarian to the South China Post. It's been an exciting year - for him, at any rate; I just look on from the sidelines and think about being a server.

These, then, are the top five things you've been looking at. There appears to be no rhyme or reason in them:

1. The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming: Party

2. The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus: review

3. I'm Late, I'm Late... Christian Marclay's The Clock

4. Books of the Year: Final Day: Children's Books

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One: Review

You've also displayed a fondness for Adam O'Riordan, Zadie Smith, Ned Beauman, and Robert Saxton (the poet).

He's found a pen - he's coming back - look, I'd better go - but hey, I for one am glad that I've had so many visitors, and maybe I can persuade some of you to follow me without The Boss sending round the heavies. See you all soon...

Love from

Philip's Blog
xx

(PS The picture is of a Black Box by Liza Campbell. It's called Fatty Had a Party and Nobody Came. Let's hope that some of you come to mine...)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One: Review

Harry Potter Review

This, the seven-and-a-halfth in the leviathan-like franchise that the Harry Potter series has become, begins with a scene of rare poignancy. We’ve come a long way from butterbeer, Nearly Headless Nick and eleven year olds grinning open-mouthed at ‘Diagon Alley.’ Hermione Granger, as played by Emma Watson, is in the salubrious surroundings of her parents’ house. She hears them talking downstairs; goes down, and pulls out her wand. ‘Obliviate’, she says – and every single picture of herself in the house begins to fade away. She will have been as nothing to her mother and father. It works so well because all teenagers grapple with their desire to be away from their family – and yet we all know that it is only they who can ever truly love us. So Hermione departs, about to enter upon a quest that threatens the very existence of that safe, leafy street. ‘Obliviate’ echoes throughout the film: the teenage trio take on (briefly) other identities through polyjuice; they transfer affections; at one point near the beginning practically all the adolescent members of the Order of the Phoenix turn into clones of Harry: what could better express the desire for conformity and the need to forget oneself? The action of the rest of the film, too, is a remarkably good expression, too, of the boredom of teenagerdom: the characters don't do much apart from mope around fields and lie around on sofas. I certainly spent most of my adolescence doing either one or the other.

As a film, it worked remarkably well, given that the book itself is so busy. It was clean, and beautifully shot: the fragile tent of the three adventurers, with one light burning, set against enormous landscapes; the children (although not quite so childlike now) walking along a shoreline underneath a bridge; the swooping drive up to the Malfoys’ house. The characters in fact were often dominated by scenery, suggesting perhaps the titantic efforts they would have to make to achieve anything.

Things could be a little confusing at times, even for someone who’s read the book (like me – I read it the day it came out, but have forgotten most of its details.) Hence I did not know why Bellatrix Lestrange thought that Godric’s sword had been in her vault; nor could I at first distinguish what Jamie Campbell Bower’s character was doing – he was Grindelwald, as it turned out. And things could be a little embarrassing too (I won’t mention the hallucinatory silver-body-suit sex scene between an imaginary Harry and Hermione, as witnessed by a Horcruxed Ron Weasley). Also, the sign for the deathly hallows reminded me of the tube advert for a sperm bank, where a d and b are placed back to back to indicate - well, you can guess. But the tone of the film as a whole was remarkably consistent. A scene in the Ministry of Magic was particularly effective, as pamphlets calling for the elimination and control of Muggles swept magically off desks, and Dolores Umbridge and the new, Fascist Minister for Magic surveyed everything with grim glee. The highlight, though, was the shadow-puppet play which told the story of ‘The Deathly Hallows’. The fable itself comes off as rather dry in the book, without the power or depth of folklore. But on screen it appeared as an eerie, haunting tale about morality and our acceptance of death. Even wizards have no power over death. A Socratesian message, in the end: learn to accept, and greet death like an old friend. Except we know that we won’t be obliviated – we’ll stay in memories, photos, films, for as long as is humanly possible. This was a fine, thoughtful and challenging work, which sets us up fittingly for the epic possibilities of the next and final part.

The Liberators by Philip Womack: Times Critic Amanda Craig's Children's Books of the Year

So out of some weird synchronous activity, I bought a copy of The Times just before I went in to see the new Harry Potter (review to follow shortly). I got home, settled in my favourite chair with some music on. I always read the Review section first; I opened it, without looking, where I imagined the first Books page might be. I saw a large picture of a cat. Ah, I thought. Children's books. And then I saw my name - The Liberators has made it into the excellent Amanda Craig's selection of Books of the Year, alongside Eva Ibbotson, Kate Saunders, Patrick Ness and many more. I was so amazed and thrilled I had to read it again to check it was true and I wasn't actually reading about some other book ('The Terminators', for instance, as some of my friends have called it.) Libations were poured all round to the god Dionysus; paeans were raised and a hecatomb offered up. Io io!

A link to the piece is HERE: you have to be a subscriber to the Times to access it.

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris: Review

Yesterday was a day of rain sliding out of the sky in sheets, of cloudy hot skies, of cocktails and mussels and balconies. I went to see Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. As I queued to buy a packet of Cheese and Chive crisps, a rather small but very polite young man walked past me and apologised for getting in my way. What a nice young man! I thought. They do still teach manners! The nice young man turned out, of course, to be Daniel Radcliffe, presumably on a night off from wizardry and Harry Potter.

We (not me and Daniel, of course) had seats right up in the rafters, which made it feel as if we were watching a puppet show. The first half took place in a stereotypical American household. The wife, in a New Look dress and pinafore, demonstrating intelligence but totally desperate, watched her husband loaf around in his pyjamas, mourning the death of his son. Things progress: it appears that a black family is moving into their house, and the neighbours are not happy. I felt that this act had too much in it: racism, the suggestion of hidden tragedy; it felt bitty, whilst the characters did not live and (even the wife) seemed to be merely mouthpieces - puppets, even. One touch of originality was the racist resident's association leader's deaf wife; but even she seemed played for laughs rather than any deeper meaning. Everything was contrived: a trunk was buried (no doubt for future significance), a colander served as an awkward sign of condescension. (Incidentally, I laid a bet with my companion: every 'issue' had been touched upon - gender, disability, racism - so there was a good chance the second half would have a gay character in it.)

But the second half was like a magnesium flare in the darkness. The curtains opened on the same set: but the house was now decayed. Now the neighbourhood was almost totally black, and a middle class white couple was moving in. The same actors appeared in new guises: the once silent maid now reincarnated as a sassy black woman; the suburban mother as a loudspoken lawyer. Martin Freeman (most famous perhaps, at the moment, for putting a stapler in a jelly, but here showing his real skill) went from playing the slimy, pedantic, wordy residents' association leader, to an articulate, bewildered husband. Norris played cleverly with our notions of offence: as a white middle class person, I go through life wondering why most people are so offended by things all the time; a joke the black woman says (after much goading by the others) caused me (and the rest of the audience) to have a sharp intake of breath - and then to think how absurd it was to be offended at all.

The play neatly showed the links between this new society and the one that had gone before. It ended with everybody storming off: and then had a quiet, poignant coda, which showed how fragile we all are anyway. (Oh, and I won the bet by the way - the male lawyer turned out to be gay.)

D B C Pierre and J K Huysmans: Do Initials Make You A Hedonist?

D B C Pierre's new, manic, Huysmanic novel of decadence, Lights Out in Wonderland, is a catalogue of horrors and hedonism. I've reviewed it in the Daily Telegraph: click HERE to see it.

Against Nature (Penguin Classics) by J K Huysmans was a book I read when I was probably too young to understand it. I was thirteen, in my last year at prep school, and I'd just read The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Classics). In it the hero is mightily affected by a nameless book; after some careful and dogged research, I unearthed it. I remember being dizzied by it; I haven't read it since, but some scenes from it stay with me even now: an English pub full of red-faced porcine boozers; the famous jewelled tortoise; the black supper. It was all good training, of course, for a writer of fantasy literature...

So is it any coincidence that D B C Pierre and J K Huysmans both use initials? Or that Huysmans shares the very same initials as J K Rowling? Joris Karl morphs very easily into Joanne Kathleen... Perhaps the latter is an incarnation of the high priest of decadence: or maybe J K R is an immortal, Huysmans expanded through the centuries.

Think about it: is there anything more hedonistic or truly expressive of decadence than a wizard? Pierre, in his novel, refers to hedonists as 'wizards'. I think something is afoot here. Perhaps Rowling's next novel will see Potter tire of wizarding life and retreat into a world of cloistered walls, jewels, magic beasts and perfumes. Or hang on, that's what he's doing anyway... Stand forth, J K, and reveal yourself! The world awaits.

How to Write A Children's Bestseller

Here is a link to a piece I wrote for The Daily Telegraph, which argues that successful children's books don't have to be well-written, as long as they contain certain elements: the poet Ted Hughes, for instance, used to say that one should 'kill a cat'; Roald Dahl thought the villain should come to a gruesome end.

Click HERE