REVIEW: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (2022)

“Like everything Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement,” says the publicity bumf from publisher Simon & Schuster. Is it, though?

Bob’s new book works best if you regard it as his version of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the entirely unlicensed compilation that he stole from a friend as a teenager, and which informed his career more than any other single document. That bootleg box-set compiled 84 folk, country and blues songs from 1926-33; this book creates a canon of its own, with essays on 66 recordings dating from 1924 to 2004, its accent falling particularly on early rock and roll. It arguably works better as a playlist than a book – alongside vaguely leftfield classics like Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso', he includes obscurities such as ‘CIA Man’ by the Fugs, 'Detroit City' by Bobby Bare, and Johnny Paycheck’s desolate, gorgeous ‘Old Violin’ – but there’s enough in The Philosophy of Modern Song to make it worthwhile, at least for that stoic and balding band of Dylan obsessives.

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Most of the book's essays consist of a freeform, stream-of-consciousness riff on the meaning of the song – inhabiting its world; frequently written in the second person – followed by a more matter-of-fact contextual section. The former, aside from the occasionally arresting, terse turn of phrase, is usually pretentious and tedious (editors don’t like to tinker with "momentous artistic achievements", especially when written by Nobel Prize winners); the latter tends to be more interesting, allowing for insights into Dylan’s own processes and prejudices – some of those revelations intentional, others unwitting – as well as inspiring some agreeably peculiar tangents. A Santana track turns into a recap of the career of screenwriter and sci-fi novelist Leigh Brackett, as well as incorporating a note about the invention of Velcro. Other songs lead to digressions on lemmings, Esperanto and the history of the Nudie suit. Good non-fiction has always been about connections.

Dylan is a curmudgeonly host, tediously "both sides”-ing every political question, complaining about people saying “OK, boomer” (OK, boomer) and, perhaps more reasonably, railing against the rise of niche marketing, which by definition narrows our artistic horizons. This broadly grouchy work, though, is saved by two things in particular: the author's transparent love of music, and the way the book shades in, subverts or enhances our understanding of his own life and legacy.

Whether he’s extolling the emotional directness of bluegrass ("the other side of heavy metal"), becoming transparently excited that Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’, or exhibiting a very nerdy, very male obsession with chart placings and discographical chronology, the sincerity of his enthusiasm about the music itself is rarely less than endearing. He'll tell you about a song he loves, and then he'll tell you why a certain live version is even more special.

And for Dylanologists, there is an almost endless amount to get your teeth into – not least his absolute hatred for you in particular; understanding music doesn’t enhance it, he says for the millionth time in his life, which broadly translates as, “Stop analysing my songs and fuck off.” Another endlessly-repeated Dylan mantra, that songs are merely captured in the studio, they don’t end there, is, like Highway 61 before it, revisited.

PROTEST SONGS

For those still nonplussed by Dylan's shrugging off of “finger-pointing songs” in 1964, he’ll spell it out for you, with that pronounced predilection for provocation that here bleeds into trolling. ‘Ball of Confusion’ is “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness,” he says. “Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment." He follows this with an unexpected, barely-veiled ad-hominem attack on Tom Lehrer.

In 1966, Dylan pretended to placate his audience in Manchester in 1966 with one of the funniest pieces of trolling in history, announcing to his audience of disgruntled folkies, “I'm going to do a protest song... this is called ‘I Hear You’ve Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’.” His essay on ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is a fascinating counterpoint to perhaps his first great protest song, ‘Masters of War’. War is “often the only solution”, he says baldly now, while still raging at the attendant profiteering, pomposity and pride. Whereas Robert Caro’s recent book, Working, included a chapter on Pete Seeger’s song, ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, notable for its piercing clarity on the subject of Vietnam, Dylan’s waffly, pointless discursion on the track turns into a peculiar rumination of the ethics of old Disney documentaries. It had been Woody Guthrie – allied perhaps to boundless ambition – that first opened Dylan’s eyes to music as a vehicle for social change; Guthrie who was once his lode star. There are no Woody Guthrie songs in the book.

Surely the oddest and most disquieting element of The Philosophy of Modern Song, though, is Dylan’s women problem. If we’re playing count-the-faces identity politics, then 62 of the 66 songs are by men, and the cover photo seems a hollow joke, but that’s not even the point. While most of the strange things he writes about women in the book are said essentially in character, he chose the songs, which include I Got a Woman, Black Magic Woman, and the execrable Eagles track, Witchy Woman). Taken at face value – which in this instance seems reasonable – Dylan is trapped as a product of his time, his inspirations and his own oeuvre in a disastrous madonna/whore dichotomy, forever desperate to escape from an awful world of terrifying, sexualised harpies to a simpler, more old-fashioned place and time in which a submissive and pliant woman will bring him snacks. A lengthy digression on the subject of divorce lawyers also seems less an objective and reasoned treatise about a societal ill, and more a highly public admission that he has just got divorced.

FIBS

In his only volume of memoir, Chronicles, Dylan defensively – and unconvincingly – suggested that his 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, had been based on a series of Chekhov plays, but had been misidentified by rock writers as exactly what it was, a break-up album in which he sounds alternately livid, sentimental and bereft. When he says in the first chapter here that first-person narration is often mistaken for truth, I took it as a threat that he’s warming up for another crack at that unconvincing lie.

There are smaller insights too, for those who care about such things. A chapter about Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ is is unexpectedly revealing as to the mundane details – and psychological facts – of Dylan’s own life on tour. ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ may be a strange vehicle for Dylan’s crotchety musings about mystery and nuance in art, but they’re valuable all the same. Elsewhere, he’s still low-key obsessed with Robert Ford, he loves old movies (though doesn’t write very well about them, and passes up the chance to engage in some much-needed Mickey Rooney revisionism), and touchingly refers to Pete Seeger throughout as “Pete”, their connection long-severed but not dead.

There’s some merit, too, in his observations from outside, though the level of insight – and interest – really does vary. He makes a fascinating, if confused, argument that how learning the back story of a song can either augment ('Old Violin') or obliterate ('Save the Last Dance for Me') its universallity. Once you know that Doc Pomus's lyric for the latter is about being in a wheelchair at his wedding, due to polio, that subtext overpowers anything the listener can bring to the song. The idea that our feelings of pure empathy for the song's narrator might create a different, even richer experience is, bizarrely, an angle that Dylan doesn't consider.

Bob's thoughts on country music are especially arresting (also sexist): the genre "finds itself in the church on Sunday morning becauuse it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips." Perceptively, he crystallises the glory of so much country music and the emptiness of its recent iterations: "Without the dynamic tension of the guilty over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytising or empty-headed carousing." That idea, though, clashes with the author's simplistic ideas of spirituality expressed elsewhere; Sam Cooke's undeniable gospel credentials are largely dismissed because ultimately he got "shot, bare-naked in a motel room". This as Bob grows misty-eyed over monotonous pig-tail wearer Willie Nelson, very much the Danny McBride of the songwriter world: adored and revered by his more talented contemporaries to the general bafflement of their fans. "Elvis had a hit with 'Always on My Mind'," points out Bob, following this observation with one of the wrongest sentences ever written: "All you remember now is the Willie version."

'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS

The author's enthusiasm is expended much more effectively righting wrongs. Dylan writes with a mixture of an old man's irascibility and a young man's idealism about the cynics who ridicule simple lyrics, particularly on paper (Brett Anderson talked about something similar when I interviewed him in 2019). Explaining that the words are written for the ear and not the eye (apologies to anyone who's bought the coffee table book of his own Nobel Prize for Literature-winning lyrics), and that prescriptive songwriting rules impair creativity, Bob takes aim at the naysayers with a critique that's at once petulant, adolescent and quite beautifully pure: "All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirise their lack of profundity only show their own limitations."

So he's appealing if repetitive when stanning Tin Pan Alley, penetrating if not necessarily correct as he delves into the world of ‘El Paso’ (“a ballad of the tortured soul… that resonates on every level with people on every level… a dark tale of indescribable beauty and death”), and extremely funny when describing Carl Perkins’ obsession with his Blue Suede Shoes. But he also reads way too much into Jackson Browne’s semi-laughable ‘The Pretender’, a song where events and what passes for motivation are determined entirely by things that happen to rhyme with ‘pretender’, including “begin and end there”, “legal tender” and, most regrettably, “ice cream vendor”. His fascinating essay on ‘Volare’ – which takes in psychedelia and foreign-language records – is followed by a confused chapter on ‘London Calling’ that contradicts itself and constantly misses the point, suggesting that Dylan understands neither punk nor England.

Perhaps only this author could reimagine the most innocuous songs as being so ineffably creepy – he depicts Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-A My House’ as a grim fairytale, and cheerily informs us, of Eddy Arnold’s elusive ‘You Don’t Know Me’, that “a serial killer would sing this song” – and yet his phrasemaking is at times appallingly cringy. “Some may argue that there are better reasons to go to war than an unpaid patisserie bill’, he writes, replacing Roget’s Thesaurus on the shelf, before claiming that a Rodgers & Hart tune is “as complex as anything by Stephen Hawking,” a sentence that could only be worse if he’d referred to him as “Hawkings”. Similarly, the potted biographies of artists sometimes come with an interesting slant, and at others are largely meaningless, whether that’s because the claims made about their talent are so vague (Bobby Darin) or so preposterous (Perry Como). The final chapter – on space, time and Dion and the Belmonts – is, fittingly, this book at its most extreme: the most weird, the most nerdy, the most pretentious and ambitious.

A GRUMPIER BOB

Some have described The Philosophy of Modern Song as the print equivalent of Dylan’s now-defunct Theme Time Radio Hour, but while the world of the songs remains the same, his view of the wider world has intruded, and palled. This is a grumpier Bob, less playful, more resigned. There are still tall tales, but there are fewer of them, and his listing of song titles that share a word seems less like a fun experiment in genre and more like a boring old bloke who won’t leave you alone in the pub.

But like everything Dylan does, it is, if not a momentous artistic achievement, at least deceptively unusual, repeatedly illuminating – at times by accident – and in the end just about worthwhile.

Review of 2019: Part 1 – Books

This year I spent two months in bed, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to catch up on their reading. All you need is a dysfunctional kidney, a sympathetic boss and an erratic surgeon. Here's everything I've read this year:

FICTION

Adults



First, the good stuff. My favourite novel of 2019 was Howard Spring's Fame Is the Spur (1940), a slow-burning saga about the rise to prominence of opportunistic, working-class J. Hamer Shawcross, whose soaring oratory and ability to weaponise his past catapult him to fame, as the fledgling Labour Party begins to crystallise. Beginning with a dying man’s memories of Peterloo, it follows Shawcross from an Ancoats slum to the House of Lords, and the labour movement from its birthing pains to the betrayal of 1930, incorporating – often realistically, though sometimes rather conveniently – the Welsh coalfields, Popular Front communism and the Suffragettes. It has shortcomings – its supporting characters, especially the female ones, aren’t nearly as interesting as its protagonist, and both its focus and its pacing can be confounding – but it’s also one of the most immersing and affecting books I’ve read in a long time, with spectacular set-pieces, a rich strain of irony and an insistent emotional pull that simply overwhelms you in its final hundred pages. There’s hurt and anger in Spring’s story of a man selling out his past, but there’s also realism, wisdom and a rich humanity, with none of the one-dimensional didacticism that can ruin political fiction, whichever side it falls.

It's a book that endures because of its characters, but also because of its insights. Though the prose can border on the Victorian (its modernist flashes forward aside), its observations still feel incredibly contemporary. Perhaps that’s because whatever tags are applied – from Blairism through Brexit – the fights going on at the centre of British politics are always the same: self-interest versus society, and – particularly on the left – idealism versus pragmatism. For Shawcross, that’s a question not of principle but of expediency, and ironically he is a better private man at the end of the book – when he has fundamentally betrayed his former allies – than he is at the start, as he has discovered an honesty and empathy sorely lacking in his sabre-rattling days. But like the sabre snatched from the ground at Peterloo, he was once a symbol, and people need symbols.



Also right up there was The Beginning of Spring (1988) by Penelope Fitzgerald, a masterpiece of a miniature, the author creating a whole, vividly atmospheric world with extraordinary economy. That world is the Russia of 1913, where printer and father-of-three Frank Reid – English, ordinary, but surprising, at times almost irrational – is attempting to carry on as normal after the disappearance of his wife. Around him cavort a poetic accountant, a precocious daughter and a drunken bear, but none of these characters are simple, or quite what they appear (or would be in other hands), and all are drawn with empathy and imagination.

Fitzgerald’s prose is so unadorned and clear, and through it you glimpse many layers of meaning: hints and illusions, shards of wisdom, observations that skewer your preconceptions. She is a writer who understands the balance of human interactions, and their often unknowable nature. Her solution isn’t to hypothesise but to observe. A couple of times she breaks off into almost self-contained passages – the acutely painful farce of the bear’s torture; branches by a dacha sagging under rain – and the effects are hypnotic: enrapturing in themselves, richly textured but hinting at themes that nudge through the story like the first grass of spring. This book is many things: a character study (or several), a key to a culture, a door to another realm. And while not a comic novel, it is funnier than most comic novels: droll and dry, giving its characters a litany of obstacles but tongues just loose enough to speak plainly. That was my second Fitzgerald of the year, and even better than Human Voices (1980), a delicately detached, effortlessly evocative story of the BBC during the Blitz, written with a precision that almost saunters, and rendering wartime London in crisp, uncompromising detail. Thanks to Andy Miller for his proselytising on Fitzgerald's behalf, which turned me onto her work. If you love books, listen to his podcast.



Nothing made me laugh more than The Adulterants (2018) by Joe Dunthorne, a slim, unspeakably wonderful addition to one of my favourite genres: books in which a middle-class white man fucks everything up. I don't laugh out loud very often when reading; I must have laughed out loud 30 times reading this. It’s also deeply touching, in a disarmingly direct way, and realises that our guilt and our cruelty are as sad as the things that sting us from outside, though no sadder. You could argue that the riot and the drink-sodden flirtation with homosexuality tip the story too far towards farce, but if you changed those bits you might lose something, and I wouldn’t want to risk it. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger (1953) comprises nine deceptively immense achievements, if (again) you don’t mind your characters mostly white and comfortably-off. It’s Salinger, so it’s quasi-real and desperately sad and sometimes hilarious, angling on precocious kids, self-delusion and the beginnings of mysticism. I’d have a different favourite every day, but ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, ‘The Laughing Man’ and ‘Esme’ say something about Salinger’s protracted innocence, ‘De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period’ is quite insanely funny – and the closest thing here to A Catcher in the Rye – while the final paragraph of ‘Teddy’ hits you like a swimming pool. Stories one, two and five are part of Salinger’s ongoing, fragmented portrait of the Glass family.

Emeric Pressburger wrote many of the finest films of the '40s and, it turns out, one of the best novels of the '60s: The Glass Pearls (1966). It’s somewhat reminiscent of Peeping Tom, his regular collaborator Michael Powell’s 1960 movie, dealing with a quiet, haunted German psychopath engaging in tentative, sexless romance in London, while trying to stay ahead of the law. His protagonist, though, isn’t a serial killer wielding a murderous tripod, but a Nazi war criminal, suspectible to flights of hypnotic anxiety and ornamented deceit, all cleverly tied by Pressburger to the character’s chilling wartime experiments. At one point he is hired by the Royal Albert Hall to tune their organ, which puts some of my mistakes at the Iconic London Venue into perspective. The book is dark and unsettling – the nature of narrative forcing us to be complicit in Braun’s neuroses, excuses and evasion of justice – but, like so much of the writer’s work, also deft, witty, intelligent and entertaining. The final scene is truly jawdropping and heartbreaking, Pressburger bringing the weight of history to bear, after holding it at bay for so long. How critics could regard the author’s feelings towards Braun as ambivalent following that is truly mystifying.



I loved Lissa Evans' Old Baggage (2018), one of the highlights of my two months in bed: a wonderful, transportative book about former Suffragettes on divergent paths in the late ‘20s. It’s full of remarkably rich characterisation, with a story that’s immersive, moving and unflinching. It's a sequel to Crooked Heart (2014), which is only marginally less wonderful: a great story from a great storyteller, whose speciality is unexpected human connections – and the ones that seem so obvious and yet miss. Both books pulse with sly humour and a quiet, offbeat humanity that really got through to me.

If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) by James Baldwin is a painful, beautiful book narrated by pregnant 19-year-old Tish, whose boyfriend Fonny is in jail, charged with rape. In Baldwin’s economical later style – still suffused with the anger that never left him – she both recalls the development of their relationship and recounts the family’s faltering efforts to get justice in a deeply racist America. The book takes a while to build, and there’s the odd pretentious line, but its characters, its world and its ideas are vividly sketched, and its relationships are suffused with a deep love that endures beyond the reading. Train Dreams (2002), meanwhile continued my love affair with Denis Johnson. It's a brutal book: unsettling, haunting and horrifying, but also lyrical, its life of labour and sadness told Johnson-style, with that unorthodox, roaming mind, and that gift for imagery, jarring juxtaposition and the right word.



After that, we're into 'flawed but fantastic' territory, led by John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy (1986), which Philip Roth once called "the best English novel since the war", having sadly died before he could read my novel, or apparently Lucky Jim. It's a book that promises a manhunt but delivers something else entirely: a deep, densely literate, richly autobiographical exploration of its cipherous anti-hero, fugitive spy Magnus Pym, a man caught between two masters, in the long, erratic shadow of his conman father. Now and then it drags its feet, so far into Pym’s mind – and childhood – that it loses sight of what will move its audience, but more often than that it’s formidable: a swaggeringly assured study of a man with so many selves he has ceased to exist, told with the stylistic affectations that mirror his shapeshifting, amidst a gallery of brilliantly-etched supporting characters – each sympathetic when telling the story on their terms. Le Carré’s ability to switch from introspection to action is startling, and he has a turn of phrase that can take the breath away.

As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner is hard work in places – with almost impenetrable passages born of its experimental elements and rooted Southern vernacular – but also gripping, original and wonderfully strange; full of sound, fury, and the most outrageous feats of language. But my mother is a fish. Also oscillating between the sublime and the not-quite is W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (1930). It starts and ends superbly – the final 20 pages are emotionally overwhelming – and the portrait of free-spirited, nonconformist adulteress Rosie Driffield is vibrant and fascinating, though the middle of the book isn’t as specific or focused as it might be, with too many asides, half-drawn faces and exuberant character assassinations that seem to have more to do with its author than its story, and frankly go on a bit. The best line in the book (“She seemed to offer herself to the assault of love”) is followed, with a crushing inevitability, by some very 1930 racism, though Maugham’s mordant wit is still a joy in 2019, particularly in the opening pages, where he slices through his alter ego’s contemporaries, before getting started on Americans.



Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! (1995) also offers us a woman to idealise, but on a fleapit screen, or freezeframed from a VHS in a festering bedsit, as his hero regresses to adolescent arousal in the face of life's utter horror. This satirical novel manages to feel both freewheeling and inexorable, Coe's simple convictions delivered through a meticulously-constructed story lit by flights of bizarre comic fancy. Its protagonist is novelist Michael Owen, a man transparently and unapologetically obsessed with What a Carve Up!, the Carry On-ish ‘60s horror-comedy that provided his entry to the world of mysterious adult sexuality (and voyeurism, and thwarted desire). Meanwhile, his journalistic investigations into the history of the aristocratic Winshaw clan finds a family carving up both Britain’s nationalised industries in the heyday of Thatcherism – and a succession of arms deals with the Iraqis. It is, frequently, an astonishingly assured book, full of meta-textual hi-jinks, comic set-pieces and broiling anger, though its ambitious meshing of cartoonish villainy and confrontational sincerity doesn’t always come off. While it takes an admirable sense of ambition to segue from the heartbreaking sequences in an NHS hospital to a warped recreation of an Old Dark House comedy, that doesn’t mean the juxtaposition quite works. Similarly, comic sequences about an incomprehensible interviewee on a current affairs programme, or the contrast between a HELLO! profile and the more bitter reality, feel broader than a book like this should be. At its best, though, it’s remarkable, with a specificity in both its mode of comedy and the subjects it has in its sights. Perhaps there are coincidences here and there, with characters reappearing in one another’s lives more than is likely, but – as with the one-dimensional nature of the villains – it seems unlikely that’s accidental: more that the Winshaws, and people like them, control everything, and we are but their playthings.

In comparison Syaka Murata's satirical Convenience Store Woman (2016) was trim and fast-moving, the perfect antidote to the book I read before it (Origins of Totalitarianism, more of which later). It's a fresh, deadpan novel about a sociopathic 36-year-old woman who can’t relate to anyone else, and lives only for her job in a convenience store. In its subversive portrait of society’s fear of nonconformity, and its adroit observations about the search for meaning, it has more to say than a dozen heavier books, though the last 30 pages are quite muddled, and can’t live up to what precedes them.



I'm rationing my Vonnegut these days, after the splurge of 2014, as there's not much left. Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) collects 25 stories written between 1950 and 1968, many dealing with his favoured themes of consumerism, conformity, community, machines, space exploration and loneliness. The title tale is very hard to take − I either simply don't understand it, or it's extremely misogynistic − and a handful of others miss the mark ('Adam', 'The Foster Portfolio', 'New Dictionary') or interrogate issues that seem irrelevant now, but at their best, these small works are as good as anything he ever wrote. And read in one lengthy slurp, Welcome to the Monkey House accentuates the worldview that underpinned his surface obsessions. "Sometimes − there's God − so quickly," Tennessee Williams once wrote, and so there is in the writing of this arch humanist, who finds tenderness at the most unexpected times, and from the most unexpected places. He finds incredible deadpan jokes there too, and wellsprings of undeserved courtesy. There's little I've read this year that I've enjoyed as much as the one-two of 'D. P.' − in which an illegitimate, mixed-race German boy mistakes an American soldier for his father − and 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', written from the perspective of a college student whose mentor has taken to blowing up armouries with his mind. There's no other writer I enjoy, or relate to, or draw upon nearly as much. A bit more here.

I also read Bluebeard (1987), which is about as pure Vonnegut as you can get, melancholy flowing beneath its unfailingly cheery, relentlessly civil surface, as he ruminates on love, war, art, loneliness, misogyny, immigration, survivor's syndrome and mental illness. His vehicle is the autobiography of an almost talentless abstract expressionist, Rabo Karabekian, who loses an eye, the love of his children and almost all of his life's work (rendered in the unintentionally self-destroying Sateen Dura-Luxe, which after a few years simply falls off the canvas), but not his sense of wonder at this thing, whatever it is. Vonnegut's approach here may no longer be novel, and Bluebeard might lack the shimmering originality of his greatest work, but no-one else on Earth could have written it, and at this point he's like an old, dear and brilliant friend.

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) takes a very certain type of macho, self-pitying American novel – in which the women are psychos or ciphers or sex objects – and, with a slow-rising fury, begins to interrogate it. The twist, if indeed it is a twist, feels slightly signposted and mechanical, but the subsequent sequence is so beautifully written and compassionate and mordantly funny that it acquires a momentum which makes it real. It’s a book about the break-up of a marriage, almost two, theoretically three, and as such it’s bleak and difficult and – in Akner’s hands – intense; frighteningly unflinching. She probes and digs and mostly (though not always) transcends a superficial, self-involved NY world that can otherwise be a turn-off. And she’s funny, very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny in a way that writers of serious, introspective books about big, moody characters struggle to be: one-liners, barbs, moments of absurdism and almost unreadable cringe comedy. I didn’t exactly enjoy it – it’s hard to enjoy something so sad and weary – and now and then Anker’s postulations are vague or tip over into the merely pretentious, but it’s such a valuable book: an omniscient feminist counter-argument which runs on a motor of anger to places that those hulking novels of self-righteous machismo simply don’t, or perhaps can’t.



I read The Princess Bride (1973) as William Goldman intended: recovering from illness. His über-meta story of high adventure and true love is a leeeettle long-winded now and then, but mostly a joy – especially when vengeance-bent Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya is involved. My favourite joke is probably in the intro when Goldman is thinking about how clever he’s been, picks up a ringing phone and just says “clever” down it. The best scene is that wonderful duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity. When We Were Orphans (2000) by Kazuo Ishiguro is bewitching and deeply poignant, though its purposefully strange diversion – meant, I presume, to satirise imperial myopia and the limits of detective fiction in comprehending the true horrors of the world – somewhat overbalances the book. If When We Were Orphans ended with those absurd, surreal and undeniably memorable sequences, and that was therefore its point, that might make sense, but we then get a very real, human coda. I’m struck by the incomparable way Ishiguro can craft a character through both small details and what he doesn’t say in his first-person narration, and this story about memory and loss is hugely affecting, I just wonder if its most obviously arresting (and ultimately most enduring) sequences are also its least effective.

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller (1979) is dizzying postmodernism about you, the reader, starting If on a winter’s night a traveller only to find it unfinished, along with each subsequent story you begin. Between the diverse selection of openings, each interrupted at the exact point you’ve become hooked, is the continuing, surreal second-person tale of you, Ludmilla – the enigmatic ‘Other Reader’ – a hoaxer, a police state and at least one cult. It’s very clever, and also very convinced of its own cleverness, which along with its dense philosophising can become a little taxing, but it’s one of a kind, with an ingenious shifting of genres and moods, an abundance of striking passages and some fascinating ideas. Tag yourself: I’m the troubled writer paralysed by ambition.



Now we're dealing with the mediocre or the maddening, led by Don LeLillo's mammoth Underworld (1997), which is the latter. Baseball, nuclear waste, painted planes and Lenny Bruce – DeLillo’s sprawling novel starts with the ‘Shot heard round the world’, leaps forward to the ‘90s, then travels back inexorably, inevitably to 1951. At times it feels almost like a pastiche of a Big Important Novel: unstintingly serious, laughably verbose, the word ‘cunt’ sprayed earthily, liberally around in the otherwise magniloquent prose. It was on page 806 that the book really, profoundly moved me, and I realised that it hadn’t done so before, and that this – along with anything resembling brevity – had been what was missing. It begins like mid-period Ellroy, tantalises and wows, sags badly in the mid-section then comes roaring back once Lenny Bruce starts riffing on Armageddon. You can’t deny the scale of DeLillo’s ambition: the scope and the niche, the level of the intellect and the beauty of the phrasing, the size of the ideas he’s wrestling with, and frequently subduing. You just wish he’d drop the genius act and get on with it. If he can close a chapter with a sentence more telling than other authors’ entire oeuvres, you wonder if another 16-page set-piece oscillating between the sloppy heat of adultery and the specifics of waste management might possibly be overkill. This taught me a lot about how to write, and a little about how not to, with some of the most dazzling passages I’ve ever read, and several of the most tedious.

Also weighing in at uncomfortably-heavy-for-my-arthritic-left-hand was London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins (1945), a brilliantly-titled close-up epic which follows the occupants of a single house in SE11 from Christmas 1938 to Christmas 1940, and is hugely readable at first, but goes on too long and doesn’t amount to enough. It’s ultimately a soap opera with a bit of edge and irony, and a faint philosophical bent. The London flavour is there, but it should be stronger: Penelope Fitzgerald evoked the city at war far more powerfully in the brief, brilliant Human Voices (above).



George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman (1969) is a mixed bag: a rake's progress in colonial Britain, as a minor character from Tom Brown's Schooldays takes centre stage: shagging, lying and riding to ill-gotten glory against the fabulously convincing backdrop of the First Afghan War. The character needs to be more of a scoundrel and less of a sex criminal. Speaking of anti-heroes who are simply dislikeable, The Damned Utd (2006) gives us David Peace's take on Brian Clough. The book is initially interesting but ultimately deadening. Peace has just one main mode of writing – supposed force through relentless repetition – and one type of character: furious, obsessive people in Yorkshire who can’t stop swearing. For all that, its story is one well worth telling, and now and then, when he drops the rage and finds something else to say, it can be rather brilliant.

Capote’s debut – like James Baldwin’s – is vivid, moving and idiosyncratic, but also very overwritten. At 23, he’s a stylist in so much as he writes like no-one else, and twists every sentence to his will. But his style isn’t developed. By Music for Chameleons he was concise and his writing perfectly balanced. In Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), there are passages of piercing wisdom and fine characterisation – Randolph’s monologue; the scenes of the young, Capote-ish Joel and the brilliantly-drawn tomboy Idabel – but they don’t often gel with the lengthy descriptions of plantlife, animals and furniture. Nor do those descriptions generally inform character, or even conjure a world. As a result, the book moves between the affecting, the profound and the densely dull.



I bought Limmy's Daft Wee Stories (2015) as I’d heard him on RHLSTP (RHLSTP), followed him on Twitter from that, and found that his feed is like a piece of inspired performance art – and the fact he’d ridicule me for saying that is partly why. Written in straightforward colloquial language (a lot of ‘wee’, a lot of ‘shite’), the stories are distinctly variable: some funny, some very funny, some fun but formulaic with increasingly obvious counterintuitive endings, some agreeably weird and a couple just crap.

Last year I had an awful lot of fun with Chester Himes' cult 'Harlem cycle'. The third in the series, The Crazy Kill (1959), has an interesting set-up, and features his usual calling cards of loud clothes, adultery and ultra-violence – all laced with black humour – but it’s conspicuously more plodding and one-note than the explosive second outing, The Real Cool Killers. It doesn’t help that Himes introduces so many characters at once near the beginning, and gives others similar names (Poor Boy/Pony Boy, Doll Baby/Baby Sis), so it’s difficult to remember exactly who is diddling whose girlfriend. And everyone keeps calling everyone else a "mother raper". It’s still grisly escapism of a sort.



If there’s one thing that undermines prospective satire, it’s characters whose names describe them, but in The Warden (1855), Anthony Trollope isn’t even trying: his low-grade novelist is called Mr Popular Sentiment. But while it may not work on those terms, as a rumination on the nature of personal conscience it’s quite effective. Still less successful was Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate (1949). I absolutely loved The Pursuit of Love: so fresh and funny, before it whacks you in the solar plexus. Great title aside, this sequel is less likeable, loveable and readable. Following another set of narrator Fanny Wincham’s relatives, it manages to have lots of plot without really having a story – at least one it’s possible to care about – as it focuses on a gallery of near-blanks and minor grotesques, spending unforgivably little time on the Radletts (for which, read: Mitfords). When Jassy and Victoria Radlett turn up, the book flares into life, and you realise just what you’ve been missing. Compared to that, the relationship between superficial Lady Montdore and her family’s prospective heir, Cedric, is a joyless slog. This one also seems to groan under the weight of its references to redundant styles of clothing and furniture – I’m not sure if the earlier book was lighter on such quickly ageing trivialities, or if I was just having so much fun (and heartbreak) that I didn’t notice. Sorry to be such a terrible counter-Hon.

Another comic novel that left me a little chilly was Nina Stibbe's Reasons to be Cheerful (2019), which nabbed the Wodehouse prize. It has a handful of good jokes and evokes its time and place well – a Leicester dental surgery in 1980 – but its observations largely involve reminding the reader of things from the past, which if you weren’t around at the time doesn’t have the same nostalgic cache. It’s diverting enough, but increasingly rambling: a succession of sitcom-ish scenes, its story not really going anywhere until it resorts to the neatest trick in literature – one which Penelope Fitzgerald employed so perfectly in Human Voices, but which here seems simply forced.

And finally on adult fiction... Rob Palk's first book, Animal Lovers, was obnoxiously great: a novel in which every sentence was good. I've been trying to make him like me on Twitter, and I think it's going OK as he let me read the draft of his new one, The Crowd Pleaser (2021?). No spoilers, but if you're a publisher who doesn't want to be laughed at by other, richer publishers, you might want to drop him a line.

***

Children



Only a handful this time around. I read Stuart Gibbs' middle-grade comedy-thriller Spy School last year, and had a lovely time, so this year I appear to have read the six sequels. They're too American, the jokes aren't funny and the adult characters are poorly-drawn, but the plots are involving, and the emotional and romantic subplots are unusually effective. Though the titles suggest a certain gimmickry, each book is a cracking and (within its knowingly ludicrous parameters) credible continuation of Gibbs' main story. Just so we're clear, the correct ranking is:

- #4. Spy Ski School (2016)
- #3. Evil Spy School (2015)
- #1. Spy School (2012)
- #6. Spy School Goes South (2018)
- #7. Spy School British Invasion (2019)
- #5. Spy School Secret Service (2017)
- #2. Spy Camp (2013)

I also enjoyed a couple of Philip Pullman books. The Tiger in the Well (1990) is something of a drop-off from his first two Sally Lockhart novels, with one conspicuously ridiculous plot development that sets up several sequences of inert, unimaginative unpleasantness and spotlights a villain who's simply an uninteresting grotesque. But before that, and even afterwards, it's exciting and highly atmospheric, as Sally discovers socialism (yay!) and atheism (yawn), the surefooted sense of storytelling, intriguing premise and original characters offsetting a certain conventiality in its mystery-thriller tropes. More here. Lyra's Oxford (2003) is slight in terms of length and story, as 15-year-old Lyra and Pantalaimon receive a visit from a witch daemon, but loaded with intelligence, atmosphere and especially emotion. The line about Will connected like a shovel to the face. I could spend my whole life in this world.

***

NON-FICTION

History and politics



Head and shoulders above all other non-fiction this year was Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982), the first in a five-volume (!) biography of the Vietnam War enthusiast and famed shagger. Sitting atop a mountain of research, Caro wages a war of his own: this one against received wisdom and inferior biographers who won't rent a house in their subject's home town for three years. For many, Johnson’s reputation is as a good man and unrepentant New Dealer whose liberal inclinations, and aspirations for a ‘Great Society’, were thwarted after he was boxed into a corner by the draining, unwinnable, all-consuming anti-commie crusade in Southeast Asia. Not so, says Caro. In this impossibly rich book, he fashions an indelible, uncompromising and excoriating portrait of a cunning, selfish but dynamic self-made politico, powered by want, hunger and insecurity, who used everyone he ever met, believed in little, and rode to the first power he ever held on a tidal wave of construction money. In order to understand Johnson, though, Caro argues, we have to understand the Hill Country, the dirt poor area of Texas beyond the 98th Meridian in which toil, hardship and, well, dirt was about all there ever was. And so, after an exhilarating flash-forward prologue that finds Johnson in the horns of a dilemma, that’s where we begin, with Johnson’s ancestors suckered into a trap which closed around them, lured there by lush, untrammelled vegetation that once utilised never returned. His grandfather and his father both gambled on fortunes and lost; Johnson gambled – repeatedly – and won. Until one day he didn't.

It’s a book about the making of a man, but a man who appears to have crystallised by the time he was at college: in his ruthless manoeuvring behind the scenes of meaningless campus elections, Caro sees the LBJ who performed the same moves, to dizzying ends, as a congressman, senator and president. By the midway point, we’re dealing with many of the titans of the 1930s, including Sam Rayburn, one of the unheralded heroes of the New Deal, an honourable, combustible man whose hard-won authority proves no match for Johnson’s flattery, obsequiousness and laser-sighted perception. The author can make literally anything interesting – a congress committee, the funding of a dam – and the way he brings to life the worlds of Texas and Washington, and the gallery of supporting players is utterly exhilarating. You’re so close to Johnson himself that you can almost feel his hand on your shoulder, the other on your lapel.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt was dazzling and difficult and insightful, if not in quite the way I was expecting. For the most part the book underlined how hyperbolic much of our discourse is. Hitler didn't start with the Holocaust, as liberal columnists keep reminding us, but he did start by writing down pretty much everything he was going to do, and I don't see the seeds of totalitarianism in Trump, as much as he's a horrible, racist cunt who appeals to the worst in people. Most topical in the book, along with Arendt's insights into the moral judgements placed on refugees − rather than their frequent persecutors − is perhaps the notion of 'political romanticism', which anticipates the tiresome 'free speech' zealots for whom no topic is apparently off-limits, nor consistency a pressing issue. I found the book enormously upsetting, if I'm honest: it shook my faith in the basic goodness of people. I wrote a bit more about it here.



The Tories who came together to oust Chamberlain and install Churchill are the subject of Lynne Olson's erratic but periodically electrifying Troublesome Young Men (2007), which comes to life when it takes us into Parliament, and ends with a heartbreakingly ironic postscript dealing with the debacle of Suez. More here.

On a similar theme, my peculiar fascination with the far-right (though I was reading them specifically for a novel I've been working on – it's ready, hit me up) led me to two books about deserved neo-Nazi bogeymen. Nigel Farndale's Haw-Haw (2005) is interesting, but decreasingly so, and too sympathetic to its subject. Stephen Dorril's Blackshirt (1999), dealing with Oswald Mosley and the wider world of British fascism, turned out to be a tremendous, cheerless chore, which it took me more than six weeks to get through.



Speaking of people on the extreme right (I'm kidding), Jess Phillips' Everywoman (2017) proved a suitably confusing read. She has done more good than I will ever do in my life. Her campaigns to stop violence against women are extraordinary and inspiring. She receives intolerable abuse because she is a woman who strongly and unapologetically speaks out about appalling, systemic misogyny. And she seems to expend an unusual amount of energy launching unhelpful, self-aggrandising attacks on her own party, then complaining when people tell her to fuck off. The book is basically that, but a book.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that Ben Macintyre is just a useful idiot for the security services who regards his association with the Times as a cross between a knighthood and a canonisation. The Spy and the Traitor (2018) is a rip-roaring read, written with panache and verve, but seeing Macintyre wrangling with the complexities of the 1980s, regarding them as essentially the same old battle between good and evil, and then swallowing everything doled out to him by a literal spy, is rather embarrassing. A Foreign Field (2001), one of his earliest books, is by contrast merely aloof and clunky, artlessly exposing the mechanics behind its construction.



I'm happy to report, however, that I am still obsessed with spies, so also devoured The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake (2013) by Roger Hermiston, a serviceable biog of the double-agent, flipped by the Russians in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp. It's a little light overall, especially compared to Andrew Lownie’s recent book on Guy Burgess, though it improves as it progresses and the author’s sources become more varied and detailed: the passages on Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs are excellent. In the intro, Hermiston – a former Today programme producer – attempts to incinerate our goodwill by praising Rod Liddle.

Like Ben Macintyre, Niall Ferguson is a capitalist running dog. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) became wildly successful, and I can see why − we'd all love to believe the Empire was great and noble. The first hundred pages are curiously dry, then he begins to offset his economic graphs and fixation on Scots with stories of derring do, imperial overreach and totally mad shit. This shouldn't be the only thing you read on empire, as there's a definite agenda underpinning its supposedly disinterested overview, and I don't personally agree with Ferguson's viewpoint (or indeed his insane conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia), but it's an interesting book.



I enjoyed The Devil in the White City last year, and thought Gary Krist's Empire of Sin (2014) might deliver more of the same. His book lacks the same laser focus, hopping along quite happily from 1890 to 1920, though the assorted stories of sex, jazz, murder and reform (but mostly murder, let's be honest) are zippily written, and there’s enough context about race, power and psychogeography for it to be of some value – if rarely enough for it to feel like heavyweight history. My usual unease with true crime reared its head near the end: I’m not sure I quite have the temperament or the stomach for it.

Finally, I nearly expired from boredom while reading Mary Banham's The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (2012), which is both desperately dry and dreadfully repetitive, doing little to evoke the experience of being there, instead delving into the ideological imperatives of various architectural journals, and endlessly restating its uncontroversial contention: that a festival subtitled ‘a land and its people’ was, by all accounts, preoccupied with the land and its people.

Music and film



I'd been meaning to read Dorian Lynskey's 33 Revolutions Per Minute (2012) for a while, and a celebratory themed concert at London's JW3 gave me the requisite kick up the arse. It's a masterful, moving and at times very funny history of message music, with a flair for both the anecdotal and the analytical, looking (as the terrific title suggests) at 33 emblematic protest songs, and the events and artistic movements that spawned them. Lynskey’s chapters on Dylan, the Pistols and the Manics are so precise and perceptive, with such sharply drawn character studies, that when he was dealing with artists of whom I knew nothing – like Crass, Fela Kuti and the Dead Kennedys – I was sure I was in safe hands. The chapter on Chilean folk hero Jara is particularly affecting, and it’s lovely too to see the committed, mercurially gifted ‘60s lefty Phil Ochs given his due. (Conversely, I always find middle-class white people pontificating about hip hop slightly embarrassing, but this may be a problem with me; Lynskey does it with humour – and his eyes wide open.) That was the pick of the bunch this year, and I'm hoping to get around to his biography of Orwell's 1984 next year. More here.

Elia Kazan's 1988 autobiography, A Life, is one of the world's more problematic doorstops. It's a comprehensive portrait of an important creative artist and a shabby man, congratulating himself on half-recognising his failings. Because I didn't read enough in my 20s but still like showing off, I mentioned that book in my Record Collector piece on Brett Anderson, which included a review of Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn (2019), an excellent follow-up to Suede frontman Anderson's first volume of autobiography, Coal Black Mornings. I read two other musical memoirs: Johnny Marr's Set the Boy Free (2016) and Just for One Day by Louise Wener (2010), which were both alright.



Two other books about music underwhelmed, exhibiting contrasting failings. Perfect Sound Whatever by James Acaster (2019) – dealing with the music of 2016 – was too prosaic and functional; though Greil Marcus's The Old, Weird America (1997/2011) exhibited more insight into its subject (Dylan's extraordinary Basement Tapes), it was also unbearably pretentious.

Thanks to Malcolm Prince for recommending Ronald Haver's A Star Is Born (1988), which deals with the 1954 film. It's a superb book, not just a making-of (and an unmaking-of, and a remaking-of), but also a Hollywood history lesson, detective story and love story, as Haver chronicles the production of a mammoth, crucial piece of cinematic art, its partial destruction, and the campaign to find and restore its missing reels – which brings him front and centre. Beginning with a second-person tour that walks you around the Tinseltown in 1954 – and evokes the city better than anything else I have ever read – it captures a moment in history, as Fox’s CinemaScope captures the national imagination, and Jack Warner and his stumbling studio scramble to react. Their solution: to bank everything on the re-emergent popularity of difficult, Dexedrine-addicted former child star, Judy Garland. It's a great story, irresistibly told, though I imagine you have to be pretty interested in A Star Is Born to get as much out of this as I did.



Since it seems unlikely that we’ll get another biography of the cult wartime filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings, Kevin Jackson's engrossing, impassioned if imperfect book (2003) is required reading for fans. The same is true of Christina Rice's Ann Dvorak biog (2013) – subtitled 'Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel' – which does a stellar job of explaining why the most promising of starts – Dvorak was a star at 20, stealing the show in Howard Hawks' Scarface – failed to translate to an enduring career. Rice is naturally funny, and an artful writer, finding what she can (Dvorak left no personal papers and has no surviving family), then marshalling her research with considerable finesse. More here.

People with no discernible talent can be good subjects for non-fiction too. The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell (2013) is an entertaining memoir about the making of The Room – and Sestero’s warped relationship with its bizarre, mysterious, tragi-comic creator, Tommy Wiseau. It starts brilliantly, though runs out of steam a little towards the end, bending to formula in its self-justification and strained attempts to render the story inspirational. The funniest bits, and there are many funny bits, are Sestero’s deadpan descriptions of the film itself.



Reel History (2015), meanwhile, collects most of Alex von Tunzelmann's Guardian columns of the same name, which scrutinised movies for their historical accuracy. I used to read the feature regularly, and I’d dipped into the book since I picked it up, but sitting down and reading it cover to cover – immersing yourself in the film history, the real history and the authorial voice – reminded me of the fun I had devouring Dorothy Parker’s non-fic last year. Arranging the entries by when the films were set (an inspired decision), the author wears her learning lightly as she travels from 10 Million Years BC to the Wikileaks scandal, via Pocahontas, Tolstoy and the Titanic, the essays sharp, concise and witty – even laugh-out-loud funny. Special mention for Laurence Olivier in Khartoum looking “like he has escaped from a racist panto”, and a comprehensive overview of the lot of Native Americans from 1492 to the present day that concludes, “... [they] suffer significantly higher rates of poverty, alcoholism and suicide than the American average. On the bright side, they can paint with all the colours of the wind.” If you like history, cinema and laughing, you couldn't do much better than to pick up a copy.

Sport



My favourite sports book of the year is about someone who didn't quite make the grade. As United-mad kids in 1994, we knew that Ben Thornley was going to be the next big thing. Everyone said it. He was the best since Best. He’d scored in every round of the FA Youth Cup in 1992: shining in a side that included Beckham, Butt, Giggs, Gary Neville and Robbie Savage. Then, on the cusp of first-team success, auditioning for a FA Cup semi-final spot, he was wiped out by a journeyman defender in a reserve game, and he never quite got it back again. Tackled: The Class of '92 Star Who Never Got to Graduate (2019), co-authored with ghost writer Dan Poole, is Thornley's story. Elegantly mixing its subject's reminiscences with those of schoolfriends, teachers, coaches and fellow players, it's amusing, honest and deeply affecting, its emotional heft accentuated intentionally by the non-linear structure (the book begins with the horror tackle and ends just before, alternating between pre- and post-injury) and perhaps unwittingly by the prominence granted the FA Youth Cup Final, which has attained a near-mythic status in modern football folklore, but remains a mere footnote for those teammates who ‘made it’. For Thornley, that was as good as it got. A bit more here.

Vic Marks' Original Spin (2019) is one of the gentlest, most genial books I’ve read, though it rather limps to the finish. I've just now realised that the title is a play on 'original sin'. I read the book four months ago. It's a lot better than Leo McKinstry's Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero (2005/2010). Ruy Castro's biography of Garrincha – The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero (1995/2004) – is also rather a dreary devoir. You get the facts, neatly established and marshalled into chronological order, but there’s no poetry. And since the sheer joy of Garrincha is absent – the transcendence he found on the field, the exultance he inspired – when the authors strip away the attendant myths, all that’s left is a selfish man (with a 10-inch penis), drinking himself to death.

Miscellaneous



I enjoyed Gotta Get Theroux This (2019) by Louis Theroux. This autobiography starts off lightheartedly, then becomes increasingly introspective – as Theroux dwells on his romantic relationships – and more challenging, as he deals with Savile. What comes across most strongly is how nuanced his view of humanity is. He can also find a good joke, a brilliant turn of phrase or a literare allusion in the tightest corner. And there simply aren’t many writers around today with such an understanding of how funny the word ‘willy’ is. One slight shortcoming is that his memory doesn’t seem to be particularly good, so the earlier sections can sometimes consist of him simply describing familiar scenes from Weird Weekends, while the behind-the-curtain material about TV production probably isn’t of wide interest. But he’s extremely honest and the book gets better and better as it progresses, exploring his own character and mirroring the growing complexity of both his work and his worldview. I read Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out (2014) as Theroux had recommended it on a podcast. In it, novelist Kirn befriends an eccentric scion of the Rockefeller clan – only he’s not a Rockefeller, he’s a murderer. It's a compulsive page-turner told with a dash of class, some eminently plausible armchair analysis and insane levels of unwitting, unwanted access.

Sara Pascoe's second book, Sex Power Money (2019) is less focused than Animal, and seems less assured: at times you’re just watching someone argue with themselves. In one way that’s not a bad thing – the issues she’s discussing are complex and many-sided, and earlier it could seem like she was presenting contestable theory as established fact – but it can also feel disordered and incomplete, a draft away from being ready. I enjoyed it a lot more than Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971) which was mostly just irritating. I wish I hadn't bought the sequel at the same time.

***

Thanks for reading. Thanks also to everyone who gave me books, lent me books, or recommended books to me in 2019, and to Jamie for organising the Brett Anderson piece. And if for some unaccountable reason you still want MORE, then sneaking in under the wire at the end of 2018 (after I compiled this thing) were this Sunday Times collection of short stories – which I read for the Rooney – Seumas Milne's partway-convincing Miners' Strike conspiracy-athon, and the memoirs of musician David Ford.

Review of 2018: Part 1 – Books

The good, the bad and the Atlas Shrugged: here's everything I read in a vain attempt to stave off the comic hopelessness and soul-chewing despair of this toxic binfire of a year. Yay. It's divided into fiction (for adults and children) and non-fiction. 79 in total.

FICTION

Adults:



My favourites first, and call me Corporate McNosurprises, but the best book I read all year was George Saunders' miraculous Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Booker last year. A hypnotic, hilarious, heart-opening story of grief and redemption, it uses the implacable, granite greatness of Honest Abe – a man we can see only in retrospect, in simple terms and a mile high – as a counterpoint to human fragility, and a way to explore the essence of our heroic figures, who are both less and much more than we often realise. It's like Vonnegut shot by John Ford, and the most intensely moving, exhilaratingly imaginative work that I've read in years.

Similarly revelatory, and American, was Denis Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018), which has only one shortcoming, and that is its pseudo-arthouse title. These five short stories may begin with a broadly conventional examination of middle-age malaise, but they end with an errant, unbalanced genius raiding Elvis Presley's grave, and are quite unlike anything else I've read. His off-kilter sentences, like his delicately warped view of society, are arresting and unsettling, and the third story – an epistolary one in which a psychiatric patient slowly loses his mind to medication – manages to be horrifying and hysterical, practically daring you to care. After that, I sought out Johnson's only previous short story collection, Jesus' Son (1993), which has an army of acolytes, but struck me as rather monotonous with its gallery of interchangeable addicts and losers.

I finally sat down and read Brideshead Revisited (1945) properly, susceptible as I expected (yes, OK, from the TV series) to Waugh's gluttonous story of youth and beauty laid low by drink-fuelled demons.



Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends (2016) – available in a variety of irrelevant, hideous covers – is deceptively immense: a 21st century Pursuit of Love turning inwards in blurry self-loathing and late-capitalist malaise. I gather that some people 'didn't like the characters', which is apparently a legitimate response. Rooney then had the temerity to follow it with Normal People (2018), which is somehow even better: an emotionally exhausting, effortlessly profound second book, with layer upon layer of characterisation and telling, memorable, incisive detail. She is so perceptive and so observant as to the details of human interactions (and human cruelty), with such extraordinary understanding of her characters’ inner workings. It's masterfully drawn, chokingly effective and deserving of all the hype, and then some. Quite how we're supposed to wait two years for the next one, I can't imagine, though I may take that long to recover.

Normal People is superficially similar to David Nicholls' One Day (2009), a book that I gather is easy to pick holes in, but why bother? I came to the party both late and snootily prepared to shrug off a book that had sold two million copies, but fuck me it got to me. An adroit, piercing love story between a smart, sharp, over-educated young woman and a guy who for most of the book is basically Tim Lovejoy, it shrugs off any danger of gimmickry with a pronounced insouciance, and proceeds to involve you in these tangled lives, before shattering your heart a dozen ways. The trappings may be mundane and the jokes variable, but I'm still thinking about it two months later.



Rounding up the list of the broadly unassailable, we have two books about old, lonely women. Firstly, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000), a dense and meticulous mystery steeped in a limping dotage and a need to reveal the truths underpinning our lives, in which ailing Iris Chase reflects on her sister's long-ago suicide, aided by dog-eared photographs, contemporary news reports and a devotion to veracity underpinned by a very Canadian reticence. It's the first of hers I've read (as I am a noted charlatan and fraudster), so I've got years of fun and education ahead of me. Less chilly, and more mordant and acidic and zippy, was Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), in which the residents of a South Kensington rooming house while away the hours until death, through artifice, self-delusion and the odd visit from a charming, utterly ruthless young writer. I think it taught me more about writing good sentences than anything else I've ever read. In comparison, her much earlier A View from the Harbour (1947) felt limp and somehow mean-spirited, the poetry of physical and moral decay summoning nothing but a sort of weary depression.

I've written before about my love of John Steinbeck, especially his trilogy about labourers in Depression-era california (In Dubious Battle, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men). East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's sprawling, biblical Californian phantasmagoria – which drags Cain and Abel into the Salinas Valley – is dizzyingly ambitious and often impossibly rich, but also a little disjointed, its characters' fates too often anti-climactic and its central 400 pages dwarfing what's either side. In a similar vein, Ken Kesey's mammoth, magnificently-titled Sometimes a Great Notion (1962) frequently takes the breath away, humanising but scrutinising every one of its fucked up characters across 600+ pages of labour wrangling, Freudian familial strife and unexpected action sequences, as college-educated Leland Stamper returns to his old, erm, stamper-ing ground to lock horns with his half-brother, the none-more-alpha Hank. Told from a multitude of viewpoints, we watch the characters begin to destroy themselves and one another, forever misreading acts of gentleness or solidarity. It begins to plod a little, bogged down in repetition by page 500, but the ending is irresistible.



Alongside Steinbeck, another of my favourite writers is Jane Austen. This year I delved deep into the admittedly limited canon. You can get Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon in a single volume. Lady Susan (1793) is an epistolary novel, recently adapted as the film Love & Friendship by the great independent filmmaker, Whit Stillman. It is Austen, but not as we know her, reveling in the amorality (and admittedly the resulting downfall) of the thoroughly unscrupulous title character, who is interested purely in acquiring capital and getting her end away. By the time she embarked on her cycle of six great, major novels, Austen had shrugged off such vicarious pleasures, though scholars still bicker over whether she had reached an artistic and emotional maturity or was merely bowing to the demands of Christian society. It is hard to read something as still and gentle and moving as Persuasion and imagine that she wasn't sincere.

The Watsons is by far my favourite of the three short works and one of the great 'what ifs' of modern literature, started in 1803 but discontinued after her father's death, at which point she returned to redrafting earlier works, beginning with Sense and Sensibility. It's an overwhelmingly charming fragment about young Emma Watson (yes, very good), who returns to the bosom of her family after years away, and begins to negotiate the social and romantic traps of their world. I say 'begins to negotiate' because we only get 17,000 words. The highlight is a wonderful set-piece at a country dance. By 1817, the 40-year-old Austen was ailing, being treated for the illness that would kill her. Out of this decline came the wry, almost absurdist Sanditon, a comedy about hypochondriacs, set in a spa-town, which is minor in itself (and again unfinished), but a testament to Austen's absolute and enduring awesomeness. I also picked up The Beautiful Cassandra (1786-93), in the Penguin Little Black Classics series, which incorporates the minor, silly eponymous story and other pieces of juvenilia: some impenetrable (being pastiches of things no longer remembered), some disposable, and others disarmingly funny.

I was surprised how readable and contemporary Jane Eyre (1847) felt, in its language and storytelling if not its sexual politics: an immersing, appealing, fast-moving and agreeably unconventional book that rather runs out of steam after its most notable revelation. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is an unsettling, unforgettable riposte: feminist, anti-colonial, written in an abstract, authentic but unrooted vernacular and almost staccato prose, dragging you where you fear to go and casting Brontë's book in the eeriest and most searing of lights.



One of the most-lauded books of last year was Sean Edward Greer's Less, which won the Pulitzer. The sad, globe-trotting adventures of a lovelorn, failed author, I liked it a lot. I didn't find it as relentlessly hilarious as a lot of reviewers (I gather that it's Greer's first comedy, so perhaps they were surprised), but I loved its warm beating heart and he undoubtedly writes lovely sentences, especially about suits.

I've always loved Lynne Ramsay's film of Morvern Callar, but had never read the Alan Warner novel (1995) that inspired it. Written in an aggressively mannered first-person Scottish dialect, it's a quietly beguiling book with a quite brilliant protagonist – the chain-smoking, powerful, inscrutable Morvern, who deals with her boyfriend's suicide by passing off his unpublished novel as her own, and going clubbing with the money – and some observations on the beautiful, crumbling wasteland of working-class culture, all of which compensate for dull pastoral passages and a rather obvious ending. (I should add that I bought this book for my friend Jess and she thought Warner's idea of how women think was completely embarrassing.)

My favourite author is Kurt Vonnegut, but I'm rationing his work now, because I've read most of it in a mad, four-year blitz. This year I treated myself to two: Jailbird (1979), a counter-intuitive, hilarious, subversive and righteous riposte to the all-consuming national crisis that was Watergate, and his 1971 play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which has Vonnegut sort of playing at Orton: a bawdy farce with legitimate pretensions at indicting modern America. It doesn't all work, and it isn't the best medium for Vonnegut's singular gifts, but it's kind of fascinating.



I've long been fascinated by the waspish, tippling doyen of the Jazz Age, without really doing anything about it, so this year I read The Collected Dorothy Parker (1977). My abiding impression was that while her verse can be good and her stories can be great (Big Blonde, ffs), it’s Parker’s journalism that’s truly remarkable. She turned reviewing into an art form, increasingly using some recent book as a jumping off point for a ruthless, coruscating comic sketch radiating her caustic, devastating wit. One dreary Sunday afternoon I decided to dip into that part of the book, only to emerge six hours later, having devoured the lot. I don’t mean for it to sound like she’s hard to live with as an author: putdowns were only a twentieth of Parker’s repertoire, and her most brutal assessments were always of herself (or A. A. Milne). But while she had the pithiness and sarcasm to make for a Jazz Age Jane Austen, she didn’t tend to trust her warmth, and there’s a lack of scope to her sharp stories and pungent, pulchritudinous poetry that for every moment of amazement and exhilaration can – when essaying the collected works over a week or two – leave you ultimately a little unsatisfied, wishing she had cast her piercing gaze a little farther.

Perhaps the most fun I've had reading this year was with Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers (1958), a dark hymn to Harlem, in which two black policemen (Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson) run around with nickel-plated handguns, shooting and pistol-whipping everyone in sight as they try to solve a murder. Written by ex-con Himes, who was living in Paris at the time, it's a fantastically entertaining slice of urban noir, the OTT violence and lashings of black comedy only slightly undercut by a bizarrely mawkish ending. I then discovered it was the second in a series, so I went back to the start with A Rage in Harlem (1957), which has the central cops as mere supporting characters in a somewhat self-satisfied tall tale about a dumb patsy unable to countenance his girlfriend's duplicity as the bodies pile up. It's good, and tries more transparently to evoke its setting, but it's not as good: certainly far less fun. I've asked for books three and four for Christmas.



Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961) is one of the most brilliant and maddening books I've read in a while: beautiful phrases and life-changing ideas wrapped in a story so cloistered and myopic that it makes Wes Anderson look like Vittorio de Sica. Its historic contextualising and throwaway brilliance seems to anticipate Roth at his zenith, but I also wanted to headbutt the author quite a bit.

The Sound of Trumpets was, unexpectedly, one of 2017's greatest pleasures – for all its self-evident flaws, a nifty, near-mythic deconstruction of Blairite hypocrisy before the ink was barely dry on the '97 election results. This year I went back to the beginning of the Rapstone Chronicles, to find that a little John Mortimer goes a long way, and that his preoccupations (a love of conservation, women who smoke and slightly laboured one-liners) can tend to make his work distinctly samey. Paradise Postponed (1986), written with TV in mind, is a multi-generational, would-be-sprawling story hooked on a mystery: why has a socialist vicar left all of his money to the Tebbit-ian figure of Thatcherite cabinet minister, Lord Titmuss? You'll desperately want to know, and enjoy the ride too, but when you find out, you'll discover it's not that interesting. The second book in the series, Titmuss Regained is so slickly plotted, and hung on such a repetitious, nebulous sense of what it means to be human (Titmuss is motivated by revenge after being pushed in a river; his new girlfriend Jackie is fixated purely on honesty) that it feels about as deep as a puddle, and it's very 1990 (which seems to date it more than if it was 1945), though its refusal to demonise or sanctify any of its characters is at least refreshing.



William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa (1981) is like Lucky Jim (my favourite book of 2016) transplanted to the colonial world of Graham Greene, but nowhere near as good. It's one of those books that you like consistently less, the more you think about it, though there is a terrific joke near the end about the narrator's seduction technique, and my friend who grew up in post-colonial Africa finds the book extraordinarily perceptive. In a similar vein, but with its sexual misadventures haunted by genocide rather than the remnants of racism, is Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story (1966), a book that cleverer men than I have lauded to the heavens. I thought it was... fine, but found the presumably purposeful trivialities of its central story frankly mystifying in this context.

Which leaves us with just three more novels: The Natural by Bernard Malamud (1952) – fitfully engaging shreds of baseball folklore fashioned into an uneven narrative – Anita Loos' influential but hopelessly weathered Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and, of course, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957): a riotous, relentless, ridiculous book, with Rand enthusiastically punching a straw man in the face for 1,168 caustic, sentimental, weird pages. It’s full of BIG ideas (well, one big idea), BIG heroes, predictable ‘twists’, identikit imagery and a cast-iron commitment to never properly engaging with the other side, who don’t merely subscribe to a different ideology, but are all physically-repulsive con-men and gangsters, with flabby faces, drooling mouths and glassy, filmy, dead, panicked eyes. I can’t help but think that seeing all her family’s belongings getting pinched by the Bolsheviks as a kid might have influenced Rand’s worldview somewhat. I wrote about it a little more here, if that's of interest.

A quick mention finally for two books by friends, which I can't possibly review, as that would be insane. These are: Rob Palk's Animal Lovers and Sophia Money-Coutts' The Plus One (both 2018). And all I will say is that I resent both authors.

Children:

I read a lot of kids' books: partly because I love them, partly because I write them and want to understand the marketplace, and partly so I can weasel up to agents who persist in ignoring my questionable talents. Here's a quick round-up of 2018:



The Many Worlds of Albie Bright (2016) by Christopher Edge is extraordinarily beautiful: a miracle of a book about a boy searching for his late mother through alternate worlds. It's ingenious and amusing and the only thing that's made me cry this year (as established last year, I am very tough and northern and only cry once a year). It's not dissimilar, in fact, to my other favourite of this year: Ross Welford's multi-award-winning Time Travelling with a Hamster (2015), another utterly winning sci-fi story in which an imperfect hero searches for a deceased parent. Only the feelgood ending misses the target. I got so engrossed in it that I accidentally took a two-hour lunch break. That is my story and I am sticking to it.

Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart books are a treat I'd recommend to anyone (except my friend Jess, who also hated these – what does she like? Titanic, that's what), pitching you into Victorian London with only a steely heroine and a good-looking portrait photographer for company. The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) is, appropriately, the jewel in the crown, though the second book – The Shadow in the North (1986) – compensates for some annoyingly faithless characterisation by being in all other ways terrific.



Genre fiction for kids doesn't get much more purely entertaining than Stuart Gibbs' Spy School (2012), which shakes off some apparently reactionary tendencies early on and throws in dozens of neat twists. The only disappointment is that the identity of its villain negates one of its funniest ideas. Also relentlessly entertaining are Andy Stanton's enormously successful Mr Gum books – beginning with You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum! (2006) and Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire (2007) – which are simply and effortlessly and consistently hilarious. The biscuit billionaire is a gingerbread man called Alan Warner who has a tin full of cash and electric muscles.

Lovely Liverpudlian socialist Frank Cottrell Boyce's book, Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth (2016), is offbeat and thrillingly unsentimental, dealing with an alien who comes to Earth to reluctantly destroy it, unless he can find 10 things worth saving. These are not the things you might expect, whether you're a tourist board, right-winger or mawkish humanitarian. It's full of clever conceits and comic flourishes. Other enjoyable comic books, with perhaps just a touch less heart, are the bizarrely overlooked Pirate McSnottbeard in the Zombie Terror Rampage (2017) – a deliriously post-modern romp with genuinely good jokes – and the overly plotty but nevertheless entertaining Jim Reaper: Son of Grim (2016).



For older kids, Gaby Halberstam's The Red Dress (2009) is troubling – even difficult – and starts conspicuously slowly, but is extremely rewarding: a heartfelt coming-of-age story, with a realistic heroine, set in a brutal, misogynistic, dirt-poor South Africa.

Tom Fletcher's The Christmasaurus (2016) is written in a slightly tiresome, patronising vernacular, but the story is lovely, even magical, with a great antagonist in the shape of charismatic bully, Brenda Payne. Maz Evans' popular Who Let the Gods Out? (2017) brings the Olympian gods (as well as a little formula plotting) to modern Britain in a book that's well-conceived, and learned and funny, though the point at which an author brings in a karate-chopping version of the Queen as a comic character is the moment in which I fucking despair. The Queen is also invoked in Onjali Q. Rauf's The Boy at the Back of the Class (2018), a simplistic but sincere story about a group of schoolchildren trying to help a refugee to integrate. The fact this involves Buckingham Palace would appear to be evidence of the cringing deference we seem committed to passing on to our children. Is what I would say if I had voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Which I did.

How Winston Delivered Christmas (2018) is a lovely new offering: an advent calendar of a book, divided into 24-and-a-half chapters, each with typically sumptuous Alex T. Smith illustrations, as a bedraggled mouse tries to get a kid's letter to Father Christmas in time for the big day. Emma Barnes' Wild Thing (2014) skirts by on the strength of its heart, The Nowhere Emporium (2015) adds up to a whole lot of vague nothing, and Paddington Races Ahead (2012) finds our hero rather adrift in a world that Michael Bond doesn't seem to understand (which after the pointedly political Paddington Here and Now is rather a disappointment).

And already at a charity shop near you are Jonathan Meres' inherently dislikeable May Contain Nuts (2011), the inexplicably successful Beetle Boy (2016) – in which the villain is a half-woman, half-beetle – and The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray (2018) by E. Latimer, a ludicrous semi-sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which characters escape from paintings and kill people. It was written by a Canadian whose idea of how people in Victorian London speak memorably incorporates the phrase, "Did you just try to sass me?"

***

NON-FICTION

Favourites



Nothing could touch Fun Home (2006), the graphic novel in which Alison Bechdel explores her relationship with her closeted father, whose life was a succession of secrets that drove them apart and pulled them together. It's peppered with wonderful imagery and details that break and mend your heart, and is also really fucking sexy. Like the best art, it leaves you changed. I also got a huge amount from Sara Pascoe's Animal (2016), which may take evolutionary psychology as fact not theory, but also made me look at the world in a different way. It's fantastically honest, Pascoe transforming her fear into fearlessness, and full of good jokes.

History and politics



Most of the non-fic I read is about history and politics. The pick of the bunch this year was probably Andrew Lownie's biography, Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess. It's a fabulously entertaining, spectacularly well-researched book which makes a convincing case that Burgess was the most brilliant and important of the Cambridge Spies – rather than the indiscreet, drunken liability of popular myth. Its flaws, such as they are, comprise an unfortunate tendency to introduce supporting characters by name without explaining who they are, and an inability to quite reach the heart of the garrulous, gossipy but complex Burgess – an analytical closing chapter coming rather closer than the 400 pages that precede it. Thanks to Lownie, we know far more of what Burgess did than we ever have before; we know when and how and definitely who, even if we’re not always sure why. The (crap) title seems to have more to do with marketing algorithms than the book it’s describing.

Another rip-roaring read was Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016) by Heather Hendershot. The author, an unrepentant but open-minded liberal, delves deep into the archives to examine the story of Firing Line, the American debate show hosted by waspish, brilliant, perma-grinning William F. Buckley, which presaged the triumph of American conservatism. Broken down by themes (though in a roughly chronological order, such was Buckley’s cresting and declining interest in certain subjects), the book looks at how Firing Line covered conservatism, communism, feminism, black power, Nixon and Reagan, giving thinkers as inflammatory and revolutionary as Huey Newton and Germaine Greer a platform to air their views at length, and so find supporters, unless the audience was suitably convinced by Buckley’s rebuttals. The writing has the odd cliché or lapse into clunkiness, and Hendershot’s need to restate conclusions at the end of each chapter (and then write another chapter of woolly media studies material positing a potential ‘Firing Line 2.0’) is an academic affectation I could do without, but this is a gripping, thoughtful and revelatory book, a treat for anyone interested in political discourse, public intellectualism or just modern American history.



Alvin Felzenger's biography of Buckley, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley (2017), is a fine companion-piece, finding its niche (in bookshelves not ill-served by Buckley biographies) in focusing on his relationships with presidents from FDR to George W. Bush, via various other people he didn’t like much, and Reagan. While it’s a little too short, shallow and limited in scope to match a political biography like Jean Edward Smith’s FDR or T. Harry Williams’ Huey Long, it’s also enlightening and highly entertaining: Felzenberg’s research feels very comprehensive and, but for a little repetition and some shortcomings imposed by the restrictive structure, it’s nicely written too. Some of Buckley’s putdowns made me laugh out loud. It's a shame he was such a snake.

Continuing my obsession with FDR's cabinet, I also read The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins (2009), one of my political idols. Kirstin Downey's book is a little dry in places, but superbly researched. Perkins created the American welfare state, while providing for her mentally ill husband and daughter, then spent her last years living in a house with 30 left-wing college students, and there is honestly nothing cooler than that. And after enjoying the Slow Burn series on Watergate, I decided to investigate whether Tricky Dicky really was as terrible as he always appeared. Answer: mostly. Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell (2017) makes a case for Nixon being somewhat misunderstood, and certainly no one-dimensional HUAC bully in his early days, but from his first state senate campaign he's slippery, dangerous and undemocratic, and by 1972 he was absolutely off on one. There's no quibbling with Farrell as a scholar – his book is stuffed with primary sources – but I was rather bored by the end, and found Nixon's contradictions simply too legion to reconcile, at least by myself.



Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City tells the tale of a serial killer stalking Chicago as the city welcomes the World's Fair of 1893. At first the true crime narrative is rather more dynamic than the story of the fair, but by the end I felt that had switched around. It's grisly and unquestionably sensationalist (I have almost no stomach for true crime), but I certainly wasn't bored.

You don't get many books about the Nazis, so it was nice to happen across Julia Boyd's Travellers in the Third Reich (2017), an impressively diverse anthology that nevertheless feels more like a collection of interesting sources (many of them previously unpublished) than a book in its own right. The perspectives from artists, diplomats, politicians, writers, tourists, scholars, the hard left and the far-right, the duped and the clear-sighted, the oblivious and the righteous are full of fascinating details, from the sights, smells, sounds and neediness of Nazi Germany to moments of insight, absurdity, incongruity, comedy and tragedy. But they’re marshalled with a distinct lack of finesse, Boyd’s writing full of clunking segues that aren’t really necessary, and a leaden-handed, simple self-righteousness that – while on the side of right – doesn’t make the book the searing moral audit that she imagines. I've harped on about it all a bit more here.

This is where, for completism's sake, I also throw in Philippe Sands' East West Street (2016), which I read too late for last year's list, and which traces the genesis of the terms 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity', coined by two very different lawyers from Lwow, the home of Sands' grandfather and subject of a litany of Nazi atroicities.



And then there are the books that weren't much good. I'm a big fan of Jon Ronson's work, but his Kindle-only book, The Elephant in the Room (2016) is so slight that it's barely there: a shallow rehash of old Alex Jones with a minimum of on-the-spot reporting and a couple of funny one-liners. Michael Wolff's notorious Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018), which briefly captured the zeitgeist, was gossipy and mildly illuminating on the various factions competing for power, but hardly trustworthy, which supporting characters clearly whitewashed if they gave decent access to the author. Lonely Courage: The True Story of the SOE Heroines Who Fought to Free Nazi-Occupied France (2017) is a completely fascinating story given severely botched treatment. There are a few gripping passages and at times the book evokes the brutal lottery of wartime espionage, but the facts – and stories – are marshalled in erratic, haphazard manner, so it’s difficult to stay immersed in the material, or indeed to remember (or follow) who everyone is. Stroud’s writing style is also clunky and repetitive: light on quotes and with a truly singular use of commas. It all seems rather half-finished.

Probably worst of all is Michelle Obama's autobiography, Becoming (2018). The most interesting bit is when her daughter gets chased by a cheetah, and that turns out to be a dream. Aside from moving reminiscences detailing her father’s decline, those early scenes with Barack, and some brief passages in the final stretch about gun violence and misogny, it all feels so crushingly banal: an astonishing story turned into 420 pages of work-family balance, in safe, quasi-inspirational corporate language. I couldn't tell if she wasn't who I thought she was or if this book has just had all the life and fire focus-grouped out of it.

Arts



Brett Anderson's Coal Black Mornings (2018) is a terrific memoir, tracing the author's life from his austere, eccentric satellite-town childhood – dominated by a domineering father who was obsessed with Franz Liszt and often wandered their council house dressed as T. E. Lawrence – to the cusp of stardom with singular indie heroes, Suede (who are, of course, the greatest band of all time). There’s the odd moment of repetition, cliché or pre-emptive defensiveness (perhaps unsurprising given the unwarranted kicking he received from a bitchy music media in the ‘90s), but it’s most often a total joy. Anderson is extraordinarily insightful when dealing with his music and the creative evolution of his band, searingly honest when required – his pathological aversion to gossip being wedded to an unblinking emotional sincerity – and possessed of a notable capacity for both a telling detail (which is hardly unexpected) and a droll one-liner (which may well be). The passage in which he shrugs off supposed influences to explain that he has always been more inspired by a lover, a friend or a flat than by someone else’s album made my jaw drop. Because of course, but who has ever said that? If your pulse doesn’t quicken over those last four pages, you are dead. Or even worse: a Blur fan.

We finally got to see Orson Welles' final movie this year, thanks – unexpectedly – to Netflix. Before that, your best bet was to read Josh Karp's invigorating, deadpan book: Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of 'The Other Side of the Wind' (2015), which traced both its haphazard production and the farce that followed. It's so much fun, at least now that there's a happy ending.

I also enjoyed, with some reservations, Otto Friedrich's City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, which inspired a recent series of You Must Remember This. A personal history of ‘40s Hollywood, which for this author means Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, labour unions and anti-semitism, as much as Gene Tierney, Rita Hayworth and Louis B. Mayer (and much more than Cary Grant, whose conflicted, confused and confusing existence is bizarrely consigned to the ‘boring’ pile). Friedrich shapes secondary sources into a narrative that at its best is panoramic and at worst somewhat bitty, but always elegantly written and highly readable. Some of the stories he tells have since been debunked and others are over-familiar (at least to massive Old Hollywood nerds), but there’s plenty that was new to me, and his contextualising is first-rate, as he explains how Hollywood got its water, America got racist and Bugsy Siegel got shot. Depending on your tastes, though, Friedrich’s endless sneering may begin to pall – aside from Double Indemnity, he is dismissive of just about everything and everybody, deriding most books and films and recordings as bad or brainless or embarrassing, and thinking the worst of almost everyone he encounters. In Brechtian fashion, he seems to take a particular delight in debunking heroism: toppling or dismantling those ‘40s figures that (left-leaning) history has since judged as stoic and virtuous – among them, John Garfield – an agenda which arguably undermines his objectivity, and is also really fucking depressing. I enjoyed it when he did it to Ronald Reagan, though, which just shows the double-standard I operate under.



Sadly I didn't enjoy A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True − Volume One (1907-40), which is clearly a labour of love, but also a mess, and something of a trial. It’s good in spots, particularly in its vivid sketches of the young Frank Fay, but it’s frequently long-winded – offering laborious descriptions of interior furnishings, interminable lists of names who attended events or belonged to certain Hollywood clubs, and every finger injury Stanwyck ever sustained – while often irrelevant when striving to be wide-ranging. Most disappointing of all is its vague and uninteresting portrait of Stanwyck, Wilson apparently so close to her subject (and so indebted to her subject’s family and friends) that she skirts shyly around topics like adultery and domestic abuse (though eventually engaging with the latter), neglects to confront the myriad contradictions of Stanwyck’s early life, and fails to articulate how the actor’s wellsprings of emotion were fed by her life’s surfeit of tragedy. I love a door-stop biography, particularly one about ‘20s and ‘30s America, and Stanwyck is one of my favourite actors, but Steel True massively outstays its welcome. As better critics than I have already pointed out: Wilson is a book editor in need of a book editor. This book is 860 pages long and ends when Stanwyck is 33.

Theory

is not something for which my brain is necessarily equipped, but I did try, reading Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: A User's Guide (2014), because I have been pretending to know about economics for years, simply regurgitating a few facts I remember from A-level politics. Chang's admirable attempts to create an accessible work unfortunately lead to him explaining who Martin Freeman is, but not what supply side economics is, but I have remembered at least two more facts for when I'm shouting at people I don't know on Twitter.



God's Funeral (1999) by A. N. Wilson purports to chart the decline of theism and faith within 19th century intellectualism, but doesn't quite do that, instead offering witty, wide-ranging pen-portraits of many major thinkers. I found it a lot livelier than Rupert Shortt's well-meaning but stodgy God Is No Thing, which has rare moments of profundity – like when examining scripture to debunk the idea that Heaven is a Christians-only club – but is hard to grasp. Or indeed read.

Football

is always more comfortable ground for me. Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (2004/2013) is still mentioned in hushed tones and rightly so, challenging much of what I thought I knew about football, and giving me an arsenal of good stories in the process.



Pete Davies' All Played Out (1995), the 'inside story' of my favourite World Cup (1990), is often cited as the great football book, so I picked up a copy to read between televised matches this time around. Boy can Davies write – and write emotively – when he wants to, ruminating on the suffocating horror of a visit to Auschwitz or the bitter glory of England’s semi-final defeat, and his access to Bobby Robson and his squad is truly remarkable, but too much of the book is about his personal itinerary, which evokes the breathless, sleepless insanity of what he terms ‘Planet Football’ but isn’t terribly compelling in itself, and makes the book an odd jumble of elements, alongside some laboured running jokes, and a little too much score-settling (though Davies is nothing if not even-handed in his portraits of the press, the fans and the England camp). His book is more incisive and insightful than James Erskine’s thin, glossy film adaptation, capturing some essential truths about what football gives us, and operating as a vivid snapshot of a turning point in the sport’s culture – hooliganism juddering in its death throes as rampant commercialism raps on the door – but it’s more uneven and self-indulgent than I expected: in World Cup terms, a Denilson rather than a Ronaldo. Andrew Downie's Doctor Socrates (2017) was more a Dunga, lacking the grace and spontaneity of its cult subject, and making claims about his political credos that it simply couldn't cash.

Comedy

James Acaster's Classic Scrapes (2017) is rather wonderful. I laughed out loud on the first page, and carried on in a similar vein from there. This succession of stories about Acaster messing stuff up, often in spectacular fashion, is inevitably uneven but frequently painfully funny. The story about the singer in his nu-metal band is genuinely one of the funniest things I have ever read (it made me cry with laughter on a train) and ‘Fell Foot Sound’ and ‘Cabadging’ are both classics, though there’s at least one great joke in even the most minor scrapes, and the cumulative effect – with most of them littered with callbacks – is joyous. Though the efforts to segue from one tale to the next are a little laboured, and Acaster’s written voice isn’t always as striking as the one he employs in stand-up (I think because it shouldn’t just be the same, even if sharing that sublime deadpan incredulity), now and then he’ll throw in something moving or profound. Mostly though it’s just very, very funny, which is really what you want from a comedy book. I haven’t laughed this hard at a book in a couple of years.



And finally: Elis and John present The Holy Vible: The Book The Bible Could Have Been by Elis James and John Robins (2018) My favourite podcast in the whole wide world becomes – if not my favourite book in the whole wide world – then definitely a book. And a proper book: not a lazy cash-in, but a labour of love (Elis’s labour not quite as heavy as John’s) from the two greatest men in the world (except my dad and Tom Waits). Individual chapters – typically written by one or the other – can be deeply beautiful, especially John’s on Queen and Oxford, and Elis’s on Gorky’s and the Welsh language, but my favourite bits are the interactions between the two, which is obviously the great joy of a double-act, and especially this one. Those are spotlighted in two chapters that consist purely of comic riffs – an editorial decision necessitated by Elis’s lack of administrative prowess and concurrent submission of a chapter that was “absolute dogshit” – and in the numerous, hilarious footnotes, which are mocking, appealing, affectionate and full of lovely and familiar in-jokes. A bit more here if you want it.

***

Thanks for reading. Live stuff next, then filums.