Interesting, rather finely written, historical novel, of a young man in 1785 given the task of digging up and destroying an ancient cemetery (les Innocents), finding himself, his love, his friends, almost death. It’s an almost Booker nom. We shall hear more from this chap.

A boy, called Michael, at the age of eight, leaves Sri Lanka, Ceylon, to voyage to a new life at an English boarding school. Readable.

He was the clear sensible voice explaining the void that was Wall Street. Now he explains the meaning of the imminent third world debt, Greece, Ireland, Spain. A house of cards ready to collapse. His precise and concise prose helps one through the unbelievable murky miasma of what began as a US Ponzi scheme, and which seems to have ruined the world, through teaching Wall Street Greed. Though in the Greeks case a well-deserved exception may be made. A people so corrupt and so entitled, well, not much of a chance they’ll change, so they’ll default… Timeo Danaos ut dona ferente.

Yay. I loved this. I felt very guilty about not loving his Booker winning novel, but this made me very happy indeed.  Not only is he very very funny, he is also wise, and gently provocative, milking sacred cows, exposing clichés and shabby and “correct” thinking. There’s a lifetime of wisdom in these occasional pieces. I can only recommend you buy three copies and give two to a friend. (I tried this for Christmas and Amazon is shockingly out of print.) And yes I will try his last novel again…

Sadly this book fails to catch fire. It’s supposed to be a thriller, a digital world thriller about a schizophrenic billionaire in Switzerland who has invented an algorithm which predicts and eventually controls the stock market bringing about a crash. But this H.G. Wells world of out of control machines controlling the financial future of Wall Street never quite rings true, it all reads like a film. The point about the novel is that it is still the best form of storytelling, since it gets inside the minds of the characters. Yes fine actors can imply what a character is thinking, and with music and close ups it is certainly possible to reveal much of the interior life of a character, but nothing is quite so good at telling us what a person thinks, and incidentally what the author thinks of what that person thinks, than the novel. So that when the characters are cardboard thin, and the emphasis is mainly on what happens next, then the experience of reading is thin, as here. In a real action novel, a detective or thriller for example, the best thing to do is to strip away all adjectives and keep only minimal scene description, and concentrate on short sentences that describe physical activity (see Thomas Perry who is brilliant at this). Harris is fatally wounded by his attempt to write a good book at the same time. Also he falls into a trap of his own cleverness, with technology, so we who do not share his cleverness, kinda skip the tech bits. I think The Ghost is a very good book (in the US The Ghost Writer) and not half a bad movie either, because it was about something, the appalling smugness and self centered behavior of Tony Blair, a man who seems but little to know himself let alone the appalling consequences of his actions, so that he is a tragic figure, a man who could have been Pitt, who turns into the pits. Some of Harris’ other books I found difficult to read. I did get through Pompeii, but I abandoned Lustrum. Of course he is a best seller, and this will be a big hit, so it doesn’t matter to him, but it matters to me, as some writers can pull off popularity and greatness and that is surely the goal. So sadly I think you can skip this.

Searching for the Real Sarah Palin A total pleasure. Everything you had ever suspected about the housewife superstar. Read and enjoy folks. I’d describe it as a guilty pleasure but since I have no religion I have no guilt. If only someone had done this job on the fledgling Bush think of the harm that could have been spared. No Iraq war, no Bush recession, no shrill voices demanding smaller government while bankrupting the country… Sarah Palin believes in God. It would be unkind to wonder whether God believes in Sarah Palin. People who believe they are chosen by God are worrying. It is one of the signs of madness. Joe McGinniss should be thanked for risking his life by living next door to this vindictive couple and their dysfunctional family. They could have been the Dysfunctional First Family. Not any more I trust. I laughed and cringed out loud. Enjoy!

Why Truman Capote (almost) wrote Answered Prayers A psychobiography of Truman Capote. This is a form of biography I was unaware of and I must say I like it. It makes a lot of sense, taking primal scenes from the life of the author and seeing how these themes work out in the pattern of their lives. Here his theme is to attempt to discover whatever made Capote so crazy as to turn round and bite all those rich and famous upper crust people in New York by exposing them in the incomplete fragments of Answered Prayers. His fancy Society friends dropped him overnight, and never spoke to him again, yet he must have anticipated this. Apparently not. There is much sense and sensibility about his relationship with Perry Smith, the gay one of the two killers of In Cold Blood. This book cost Capote years of effort and pain and work, at the end of which he had to attend the executions of his two protagonists, (at their request) which he bravely and painfully did. Watching two men who have become friends (and possibly lovers) hanged in front of your eyes, well you can see why the alcoholic drug laden path lay ahead, poor man. He was an incomparable talent. I happen to love Breakfast at Tiffany’s and take a great deal of guilty pleasure in Answered Prayers and I very much liked this short psychobiography in a series into which I shall dip further.

A wonderful mad cap dash through the incredible and hilarious and at times farcical life of this not very nice man. I really enjoyed it. He was a kind of Regency rock star and as Caroline Lamb said “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Buy it and read in amazement.

As fine a written a short novella as you could wish to read. A kind of magical tale of an Auschwitz victim, prisoner, saved through his unlikely skill of being an expert violin maker. That odd conjunction of pure evil with the sublime. Just great.

This is a tale of the West Indies and how immense profits came into the hands of those entrepreneurs and slave owning families, when Sugar was the Oil of the 18th Century, the cause of wars and fortunes. I shall probably leave it here in France to return to another year. Actually I took it with me on my travels, but eventually abandoned it not because it wasn’t interesting, or because it was very heavy hauling it round the world, but because it wasn’t gripping. And it should be. Also there is a kind of general acceptance of slavery without the complete horror of the state and practise of this extraordinary evil. This may be too severe criticism of what is an interesting book, but I’m trying to explain why I suddenly lost interest. The tales of the islands – particularly the sides taken by Cavaliers and Roundheads during Cromwellian times - are funny. A continuation of a very British quarrel in the West Indies. The sheer death and destruction and plunder and greed and piracy (buccaneering!) is breath taking. The constant invasion of other islands. The bringing of hell to Paradise, the massacres of civilians, the death and destruction of huge invading forces, victims of disease and lack of water, planning and supply, all a far cry from the cricket playing Paradise of sandy beaches and sunsets…

The tragic, untold story of the Duchess of Windsor which seems neither tragic nor untold. Behind Closed Bores might be more accurate as he writes at enormous length and whenever possible about himself and his very minor role in the funeral of two Kings, Edward and George. I shall probably dip a bit again some other year in Provence as I never found anything very interesting and there must be something interesting in here. It seems pathetically royalist. Wallis Simpson: the less you know of her the more fascinating she is.

Which I find fascinating as he is writing about the perception of the Great War, in its poetry and novels and monuments, as much as his own fascination with the horror of trench warfare. I was drawn to it by having seen the magnificent production of Warhorse in London, which made me weep buckets. It’s a very fine book, and his observations are telling and interesting, particularly his theme of Remembrance and Remembering, and his description of the outpouring of public monument building in the twelve short years before the World was at it again.

A wonderful, tender, poetical book about literature and writing and being the son of a father who was a very special comic writer. His love and support for Kingsley and his tender recounting of his various times with him, including helping him die, is reflected in his own life, with various upheavals, and the sadness of leaving children behind in failed marriages, so that while he repeats some of the same patterns as his father, he never falls into the comic alcoholism of Kingsley. In fact we learn very little of his own wives and marriages – a deliberate choice, so that there is no bitterness in the book, only kindness and wisdom and regret. Even the Fourth Estate, who blast him for leaving his long time agent, and for having his appalling dental problems fixed in New York, only come in for a sad side swipe here and there, and he is remarkably gentle over his long-time pal Barnes dumping him, because he was married to Pat Kavanagh, the agent Amis let go. Actually he saves all his well-founded contempt of the fourth estate to an appendix and a blistering attack on Eric Jacobs, who was to have been KA’s literary biographer, but who noxiously and poisonously and typically could not resist writing cruel and untrue things in the Sunday Times about the funeral from which he himself was banned. The final theme of the book, the dreadful murder of his niece Lucy Partington, by the foul serial killer Frederick West, a recurring and dreadful theme, as she was missing for several years before the truth, and then mercifully not all of it, finally emerged, reaches its culmination in the permission of his Aunt to write about poor Lucy, only after she has seen his youngest daughter and seen her own daughter in her. The recurring healing power of children… (The cowardly brutal evil West commits suicide in Winson Green Prison, suicide being an occasional theme in this book, as also wickedness itself, which culminates in a visit to Auschwitz. ) This is a loving and remarkable book, from a brilliant man, and a loving father.

A very touching short story about the dying Duchess under the care/imprisonment of the appalling French lawyer Maître Blum. Her life and memory are both slipping away, and it is beautifully imagined and written, and far and away the most sympathetic she will ever appear in print.

A very light book to travel with. And autographed I see. It’s actually three short stories, the first one of which, about a skinny boy boxer, who builds and defends his reputation against The Goat, a thicker set boy, builds up to a classic fight, but it is about much more, growing up, maturing, becoming a man. I shall save the other two here in Provence.

Not over impressed by a book heavily recommended by Mr. B’s in Bath but I’ll leave it here in France and try again, and have a go at his first book:

Perhaps my favourite Mailer. He writes so marvellously. In many ways in this book he writes a little like Scott Fitzgerald. It concerns Hollywood, but viewed from the distance of Palm Springs, here called Desert D’Or, with wholly recognisable figures, such as Orson Welles and Marilyn Monroe with whom the ex-flyer hero has a huge affair. Largely about love and sex and the connection, if any, between them. Lots of other excellent characters: pimps, and queens and hangers on in the monstrous dictator world of the Studios, controlled by morally bankrupt heads and mediated by the Committee for Un American activities. This is a most honest book because he tackles and captures the conflicts and hesitations men feel about sex and physical love. The Deer Park is a pleasure ground of the sexually available (Is this Roman or French?) which here is used as a metaphor for Hollywood. Nothing is clear cut, nothing is self-evident, ambivalence is everywhere. It shows relationships working and not working at the same time. The completely contradictory feelings it is possible to experience about the loved one: lust, hatred, contempt, arousal and indifference. He is on to something new here I think, our ambivalence about ourselves and our desires. The novel is set amongst the corruption of the Studio World, the commercialisation of an apparent art form and the temptation to a young writer (obviously here Mailer writes of himself) to shag the beautiful and take the money. It explores hypocrisy, and how people become users of each other. All for HT, the exploitive Studio Head who is powerfully connected to the Subversive Committee and their goons. In the ambivalent figure of Welles, we see the self-loathing of the creative director at the mercy of commercial Hollywood, torn between his lust for the beautiful and his frustration with the stupid, while revealing his heartlessness, selfishness and snobbery: the ageing roué amongst a world of constantly available fresh meat. This is still true of contemporary Hollywood society and sadly hinders men committing to relationships there.

Stephen’s book is most interesting, about the discovery by the medieval book searcher Poggio di Baldisarri of an ancient copy of Lucretius Poem On The Nature of Things. Poggio’s happy discovery and his copying of this ancient text, saves the book from extinction and has profound effects on the world, including, he argues, starting the Reformation. He also suggests that this extraordinary poem is a classical statement of the real views of Epictetus, which profoundly influence modern science, and ultimately, through Thomas Jefferson, and the Pleasure Principle, to the concept of the Pursuit of Happiness, which sadly modern Yanks have replaced with the Pursuit of Money and Fame. I get to discuss this book with Stephen in October at Writers Block. I’m already worried what I might possibly add to the debate…

In Bath I picked up a lovely little Collectors Library edition and very much enjoyed it. It’s ages since I read this novel and I really loved it. She is so funny. Like Dickens she is very good at hypocrisy. Lack of self-knowledge is the key to her comedy; characters say one thing and act another, revealing their true selves, for instance the “poverty” of the half-brother who is persuaded by his wife to give Mrs Dashwood (the surviving wife) and her three daughters, absolutely nothing. This is more than irony this is savage irony (Swift – saevo indignation) which Dickens perfects. She has a clear eye to the folly and pretensions of society – living unhappily in Bath between 1801 and 1806, before she finally escaped to Clifton. Her first four novels were published anonymously. She does not do the Dickens thing of addressing the reader directly, where he involves himself in the suffering of society, there is no pulpit with Austen, but she is always there at your elbow, often with killer understatements. It is satire as much as irony, comedy with sentiment. The story revolves around the awakening of Sense in the giddy younger sister Marianne as opposed to Sensibility (Feelings, in the full sentimentality of the song.) The heroine Elinor sees all and suffers all in her sisters tragedy of unrequited love, but poor nflighty Marianne does not die of love. Almost. She goes through suffering to wisdom. Like all Jane Austen’s books it is about money, the lack of it, expectations of inheriting it, finding suitable men to marry with or without it. There is almost no male mentioned who does not have a price attached. This, one feels, is very close to the society of Bath which she was able to observe so closely. I loved it.

I continued my reading of the excellent Beevor, with this study of the return of de Gaulle to Paris, and the stories of Hemmingway etc. Unfinished and left in France for later travel. I squirrel books away in France so I don’t have to carry them all the time…

A magnificent history of the nemesis that awaited the civilians of Berlin, Prussia and Eastern Germany with the arrival of the Red Army. Four million rapes, twelve year olds on bikes trying to stop tanks, the full irony of the cowardly end of the grotesque Nazi leadership.

The best of these unrelated articles is Season on the Chalk, about the huge belts of chalk that form the English South Downs and Beachy Head (the White Cliffs of Dover) and then go under the channel, emerging in the champagne district of France. Filled with interesting facts about chalk and why it isn’t limestone, facts I have sadly already forgotten…

I couldn’t decide whether it was merely interesting at times or truly awful. About a wife who organises her husband into an affair with a celebrity whom she adores. An odd creature. I read it though, so she can tell a story.

A fine short novel. Very good. Booker winner surely. A must read.

A fine and very well written brief history of the Regency Period. She writes well, and is particularly good at set pieces. The Peterloo Massacre is very well done for example. Much about the Prince Regent, (later George IV) his wife Caroline, and people such as Byron and Caroline Lamb. I think she is really good.