Dickens and "utterly unreasonable compassion"

Having of late and very gladly taken my turn as a missionary for the exalted name of Charles Dickens, I was pleased back in February to attend the wreath-laying at Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, that marked the bicentennial of the great man’s birth. 

I went along not expecting the ceremony to be a huge deal, rather more interested in the prospect of seeing the Abbey in full formal regalia, and also the outside prospect of some top-quality people-watching. (Simon Callow had made it plain that all true believers should shun the Abbey and make their way to Portsmouth for the day; but then Simon Callow was not someone I’d been hoping to snag a glimpse of.)

I had a slight wardrobe malfunction at the door to the Abbey, an impeccable usher leaning to my ear to murmur, ‘May I remind you, sir, of the formality in respect of hats...?’ For I was in fact wearing one, and it had simply hadn't occurred to me that a man must go bare-headed into church... Anyhow, once inside, I was allotted a nice seat right on top of Gladstone's grave. After the solemn entrance of HRH the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, and a lovely airing from Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony, we were treated to a consummate and notably upbeat assessment of Dickens and his legacy by Claire Tomalin, and a very controlled and intense reading of the death of Jo from Bleak House by Ralph Fiennes. 

But to my surprise my favourite address was that given by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is obviously a smart man, though in the past that hasn’t stopped him from saying a lot of fatuous things – fatuous even by the low standards of what clever Anglicans are forced to say just on account of the collars round their necks. But literary appreciation is evidently a strength of his. I have quite never been able to bear the thought of his book on Dostoyevsky, but quite possibly this has been my loss. His best observations on Dickens were in respect of the ticklish issue of caricature, melodrama, excessive emotion and what have you. Very accurately he praised Dickens’ gift for depicting characters who are in advanced states of inner torment – ‘in hell’, as was the forgivable gloss – and pointed out that what is often their salvation in Dickens is an “utterly unreasonable compassion" that shakes the dungeon and “because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.” It is the very same excess that leaves many of us in bits over Dostoyevsky, and Williams was, I daresay, promoting the connection quite deftly. 

On the star-gazing front, by the way, I feel I need only report that I made my way out of the Abbey side by side with Ron Moody - The People’s Fagin, no question. A cherishable moment.

David Storey & 'This Sporting Life': Me on Radio 3

Back in early March BBC Radio 3 kindly broadcast a contribution of mine to their regular 'Essay' series. In that particular week all the contributions were on the theme of representations of sport, and grouped under the heading 'Listener, They Won It.' I'd been asked to pick a film that gives an especially good audio-visual account of how a particular sport is played and experienced. Pretty much without hesitation I chose the film version of David Storey's novel This Sporting Life, directed by Lindsay Anderson in 1963. Thanks to BBC iPlayer you can still listen to the edited broadcast here; and what follows is the text that I read out:

"The opening credits of Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life are accompanied by a musical score so nerve-straining and ominous, it could lead you to expect some kind of spy thriller set in Cold War Berlin – or maybe a tense war drama about young squaddies patrolling the Malayan jungle – either of which would have been perfectly viable subjects for a British film in the early 1960s.

But then we start to hear the unmistakable din of a crowd watching live sport. Then comes a credit thanking Wakefield Trinity rugby league football club, for their ‘generous co-operation’ in the making of what we’re about to see. The music turns a shade more muted and melancholy. And, with that, we’re thrown directly into the thick of battle.

A rugby ball rolls loose over turf: a player lunges for it but it’s booted clear of his grasp. Cut to a defensive tackle, made rather high – round the attacking player’s neck, wrangling him to the ground – but quickly he recycles the ball behind him with a scrape of his boot. The attack resumes: another player makes a purposeful run, ‘handing off’ a defender as he goes. The crowd noise rises. Already you feel the pace of this game, the size and force and fierceness of the big men in the frame.

The attack gains ground in the teeth of more tackles, and the camera tracks to keep pace with play. A man goes down in the mud but, again, he heels the ball back to a teammate. Suddenly half a dozen passes are strung together. The crowd roars. Then the ball’s in the hands of the ‘loose forward’ – the team’s fastest runner, Frank Machin, who barges his way through – not so much ‘handing off’ as elbowing defenders aside – to ground the ball over the try-line for a score.

Straight away there’s a defender right up in Machin’s face – they eyeball one another and butt their barrel chests. Cut to a scrum – the camera down at eye-level of both rows before they lock heads, then up with Machin as he retrieves and passes the ball. But no sooner has he released than an opponent darts around the scrum and punches him smack in the mouth, making a bloody mess of his front teeth. This is what the late Bill MacLaren, the BBC’s beloved ‘voice of rugby’, might have called ‘a wee bit of argy-bargy’...

Except MacLaren’s game was rugby union, one of the sport’s two rival codes, divided not just by a rule book but by social class and geography. In a British context, for sure, rugby union is southern and bourgeois. But This Sporting Life is a tale of rugby league: unambiguously a game of the north and of industrial working-class men who, back at the end of the nineteenth century, simply couldn’t afford to give up their Saturday wages and play their sport at leisure, in the union manner, as ‘gentlemen amateurs.’ And so, in 1895, the northern and southern clubs formally went their separate ways.

It was the Union game that I was taught to play as a boy, at a grammar school that fancied itself as a bit fancy (such that association football was considered totally uncouth, even though we all kicked a ball around the schoolyard at lunchtime.) And I could see that Union was more ‘sophisticated’ than League in terms of rules and tactics: hence its reputation as the game of ‘kick and clap.’ But, being a bit on the wiry side as a lad, I was less keen on how Union favoured the chunkier sort of player just because of the primacy it gave to the scrummage.

In League, a scrum is hardly more than a ritual for getting the game restarted. But scrummage is really the trademark of Union: its visual signature of big mastodon-like blokes knuckling down to heave for the try-line; that sense of a ponderous stop-start battle fought in winter mud. Of course League has never lacked for ‘muck and nettles’ either. But it is faster, and more free-flowing – offers more opportunity for flourishes of individual artistry. Certainly it’s the kind of rugby I’ve always preferred.

To argue that one code is tougher or more demanding than the other would only be a pointless provocation. Let’s just say that in League as in Union, toughness as a masculine virtue is very obviously prized. Neither of them are games for retiring types or faint-hearts. And yet, by the law of averages, you will occasionally find that beneath a rugby shirt beats the heart of a poet. One such poet is David Storey, who is perhaps the boldest and most accomplished of those English writers from the 1950s who were lumped together as a movement under the label of ‘kitchen sink realism.’ This Sporting Life was Storey’s first published novel, which he duly turned into a  screenplay for Lindsay Anderson. And in common with his later work it was absolutely rooted in the life he’d actually led.

Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1933, Storey was a miner’s son and grammar school boy whose dad didn’t want him going down the pit but, rather, setting himself up in some more respectable profession. Storey was a very handy rugby player, but he had other more burning talents inside of him – painting, for one. In 1953 he signed professional forms with Leeds rugby club. But he used his signature money to pay his fees at Wakefield Art School, since his dad refused to subsidise any such bohemian ambitions.

When Storey then won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, Leeds gave him special dispensation to attend classes in London then commute back home for matches. Thus the £6 a week earned by Storey’s sporting life also funded his higher creative calling. And yet this radical divide in his young self also put Storey in a sadly familiar predicament: that of the northern proletarian artist whose self-education and high attainment act also to alienate him from whence he has come.

As Storey has told it, his Leeds teammates regarded him frostily as “the outsider from London.” Meanwhile at the Slade School he was taken for “a bit of an oaf.” It got to be that the only time he could find solace was in those solitary London-to-Leeds train rides; and it was in this solitude that the painter began to write, and a novel emerged. Its title came to Storey in a remark he overheard on the radio: ‘This sporting life’ somebody said, ‘is gonna be the death of me…’

But his real inspiration had been a particular experience on the pitch. Though no shrinking violet, Storey had a very rational fear of getting seriously injured in a game. And once, when a loose ball fell at his feet and his instinct told him to stoop and collect it, he was sure in that same instant that to do so would earn him a kick in the face. So he held back, and one of his older teammates took the ball, and duly received that dreaded boot to the teeth. Though Storey had got away unscathed, he did have to accept a short four-lettered rebuke from his veteran teammate, and he felt guilty – that guilt turning, upon reflection, to an imaginative sympathy, one that led Storey to describe This Sporting Life not as an autobiographical work but rather more the tale of ‘the guy I caused to have his teeth kicked in.’

And this is the guy we meet in the opening reel of Lindsay Anderson’s film. Frank Machin is played by the young Richard Harris, himself a gifted rugby player in his teens before he left Limerick for drama studies in London. And the camera can’t lie: Harris looks like a player – big and burly, but athletic, his eyes intensely focused under a no-nonsense haircut. A tough guy, for sure. But it’s no accident that the movie starts with Machin losing his front teeth; for in the drama that follows he’s forced to endure any number of hard knocks.

After that assault on his mouth we see that Machin is of sufficient value to his club that he can demand to be chauffeur-driven to a private dentist, there to be fitted for a plate at ten guineas. ‘Come on’, he chides the dentist through swollen lips, ‘whatever the bloody price...’ But as the nitrous oxide gas delivers him to unconsciousness, so the film begins to bleed the past into the present: a bold editing style that mirrors Storey’s novel and lets us into Machin’s life – the path he took to sporting glory, and the thorny question of whether it was worth the effort.

The younger Machin we meet as a local lad at a Saturday dance, a hothead, wild enough to pick a fight with a player from the City rugby team. But afterward Machin badgers the team’s aged talent-spotter to get him a trial; and the scout can tell, Machin obviously has something burning inside him that demands expression.

The trial is a triumph. Machin’s ball-running skills are abundantly clear, though he’s nearly thwarted by a teammate, Gower, who obstinately won’t pass to him. So at the next available scrum, with the referee’s vision obscured, Machin smacks Gower in the mouth: proof, if it were needed, that he’s not to be messed with – though the viewer does get the sense that what goes around will come around.

What also comes over from these superb rugby sequences is the skilful eye of director Lindsay Anderson, then at the outset of a movie career marked by a preference for gritty material that belied his upper-middle-class background. But then his Cheltenham schoolmate and friend the writer Gavin Lambert remembered Anderson as always playing a very ‘efficient game of rugger.’ Anderson’s natural style was a kind of poetic social realism, and one sees this in the way that he repeatedly frames Richard Harris on the field: waist up from a low angle against a great grey Yorkshire sky – gladiatorial, mud on his shirt, exertion etched upon his face.

Having proven his worth in trial, Machin is signed up for a thousand pounds by City’s industrialist owner Mr Weaver, and he soon becomes a hero to the team’s support. Away from the pitch, though, the emotional crux of the film is really Machin’s turbulent relationship with his landlady Mrs Hammond, a woman with two children, widowed by an industrial accident at Mr Weaver’s factory. Perpetually terse and fraught, Mrs Hammond keeps her late husband’s boots by the hearth, always polished to a shine. Machin looks at those boots, and at Mrs Hammond’s handsomeness, and her obvious repression and unhappiness, and he determines that he will drag her free of the little world that’s oppressing her – one whose leash he believes he has already escaped. He cannot see that he is laying claim to ownership of her, just as Mr Weaver owns a contract on him.

Meantime, Frank’s star rises: he buys a Bentley and a cashmere coat, escorts Mrs Hammond wreathed in furs to a fancy restaurant. But his behaviour is obnoxious and embarrassing. He wants to see himself as entirely his own man, principled, heroic, protesting society’s limits, careless of material things. But this blinkered, battering kind of individualism only serves to make him enemies, even out of people he claims to love.
 

Lindsay Anderson saw This Sporting Life as ‘a tragedy’, and it is, in the sense that it expresses superbly the lonesome plight of a sportsman who has contrived to ruin his life everywhere other than on the field of play; and must realise, moreover, that his glory days are numbered.

As his Local Hero status recedes, Machin discovers that he’s not really so special: in the eyes of the crowd, only ‘a great ape’, a surrogate for lesser men who pay their ticket and so pay his wages, just to live vicariously by his efforts for eighty minutes or so.

Late on in the film, with Machin’s personal life unravelling, Anderson shoots one match in the manner of a battle scene, with no sound but a harsh percussive score, and images of weary, filthy bodies crashing dazedly into one another – a plangent sense of cold and exhaustion and pain – ignorant armies clashing on a darkling plain.

The final sequence is yet more painful, as Anderson frames Machin in the last of those low-angle shots from waist-up, looking older and slower and more easily hurt in the tackle. The floodlights are on in the winter dusk, the cooling towers of gasworks overshadow the pitch. And as Machin stands, bruised and battered, his breath condensing in the air, one voice from the crowd cuts through the din. ‘Come on Machin! Get a bloody move on!’ Those ‘lesser men’ have renounced their former idol. Resignedly, heavy-footedly, he jogs back into the fray. This sporting life, we understand, will be the death of him – and it’s wisdom dearly bought. But – in the hands of David Storey and Lindsay Anderson – elevated to the level of poetry.

Dear diary...

In my late teens (this would be 1988) I began to keep a diary, and this peculiar habit sustained me for several years, its upside being that I nearly always knew what I was thinking, its downside being that I nearly always knew what I was thinking... In those days one had ample time to order one’s thoughts; but then order in one’s affairs can quite quickly become oppressive.

In my late thirties (this would be 2008) I began to blog, and did so fairly diligently for a couple of years, the upside being that I was able to curate all sorts of written opinions on the issues that concern me, the downside being that these came to bear a rather strained relationship to the writing that I did for a living... Time is money, these days, I find, and one has to be mindful of succumbing to luxury.

Looking back, we can all say of ourselves - can't we? - that we have been a succession of selves rather than one integrated individual. And yet, the effort does persist to try to pull it all together... I’m going to have another go at it here.

Becoming Boz: Me, Buenos Aires, Charles Dickens, Lionel Messi

I know, I know, back I come, tail between my legs... My excuse this time is that I moved house, and to some extent we're still unpacking. Even prior to that I ought to have written up my adventures last November teaching Dickensian descriptive writing in Argentina - or at least linked to this essay of mine like so, which gives my more or less complete thoughts on the matter.
My sponsor was the British Council, with whom I very much hope to work again in future, and they've graciously added me to their directory of UK writers here.

Gilbert Adair 1944-2011

So Gilbert Adair is gone, and the fine tributes that have followed already are a splendid expression of his achievements as a writer, as well as the good friends and impressions that he made everywhere.
I first discovered Gilbert Adair for myself as a young reader at a time (the mid 1980s) when he was one of a select band of critical writers whose acute literary-visual sensibilities made cinema feel like a significant 20th-century creative endeavour, and a lustrous aesthetic universe that was well worth exploring. Gilbert wrote widely and with great finesse about film: there was wit and playfulness there, as well as a severe assessing eye. My regard for him only grew as I learned of his accomplishments in literary translation (mainly French, clearly his passion); and then around 1989 he began to publish novels, in which all of his reading and viewing were intensely present but which nonetheless wore their learning lightly and offered all sorts of clever and impish pleasures. Love and Death in Long Island, his sly twist on the classic perverse erotic-obsessive classics of Mann and Nabokov, was a book that had me in stitches (and I think of it still whenever I happen to glance at the teenage pop fan-mag sections of any London newsagent's wares...)
A bit later in life I shared an office at Faber and Faber with Gilbert's editor and friend Walter Donohue, and by these means I was very pleased to make his acquaintance. There was both a careful privacy and a sort of refinedly performative quality about him that indicated you would have to work diligently to know him better. But certainly any meeting with Gilbert would be memorable for the range of glittering subject matters that would be raised and rated in quickfire fashion.
When I put together a playful book of cinephile film lists called Ten Bad Dates with De Niro I was delighted that Gilbert made a contribution: a stunningly varied selection of noteworthy films that had (for an assortment of reasons) rather vanished from the face of the earth. Gilbert stuck up for the so-called lesser works of auteurs, cult efforts that deserved better than extinction, and pictures unfairly denigrated by critical fashion (including, perhaps inevitably, Adrian Lyne's Lolita...) In this small way it was a pleasure to work with Gilbert, and to experience close-up (as in his freely expressed opinion of the book's title and artwork) his exquisite taste.
In the range of his interests and writings, and the prodigious way in which he turned his hand to storytelling of his own, Gilbert was a model of the critic-turned-practitioner. To have adapted his novel The Dreamers into a screenplay filmed by Bertolucci has to be as good as it gets for any true cinephiliac. I remember him well at an early screening of the picture, highly nervous of course, but evidently living something of a dream, and deservedly so. (That's him and the maestro in the picture above.)
Thinking back I realise I first saw and heard Gilbert - having admired him for some time only on the page - when he introduced a BBC screening of some films by Cocteau, and offered a typically brilliant and succinct biographical-artistic portrait of the great man. He referred to Cocteau at one point as a 'crackerjack of all trades'; and I daresay Gilbert himself is deserving of a similar sort of epitaph. Moreover he was a special man with his very own charm and you can see already how much he's missed.

Crusaders, and "proper novels"...

Amid the broad spectrum of print reviews garnered by my Crusaders back in 2008 (the 'broad' being a huge bonus for a debut-novelist, and the 'spectrum' probably a necessary corollary of his fledgling level of attainment) I seem to remember the Telegraph, both Daily and Sunday, being kind enough to review the novel while finding a fair few things to criticise as well as praise. Fair do's; and for that very reason I was pleasd to see that in his Telegraph round-up of the best fiction of 2011 Keith Miller made a point (in the course of extolling the most recent novel by Philip Hensher) of offering a rather kind comparison:
"Like Richard T Kelly’s Crusaders of 2008, it is a proper, fat, politically and ethically engaged condition-of-England novel..."
Nothing else to say, really, other than 'Cheers Keith'...

Durham Big Debate: A resilience test for the North East

Last month I had two distinctive engagements at the Durham Book Festival: the first being the furthering of my nefarious plot to re-infect the modern world with Late Victorian Gothic (for a report on which see here); the second the presentation of an essay commissioned from me by the Festival and addressing the prospects for the economy of North East England in the depressed years that lie ahead. That essay was published locally as a pamphlet, and its text is available online here.
I discussed the essay's various arguments in a panel event on Saturday October 22, chaired by the FT’s Chris Tighe, at which I was privileged to sit down and reason alongside Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, Paul Woolston (chair of the North East Local Economic Partnership) and Professor John Tomaney from the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. I found the session very energetic, with some good pointed contributions from the floor, though inevitably more dimensions to the debate were opened up than could be adequately explored within the time-slot.
I spent several months mulling over/interviewing for/writing up the essay, an absorbing experience. Can I summarise my findings? Well, I suppose I came to my brief feeling – as I had when I last addressed the subject for Prospect back in 2008 – that the North East is blessed by its industrious heritage, its natural resources, and its people, with all their rightly legendary qualities of resilience; and yet also beset by its particular and substantive share in Britain’s long twentieth-century decline. Even in 2008, as one sensed the tide going out again, it was easier to feel buoyed by the benefits the region had enjoyed from new kinds of jobs, urban regeneration, better living standards. Today, with UK PLC in such a hole, one has to worry for a region under a government that undervalues its strengths and doesn’t believe in ‘regions’ anyway; a government, moreover, that is offering a ‘growth plan’ not unreasonably described by David Miliband (that’s the MP for South Shields) as ‘risibly, depressingly thin.’
We’ve known for long enough that British business needs to innovate more in profitable new growth sectors and to export more of that innovation to emerging markets. Apparently our main innovation goes in the fields of market research, advertising and branding, management consultancy... Not what my granddad would have called ‘proper work’, though a living, for sure. But if your chief skills are selling hot air and processing bullshit you can’t claim surprise if your former ‘emerging market’ then becomes your master.
The thing people in the South East especially like to forget about the North East is that it still makes stuff and exports it: fine and bulk chemicals and pharmaceuticals; tracks and cast armour for tanks; diggers, and a whole lot of cars at Nissan. The North East’s subsea sector has had global stature for three decades. (The transoceanic fibre-optic cables that enable our keen use of the internet are there thanks to seabed trenching technology originated at the firm of SMD in Wallsend.) Hitachi is readying to turn out bi-mode train carriages in Durham; the blast furnace at the former Corus steelworks in Redcar has re-fired under new ownership.
Lest people be unaware, the North East now does both metal-bashing and key-pushing. (Witness the FTSE-measured success of the Sage software group, an inspiration to the region’s recent rash of digital technology start-ups.) It has several world-class universities capable of translating research into commerce, most impressively in life sciences. In all the North East has notable comparative advantages, skills that aren’t so prevalent in the rest of the world; not to mention indigenous raw materials, gold beneath its feet, an entirely plausible claim to be the hub of any future low carbon/clean energy economy.
True, the region is deficient in financial services (but then lately that sector has stuck us with its own ‘dependency’, and attendant strife.) The North East has rather weightier assets, which could yet make a hefty contribution to ‘rebalancing’ the national economy.
The challenge for North East business is how to be sufficiently nimble and entrepreneurial at a time when a state-dependent outlook appears forlorn. Traditionally the region has viewed entrepreneurs as rather rare birds. Throughout the last century the done thing for North Easterners was to work for someone else, whether the Coal Board or British Steel, ICI or the Department of Work and Pensions. And yet it wasn’t ‘working for someone else’ that begat the North East’s great industrial heritage: the entrepreneurial honour-roll of Armstrong, Palmer, Merz, Reyrolle – inspired engineers who made big things happen out of little, beginning with a wager.
Heavy industry has its own fiery kind of historical romance; yet in the era of The Apprentice we know that business innovation can take lighter but still lucrative forms. Consider the more recent North East success story that is Greggs (est. 1951), which chose not to remain a ‘traditional’ baker, pleasant as that may have seemed – and a good job too, otherwise the big supermarkets would have eaten it alive. Instead it was Greggs that did the consuming, of other smaller companies, and built a new brand as a first-rate seller of takeaway food that still does a fair bit of baking.
Much as I enjoy a sausage roll, I don’t propose that the Greggs business model has universal application. But I do believe Greggs offers a useful model of ethos and drive, of seeking out the best available niche in a market that could do with a bit of entrepreneurial development, ‘a properly-engineered solution.’ Spare capacity in our economy is there to be unleashed within our Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But one can’t wag one’s finger at them, demand that they speculate to accumulate, adapt or else die. Innovation is expensive, and rarely yields a fast profit. Hiring and training aren’t cheap either, and in the North East as around the UK the skills employers require are not being readily met by the labour pool.
Right now it would seem only government can provide the impetus to the far-sighted investment in innovation and infrastructure that we know we need. Adam Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, has made eloquent calls for a state investment bank that will bypass our tarnished banking sector and lend directly to businesses. Training (and re-training) schemes in hi-tech engineering, digital and green energy vocations would not be wasted. And renewed claims for infrastructure spending, good old-fashioned ‘capital projects’, have force to them: they will create jobs, and remedy a long national deficiency. From transport links to power lines to superfast broadband... we are going to need these things if we’re to have any sort of future.
A Conservative-led government is always liable to be leery of ‘industrial policy’, with its connotations of Labour, a pre-Thatcher era and a North where it has few friends. But I believe a forward-looking Tory ought to think fully on what the state can do as an engine for economic growth, not merely a dispenser of hardship funds. And as a potential engine room for such growth, the North East is fully stocked with tools and resources.
Then again, the excellent analyst/blogger Chris Dillow has been brave enough to propose that maybe no policy fix is possible, since long-term growth “is determined by factors which governments cannot control, such as entrepreneurial spirit or the rate of monetizable innovation.” But it’s those very ungovernable factors in which one is therefore forced to invest whatever hope one has lying around spare...

NUFC: Demba Ba is a Geordie

As you's know, it’s mainly Twitter for me these days; and there the other week I was joshing with some Newcastle fan whom I’ve never met about whether we would take Andy Carroll back, in the event that Liverpool thrust him in our direction, nose and eyes averted toward high heaven... Just banter, as I say, because despite big Andy missing something of a sitter the week before he was said to link up well with Suarez in a win at the weekend. In any case, I expect the much-rumoured ‘psychological flaws’/’refuelling problems’ of the young Bensham Beast would now pose a really unsettling problem for the newly world-famous Team Spirit and United Dressing Room of Alan Pardew’s NUFC.
We are 3rd tonight, and some might say we are walking in a Demba wonderland. It’s an outstanding effort from this squad in every department, and respect is due to the manager whom some of us used to pretend was called Curbishley. Moreover these results and this placing are a useful if temporary two fingers up at free-spending bigger clubs, some of whose fans, despite their mob being several points/places behind Newcastle, are still making free with the patronising remarks online about how they’d gladly consider giving Coloccini a run in their side.
I don’t know one Newcastle fan who thinks European qualification is achievable – not unless Mike Ashley gets so drunk on New Year’s Eve that he goes out and buys half-a-dozen high-waged hot-shots with his own money. Even the much-vaunted Sky/Talksport ‘Battle for Fourth’ is hard to get excited about, since to be involved in that is only to waste a lot of quality time having to think about Spurs and Liverpool. And looking up is an impossibility, first among many reasons being quite simply that right now it looks like Man City have bought the title; and bought it in a way that makes what Jack Walker did at Blackburn with Kenny Dalglish seem hardly more substantive than what John Henry et al are now doing at Liverpool with... oh aye, Miserable Kenny. What should be the ambition be, then? To edge 'The Battle for Eighth'? To be 'North East Top Dogs'? It’s all down to the players, isn't it? God knows what they’re on right now, but I’ll have a shot of it whenever you’re ready.
Anyway, past half-way to safety... and the pleasures of this Newcastle run are in the attractive, smart, committed football that the side are playing, and also in points won that, given the low expectations back in August, almost have the sweet feeling of being stolen - or should I say twocked?

Sean Penn et al give it back to Bill Clinton

Hollywood, politics, and charitable work & donation: they certainly all do mix, whether or not you care for the theory and/or the practice. The Democrats, traditionally, have enjoyed the support of a classier, artier, wittier showbusiness crowd than have the GOP - in public, at least. The artistes who have come out in this video on behalf of ex-President Clinton's Foundation are comedic performers in the main, but there among them is Sean Penn, who has - to be fair - a certain amount of form in the knockabout tradition, and whose JP/HRO organisation for post-earthquake relief and reconstruction in Haiti have been generously assisted by the Foundation's purse. This is a fun 5 minutes, for sure. Those who recall Tony Blair's cameo in a 2007 Catherine Tate TV special may reflect that in the final comic pay-off Clinton exhibits a remarkably similar ease and apparent sense of timing in front of a camera, even alongside a professional and double-Oscar-winning mummer (not, in this instance, Sean...)

FantasyCon2011: The Possessions of Doctor Forrest by Brighton Pier...

So I’m gazing into the depths of the black mirror of my first ever fantasy-fiction convention... FantasyCon 2011, in Brighton, this Saturday October 1. I’m down to be reading from Doctor Forrest at 1030 in Room 134 of the Royal Albion Hotel. Beyond that, who knows...?
My slot is between Julia Knight and Reggie Oliver, so I’ll have to bring my game and hope that their fanbases might look kindly, if darkly, on my sacrificial offering. Perhaps I’m lucky to finish just before Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon, gets started for a reading/Q&A in the main assembly space at 1100.
The amusing conundrum is the choice of what to read for 20 minutes or so. One gets into a certain pattern after having done a few events with a book, and it’s only in the last few outings that I’ve tried to vary things a little, which can be a pleasant surprise to oneself. Until now I’ve vaguely favoured readings focused on character, theme, mystery, intrigue, mood... But in a crowded programme of experienced thrill-practioners, perhaps I ought to offer the closest I can to the red meat of sensation...? Some selections from the 'Confession', perhaps? Murder by scalpel, radical surgery, taboo seduction, perhaps even ‘the speculum scene’...?
Anyhow, if you’re going to FantasyCon this Saturday or know anybody who is, please do speak of me and speak kindly and let them know where I'll be at 1030 - that's room 134, the Royal Albion! - otherwise, being a stranger by the shore and all that, it’ll likely be a case of in and out and barely time for fish and chips on the pier before I’m back off to London, no doubt with Quadrophenia on my iPod.

Financial Crisis Redux: We are all Japanese now

Very interesting this week to see the sudden, riled, edgy urging of a Plan B For Growth/Contra Recession by a good many financial journalists – this urging upon a Chancellor who clearly has wished to be seen as a Man of Iron, and whose confidence is probably rice-paper-thin right now, as the economic forecasts start to turn over the ballast in everybody’s guts. In these circumstances it’s no wonder that Ed Balls, with his mildly psychotic and probably permanent air of assurance, is unusually happy to be asked to give a lot of sound-bites on the general theme that, since everyone in the world has now stopped spending money, then it’s time for the UK to resume the practice.
I can see that George Osborne hates the thought of humiliation, maybe even more than the rest of us. I hadn’t thought he could bear the idea of calling a slippage on his deficit-reduction programme. But I’m truly curious to see what else he can do now. No amount of small-beer red-tape-cutting or enforced ‘flexibility’ upon the labour market, no greenbelt home-building or income tax tinkering can turn around the grim figures. Some big infrastructure projects – ‘public works!’ – would be the smallest start, and very welcome to my mind – but themselves inconceivable as of a few months ago, and thus a lot for Osborne to swallow. Let’s see if he can face the idea of ‘finding’ money to stuff into the public maw.
My problem with Ed Balls – sorry, one of my problems – is that I don’t believe he’s bothered by the notion of rebalancing the economy, only with slackening the pace of deficit reduction, and what that could mean for him in the eyes of Labour’s usual voters. And I don’t think that’s an adequate showing from an Opposition in these circumstances. Obviously no Opposition would put up costed plans this early in a parliament but, given the State of the Nation and the slough of public disregard that Labour's fallen into, I think they could do themselves a favour by seeming to be chomping at the bit with smart cost-efficient fiscal ideas.
I’ve been intrigued to see the amount of press play given (as here in the New York Times) to Adam S. Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, ‘a leading expert on what is often called Japan’s lost decade’ who sees the US and Europe as repeating ‘the same monetary policy mistakes that left Japan’s once-robust economy stagnant...’ Posen is nakedly advocating ‘more monetary stimulus’, and I admit I don’t see why that’s going to work now rather than before. But I’m more interested in his conviction that ‘the Bank of England and the British Treasury form a government-backed bank to make small-business loans.’
I've just written a long paper about the prospects for the North East England economy, to be discussed at the Durham Book Festival next month. It was largely concerned with urging entrepreneurialism and growth in SMEs. However I fought shy of too many policy prescriptions, just because the paper assumes tight-fisted Tories in power until 2015 at the very least. But then maybe Osborne really is about to un-constrict the spending sphincter, in which case all bets are off. If I were urging positions upon Labour now... well, business-targeted job-creating infrastructure projects, the full gamut of tax breaks for start-up businesses (research, employees, profits), establishment of sector-specific state investment banks, vocational training (also adult re-training) in hi-tech, digital and green energy skilling... yeah, I'd probably be focusing on things like that, in respect of what the state can do as an engine for growth, and not just a dispenser of hardship funds.

The Most Recent Riots of 2011

Of all the persuasive things I read in July perhaps the one that took up most solid residence among my mental furnishings was a 'tweet' by the excellent PatrickOsgood, Assistant Editor at Oil & Gas Middle East magazine: “We're screwed, right? By ‘we’ I mean flabby westerners in advanced economies...”
To wit: earlier this month I spent a week’s family holiday abroad, a proportion of which was spent watching BBCNews24, aghast, and debating the usefulness of plastic bullets in situations of violent mass public disorder... A friend with whose family we were sharing the holiday watched these bulletins alongside me with a special set of concerns – he being a producer for the BBC 10 O’Clock News, thus a keen-eyed judge of how well ‘the firm’ was doing in its coverage.
For me there was the special unease of goggling from afar at conflagration and mayhem in parts of North London (N17 and N22) where I used to live – contentedly in the main, among good people, if always feeling fairly rueful about the patches of public deprivation/squalor, and very often nervy/annoyed about the unnecessary levels of edginess on the street courtesy of young males whose chief ambition in life seemed to be making themselves look quite nasty. Still, as an impotent riot-watcher I had the consolation that my current manor (N8) was being spared too much shattering of shop windows. Instead it was Tottenham and Wood Green where the workless class of England smashed and grabbed armfuls of branded sportswear made in China and Vietnam.
I must admit, one of my most insistent feelings in watching the reportage and mulling over it was: fings ain’t what they used to be. To be precise, what I was seeing didn’t strike me as having the full-force ramifications of the Thatcher-era riots of 1981 that I remember, in Brixton, Southall, Toxteth, Moss Side et cetera. In 2011 I simply couldn’t see the point of summoning a Lord Scarman to pick over this wreckage: it just wasn’t an impressive sort of uprising. And by the time one heard the first reports of a millionaire’s daughter in court for nicking – it felt like a 'disenfranchised class'-type analysis wasn’t going to stay on its feet for long.
Arriving home again on Wednesday August 10 I found the heat had abated: the cab driver at Stansted presented me with the Sun, its front cover a mosaic of CCTV-busted rioters, the inner pages given over to a chorus of popular revulsion. Sixteen thousand additional police officers appeared to have worked the trick and laid down the law. (I understand David Cameron, unlike his Home Secretary, had been all for wheeling in the army. Good job cooler heads prevailed - I admit I was one who briefly got into a tizzy of what sort of force might be needed to dampen the rioters' ardour.)
That Wednesday night I watched the father of Haroon Jahan on the news, and burst into tears, as I suspect did others. His remarkable dignity and eloquence seemed to sum up a noticeably prevalent message: for shame. Meanwhile online I found (via Norman Geras) that Kenan Malik had said quite quickly most of what I’d been thinking. (I also endorse pretty much all of what’s written here by Will Davies at his Potlatch blog.)
In a mood of dubious nostalgia I did allow myself a glance back the other day at Alexander Cockburn’s long essay ‘The Underclass’, published by the Village Voice in January 1982, subsequently collected in Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire (Verso), and dominated by an interview with Darcus Howe, who was then billed as ‘editor of Race Today.’ Interestingly Howe spoke witheringly of a Britain ‘saturated with the concept of welfare’, a placebo that black Britain had come to see as ‘no cure for the cancer’ – the cancer being the threat of ‘permanent unemployment.’ Cockburn ended pointedly with this interpretation of events in the Manchester vicinity by Howe: ‘Whites from Withenshawe (sic), blacks from Moss Side, no prearranged plan. They gather. There is a shout, “On to Moss Side police station.’ That gives you some indication. You must have a convergence of interests in order for that to happen...’ The question, of course, is what those interests can be defined as, and what they amount to. But in any case on the occasion of the Riots of August 2011 I’ve yet to hear or read a resolute class analysis akin to Howe’s of 1981 (or rather, yet to hear or read one that wasn’t outstandingly foolish.)
Finally, what to make of Tony Blair’s contribution to the post-mortem (‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’)? Very well made, I’d say, and firmly on the side of ‘decent law-abiding’ people who don’t want their homes and livelihoods wrecked by reprehensible gang-bangers. But this reflective passage is, for me, ‘the money’:
“I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up. I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west...”
Ah yes, the fading of the West, which is where (with Patrick Osgood) we came in.
Oh, and finally (2): Blair is quite right to express irritation at sections of the media given to “a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally.” In particular one of the most irritating things about the (generally Blair-hating) tenor of left-liberal England is where it joins hands with the most reactionary right in heeding the sermons of Peter Oborne, the churchy Sherborne Tory who is very good at sounding morally vexed by everybody living outside his parish. Oborne lacks even that one highly redeeming feature of Toryism: namely its departure from the Spartan Left in seeing Man not as some perfectable socio-political unit in a grand Utopian project but, rather, as a fallen creature of whom we must simply try to make the best that we can. Still, Socialist Worker and Daily Mail meet over drinks in their shared capacity to get disgusted by the slightest traits of their fellow men and women, and that is one party from which I’ll always run a mile.

Norman Geras on the fading of blogs

Where was I...? Oh yes, Norman Geras. Proprietor of as thoughtful a weblog as you're liable to find, he made these comments last month (on the eighth anniversary of his celebrated site) in respect of some recent "difficulties in blogging":

"Some of the reasons for them are obvious: this particular debate has been had, and one doesn't feel as if there's anything to add; even if there may be, I don't feel like writing about the same thing yet again; just temporarily the 'topics of the day' don't appeal to me; even if I've got something to say, other people are already saying it, saying it a billion times - in the press, on the blogs, on Twitter; and so on. Whatever the case, until very recently I never had trouble finding what to post about; now sometimes I do. Yesterday I came across [a] post by Andrew Sullivan, in which he says that if it isn't updated at least twice daily it ain't a blog; and ideally it should be updated four or five times a day... Anyone who's blogged for any length of time will know why the rate of posting on so many blogs begins to fade, and why those who pack in blogging altogether, which is many many people, do so. And how many former bloggers now prefer Twitter, as being much less demanding of their time..."

Norm has decided to carry on, though. And so, confound it, shall I. We shall see quite what I'm made of in short order, shall we not...? In the meantime you can of course find me on Twitter...

Normblog: Tolstoy, The False Note, and the problem of Evil

Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, has since 2003 been fashioning a notable second career for himself as a blogger and tweeter on issues of the day and assorted enthusiasms. A regular feature of the blog is 'Writer's Choice', wherein (as Geras described it for the Guardian) "novelists, poets and other writers have contributed their thoughts on books that have been important to them in one way or another, or books they have simply enjoyed." I am very pleased to say that I am the latest invitee to contribute a screed of this sort to Normblog: my choice was Tolstoy's novella The False Note, also known as The Forged Coupon, and you will find the full essay here. Meantime, a taster:

"I find The False Note an endlessly involving piece, and I feel it ought to be more widely known and celebrated. It is a kind of parable about money (we might better say 'currency') and the problem of evil: how a simple exchange of tainted money introduces a current of malevolence into social relations. Yet it resists a straightforwardly materialist analysis. As the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia read it, Tolstoy exhibits 'a strange conviction that every society creates evil according to some kind of natural secretion, as certain molluscs produce pearls'."

I might have said in the piece - but it was long enough already - that Robert Bresson's masterly 1983 film L'Argent is derived from the first of the two parts of The False Note, the setting transposed to contemporary France. Below, the last movement from L'Argent and the great Bresson in discussion of his work.

Esquire (August 2011) now on stands: I'm Back...

Well now, there's a familiar form of headline for this blog, albeit one that's been out of action for roughly 18 months... Nonetheless, it's a fact that I have written something in Esquire this month, and I'm very glad about it since a) I've remained a Contributing Editor in the time since my last contribution, even without troubling the scorers, as it were; and b) the magazine has a new editor in the excellent Alex Bilmes, who has a raft of fine ideas and has been putting them vigorously into practice since his appointment earlier this year. (To wit, the Esquire website has had a refurbishment recently and is worth your perusal.)
My essay for the August ish straddles the categories of 'Personal/Humour/Lifestyle', I suppose. It's called 'Fitness First?' and it's the up-and-down story of the 20 or so years that I've spent intermittently belonging to gyms and working out: a pastime that has brought me joy and pain, you may be sure - and for which I now feel the need to make an accounting in my life. Why am I harping on this, you ask? Well, because I'm one of many 40-year-old men who received a new gym membership on said birthday from their better half. And, possibly against the run of the mill, I was very glad to have it - because a small but significant part of my adult life has been spent hefting heavy lumps on metal around padded or reinforced floors. But, but... you do get to an age where the gravity of time sits heavy on your shoulders. As I say in the piece:

"... at this new Health Club of mine the fight I am picking is with Nature. My genes having been tidily downloaded to my kids, I am now expendable: Nature has written me off, reckons it has no further business with me. And Nature might be right. Every ten years a man loses four-to-six pounds of muscle. After 40 his testosterone levels ebb, his body hair shrivels, his spine weakens until he’s nearly as titchy as Tom Cruise.
I don’t presume to reverse that process, merely to ward it off just for a bit. I want to feel my heart racing, but under my control; to feel some vigour again in my limbs; to recapture that natural high of physical exertion – the high that brings no self-hating hangover, leaves one indeed feeling better in the morning. My body remembers all this, however vaguely. Because I have a long, complex relationship with gyms..."

To read on, as I'm sure you're dying to on the basis of that, give yourself a present of the August Esquire, it's £4.25 and there's loads of lovely stuff in it. Wrapped round the exterior and draped across a few pages therein is Abigail Clancy (pictured), who I believe has just enjoyed the loveliest of wedding days and is thus newly married to a professional footballer and accomplished body-popper.

Freud & Jung: The Movie!

On the subject of psychoanalysis - well, I've never been there, you understand, but I'm an admirer both of Freud and of Jung, and I'm quite sure that I’ve learned many profound things from the writings of both that, taken together, are not exactly complementary. As such I have waited keenly for a film of The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton’s play about the great Austrian, the great Swiss, and Ms Sabina Spielrein. Now that film is nigh, under the title A Dangerous Method, which references a book by John Kerr that was (as far as I know – I’ve not read it) the first to take seriously the importance of Spielrein to the history of psychoanalysis on the grounds that she was first a patient of Jung’s and subsequently a disciple of Freud’s. As I understand it, what Kerr didn’t know when he wrote A Very Dangerous Method was that Spielrein and Jung had been lovers during his treatment of her.
Hence the special drama of this story, for which Hampton was the ideal dramatist – Freud and Jung as mentor-and-protégé pioneers in the fathoming of the unconscious; Jung becoming the errant son who succumbed to sex with a patient, then proceeded to an occult-spiritual philosophy that alienated him yet further from rational, disapproving ‘father’ Freud; and Spielrein as the woman who first occasioned this intellectual dispute, then went on to make a discerning contribution to it.
The richness of all this is obvious. Is it ‘a movie’ though? I’ll be intrigued to see whether Cronenberg follows Hampton’s play in jumping forward and revealing to the audience at the halfway stage what was Spielrein’s eventual fate. It’s also worth noting that Paul Schrader, an equally fine piece of ‘casting’ for this project, tried to write it as a play for the National Theatre in 1982 at the prompting of Peter Hall, but could never quite finish his script. (‘It’s such a great story’, Schrader told Kevin Jackson for the excellent book Schrader on Schrader, ‘that it took me a long time to realize that it just wasn’t working.’)
For Cronenberg Sabina Spielrein is played by Keira Knightley who also gets top billing over Viggo Mortensen (Freud) and Michael Fassbender (Jung). For me as for many viewers, this is a small matter of concern, but presumably for many other viewers it will be why they turn out for this movie. So, we shall see… Here at any rate is the trailer.

"The Good of the Novel"

During my adolescence I regularly day-dreamed of growing up to be the sort of fellow who'd be asked to pontificate in print on the current condition of The Contemporary Novel... or I should say that I day-dreamed about this as regularly as I did about winning Wimbledon or taking Susannah Hoffs to the pictures. Still, as of now I have my wish in respect of the first of these, and here you can read my contribution to an online symposium occasioned by the Faber essay collection The Good of the Novel.

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

Just to don my crimson-lined Prince of Darkness cape for a short moment: there was a nice review of Doctor Forrest in Scotland on Sunday recently, and before that another very pleasing one from The Scotsman. Scotland is certainly doing me a world of good right now, for I am also (with Kevin MacNeil) the first act on at the 2011 Edinburgh Book Festival. Meantime the Forrest blog continues to be a crypt-like repository for my blackest and gravest thoughts, with recent musings on Hammer Horror, Robert Aickman, Doctor Who and Yukio Mishima...

Sylvain Marveaux is a Geordie. As is Demba Ba.

In a fortnight NUFC return to action, as they say, with the first pre-season outing at Darlington Arena, followed by a US tour and games against Sporting Kansas City, Orlando City and Columbus Crew. How's the recruitment plan looking then? Alan Curbishley, sorry, Pardew has said "I am really pleased with the way the squad is taking shape." But Al, shouldn't that be more like "Je suis vraiment heureux avec la façon dont l'équipe prend forme."? Because aside from those long-term crocked lads who "will feel like new signings" (and actually this does go for one of them too) we seem to be entirely in the business of adding Frenchmen or French-speakers to the ranks.
No, since you ask, I'm not over L'Affaire Carroll yet. True Faith speaks for me:

"I’d foolishly allowed myself to imagine myself sitting in my SJP pew watching the Bensham Van Basten develop over the next ten years into a bona fide No.9 legend, smashing goals in, leading the line and providing the essential link between team and the terraces he also supported the club from... But the fact is Andy Carroll is not at Newcastle United but £35m of Liverpool’s money is... I didn’t imagine that the big answer to Carroll’s departure would be Demba Ba, on a free with a dodgy knee... and us having had the bum’s rush from No.1 and No.2 targets Gameiro and Gervinho."

The swing to Labour and the margin of error

It does shame me somewhat that I have so little to say on politics at present, which is why I've not said it. Recently I felt my sense of malaise and stagnation on burning issues of the day was expressed to some extent by this PoliticsHome/YouGov poll on the NHS that found 'while voters largely support reforms in principle, they don’t trust the Conservatives to deliver them in practice.' Which leaves us where exactly? Meanwhile, flinching and flip-flopping seems to have become the Cameron Way, and if he thinks that's the way by which he'll win an outright majority in 2015 then he's a braver man than I thought. The creeping lack of assurance, the tendency to panic would be more dangerous for Cameron in the short term, I'm sure, were it not for the peculiar character of the Leader of the Opposition.
Ed Miliband has quite clearly had a result or two at PMQs lately, and Labour's poll lead looks to me to be six points more often than not. This ought to have the look of a strong position: not least since there is no realistic chance of Ed being ousted from the post, no real money in the Labour current account that hasn't come by way of Ed's avowed admirers in the Movement, and no form in the Labour Party for ditching leaders other than those who have won three general elections. And yet... are Labour behind this leader? Are Labour voters actively keen on him? Are undecided voters persuaded by him? I only ask these questions at this time of night because there's no need to answer them.
The delightful photo above I have borrowed from this Jim Pickard piece in the FT.

Kate Bush: The thrill and the hurting

Bloomsday this year brought me a very pleasant surprise in Slate magazine’s splendid set of links for celebrating Ulysses online. It also reminded me that in spite of best intentions I’ve yet to get to a record shop and purchase Kate Bush’s The Director’s Cut, with its allegedly ‘warmer’ and ‘more organic’ re-workings of her material circa 1989-1993, including the new ‘Sensual World’ with approved extracts from Joyce. However the great video jukebox that is YouTube has given me a preview and... well, I don’t know. The musical-production fashions and stylings of the 1980s, which seemed old to me by round about 1990, have a fair bit to commend them now, I’d say. And I don’t think that too much of The Sensual World as an album is really improvable (The Red Shoes rather more so...) But, eh bien, I think one generous YouTube commenter puts it best: ‘None of these songs are better than the originals, i don’t think they were meant to be, it’s just good to add them to your collection and enjoy them for what they are...’ That is indeed the spirit.

The Faber Social: It Lives, and Shall Live Again...

A late word for the inaugural Faber Social which took place on Monday June 6: a really good night, auguring well for many more top-drawer monthly literary-musical evenings ahead. (The proceedings had a nice write-up from Max Liu here). The audience were savvy and engaged, both for myself and David Peace in our discussion of gothic themes, and for Simon Reynolds and Bob Stanley on pop's endless fixation upon recycling. The Social as a venue is both suitably intimate for dialogue and good and lively for the purpose of spinning a few tunes. (Highlight for me having retired to the bar was hearing Simon Reynolds drop John Martyn's 'Big Muff'). But the overall top moment was hearing David Peace's incantatory reading of the 'Battle of Orgreave' chapter from GB84. I must admit that when I headed down the steps into the Social basement for the start of the night's proceedings I was feeling roughly twice my age, yet seeing my face on the promotional posters alongside the DJs was a kind of anti-ageing serum for the soul...

Bloody England in the Summertime

I'll always remember June of 2006: a new home, our firstborn child just a few months’ old, the drama of Zidane's swansong World Cup on the telly, and – I’m certain of this – a kindling early summer heat that came off the very paving stones beneath one’s feet. Conversely the cold, dreich summer of 2007 I'll always associate with Gordon Brown. (And sometimes I feel like we're still living through it.) As for 2011 – we’ve now had the Solstice, a day I always think of as Great Gatsby Day ("I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it...") and still we’re peering up at drear skies, scouring for patches of blue... Good lord, is this how it will be from now on?

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest: News/Reviews/Events Round-Up

How've I been keeping? Busy, thank you very much. Here's the current report card on me and my Doctor Forrest:
- A couple of pleasing reviews, from Louise Welsh in the Financial Times ("Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the gothic horror genre") and Ben Felsenberg in Metro ("Richard T Kelly's new novel is a rattlingly good yarn that wears a bloody Gothic heart on its sleeve")
- Last weekend I had the pleasure of writing about The Brothers Karamazov for The Independent's 'Book of a Lifetime' and on Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for The Guardian's 'Re-Readings'.
- I am interviewed here by Professor Glennis Byron at the University of Stirling's excellent Gothic Imagination website.
- An extract from the opening of the novel is online here at Writers' Hub.
- And I am in conversation tonight with David Peace on matters of the gothic and occult and Northern, at the first 'Faber Social' event in central London. Come ye all, ye be welcome...

Trailer for The Possessions of Doctor Forrest!

(Connoisseurs of the North London Gothic may care to know that the scenic element of this clip in which I read from and discuss the themes of The Possessions of Dr Forrest was shot in the grounds of Abney Park Cemetary, Stoke Newington.)

Dr Forrest at Stoke Newington LitFest 05.06.2011

I’m delighted to say I will be appearing at an event as part of the 2nd annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Sunday June 5, details of which are now available at the festival website but which I reproduce below. I’ll have the special pleasure of being part of a panel of fine practitioners in fiction and non-fiction, with whom I daresay I have a good few things in common. Doctor Forrest obviously belongs more to the genre of Horror than to Crime but without doubt it partakes of crime/procedural elements that were the product of research on my part, just as Crusaders, ostensibly a social-realist or state-of-the-nation novel, also included criminal acts and their investigation in a drawn-from-life fashion. So I’m looking forward to chipping in to what I hope will be a lively conversation, with the added marquee value of the terrific recent TV adaptation of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The Serious Crime Squad
Sunday June 5 @ 6pm
Abney Public Hall, 73a Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0AS
Tickets £6. Click here to book online.
Of all genre writing, crime – both true crime and fiction – hold an enduring fascination for millions of readers, male and female, young and old. So much so that crime writing has grown much bigger than ‘genre’ can contain, making considerable inroads into ‘serious’ literature and historical research. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (recently dramatised on ITV), Kate Colquhon’s Mr Briggs’ Hat: The Sensational Account of the First Railway Murder (set in Hackney), Chris Paling’s Nimrod’s Shadow and Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, are all stunning examples. Together, this is an astonishing panel of some of crime’s most exciting writers. The Guardian’s Alex Clark chairs.

Doctor Forrest - The Film

This post is merely to acknowledge that Doctor Forrest is now in development as a motion picture with the excellent Festival Films and their chief producer Ray Marshall. Your humble correspondent is fully ‘attached’ as the project’s screenwriter, and is currently on work on the highly intriguing task of re-tooling his own novel into a viable film script. The Festival site makes a very handsome home for the Forrest jacket, methinks, and I would hope the tag-line on the dedicated page is just the sort of thing to have people racing to book tickets and babysitters once the finished product rolls out at Odeons Everywhere…

When an eminent cosmetic surgeon vanishes mysteriously, his two oldest friends investigate his disappearance – only to discover that Doctor Forrest has unleashed a diabolical evil that could destroy them all…

Yes, as the showmen used to say, we’ll sell you a seat but you’ll only need the edge of it.

Bookhugger column: "Is There Such a Thing as a Male Book?"

I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...

NUFC: Limping to the line

Gettin’ beat 3-0 off Liverpool is a wearyingly familiar experience, as indeed is getting beat 2-0 off Liverpool. Nine years ago one such 3-0 finally robbed the wheels off what had been our very real push to the top-division title under Bobby Robson - wistful to think back on it now, but in that season of 2001-02, with 11 games to play, the title was mathematically in our hands. Seems like dreamland tonight...
Today’s special discomforts: for one it was our owld manager King Kenny in the Liverpool dugout, looking like he’s really enjoying his football, as he never once appeared during his tenure at NUFC (at least not after the day of his coronation and mandatory mobbing by adoring Geordies.) And for two, owld King Kenny reckoned it would be canny just to bring on Andy Carroll for a 20-minute run-out even with the match won. You could have spared us that one, Ken, let it ride for another day... It’s only amazing that Carroll didn’t score, since NUFC alumni nearly always score crucial goals against us, as do the non-Toon-related glamour signings of other clubs, especially when they’ve otherwise been having a lean spell (so back Fernando Torres for a brace at least when we face Chelsea on May 15.)
The corollary to this gloom is that Newcastle rarely ever get to enjoy a reciprocal pleasure in ‘putting one over.’ I remember the hype and the chatter back in 2005 as Michael Owen prepared to face Liverpool for the first time in a black-and-white shirt. What happened that day? That’s right, we’s got beat 2-0, and Owen had the sort of disconsolate just-in-it-for-the-money-pal day that was his stock-in-trade at Newcastle.
The excellent True Faith seemed to me to get it right with this Carroll comment piece before the game. The sad - indeed pathetic - thing is that I dreamed I met Carroll last night – honest – in a crowd amid some kind of post-training canteen chat situation; and he seemed a very nice lad, and told me casually that he reckoned he’d probably be re-signing for Newcastle eventually, after the whole Liverpool thing had gone off the boil... So, alas, I clearly can’t say I’m over this thing yet. Worse, a Liverpool fan of my acquaintance, a good lad generally speaking, seems to have no conception of the pain he causes when he tells me cheerily how much he’s looking forward to having Jose Enrique on the left of defence next season.
In other Toon news the mighty nufc.com kindly transcribes some comments from Kevin Keegan uttered in his capacity as ESPN pundit – another warning that Carroll’s transfer fee will not be spent on new players, and this about our erstwhile #9:

"He (Carroll) was on the fringe when I was there. He was raw. This kid is the best header of the ball I’ve ever seen. That’s his biggest plus point for me... His minus points have always been there. Can he get his head down? Can someone make him realise that all he has to do is train hard, work hard and be a good pro for 10 years and he’ll be a very rich boy? He needs to get rid of the other stuff...”

Ah yes, the other stuff. ‘Very nice lad’? In your dreams, as they say...