Crusaders back in the Financial Times

"Oh, the state of the nation / Is causing deprivation." Had I had been asked 20 years ago what the phrase 'State of the Nation' meant to me personally (and, of course, back then nobody was asking me anything of the sort...) I would have gladly discoursed about either a) various drama series I had seen on television, mainly written by Alan Bleasdale, or b) a mid-ranking recent single by New Order, a band I have always adored and thus forgiven for some of their dodgier lyrics (as above.) But this is Spring 2008, the season of the State-of-the-Nation novel, and it seems that I have written a contender in this peculiar category. Adrian Turpin of the Financial Times, who wrote an early review of Crusaders for which I was massively grateful, has now graciously cited the book again in a long review/thinkpiece concerning various titles, including the paperback of Blake Morrison's last novel, and Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday. For my part I couldn't be more pleased to have my book described by Adrian Turpin as "an enjoyable and unapologetically Victorian slab of social realism." And, to extend the theme of my previous post, I have to say that, as intriguing as I find the figure of Tony Blair, I'm much more interested in Pontius Pilate. The general tendency, mine too, is often to see whatever's happening in politics today as the bitter end, the final insult. And some observers will indeed have seen worthier standards applied in public life. But I don't think there's all that much new under the sun. At any rate, if we the people want to revive or reform our politics then we're obliged to get actively involved in politics, from day to day. As Bernard Sumner sang elsewhere in the aforementioned mid-ranking New Order tune, 'Yes, it's the state of the nation / That's holding our salvation...'

Crusaders' share of Blair in Fact and Fiction...

Hmm... It's getting on for a year now since Blair's resignation. I know, the leavetaking took forever, so let's not rush to the anniversary retrospectives... Still, I raise the matter now not merely because a steady drip of Blair re-evaluations has turned into a running tap because of Gordon Brown's anguished and ungainly recent performances. And not because the whole Blair Conundrum was a key part of the backstory of Crusaders, as Joel Rickett cottoned to very quickly. No, it's because last month I sat on a panel called 'Blair In Fact and Fiction' at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow, alongside Martin Bell, Helena Kennedy and Joan Smith, and as ever with these things, given the time and the format, you rarely come away feeling you've said what was truly on your mind. This eyewitness reporter from the Herald clearly felt that we had all lined up over Tone with the sharpened stilettos out like it was Murder on the Orient Express. ("They all did it!") Indeed the chap mentioned therein who 'stood up for Blair' chatted with me afterward at the bookshop signing. (I hope he found the copy of Crusaders he bought not too yawnsome...) But there's so much to say about public figures of this prominence. Didn't even Garcia Marquez once say he would need a million pages to do justice to Che Guevara...? (Staunch people of the Left who always loathed Blair would shudder at that analogy.) In any event, what I think I said at Aye Write and have certainly said at every other platform occasion is that when in 1996 Blair described Pontius Pilate as the archetypal politician, I thought it was the most interesting thing I'd ever heard a pragmatic/centrist leader say. I still do.

Crusaders reviewed in the Church Times!

Seems like a good match to me... This is the April 18 issue of Church Times to be precise, now on the newsstands or otherwise hitting subscribers' doormats. The review is by David McLaurin, who I believe to be a novelist as well as a (former?) priest. At any rate his take on the novel is very gratefully received: "A big book... but the author transforms the blockbuster genre into something more profound... [It] gives the reader a satisfyingly intense and cathartic conclusion that is well worth waiting for... a fearsomely well written, if somewhat bleak, book."
(The picture is of inside Durham Cathedral, taken by John Dalkin, who posts on Flickr as 'Heaven's Gate.)

RTK Newcastle article in new Prospect (May 2008)

"London to Newcastle isn't rated among the world's great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits..."
The new issue of the excellent Prospect magazine is now on the stands and includes an essay by myself in the 'Witness' strand which somebody has wittily entitled In Search of Lost Tyne. Yes, it's a series of snap-shots of the current state of Newcastle upon Tyne - socially, economically, politically, and culturally. In a sense, because the plot of Crusaders concludes in 1997, this piece of reportage brings the novel's story up to date, and with rather more of a debt to the actualite.
Needless to say there's a great deal more to enjoy in the magazine, including an essay by the South Shields-born historian Robert Colls on the neglected novels of Melvyn Bragg; quite a bit about the 40-year anniversary of May '68; and a long interview with Christopher Hitchens by Alex Linklater, in which it is casually noted that Hitchens enjoys friendly relations with the 'independent-minded' Sean Penn. Any sane/civilised person would want to be the proverbial fly on the wall when those two meet for cocktails.

Pennsylvania primary: the commander-in-chief thing

A week or so ago Alexander Cockburn made a witty point in the course of a piece on his radical site Counterpunch, one that other commentators should kick themselves for having missed. At least, I didn't see it noted anywhere else in the drizzle of Dem-Feud coverage, and I read as much of it as you do... Cockburn was weighing up the broadly disastrous contribution of Ex-President Bill to his wife's campaign, and drew special attention to Bill's "managing to reignite Hillary's Bosnian disaster, where she converted a pleasant outing into an anecdote of courage under fire unexampled since Audie Murphy took on a battlion of German soldiers single-handed. Bill says that Hillary came up with this fictional packet because it was late in a long day and she was kind of tired and not thinking straight. So, as my coeditor Jeffrey St Clair, asks, what happens four hours later when that 3am phone call comes?" Makes you think, doesn't it? One wouldn't harp on it, except that I understand the latest Clinton TV attack-spots harp unashamedly on the theme of "Who do you think has what it takes...?" But, for now The Dream lives on - or do I mean the nightmare from which, one morning soon, we shall awaken?

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?

Newcastle 2 Sunderland 0

My late grandma was one of those people who genuinely "liked to see all the North East teams do well" in the football leagues, and would sit through the entirety of the Saturday final scores just to see how Hartlepool, Carlisle and Darlo had done. This is probably something to do with being from Durham, rather than Tyneside or Wearside. For a taste of a more partisan view, look at/listen to this and this from a packed St James's Park yesterday. Being the North East top dog isn't the grandest bragging right in the game just now, not with the top 4 far from reach and the likes of Villa, Blackburn, and Portsmouth having left Newcastle behind them this season. (Hence the importance of the career plans of the fella pictured above with his adorable little moppet on a startling day back in 2005.) But it'll suffice for the time being. After all, coming 11th or 12th in the top division these days is pretty much the same as coming 7th i.e. you still get nowt, and your passports stay in your drawers, though I can name at least one side for whom 7th place seemed to count as "taking the Premiership by storm" a few years ago. Alas, for me (and for other soul-searching Toon fans, I'm sure) it's Middlesborough who still hold the whip hand in the region, purely on account of a League Cup won as recently as 2004. Whatever they say about the pains of managing Newcastle it remains the case that to be a legend the gaffer only has to win six matches in a season, so long as they're all in the same cup competition. But Kevin Keegan has a bye through any such miserly qualifying process on account of pre-approval such as this.

George Steiner, maintaining the standards

I was 17 or 18 when I first encountered the critical writings of George Steiner, and I don't think I have ever liked a critic better. (I say 'critic' - modestly the man himself discounts his occasional fictions, including The Portage to San Christobal of A.H., but then one can be sure he sets the bar higher than the average mortal.) My favourite titles of his remain Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky and Real Presences. I will never forget hearing Steiner describe the true function of the critic as that of a postman: one who knows precisely where to deliver the missives of men & women of letters. (As I recall, he attributes this image to Pushkin?) And he returns to this theme in an excellent interview in today's Guardian. He also expresses the view that most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight - often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where's the bloody horse?"

Ten Bad Dates With De Niro in America

Listen, I gotta tell ya - New York's never been a lucky town for me - for a buncha reasons - though as a visitor I like the place enormously, always have done. But anyhow, no hard feelings, and here's to maybe a little rub of the green come May 1 when the Rookery Press NYC will publish their US edition of the widely-considered-amusing movie-list compendium Ten Bad Dates With De Niro. I could say my luck's already turning a little, cos I never had no mention on no Page 6 of the New York Post before. And I've been reading Peter Travers in the Rolling Stone since I was a boy and Reagan was President, but now - whaddaya know? - my book's got a mention in his 'blog'. Yep, dollar for dollar all I can say is luck be a lady tonight. The new cover image for Rookery's edition really delights me, immortalising as it does the Very Worst Date real or imagined that you or I will ever be rubber-necker to.

The genius of Nicolas Roeg, live in North London this Sunday

This Sunday 20 April 2008 the Phoenix in North Finchley offers a Nicolas Roeg double bill - The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975) and Bad Timing (1980) after which Nic Roeg himself will take the stage for a Q&A with the audience, a session that I will have the pleasure of 'chairing'. I'll be writing about this at greater length after the weekend, but I should just quickly take this space to say some obvious things, i.e. 1) that Roeg is as brilliant a filmmaker as Britain has ever produced, the golden era of his work (roughly the 20 years from 1966-1985) being comparable to the best of anybody else's ever, 2) that a lot of us out there feel this way, and 3) that I will never forget the first time I 'met' Roeg (i.e. got his autograph) after a screening of Insignificance and Q&A at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast, in November 1985. Theresa Russell was at his side that night, and I couldn't have been more in awe if the proverbial Martian had fallen to earth and sat itself beside me in the front row. (The photo of Roeg herewith is by fikirbaz (Ozgur Poyrazoglu) from the Flickr site, and was taken at the Antalya 44th Golden Orange Film Festival & 3rd Eurasia Film Festival.)

Crusaders in Australia, and The Spectator...

... and so I wonder which of the above was the less likely place for Crusaders to crop up, had I been a betting man? At any rate, it's interesting to note new responses to the book in print when one had thought that moment was past. The latest Spectator makes some rather wearily familiar remarks about Crusaders in a 'round-up' of first novels largely concerned with the recently-published Submarine. A much more detailed solus review is in The Australian, and as on many previous occasions I have to count myself lucky to receive such a considered response to the book, given its particular idiosyncrasies, which the reviewer itemises perfectly intelligently and without malice. This oft-commented-upon business of the book's old-fashioned structure and archaic turns of prose-style is something I'd like to comment on myself at greater length - and I suppose this site is the place to do it, all things considered - but maybe not tonight, eh?

"The Best Man"? Springsteen favours Obama

Not that these things mean anything. I don't recall Springsteen's deeply felt on-the-stump renditions of 'The Promised Land' doing anything for John Kerry in 04. Nor do I recall Obama saying anything very stirring this year, other than he wasn't minded to share a ticket with Mrs Clinton. But then I don't have a vote in this election. I was simply interested to read Springsteen's just-published reasons for wanting Obama in 08. There's only one thing to be read into his assertion that the senator for Illinois is 'head and shoulders' above the rival candidate(s). Springsteen is a well-mannered fellow in public, and even were he not, he probably wouldn't summon up the same invective (i.e. invoking 'evil') as Christopher Hitchens in this critique of Mrs Clinton from a recent appearance on Fox News. But then again...

Crusaders - the basic plot explained...

The above 'author presentation' has been newly added to Faber and Faber's YouTube channel, and was recorded especially for an internal sales conference in September 2007. Not a fussy crowd, otherwise I'd have shaved that morning. The unflashy locations are matched by a spare attention to sound-levels, but it was quite a windy day, see...

Gordon Burn & David Peace

Yesterday I had the privilege of a sit-down discussion with two of the most formidable English writers working today: Gordon Burn and David Peace, who share some obvious affinities in subject matter (Peter Sutcliffe for one - the subject of Burn's Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son and the shadow-stimulus for David's 'Red Riding Quartet' of 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983. Football, for another - 2006 was a red-letter year for writing in this field thanks to Gordon's Best and Edwards and David's The Damned United.) But by the time your estimation factors in the further range of Gordon's four novels (Alma Cogan, Fullalove, North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday) alongside his studies of the art world that include a book with Damien Hirst - and then you think about David's GB84, that occult history of the 84-85 Miners Strike, and then the fictional accounting of post-war Japan that he has now embarked upon, beginning with Tokyo Year Zero - and you have to consider it a blazing miracle that England can boast writers such as these. The symposium I had with them was arranged by Esquire magazine and was concerned primarily with crime and other forms of aberrant true-life behaviour, and the extent to which they make fitting inspiration for books. The resultant article should appear in the August issue (i.e. late July). But if you're stuck for reading beforehand, get yourself into some Burn and some Peace. If you've already read one or two do yourself a favour and read the lot.

Crusaders at the Living Room Book Group

I had some very good fortune last month in having the opportunity to discuss Crusaders with the members of a book group who had been hacking their way through it together over recent weeks. That's me in the photo - I'm on the red rather than the white, but a large one, de rigueur - and it's not posed, I really was using both hands to make a point, as is my wont. The session took place in the Living Room bar on Newcastle's elegantly restored Grey Street, in the district of the city that my mother is surprised to hear they now call 'Grainger Town'. My luck in getting this engagement was in the sense that readers' group meetings are, of course, an emergent force in our society, but their members (naturally) tend to value their recreational reading time highly, and I sense they prefer to assign each other books with widely-vouched-for qualities (i.e. prizewinners, or acclaimed bestsellers) rather than Very Long Debut Novels by Unknowns. Clearly I had in my favour that Crusaders is very much a novel of Newcastle and the North East, but the fact that a book treats aspects of one's locality is not a cast-iron reason to want to spend time with it. At any rate, I had a truly interesting time at the Living Room, and found it rather a privilege to get the unmediated responses of real readers, whatever was their reckoning of the novel's accomplishment. I wonder if I'll get another chance?

Thomas Mann

Which bit of formidable sculpture would win in a fight, do you think? Paolozzi's Tyneside 'Vulcan' as glimpsed here in one of last week's entries? Or Herr Thomas Mann, as immortalised in this thumping great Berlin bust? I'm in a favourite-writers mood, see, and harking on Mishima as below reminded me of one to whom Mishima bent the knee. Again, the length of the average novel may have been a consideration here: Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Joseph And His Brothers all have great capacity to them... My favourite of Mann's productions is the magisterial Doctor Faustus, and when I get round to constituting a proper Recommendations element to this blog I shall say more about why.

dovegreyreader...

...is a name in the blogosphere that has started to crop up in my field of vision with increasing regularity: a Devonshire "bookaholic"/community nurse, who runs a very diligent and involving blog on what she's reading, i.e. seemingly just about every bit of fiction that's being published into bookstores. She posted the following in respect of Crusaders, and I have to say I'm very glad of the courtesy and consideration shown. Even had she been less keen on the novel... I hope I would still have had the courtesy in return to say: books and reading clearly need more advocates of her sort out there.

Spring Snow...

It's not just the snowfall of early April that has started me thinking of Yukio Mishima again lately. It's also something to do with very long novels, and with the idea of reincarnation too... Plus some dark thoughts about one's level of physical fitness, and general tendency toward torpor... And also the issue of how thoroughly busy one ought to be as a writer. Mishima never really stopped working - until, that is, he stopped - and in about as appalling a manner as one could envisage. The photo herewith depicts the pre-iron Mishima of course - dreaming perchance of the rather leathery muscle-Mary he would become? Anyhow, Googling about to remind myself of some of the content of Mishima's short stories I found this thoroughgoing response to the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which I'm aiming to re-read this year, images from which have stayed in my mental furniture ever since I first picked up that huge volume back in 1988. So I still think of it as my favourite of his, if not for After the Banquet, which I wasn't so keen on as an adolescent but have come to regard more highly over the years in which my interest in sexual perversity has, simultaneously and thankfully, receded.

Zidane, formidable...

Memory lane... reading the just-published 'news novel' Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn has brought back the summer of 2007 to me in all its dank, rain-steeped misery. As sorry forecasts of a warm but wet July/August 08 start to surface, a good time then to recall the baking-hot cold-beer World Cup summer of 2006. For me that was all about the slow return to supreme form - and the sudden exit pitch-left - of the player in white seen in the photo montage above (this by premasagar on Flickr.) I wrote about this and other aspects of the great Zizou in an essay you can read here from Sight & Sound, prompted by the art-movie Zidane - A 21st Century Portrait. The Guardian today reports that lucky Australians will get a rare glimpse of him back in action June 1.

Crusaders / Brackstone on Sky Arts' The Book Show