of it. Foulds has written an apparently brilliant novel, The Quickening Maze , about the poet John Clare, in whom I have obviously had no previous interest, but this has the narrative drive of a novel anyway. Set in the 1950s ( der , say the people who know all about the Mau Mau, which Iâm presuming isnât every single one of you), it tells the story of Tom, a young Englishman who, in the summer between school and university, goes to visit his parents in Kenya, and is drawn into a horrific, nightmarish suppression of a violent rebellion. If there were money to be made from cinematic adaptations of bloody, politically aware but deeply humanistic long-form poetry, then the film rights to The Broken Word would make Foulds rich.
Such is his talent that Foulds can elevate just about any banal domestic conversation. In the last section of the poem, Tom is attempting to seduce a young woman at university, and the dialogue is full of no s and thatâs not nice s, the flat, commonplace rejections of a 1950s courtship. But what gives the passage its chilling power is everything that has gone before: how much of the violence Tom has seen is contained in him now? The control here is such that the language doesnât have to be anything other than humdrum to be powerful, layered, dense, and thatâs some trick to pull off. Why the Mau Mau uprising? At the end of the poem, Tom and the girl he has been forcing himself upon are looking in a jewelerâs window; the children they would have had together, born at the end of the 1950s and early â60s, sent to English public schools, are as we speak running our banks and our armies, our country, even.
These are three of the best books Iâve read in years, and I read them in the last four weeks, and they are all contemporaryâ How to Live and Book of Days were published in 2010, The Broken Word was published in 2008. So despite all my showing off and name-dropping, a narrative poem published two years ago and set in the 1950s is the closest Iâve come to the ancient world. But then, thatâs the whole point, isnât it? Great writing is going on all around us, always has done, always will.
JANUARY 2011
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Dickens Dictionary âAlexander J. Philip
Half a Life âDarin Strauss
The Anthologist âNicholson Baker
The Million Dollar Mermaid âEsther Williams
BOOKS READ:
Our Mutual Friend âCharles Dickens
The Uncoupling âMeg Wolitzer
Let the Great World Spin âColum McCann
Half a Life âDarin Strauss
T he advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (itâs amazing what people will do to get early information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you canât read long books. Well, I canât, anyway. I probably read between two and three hundred pages, Iâm guessing, during the average working week, and I have the impressionâplease correct me if Iâm wrongâthat if you saw only one book in the Books Read list at the top there, it would be very hard to persuade you to plough through what would, in effect, be a two-thousand-wordbook review. And as a consequence, there are all sorts of intimidating-looking eight-hundred-pagers that I feel completely justified in overlooking. I am ignoring them for your benefit, effectively, although it would be disingenuous to claim that I spend my month resenting you. On the contrary, there have been times when, watching friends or fellow passengers struggling through some au courant literary monster, I have wanted to kiss you. I once gave a whole column over to David Copperfield , I remember, and more recently I raced through David Kynastonâs brilliant but Rubenesque Austerity Britain . For the most part, though, thereâs a âStuff
Such is his talent that Foulds can elevate just about any banal domestic conversation. In the last section of the poem, Tom is attempting to seduce a young woman at university, and the dialogue is full of no s and thatâs not nice s, the flat, commonplace rejections of a 1950s courtship. But what gives the passage its chilling power is everything that has gone before: how much of the violence Tom has seen is contained in him now? The control here is such that the language doesnât have to be anything other than humdrum to be powerful, layered, dense, and thatâs some trick to pull off. Why the Mau Mau uprising? At the end of the poem, Tom and the girl he has been forcing himself upon are looking in a jewelerâs window; the children they would have had together, born at the end of the 1950s and early â60s, sent to English public schools, are as we speak running our banks and our armies, our country, even.
These are three of the best books Iâve read in years, and I read them in the last four weeks, and they are all contemporaryâ How to Live and Book of Days were published in 2010, The Broken Word was published in 2008. So despite all my showing off and name-dropping, a narrative poem published two years ago and set in the 1950s is the closest Iâve come to the ancient world. But then, thatâs the whole point, isnât it? Great writing is going on all around us, always has done, always will.
JANUARY 2011
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Dickens Dictionary âAlexander J. Philip
Half a Life âDarin Strauss
The Anthologist âNicholson Baker
The Million Dollar Mermaid âEsther Williams
BOOKS READ:
Our Mutual Friend âCharles Dickens
The Uncoupling âMeg Wolitzer
Let the Great World Spin âColum McCann
Half a Life âDarin Strauss
T he advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (itâs amazing what people will do to get early information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you canât read long books. Well, I canât, anyway. I probably read between two and three hundred pages, Iâm guessing, during the average working week, and I have the impressionâplease correct me if Iâm wrongâthat if you saw only one book in the Books Read list at the top there, it would be very hard to persuade you to plough through what would, in effect, be a two-thousand-wordbook review. And as a consequence, there are all sorts of intimidating-looking eight-hundred-pagers that I feel completely justified in overlooking. I am ignoring them for your benefit, effectively, although it would be disingenuous to claim that I spend my month resenting you. On the contrary, there have been times when, watching friends or fellow passengers struggling through some au courant literary monster, I have wanted to kiss you. I once gave a whole column over to David Copperfield , I remember, and more recently I raced through David Kynastonâs brilliant but Rubenesque Austerity Britain . For the most part, though, thereâs a âStuff
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