D J-Taylor

Thursday

25 Apr 2019
D J-Taylor

The House of Eliot

Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The inaugurating Faber — Geoffrey — was an All Souls don in search of a livelihood, who began his career in the post-Great War book trade by investing in the Scientific Press, publishers of the Nursing Mirror. There was trouble with the Gwyer family, owners of the original concern, who resisted the move into general books and disliked the poems of Faber’s brisk young protégé Mr Eliot, but by 1929 the sale of the Mirror for an eye-watering £190,000 (about £5 million at current values), allowed Geoffrey to buy them out and set up on his own. None of this was accomplished without a struggle, and Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson, quotes some particularly gloomy diary entries from the Gwyer days (‘I feel life is not worth living: the business seems to present insuperable obstacles’.

The House of Eliot

Thursday

27 Jul 2017
D J-Taylor

His own worst enemy | 27 July 2017

One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out of the London Library. Here, alas, John Lodwick (1916–1959) scores particularly badly. If The Butterfly Net (‘filled with a lot of booksy talk and worldly philosophising,’ Angus Wilson pronounced in 1954) has run to all of five borrowers in the last five years, then The Starless Night (1955) seems not to have left the shelves since 1991. All this suggests that the title of Geoffrey Elliott’s valiant attempt to reconstruct Lodwick’s lost, vagrant and sometimes violent life is painfully accurate. Why should this writer, who published nearly a score of well-regarded novels before dying in a Spanish road accident, have fallen so irretrievably off the map? It was Cyril Connolly who remarked that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first endow with promise; and the sparkle of The Cradle of Neptune (1951), an account of a deeply unhappy apprenticeship at Dartmouth Naval College, was there for all to see.

His own worst enemy | 27 July 2017

Thursday

22 Sep 2016
D J-Taylor

A woman of some importance | 22 September 2016

Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person she was and the circumstances of her fraught and chaotic career, I settled on the year of 1955. Our heroine, then living in a maisonette flat in Little Venice and reading manuscripts for the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, was hard at work on her well-received second novel, The Long View (1956). She was also having an affair with Arthur Koestler, who, when they entertained, her biographer tells us, expected her to ‘produce a three-course meal, look demurely beautiful and say as little as possible’. And so the year winds on. Koestler dazzles her with his volcanic temperament, gets her pregnant and then fixes an abortion.

A woman of some importance | 22 September 2016

Thursday

27 Aug 2015
D J-Taylor

Spirits of the Blitz

If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the later Pat Barker can be similarly identified by its finely wrought accounts of physical trauma. ‘Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered,’ runs a specimen sentence from the new novel, ‘galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire.’ Noonday’s Blitz-era setting — the horses are in flight from a bombed-out brewery — gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best: intent descriptions of splayed limbs that are sometimes engaged in the act of love, occasionally the subjects of paintings or, more often, casualties of war. Concluding the trilogy that began with Life Class (2007), it finds its three remaining protagonists — the artists Elinor and Paul and their old friend Kit Neville — in nervy middle-age, driving ambulances and bearing stretchers in a part of central London where the death toll is at its heaviest.

Spirits of the Blitz

Thursday

21 May 2015
D J-Taylor

Cats, curates and cardigans

Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering fourth Sunday in Lent’, as Ann Allestree is careful to remind us — came a bolt from the skies, in the shape of a letter from Cape’s editorial director, Wren Howard, turning down the seventh with the age-old publisher’s bromide that ‘in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs’. There seems little doubt that this throwing over was the great trauma of Pym’s life, far more upsetting to her than the various relationships that punctuated her half-century of wistful spinsterdom, and a kind of King Charles’s Head to which she infallibly reverted in conversations with dinner guests or letters to literary chums.

Cats, curates and cardigans

Thursday

25 Sep 2014
D J-Taylor

Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about killing Thatcher is funny. Honest

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make of the ten stories collected here, for they return us to the landscape occupied by Hilary Mantel’s last great contemporary novel, Beyond Black (2005). This, for those of you unfamiliar with her pre- (or rather post-) Tudor work is a world of fraught domestic interiors, twitches on the satirical thread and, above all, stealing over the shimmering Home Counties gardens and the thronged Thames Valley shopping malls, a faint hint of the numinous. Make that a very strong hint of the numinous, for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher fairly crackles with evidence of the supernatural making its presence felt.

Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about killing Thatcher is funny. Honest

Thursday

7 Nov 2013
D J-Taylor

The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at least one of them set in the here- and-now, but Palliser’s fifth outing straightaway returns us to the world of creaking lawsuits, high-grade subterfuge and lickerish kitchen-maids in which he made his reputation. In fact the territory occupied by Rustication is so familiar as to make the case-hardened reader of A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (the last two referenced in the blurb) wonder whether he or she hasn’t travelled this way too often for comfort.

The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

Saturday

21 Apr 2012
D J-Taylor

Nowhere to go but down

I am just old enough to remember the terrific fuss that was made about the first Scots literary renaissance when it kicked into gear in the early 1980s. Inaugurated by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), whipped up into a movement by Gray, Agnes Owens and James Kelman’s Lean Tales (1985), and sent on a downward spiral by the latter’s Booker-winning How Late It Was How Late (1994), its distinguishing features were Glasgie patois, the conviction that everything was Mrs Thatcher’s fault, and a colossal amount of swearing. If you knew the meaning of the word ‘fuck’, a critic once wearily suggested, then about 10 per cent of Kelman’s work was already known to you.The second Scots literary renaissance, which started making its presence felt at about the time the first descended into parody, was a very different animal.

Saturday

7 May 2011
D J-Taylor

Doomed to disillusion

The Forgotten Waltz is one of those densely recapitulative novels that seek to interpret emotional crack-up from the angle of its ground-down aftermath. At the same time, it is not really a book about hindsight. Sometimes extending information to the reader and sometimes deliberately covering its tracks, sometimes inviting sympathy for its characters and sometimes implying that sympathy only gets in the way of knowledge, it offers the enticing spectacle of a heroine determined to decode the human acrostics that strew her path while darkly conscious that most of her judgments are either horribly provisional or downright inchoate.Everything kicks into gear back in the early 2000s, down by the sea in fashionable Enniskerry, where twenty-something Gina (good-hearted, feisty, likes a drop) first catches sight of Sean Vallely, a neighbour of her prosperously married sister.

Saturday

11 Sep 2010
D J-Taylor

Acting strange

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’.Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Slight anxiety when Lindsay Clarke then appeared on the bill at a literary festival I was attending — authors, you may be surprised to learn, don’t always care for these off-the-cuff judgments — was quickly dispelled. No doubt about it, Mr Clarke affably deposed, ‘hippy’ was exactly the right word.

Acting strange

Wednesday

7 Jul 2010
D J-Taylor

Physical and spiritual decay

The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay.The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay. The bloom of youth barely had time to settle before it was overrun by maggots. Thus, coolly appraising his mistress’s somewhat faded charms, Hilary Fletcher in The Upstart (1973) notes that marriage and children ‘had loosened her bones and skin and clouded those once fresh eyes with the film of age.’ Harriet, it turns out, is all of 26. Strickland, the barrister hero of A Married Man (1979) has an even worse time of it, what with the smell of his wife’s wind and ‘the liverish early morning odour from her mouth’.

Saturday

20 Mar 2010
D J-Taylor

Dogged by misfortune

Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread of black-and-white photographs, part of an ‘investigator’s report’ into a fatal collision said to have taken place on a Birmingham dual carriageway in the summer of 1996.Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread of black-and-white photographs, part of an ‘investigator’s report’ into a fatal collision said to have taken place on a Birmingham dual carriageway in the summer of 1996. The victim is a six year-old girl named, Sara Ithell. Her father, 35 year-old, Owen, loses both his right hand and his livelihood as a jobbing gardener to the local bourgeoisie. Of the brown mongrel dog, whose irruption onto a pelican crossing is supposed to have caused the accident, there is no sign.

Dogged by misfortune

Wednesday

21 Oct 2009
D J-Taylor

Rural flotsam

Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy.Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Having read the first piece, ‘Archie and the Birds’, about a cheery forty-something bachelor living with his mother who communicates with her by way of a walkie-talkie, and grimly despatched the third, ‘Archie and the Woman’, in which our man marries a fellow dog-walker, I was about to write the whole thing off as an exercise in the higher whimsy when I came across a fourth, and much longer, piece called ‘The Girt Pike.

Wednesday

1 Jul 2009
D J-Taylor

Transcontinental satires

One could easily get lost in Jerusalem’s myriad compartments. To begin with there is Preston Pinner, CEO of ‘AuthencityTM’, otherwise known as the ‘hip hub’, a ‘contemporary cultural consulting and production house’ deviously at work to manipulate consumer tastes. Then there is Preston’s father, David, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing junior minister about to depart to ‘Zambabwia’, an African republic deep in post-colonial meltdown. In Zambabwia itself, a variety of characters — from Adini the venal president to Musa Musa the charismatic musungu and Tranter the imprisoned British businessman — compete for our attention. Finally, and most whimsically, there is the ‘diary of a local gentleman’, the record of a mutilated survivor of the Boer War’s Frazer-fuelled journey around South-West England in search of its ancient folklore.

Wednesday

6 May 2009
D J-Taylor

Trouble at the Imperial

It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door.The first sign that all might not be well below stairs at the Piccadilly Imperial, built in 1878 by a Victorian industrialist and once visited by Charlie Chaplin, comes when Yuri, the Ukrainian night-porter, is found dead in the basement store-room.

Wednesday

29 Oct 2008
D J-Taylor

A master of drab grotesques

Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far into itself, and a writer feeding entirely off his own imagination rather than the world beyond it. Hamilton revivals, which come round every five years or so, usually concentrate on his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (1929-34), or Hangover Square (1941), but it is nearly two decades since anyone has taken a punt on his second novel, Craven House (1926).First published in his very early twenties, and here introduced by one of Hamilton’s two modern biographers, Nigel Jones, this belongs to an extinct sub-species of English fiction: the boarding house novel.

Saturday

5 Jul 2008
D J-Taylor

Waves of geniality

No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man at Hodder Headline who declared that if the public wanted cookery and celebrity memoirs then that is what he would publish for them, yet still, apparently, there is a market for garrulous book-world memoirs fanatically absorbed in what the literary editor of the New Statesman said to his assistant around the time that Hillary climbed Everest.This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Grub Street Irregular’s tone reveals itself from the very first paragraph, in which Lewis maintains that as a child he excelled at nothing, was debarred from organised sport by ‘cowardice, short-sightedness, physical ineptitude and a total absence of team spirit’ and displayed ‘no artistic leanings whatever’.

Saturday

1 Mar 2008
D J-Taylor

The return of Kureishi-man

Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the 1930s, irked by the party-going degenerates of a novel like Afternoon Men (1931) did not believe that such people existed. If, on the other hand, they did exist then novels ought not to be written about them. The same danger has always lain in wait for Hanif Kureishi, whose fiction — whatever one might think of his prose style — has always been weighed down by the almost supernatural dreariness of the characters who wander about in it.We first met Kureishi-man as long ago as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Older, by no means wiser and yet more inwardly distressed, he turned up again in Intimacy (1998), a novella whose subject was supposedly Kureishi’s own failed marriage, and the short stories collected in The Body (2002).

Wednesday

23 Jan 2008
D J-Taylor

Capturing the decade

Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jay McInerney, Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith. Two more minutes with the contents table, scrupulously ignoring Zadie Smith who doesn’t contribute a piece but takes part in one of the features, produced a score of six. Successful literary magazines play to their strengths, of course: anyone who compiled an anthology of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and left out Connolly, Waugh, Orwell and Angus Wilson would not be doing their job.

Saturday

10 Nov 2007
D J-Taylor

The fading of the Cambridge dawn

An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man in the Times Literary Supplement is going to say about you, and then alongside floats a whole convoy of merely human dilemmas craving resolution. The sister of your dead college chum wants a saucy threesome, the admiring fan met in Venice murmurs, ‘I would do anything to spend time with you’, while the wife of your bosom, a quarter of a century soignée, and not to be outdone, opens the door stark-naked with a cry of ‘Special offer!’ The Alfa Romeo (‘paid for by a two-week rewrite of a movie that was never made’) must be scant compensation.

Saturday

13 Oct 2007
D J-Taylor

War-war and jaw-jaw

Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the ages: ‘the photo I was never able to take’, he explains. His routines include occasional supply-trips to the local town, morning swims out to sea and back and, less agreeably, ‘a sharp stab in his side over his right hip’ that comes on every eight hours or so and requires dousing with analgesics.Into this world of diligent sequestration marches the figure of Ivo Markovic, who turns up on Faulques’ doorstep one day, downs some of his cognac and announces that he intends to kill him.

Saturday

11 Aug 2007
D J-Taylor

Trusty steeds and saucy varlets

Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, Charlemagne and Roland completes the trilogy begun by The Evening of the World and Arthur the King. Although framed as a picturesquely tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to a great deal of Carolingian history, it also doubles up — and far more amusingly — as a highly sophisticated commentary on the whole idea of how one sets about writing an historical novel.The battlefield on which most purists of the genre take their stand lies on the plain of idiom. All very well cramming in casket-loads of period detail, they stoutly cry — already, you see, I am sounding like Allan Massie — but what is the point if you can’t get vernacular and mindset right; that is, encumber your characters with no observations and attitudes beyond those that could be plausibly associated with their real-life equivalents? Booker Prize-winners have faltered at this gargantuan hurdle, but Massie gets round the problem by pretending that it doesn’t exist, or rather by helping himself to any particular vocal style that he thinks appropriate to the task in hand.

Saturday

10 Mar 2007
D J-Taylor

Too little, too late | 10 March 2007

Aldous Jones, the hero of Gerard Woodward’s heroically odd third novel, has sunk into a decline. His wife dead, his only solace the bottle, the retired art teacher sits in the family house in north London brooding over relics of his married life and watching outgrowths of potato tuber lavishly uncoil from one of the kitchen cupboards. None of his three children seems much help: journalist Juliette, who lives in Holland Park with a quiz-obsessed political correspondent, occasionally steps round to nag; unforthcoming Julian works on the Channel ferry to Ostend; anthropologist James has recently married an Amazonian tribeswoman.With its fragmentary allusions to the London Evening News and the Falklands War, A Curious Earth eventually displays a grounding in the early- to mid-1980s.

Saturday

3 Feb 2007
D J-Taylor

Things falling apart

Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around them.Measuring Time, the follow-up to Helon Habila’s award-winning Waiting for an Angel, falls squarely into this final category.

Saturday

14 Oct 2006
D J-Taylor

Two stricken strikers

The most affecting moment in Gordon Burn’s new book is only marginally connected to its subjects. Borrowed from Jackie Milburn’s autobiography Golden Goals, it takes in a long-ago Christmas morning when the future England centre-forward woke in the small hours to discover a new pair of football boots — the first ever allowed him — lying among the presents. The temptation was too much to resist. At 3.30 a.m. Milburn let himself silently out of the house to find most of his friends, all wearing their festive sporting gear, ‘playing football by torchlight in the middle of the street’.Best and Edwards offers plenty of twitches on this lost, prelapsarian thread. Like sexual intercourse, the modern era of professional soccer turns out to have begun in 1963, shortly after the abolition of the maximum wage and shortly before the regular televising of matches.

Saturday

30 Sep 2006
D J-Taylor

Laughing to some purpose

As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly by. The other was the opening salvo of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, then featuring Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner; never broadcast on this side of the Atlantic, alas, but periodically written up in that hip young person’s bible, the New Musical Express. One of the advantages of Revel with a Cause (one of the worst titles ever devised for a book about comedy) is that it demonstrates where this second, and infinitely superior, strain came from.

Wednesday

12 Jul 2006
D J-Taylor

More than meets the eye — or not

Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush, famously Delphic in conversation, gave nothing away. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘it’s about Mrs Bartolozzi.’ For some reason I thought about this exchange while working my way through Haruki Murakami’s bumper selection of short stories.A representative offering from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a career showcase going back to the early 1980s, might be ‘New York Mining Disaster’. Is it about a mining disaster? Well, no.

Wednesday

31 May 2006
D J-Taylor

Fragments of village life

Listing page content hereBrick Lane, Monica Ali’s first novel, sold a great many copies and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was also criticised by those guardians of the public conscience who write letters to newspapers on the grounds of cultural tourism. Despite her impeccable Bangladeshi origins, these detractors alleged, the Oxford-educated Ms Ali was clearly unqualified to write about the realities of life in the polyglot East End. No doubt one or two of the same criticisms will be levelled at her choice of a sequestered Portuguese village as the setting for novel number two.For all the modesty of its style and some highly uncontentious subject matter, Alentejo Blue is a risky enterprise. The risk lies in Ali’s decision to construct what is not so much a novel with a large and interconnected cast as a collection of short stories whose characters stray occasionally onto the margins of each other’s lives.

Wednesday

17 May 2006
D J-Taylor

Delivering the goods

Listing page content hereThe funniest episode in Leo McKinstry’s biography of Sir Alf Ramsey (1920-99) finds its subject — the time is 1973 — reaching the end of his tether with the talented but undisciplined Manchester City forward Rodney Marsh. ‘I’ve told you that when you play for England you have to work harder’, Sir Alf harangues his wayward protégé. ‘I’ll be watching you and if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off at half-time.’ ‘Christ!’ Marsh mutters. ‘At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.’ Here in the twilight of Ramsey’s career, this ‘typical piece of cockney wit’ marked a wider, symbolical divide: the gap that had opened up between an erstwhile national saviour and a new breed of mavericks more interested in soccer’s rewards than some of its obligations.

Commercial
More from The Spectator
About us
Subscribe
Commercial
About us
More from The Spectator
Subscribe