Today

11 Aug 2022
Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed

Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should all be thankful. Craceland is a compelling place to visit, full of hazy yet broadly recognisable locations (Tudoresque England in the IMPAC award winning Harvest; a vaguely Mediterranean town in Melody) and spanning indeterminate times (the post-apocalyptic future in The Pesthouse; the end of the Stone Age in The Gift of Stones). The specific non-specificity of his fiction reflects Crace’s view of himself as more of a storyteller than a novelist, and his sense of history as a largely unwritten – and therefore often forgotten – phenomenon. In this, eden is typical Cracian fare. The book is set in paradise, or something like it, years after Adam and Eve’s fall.

Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed

Thursday

10 Feb 2022
The controversial side of carp fishing

All anglers are obsessive, but carp fishers are the most single-minded of all. They think nothing of spending weeks on the banks of a muddy lake or gravel pit, lines and breath baited, waiting for a bite. Ask an aficionado what motivates him and he’ll speak — with an intensity that sounds a lot like love — about the carp’s unrivalled cunning and fighting ability: its coquettish, crafty takes and its long, blistering runs. Most of all he will talk in awe about the sheer, meaty heft of these fish, of their unparalleled weight and girth. Carp fishing is a particularly British obsession, which is surprising, as the species is a relative newcomer to our waters. In The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, Izaak Walton described the carp as ‘the queen of rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish’, and asserted that the species had been brought to England only 100 or so years previously by one ‘Mr Mascal, a gentleman that then lived at Plumsted in Sussex, a county that abounds more with this fish than any in this nation’.

The controversial side of carp fishing

Saturday

3 Jul 2021

Thursday

1 Jul 2021
The mysterious world of pigeon racing

Pigeon racing isn’t much of a spectator sport. Race birds are driven to the ‘liberation point’, where they’re released to fly back to their homes. Only the liberation and the return are witnessed — what happens in between is a mystery. This is partly what makes pigeon racing so fascinating. It’s also what can make it so stressful. A week ago, between 5,000 and 10,000 pigeons went missing during a race from Peterborough. Usually fanciers aren’t too worried if a few birds don’t make it straight home from a race; they’ll rest up and return a few days later, no worse for wear. But this time the losses were exceptionally large. ‘I have never heard of anything like this,’ said Ian Evans, manager of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association.

The mysterious world of pigeon racing

Thursday

1 Apr 2021
Man about the house: Kitchenly 434, by Alan Warner, reviewed

I have enjoyed many of Alan Warner’s previous novels, so it gives me no pleasure to report that his new book is so monumentally tedious that when two accountants turn up halfway through you think: great! Things might finally be getting interesting. Kitchenly 434, set in Thatcherite Britain, is narrated by Crofton Clark, an aging hippy who lives at Kitchenly Mill Race, a Tudorbethan pile belonging to the mainly absentee rock star Marko Morell. Crofton loves both Marko and the house with an obsessiveness signalled by his frequent mentions of the fact. ‘I’m your, eh, caretaker,’ he reminds the owner. ‘I’m the retainer. I’m a faithful retainer of this house that I love.’ Marko rose to fame on the first wave of the English rock’n’roll revolution, during which he unleashed ‘a mighty noise of consequence and of economic empowerment’.

Man about the house: Kitchenly 434, by Alan Warner, reviewed

Thursday

1 Nov 2018
A chronicle of modern times

Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane and funny novels, but you sometimes suspect he wants to write more audacious ones. He has a long-standing interest in formally experimental writers — Flann O’Brien and B. S. Johnson are heroes — but it’s an interest that has never really become full-blown influence. Though The Rotter’s Club (2001) — our first introduction to some of the characters who populate Middle England — contains a 13,000-word-long sentence and a wonderfully complicated scene in which a husband and wife have a misdirected conversation (he completing a crossword; she reading a love letter from one of her son’s teachers) as they each consult a dictionary, for the most part experimentalism is confined to the surface of Coe’s novels.

A chronicle of modern times

Thursday

30 Mar 2017
Back to basics | 30 March 2017

Tim Parks is a writer of some very fine books indeed, which makes it even more of a shame that his most recent novel is flat, grim and (like its narrator) interesting only to itself. His main theme is adultery, a subject he explored in his wonderful novel Europa (1997), in the short story collection Talking About It (2005), and in the thoughtful essays of Adultery and Other Diversions (1998). But in recent years he has become the laureate of a certain kind of seedy, middle-aged infidelity, and In Extremis is single-minded to the point of obsession: anorak and dirty mac in one. The problem might be that he is simply too productive. In Extremis is a loose sequel to Thomas And Mary (2016) a novel that explored the breakup of a marriage from a range of narrative perspectives.

Back to basics | 30 March 2017

Thursday

12 Nov 2015
Life in the chain gang

In 2004, French police officers searching the home of the professional cyclist David Millar found some syringes and empty phials hidden in a hollowed-out book. Millar confessed that he had been using the substance EPO to boost his red-blood-cell count. He was banned from the sport for two years, and returned to cycling a reformed man, becoming a prominent and vocal critic of doping in the professional peloton. The rise and fall and rise of David Millar’s cycling career formed the dramatic backdrop to his first memoir, Riding Through the Dark (2011). His second book, The Racer, is a more elegiac affair. It follows Millar through the twilight of his career, recording his frustration as he loses his position as the elder statesman of British cycling.

Life in the chain gang