Justin Cartwright

Thursday

14 Apr 2016
Justin Cartwright

The last word

Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India. Characteristically of Barker, the narrative of her latest book is interlaced with little jokes and haikus and sly references to contemporary language and manners. (There is even an excursion to the Camargue.) At first I found the whole enterprise repetitive and wilfully quixotic, but it is well worth persevering. Barker describes her book as ‘truly little more than the sum of its many parts’. It turns out to be far more than that; a freehand, jokey sort of spiritual journey, an admiration and a parody of faith, orchestrated by Barker with an unfailing eye for the comic opportunity.

The last word

Thursday

22 Oct 2015
Justin Cartwright

Fear, loneliness and nostalgia: a return to Johannesburg

Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class snacks. They are bulging out of their uniforms. They cannot pass each other in the aisles without difficulty. This is the sort of thing you notice during a long flight; at least the sort of thing I notice. I arrive in the morning at Johannesburg after an 11-hour flight from Heathrow, to promote my new book, Up Against the Night. I am met by a minder who turns out to be the wife of an admiral in the South African navy. He is stationed in Pretoria. I point out that there is no naval base within a thousand miles of Pretoria. She says her husband has noticed this. The book tour is a strange institution.

Fear, loneliness and nostalgia: a return to Johannesburg

Thursday

4 Jun 2015
Justin Cartwright

Lost in the telling

This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key fact I can provide without giving away the plot is that Caroline, the film-making wife of Michael, the novel’s main protagonist, is killed in the badlands of Pakistan by a drone controlled from a facility near Las Vegas. Caroline is filming Taleban leaders when they and Caroline are killed. Michael, who is ‘an immersive journalist’, has spent some years on a project with gangs in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is dangerous but rewarding work, and after a few years his findings are published to some acclaim under the title of BrotherHoods. Now back in London, he falls in with Josh and Samantha, neighbours in the adjoining house and flat on Hampstead Heath.

Lost in the telling

Thursday

2 Apr 2015
Justin Cartwright

Justin Cartwright on redheads, anti-Semitism and the betrayal of Christ

Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald. Writing Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened. Also, he may not have hanged himself. This is a fascinating story of febrile myth-making over two millennia, with very little historical fact. Stanford starts his pursuit of Judas with a visit to gloomy Hakeldama in Jerusalem, the place where Judas is traditionally said to have hanged himself — if he did hang himself. The famous kiss is, as Stanford points out, improbable because those who were looking for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane would have known perfectly well who he was in a group of 12; after all, he had recently created havoc among the moneylenders of the temple.

Justin Cartwright on redheads, anti-Semitism and the betrayal of Christ

Thursday

16 Oct 2014
Justin Cartwright

The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed

Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something resonant, evoking a connection with the land and its meaning. Marsden is obsessed with pre-history and the beliefs and practices of the earliest inhabitants of Cornwall. He cites with approval someone’s judgment that written history is a palimpsest and he is demonstrably eager to see what was written over. Although his area of special interest is Cornwall, he describes expeditions to other European countries in search of a kind of kinship of belief and practice among them. His book is also a personal account of renovating an old but enchanting house on the Fal, interspersed with descriptions of his journeys across Cornwall, mostly on foot, to get close to the impenetrable secrets of pre-history.

The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed

Thursday

23 Jan 2014
Justin Cartwright

The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride - review

James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is set in the mid 19th century, and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. Recently it won a National Book Award in the USA. Brown, the Old Man, was a religious fanatic who believed that he had the nod from God to free the slaves. Early in his harum-scarum life he killed and beheaded some pro-slavery opponents with God’s sanction; like many fanatics he had a direct line to the Almighty. But it all ended in tragedy when, with his small band of followers, very few of whom were slaves, he took a federal government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The plan was to distribute thousands of guns to the ‘negroes’ (as McBride calls them).

The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride - review

Thursday

30 May 2013
Justin Cartwright

Justin Cartwright’s Diary

Too often, I go to South African theatre with a sense of foreboding: I anticipate something overwrought, tendentious, poorly acted and emotionally exploitative. So I arrived at the Hampstead Theatre last week without high expectations. The play, A Human Being Died That Night, was based on the book written by the psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who conducted interviews with Eugene de Kock, the most notorious of the appalling state-sponsored killers of the apartheid era. De Kock and his comrades murdered and tortured hundreds of anti-apartheid activists. But in the course of her discussions with him, Madikizela came to believe that De Kock should be pardoned and released from Pretoria Central jail, where he has been held for years.

Justin Cartwright’s Diary

Thursday

14 Feb 2013
Justin Cartwright

The tragedy of a hamlet

Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. The subjects Crace tackles are varied, from a microscopic study of death (Being Dead) to an eremitic retreat in the Judaean desert (Quarantine). They all deploy a terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read. Some of them are dystopian (The Pesthouse), some are set in very faintly demarcated places, or places that we recognise because we have dreamed of them. Yet this is not science fiction. It is rather a re-imagining of the world, using the available tools. It is as though Crace looks beyond and beneath the obvious, for the elemental, to produce prose poems whose cadences are accumulatively mesmerising.

Saturday

21 Jul 2012
Justin Cartwright

Welcome to surreal Luton

Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain  more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or other, it is not in London, not in the Midlands; its architecture is frightful, its pretentious but tatty hotels are full of middle management businessmen, its streets full of Vauxhalls driven by men with delusions and tattoos. It’s true Barker territory: the utterly grotesque sheltering amongst the banal. The action of the novel, which is wide-ranging and hasn’t what might be described as a plot, centres on a drunken golfer, Stuart Ransom, still a minor celebrity, who has unplumbed depths of self-esteem, despite the fact that he has the nervous disorder focal dystonia, known as ‘the yips’, is bankrupt, and his manager, a hilariously funny Jamaican woman, is due  to have a baby at any moment.

Thursday

3 May 2012
Justin Cartwright

Putting the fun in fundamentalism

Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition: this is a novel about jihad in south-east Asia, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim ladyboy. Mo’s perversity and boldness apply in equal measure to his hero/heroine. In the person of Snooky, né Ahmed, the katoey, or ladyboy, from the Malay south who has moved to Bhuddist Bangkok, a film critic and an autodidact who loves pop culture, Mo has written the best and most plausible account of jihadi I have ever read.

Saturday

21 Apr 2012
Justin Cartwright

Road to ruins

This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’. At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and historical sites, and by examining our love affair — cooling — with the motor car, he has in fact written a plain man’s state-of-the-nation book.

Saturday

25 Jun 2011

Saturday

12 Mar 2011
Justin Cartwright

When the best defence is no defence

This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to be known as the Delmas Four. It is also a wonderfully vivid and at times alarming account of the inner workings both of ANC ‘operations units’ and of the police, who used torture, murder and intimidation without compunction in the fight to save South Africa from what they saw as a communist threat. As South Africans in general drew closer to some sort of détente between the ANC and the nationalist government, neither the ANC on the one hand nor the security police on the other were prepared to hold back. It was as if this was the last hurrah for their deepest fears and hopes for the country.

Saturday

13 Nov 2010
Justin Cartwright

Positively Kafkaesque

This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of Nadine Gordimer’s non-fiction, called Telling Times.This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of Nadine Gordimer’s non-fiction, called Telling Times. Short stories are, of all her endeavours, the most successful. Their heyday was in the Seventies, when they perfectly realised the awful but fascinating contrasts of South African life.As a boy I lived in Johannesburg just two streets away from Gordimer. She was a towering figure, known to be very close to the ANC. Her presence cast a certain penumbra over our modest house. She had run, it was said, certain missions for the ANC, although when I asked her about this a few years ago, she suggested that she had just helped leading figures like Albert Luthuli pass messages to others.

Positively Kafkaesque

Saturday

29 May 2010
Justin Cartwright

Taking on the turmoil

Nadine Gordimer is now in her mid-eighties. For as long as I have been alive, she has been the towering figure of South African literature, a fact recognised in l991 by the Nobel committee. This is a collection of her non-fiction over 60 years, running to nearly 800 pages.There is a belief, prevalent in South Africa, that she received the Nobel more for her politics than her literature. The distinction between politics and literature is to her absurd; she quotes with approval a maxim, ‘Once I am no more than a writer I will stop writing’. No writer, she says, should be required to separate the inner life from a perception of the outer world. A writer, in her view, is someone who is deeply engaged with, and uniquely equipped to understand, the political and cultural life of his country, and of course in no country has the cultural and political life been more pressing or more present than in South Africa.

Taking on the turmoil

Saturday

6 Mar 2010
Justin Cartwright

A canker on the rose

This is a very short book with large type. DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America. America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town — from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford — America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.But now a canker has fallen on the rose. America is looking more closely at itself, and the most disturbing things it sees are the abuses of the Iraq war and the subsequent treatment of suspects, all in the name of a notion of freedom.

A canker on the rose

Saturday

23 Jan 2010
Justin Cartwright

Decline in New York

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope. Homer was thought to be blind — if indeed he was one person — and Milton of course suffered torture by going blind. Blindness is also associated with special powers of insight and intuition, very useful attributes for a poet. Blind poets had to develop long memories, too, if they wished to recite their works. The Odyssey is thought to have been the work of Homer’s old age. Homer and Langley is the work of E. L. Doctorow’s old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind. Homer Collyer’s chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing.

Decline in New York

Wednesday

14 Oct 2009
Justin Cartwright

The man who saved Oxford University

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored, so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter’s original allegory of truth and light striking the university, is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds. Here, bookended by large chunks of Latin, a new vice chancellor is to be admitted to the job. He is Andrew David Hamilton, his name Latinised for the ceremony into Andreas. He is not an Oxford man, having arrived here by way of Exeter, Cambridge and Princeton, where he was Provost. Later you could tell that he was not an Oxford man: he pronounced ‘Cherwell’, in his amusing and rather post-prandial speech, as ‘Churwell’.

Wednesday

2 Sep 2009

Wednesday

22 Apr 2009
Justin Cartwright

Zuluboy is here

South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since Apartheid, by R. W. Johnson After the Party: Corruption and the ANC, by Andrew FeinsteinI am writing this in Cape Town on the very day that Jacob Zuma is exonerated of all charges of corruption, racketeering and money-laundering — not by a judge, but by an ANC-appointed acting Director of the National Prosecuting Authority. This man defended his decision by claiming that there had been an abuse of due process when the head of the Scorpions anti-corruption unit was recorded by the National Intelligence Agency talking with ANC high-ups, including Thabo Mbeki, about the timing of Zuma’s prosecution. This abuse of process has apparently made the strong case against Zuma unwinnable.

Wednesday

28 Jan 2009
Justin Cartwright

My memories of the American Dostoevsky

Justin Cartwright recalls his conversations over the years with John Updike, who died this week, and the master’s contention that the only excuse for reading is to stealI love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone, because he was for me the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming and witty man. But above all he had a very rare quality in writing — absolute integrity. He never jumped on bandwagons, he never wrote down or pretentiously, he never pulled his punches, he never renounced his patriotism or his religious faith, as he applied himself diligently and sympathetically to his depiction of America in his time. He was also one of the most penetrating of critics, always honest, always looking for the best in a writer, always sympathetic to the great project, but at the same time relentlessly following the demands of a serious writer’s life.

Friday

12 Dec 2008
Justin Cartwright

Christmas Short Story

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas by Justin CartwrightIn 1920, at the age of 38, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father, Hermann, accusing him of ruining his life by his dictatorial and insensitive behaviour, which left him lacking in self-belief and unable to escape his father’s dominance. Kafka never sent this letter to his father, but instead showed it to friends.Justin Cartwright imagines the father’s reply.My dear Franz,Your letter to me, which I read with disgust and sorrow, is the product of your oversensitive imagination and your weak constitution, both of which are, alas, faults with which you were born.  You are misguided on so many points, starting with the nature of a father’s duty to his children and the nature of a son’s obligations to his father, that I hardly know where to start, except to say that your spite and lack of gratitude are monumental.

Wednesday

29 Oct 2008

Saturday

30 Aug 2008
Justin Cartwright

Who is selling what to whom?

Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising by Winston Fletcher The impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant, but ultimately shallow business. It is full of accounts of crassness, of overstated promise, of meaningless awards, fly-by-night companies, promotion of the semi-talented and clashing egos. It’s quite comprehensive and at times entertaining, as we hear of the hubris of the ridiculous Saatchis, the naivete of politicians and the endless attempts by ad agencies to carve out a little philosophical niche for themselves, be it the derided USP or the idea of account management. Fletcher also includes a rather dutiful section on advertising in history — Montaigne noted it, Johnson liked it — and a tour d’horizon of early exponents of the dark art.

Saturday

5 Jul 2008
Justin Cartwright

Mad, bad and incompetent

As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar with its manifold resentments. We also know that the myth of efficiency and single-mindedness was an illusion: the Third Reich was a shambles, both organisationally and ideologically. Much of the policy was made on the hoof, with the SS, the Gauleiters, the Army and the Civil Service in competition for power, and for Hitler’s attention.What Mazower demonstrates in this exhaustive and brilliant book, is that the unexpected speed of the conquest of Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Norway and France led to utter confusion about how to govern, how to impose German dominance and how to lend some form to the racial paranoia which inhabited the minds of Hitler, Heydrich and Himmler, and the minds of many other lesser lights and opportunists like Rosenberg, Sauckel and Koch.

Saturday

2 Feb 2008
Justin Cartwright

Daring to defy the myth

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures.Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers’ rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women. However, Weimar was, from the beginning, the target of the anti-democratic forces of the established Right — as Weitz describes the disparate forces which could be found in the nobility, the army, business, the churches and in the civil service. They, long before Hitler, were responsible for propagating the myth of the Dolschstoss, the stab in the back, and they were the people who would never accept that the first world war was the product of German militarism.

Saturday

6 Oct 2007
Justin Cartwright

Accentuating the human factor

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea. It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts; but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness, the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life. In Graham Greene’s case, I don’t think his novels are the key to understanding him. He writes, ‘I am my books,’ but this admirable volume of his letters suggests that for all his success he is not his books. He may have been a man of letters, but his books are, you feel, the means to an end, namely a kind of public eminence.

Saturday

14 Apr 2007
Justin Cartwright

Historical- thrillery-factual fiction

Recently, Adam Mars Jones accused me in the Observer of being in some ways worse than Hitler, because at least Hitler had an excuse for idolising the German upper classes, namely race science, which I didn’t. I was outraged, and seriously considered suing him. I have since calmed down a little and see now that novels set in the recent past are particularly prone to judgments which are more about the history than the fiction, and sometimes even confuse the author with the fictional voice.  This was the point Allan Massie made so eloquently in these pages a few weeks ago.       Dancing with Eva raises some of these questions. It is based on the account of the last days of the Hitler bunker given by Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary; Alan Judd insinuates into the story an account of a fictional secretary to Eva Braun, Edith Ashburnham, long since married to a British officer, now dead, and settled into her husband’s house in the shires with her housekeeper, Mrs Hoath.

Wednesday

5 Jul 2006
Justin Cartwright

Betjeman’s world of trains and buttered toast

I am sitting in the London Library as I write this. I am wearing Rafael Nadal tennis shorts, which come below the knee. Obviously, I look ridiculous. But this is the role of the middle-class, middle-aged English male, to feel slightly out of time, out of kilter, with the world around him. Sometimes down in Rock I see middle-aged Englishmen in their holiday gear, capacious navy-blue shorts or those faded pinkish trousers they wear for golf, always topped with a polo shirt, and it is clear to me that the English seaside has a liberating effect on these people: in a rather crabbed English fashion, they are letting their hair down. It’s odd, because most of the population has long ago learned to chill; it has no fears about looking absurd or being suburban or talking estuary English or driving a large car or wearing a saggy t-shirt.

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