Nobel Peace Prize 2010

The Nobel Peace prize for 2010 has been awarded to a Chinese dissident activist. What a surprise! China has reacted with anger at the decision of the Nobel committee to award the prize to this man whom the regime jailed in December 2009 for ‘inciting subversion of state power’, and has accused the committee of attempting to destabilise the country by fomenting internal strife. I am shocked!

The reaction of the Chinese regime is as depressingly predictable as the decision of the Nobel committee to award the peace prize to the dissident. Indeed as Liu Xiaobo was convicted by what passes in China for judicial system he might have consoled himself with the thought that the Nobel Peace Prize was now surely his (not enough, or nearly enough, compensation for spending eleven years in Chinese gaol if you ask me).

If you (like me) do not have a position, so to speak, on this issue, you would be puzzled. On one side is China, the de facto superpower, a nation that is the inheritor of one of the ancient civilizations of the world, a nation that represents a significant chunk of humanity (I haven’t done the math, which, in any case, is not my strong point, but I would have thought that India and China, the two Asian giants, between them, represent at least one third of the humanity), and a nation that has, for the past six decades, a political system that is, not to put too fine a point on it, a police state; on the other side is a tiny Scandinavian nation that is mostly known for giving the world the pop group ‘Abba’ and a few blonde (and bland) tennis players in the 1980s, and which doles out yearly largesse in the memory of a man who invented dynamite. The Nobel peace prize is awarded by another (tinier) Scandinavian country whose most famous gift to the world is Jarlsberg cheese.

However, this is not just about the respective sizes of the countries. These Scandinavian countries have money to give, and it is a lot of money. They can of course give the money to whomever they wish; it is their money. And it is an award that is associated with a lot of prestige. Its earlier recipients include such heavyweights as Al Gore (for making a documentary) and Barak Obama (for doing what?). So, coming back to the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, we have two diametrically opposite views about the man Xiaobo. The Chinese say he is a criminal who has been convicted by the system that exists in that country, and the regime believes that he is part of the plot to destabilise China. The Nobel Committee would have us believe that Xiaobo has made so much contribution to peace (where?) that it could think of no better or more deserving person than him to shower their millions on. The Chinese are hopping mad. They are seeing all kinds of conspiracies. The Chinese Foreign minister has declared that awarding the peace prize to the criminal Xiaobo runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and is also a blasphemy to the peace prize (he should know). The Chinese has cancelled with immediate effect the visit of a Norwegian fisheries committee (that should teach them a lesson). If this was predictable, the Nobel committee’s response to Chinese histrionics was equally predictable. The committee couldn’t be more smug. The Chinese response, it declared, was as misguided as their accusation of interference. The committee regretted the actions taken by the regime (the dissident’s wife has been put under house arrest, and I’d imagine that she has less chances of making it to Sweden to accept the prize on behalf of her jailed husband than, as they say, a one-legged man winning an ass-kicking competition), but it was not surprised. The Nobel committee (in case it has escaped your notice) stands for a set of principles. The committee takes instructions from nobody. The Nobel committees over the years, of course, have a great tradition of standing for their principles and taking instructions from nobody. Such as not awarding the prize to Gandhi even though he was nominated twice, because the British colonialists indicated that they would be very displeased if Gandhi was given the award (and, no doubt, further indicated that the Scandinavian monarch—if such an institution exists— would not be welcome for tea at Buckingham palace; which, if you think of it, should be regarded as a blessing in disguise—if you value your life do not go to a British house for their dreadful tea). The pompous hectoring of Geir Lundestead about principles and being independent minded is what the Spanish call gilipollez, Italians call cazzata, French call connerie and the English call bullshit (don’t know what the Norwegian or Swedish call it). Or, if this is too rude, you might say the argument is rich; it couldn’t be richer than if it were weighed down with kilos of Jarlsberg cheese.

The question, here, is: what exactly has Liu Xiaobo done to promote peace in China? WikiPedia informs us that he is a political activist who is unhappy with the current political system in that country, and is agitating to change it. He was jailed in 1989, for example, for his part in the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1996 he was ordered to serve three years of re-education through labour for disturbing public order. He obviously did not learn the lesson the regime was hoping to teach him, and last year he was jailed for spreading messages to subvert the country and authority. This does not sound to me like behaviour of someone who is spreading peace.

And what is more, I don’t think the regime is exaggerating or lying when it says that Xiaobo is attempting to subvert the authority. Because that is precisely what he is doing; that is his stated aim. What is not clear (to me anyway) is whether the regime is really afraid of Xiaobo or it is merely irked at what it sees as an attempt by the uppity Scandinavians to embarrass the regime on an international stage. Whatever the case, it would be fair to assume that the Chinese Communist party can do without the likes of Xiaobo going around putting ideas into people’s head that democracy is the answer to their problems. Because it isn’t— in any case, the lies and intrigues of the rulers are the same no matter what system is in place—and also there may not be any problem—especially if you support the party—in the first place. What is impossible to know is whether the pro-democracy movement is gaining ground in China. There is no reason to suppose that—not taking into account the hard-core Communists—hoi polli of China are pining for democracy. Difficult as it is for democracy-mongers in the West, who are prepared to (illegally) invade sovereign countries and murder millions to spread the message of democracy, to believe this, the Chinese might actually be happy with how things are in their country, thank you very much. The decision of the Nobel committee to award Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize is a political decision. It is as much a political decision as George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was. There is also, I feel, an element of mischief-making. Now that China is reasserting herself on the world stage and the balance of power is shifting slowly but surely Asiawards, we should expect more of this from European countries in which industrial revolution took place with little to no regard to democracy and human rights. Expect more of hand-wringing and tut-tutting about the human right violations in China and the starving millions in India.

If I were the Chinese premier (and still in full control of all the factions in the party and my faculties) I would seriously consider starting a Chinese award. That would be the apt thing to do rather than whingeing every time the Western pranksters get up to their old tricks. The Chinese regime can award that nutter who tried to set off car-bombs the Time Square. He is fearlessly fighting a valiant battle to subvert the authority of the regime in, as a character in a Peter Carey novel I recently finished reading says, the you-Knighted States of America, and the regime gave him a life-sentence without a parole. The Chinese could honour the unsung heroes of the ultra-leftist terrorists in the neighbouring India who periodically blow up railways, kidnap and kill civilians in order to unleash an egalitarian dictatorship (and they are doing this in the name of Chairman Mao). How about conferring posthumous honours on Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein? The former tried to wipe out Muslims in the erstwhile Yugoslavia, perhaps not with as much success and efficiency as the Chinese in the Xingjiang province, but you have got to admit that the man had a bloody good go at it. And Saddam, of course, had modelled himself, his regime and his party on Stalin whose puppet chairman Mao was in the early years of his dictatorship. Nick Griffin (he, like Xiaobo, is not afraid to make his point, and, again, like him, is, so far, in minority in his country) would be happy to travel to Beijing to receive his millions. It is about time. 

Book of the Month: Chinese Whispers (Jane Wong)

In 1972 Jan Wong, a third generation Chinese woman from Canada, enrolled into the historical Beijing University to study Mandarin. China was in the midst of Cultural Revolution, and its relation with the West was below freezing point. Jan Wong was one of the only two foreign students allowed to study in Beijing; the other, like her, was an ethnic Chinese from America. Their studies had been approved at the highest level of the Chinese government. As the first foreign student, Wong had her own teacher, cook and dormitory. Everyone who befriended Wong during her year long stay in Beijing, although she did not know it at the time, was carefully vetted by the Communist party—the Beijing University even selected hand-picked students to fill the dormitory in which Wong was staying. All of this was entirely in keeping with the monumental paranoia of the West reigning in Mao’s China, counterpoised by a desire to present a picture of harmonious, happy society to impressionable Westerners. The regime, like all totalitarian regimes, was petrified of knowledge and new ideas that would threaten the hegemony of the Communist Party. It encouraged ordinary citizens, even members of the same families in several instances, to spy on and denounce each other. In what would surely go down in the history of the twentieth century as an extreme example of thought control—much worse than what the Stasi did in the German Democratic Republic—steenth careers and lives were ruined for harbouring heretic and unpatriotic thoughts. Someone could be imprisoned or beaten to death for accidently ripping up a newspaper that happened to contain a photograph of Mao.

As a starry eyed socialist Wong was completely unaware of this (she was not alone; very few at the time were aware of what was going on in China; China’s human violations were not common knowledge then). China, for her, was a socialist paradise. She willingly worked in factories, volunteered to rub shoulders with the peasants in the paddy fields, and mixed cement when one of the buildings on the university campus was being built. She believed totally, unhesitatingly, unquestioningly in the lies spread by Mao and the Communist Party. China, she convinced herself, was a socialist heaven on earth where people lived in harmony, happiness, and cleanliness. She was therefore aghast when one of the Chinese students in the university, studying History (which in Mao’s time meant Modern Communist History), whom she barely knew, approached her and her American friend with a request to help her get out of China; the young woman wanted to go to America. To Wong and her Chinese-American friend, who was even more left-wing than Wong, this was a betrayal—of the workers and peasants who had paid for the young woman’s university education—on a mammoth scale. Anyone who accepted such help was duty-bound to stay in China. Helping the young woman was out of the question. However, Wong and her friend went a step further: they reported the woman to their respective teachers. The discomfort she felt at tattling on the woman, Wong convinced herself, was just a manifestation of the bourgeois Western sentimentality she was trying to overcome. Chairman Mao had exhorted to ‘let politics take command’; any other considerations were supererogatory. Wong made an entry into a diary she kept at that time, with the woman’s name, and forgot about the incident. A year later, Wong went back to her Capitalist country of birth. She graduated with a degree in journalism, and, over the next two decades spent considerable time in China as a correspondent of various newspapers. Then, in the 1990s, while moving her house, Wong came across the diaries of her youth. She read them for the first time in twenty years, and the enormity of what she had done to this young woman in 1972 sank in.

It took Wong another decade to take the decision that she was going to find this woman, if she could, and apologise for what she (Wong) had done to her. So, in 2007, when China and Beijing were gearing up for what the Communist Party had decided would be the greatest show on earth—the 2008 Olympics—Wong arrived in Beijing with her family—her Canadian husband who spoke Mandarin like a native, and two sons, who couldn’t. Chinese Whisper: A Journey Into Betrayal is the story of Wong’s quest to trace the woman she had so casually betrayed, in a country of 1.3 billion. However, it is not just that. It is a part travelogue, and gives a fascinating insight into how far China—at least Beijing— has come since the days of Chairman Mao, who lies embalmed in his mausoleum in the Tiananmen Square.

In Beijing Wong finds herself in the midst of a construction mania—wherever she goes, the roads are being expanded, old houses bulldozed in order to make way to giant skyscrapers—that would change the face of this city, which first emerged on the world podium almost 3000 years ago. Hutong, Beijing’s famed residential laneways, are disappearing fast, and are being replaced by wide roads, and for the expansion to happen, thousands of trees are being cut. China is no longer the ‘Sick Man of Asia’. After having invented the gunpowder (and a few other essentials) China is now gunning for economic engines. It is the world’s biggest consumer of steel and cement; it is the world’s largest market for computer, cameras, and cell phones; and the world’s second largest market (after the USA) for cars. Any day now, China will start exporting cars to America. Malls the size of several football stadiums are being erected, and the high earners live in condos that cost up to a million dollars (the State has long since given up its monopoly on the real estate, and the people are allowed to own their properties); and, if there is one thing that is emblematic of the Jettisoning of Maoist doctrine, it is the craze among the ‘nouveau riche’ to have dogs as pets—Mao hated dogs, and had decreed that having pet dogs was a bourgeois indulgence—which, in the time-honoured Chinese habit of weighing the worth of everything in monetary terms, are also regarded as commodities the value of which increase with time: more than one dog-owner proudly informs Wong that his pet dog which he bought for 5000 yuans, was worth 15,000 yuans. More than 40% of Chinese do more than 10 hours of overtime every week, and almost 10% work in excess of 60 hours every week.

So much for the material wealth and progress. Has anything changed culturally? Wong finds that China is communist only in name. The party which still presides over what is effectively a police state does not make its presence conspicuous in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. Many amongst the young Chinese are not overtly concerned about the (relative) lack of free speech and media control by the party. Upwardly mobile and ambitious young men join the party in order to go up the career ladder quickly, not because they believe in the dogma. There are certain ‘advantages’ of a Police State. For example, when Westerners began yapping about the high levels of pollution in Beijing, the dictatorship simply shifted—lock stock and barrels—several factories and a couple of industries out of Beijing, into the interiors. When large motorways are to be developed—as the party’s plans to improve the infrastructure—or dams are to be built, the houses and the villages that come in the way, are simply bulldozed. Someone higher up in the hierarchy of the dictatorship takes a decision, and it happens; the trifles such as public consultations, adequate compensations for those who have lost their homes and livelihoods are dispensed with. This is the paradox of the country, which may well be the next (and the first socialist) superpower: human lives come with different price-tags attached to them. The party still gives away official residential permits for each district and cities within the districts. You can buy properties, access health care etc. in a given city only if you have the official permit. Millions of rural Chinese, displaced by the government projects and the unequal developments, head for the cities and become second class citizens in their own country, living in shanties cheek by jowl with the opulent housing estates. The party still clings on to the one Maoist tactic, though: to limit and control the spread of knowledge. Because it knows that that is the ultimate threat to its existence. The media is state controlled, and subjects such as Tiananmen Square Massacre of the 1989 are not discussed. Indeed, Wong comes across many young Chinese who have not heard of—or say they have not heard of—the massacre; a number of them associate the historical square with the giant rally the party organized to celebrate Beijing’s selection as a venue for the 2008 Olympics. Those who are old enough to remember what happened, are reluctant to discuss it; and Wong gets the feeling that the reluctance is only partly down to their fear of reprisal by the Communist dictatorship; they do not want to talk about it because in their minds they—and the country with them—have moved on. This collective amnesia for the event in which, according to which Western Newspaper report you read, between 1000 to 3000 people died, might puzzle the Western minds, which, have the need for public soul searching—the only way to come to terms with a catastrophe; but for the Chinese this is par for the course. After all, this is a country which has not autopsied the ten years of Cultural Revolution in which reportedly 1 million Chinese died; and the man who unleashed this terror (and with it unspeakable miseries on his people) is still hailed as the Father of the Communist China. This is the Chinese way of doing things; they do things differently. Thus, when Deng Xiaoping became the Chinese Premiere after Mao’s death, he went about quietly burying Mao’s unworkable ideas, but stopped short of denouncing him, unlike Khrushchev who denounced Stalin. This is all the more interesting, as, during the Cultural Revolution—which Mao unleashed essentially to purge to Communist Party of his opposers, who, he was convinced, were plotting against him—, Deng was officially declared as Mao’s number two enemy and was subjected to extreme humiliation. His eldest son was thrown out of fourth floor window by the fanatical Maoist cadres, and became paraplegic. When interviewed in 2004, full 38 years after the accident, the son said that he did not feel the need to discuss it; it was all in the past.   

Does this story have a personal happy ending? Does Wong manage to trace the woman she betrayed all those years ago and to whom she now wants to apologise? With no clue other than the woman’s name—which turns out to be incorrect—Wong begins her search. She manages to contact some of her former fellow socialist students—all of whom are living in humongous condos equipped to keep the Beijing pollution at bay; own Porsches which they cannot drive faster than 15 mph because of gridlock; dine in restaurants and spending money in an evening many in the West don’t earn in a month; and—the supreme irony of a socialist state, this—have a bevy of maids, poor peasant girls from the interiors, to do the housework—and some of the former teachers. They either can’t remember or have only the vaguest idea of what might have happened to this woman, which, Wong reasons, is understandable seeing as the woman was one of the millions who were denounced and ruined during the Cultural Revolution. Wong traces several leads which, to her dismay, run cold. Just when she has all but given hope of finding the woman—she is eager to atone, but only if she can trace the woman within a month, which is the maximum time she can set aside from her busy schedule to expiate an old guilt—the woman phones her out of the blue. It turns out that the woman has a house on the Beijing University Campus. Wong meets with her and learns what happened to her after she was betrayed. As she listens to the story, Wong realises that all those former fellow students and friends who could not remember the woman or what had happened to her had not told her the truth.

Chinese Whispers: A Journey Into Betrayal is a gripping tale which hooks you within the first few pages. It gives you an insight into how China, the next superpower, is dealing with her past. It also makes you re-examine the world that we inhabit.

Jacobson Wins the Booker

Earlier this week I was at a friend’s house with another friend—the friend’s friend, that is. So there were three of us: my friend with her two friends—that is me and the third person, a woman with pie-eater’s jowls—, both of us—that is I and the pie-eater—having my friend—although she was not just my friend, she was her—the third person’s—friend too—as the common link. We were, the three of us, having a light lunch, which I was disappointed to note consisted of red grapes (sour), strawberries (watery and soft), slices of cantaloupe melon (tasteless), salted pea nuts (couldn’t she have been less tight-fisted and served cashew nuts?), sourdough bread and brie (not brie de meaux which I prefer) and canned orange juice. (What’s wrong with a glass of wine; you can have a glass or two at lunch, can’t you? Drinking in the afternoon does not make you an alcoholic, does it? Alcohol for me, at whatever time of the day I drink it, is just fuel to be chucked on the conversational pyre; once I have bathed my tongue in it, I feel more relaxed, and the words flow more smoothly out of my mouth.) We were sitting in my friend’s rectangular dining room. On the opposite window-sill were three potted chilli plants. The conversation was not flowing smoothly, and I was wondering why the other woman was invited (perhaps she was wondering the same). Perhaps, I wondered, my friend was attempting for the two of us to get to know each other. If that was the case, she had not gone about it cleverly. Firstly, she knows I do not like surprises, so she should have told me about this. Secondly, she ought to have known that wobbly inner thighs do not light my fire. The other woman did not seem in a mood to talk much, and not only because her mouth was crammed with salted pea nuts.  I wondered whether her sex life was an unending eat-as-much-as-you-like buffet. I tried to imagine her in her underwear but stopped as I found the image incompatible with mental well-being. The woman might just be the ticket for some desperate bloke, but not me. (I am desperate, but not that desperate.) Maybe, I concluded, my friend had no hidden motive behind inviting me and the fat woman for lunch.

Trying to wrestle my thoughts away from sex, I looked around the dining room. Behind me, on a shelf were stacked piles and piles of CDs. In one corner was a wooden table on which were arranged porcelain figurines and dishes, the kind of tat you see in low income houses. (You can take a girl out of council estate, but you can’t take council estate out of a girl.) I looked to my left where on another wooden table, amongst all sort of things—from a jar of quality chocolates and hairclips— were stacked five books—all hard-bound—one on top of another. That surprised me. My friend is a bit common (she comes from some Northern town and speaks in this incredible accent, as if she has had a stroke or something) and while I know that she likes to read, I have always assumed that she is not equipped to read anything more intellectually demanding than the Waitrose weekend guide on Food & Drink (she might be a butcher’s daughter, but now runs a successful Interior Decoration business and discusses the relative merits of Gigonda—which she pronounces ji-gonda—and Chateauneuf du pape—I won’t even attempt to type how she pronounces—but it is noteworthy that she has even heard of these wines; and I ‘d have described the fact that I who know how the wine names are pronounced can’t afford them as ironic if I were not pissed off by it), or, in the fiction territory—Jill Cooper or Norah Roberts. The books stacked up on the table—five of them—were the Booker short-listed ones.

‘I see,’ I said, ‘that you are planning to read all the Booker short-listed novels.’

My friends looked pleased. ‘But,’ I continued, ‘one book is missing. Why is that?’

‘Which one?’ my friend asked.

‘Damon Galgut,’ this was the fat friend. I looked at her, impressed, and overlooked the fact that she spoke with pea nuts in her mouth. Perhaps there was more to her than met the eyes (and there was a lot of her that met the eyes).

‘Oh! That! I gave it as a present to my sister,’ my friend said.

‘Have actually read any of the books, yet?’ I asked.

My friend responded by asking me a question of her own: ‘Have you read Room?’

‘No I haven’t. Isn’t it the book inspired by that Austrian pervert who imprisoned his daughter for years in the basement of his house and shagged her?’

‘I wouldn’t quite put it like that, but yes.’

‘I can see why you liked the book,’ I said.

‘I didn’t even tell you I read the book,’ my friend said.

‘Well, have you? You have, haven’t you? Or haven’t you?’

‘As it happens I have. Why did you say you could see I’d like the book?’

‘Well,’ I said, retreating, ‘I thought that was the sort of book you’d like.’

‘You mean, books on perverts?’ my friend looked threateningly at me.

‘Well, you have liked the book, obviously,’ I said.

‘I don’t recall telling you,’ my friend replied with exaggerated slowness, as though speaking to a well meaning but not overtly bright child, ‘that I liked the book. I recall asking you whether you had read the book.’

‘From which I cleverly inferred that you must have read the book. Why else would you ask me about that book? You could have asked me, “Did you read Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America?” But you didn’t. You asked me, “Have you read Room?” There!’

‘’OK Sherlock, I have read the book and as it happens I liked it. Now tell me, have you read any of the books yourself?’

‘Yes I have.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Only one so far. Parrot and Oliver in America. If you had more than ten brain cells, you’d have figured that out,’ I said, watching from the corner of my eyes the fat friend lathering a slice of sourdough with butter, on which she balanced a large chunk of brie.

‘How did you find it?’

‘Dull beyond belief,’ I said.

This was true. Parrot and Olivier in America is a drag. This is the fourth novel of Carey I have read and the second I have not liked. The novel tells the story of a French noble and his English servant travelling in America in the first half the nineteenth century and observing the dawn of democracy. In the 'Acknowledgement' Carey says that he was inspired to write the novel after he read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I haven’t read Tocqueville’s book, but I doubt it will be as dreary as Carey’s novel. The language is incredibly stilted—it judders and clanks like a rusted train on the Australian outback. There is no real plot to speak of; the two protagonists—Olivier and Parrot— are about as lively as mannequins in a clothes shop; and the novel has more stereotypes than fleas in a mongrel’s ears. I lost the will to live after about two hundred pages; the novel sucked out—as one of the characters in the novel might say—the life-juice out of me. And it was only my stubbornness that kept me going until the end.

‘Do you think he will win the Booker?’ The fat friend asked.

‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘But I won’t be surprised he wins.’

‘Who do you think will win?’ She asked.

‘I’d like Howard Jacobson to win.’

‘Have you read any of his books?’ My friend asked.

‘No I haven’t. I want him to win because I think he is stunningly handsome. Of course I have,’ I said.

‘Have you read ‘The Finkler Question’?’

‘No I haven’t,’ I said. ‘But I plan to read it. But before that I will read ‘The Long Song’’.

‘Oh! Isn't she gorgeous?’ my friend said, exhaling noisily through her mouth on ‘s’. ‘Small Island! Have you read it?’

‘Small Island!' I said, mimicking the way my friend said it. 'I have read her earlier novels too, which I liked even more.’

‘I haven’t read those,’ my friend said.

‘No I didn’t think you would have,’ I said. In response my friend picked up a slice of bread and threw it at my face.

The above conversation took place on the day the Booker winner was announced. I was very pleased that Howard Jacobson won the prize for his comic novel, The Finkler Question. This is the first time in years that the writer I’d have liked to win the prize actually won. I should have betted on Jacobson. That would have made me richer too. In the days leading to the announcement, Tom McCarthy’s C was put by the bookies in the prime position to win the prize, with Emma Donghue’s Room in the second position. C apparently received an inexplicable flurry of betting in the last few days prior to the announcement, which triggered rumours of a leak and prompted Ladbrokes to close betting early. Usually, being bookies’ favourite is a guarantee that the novel won’t win the prize, although Last year Hilary Mantel broke the taboo when her historical novel, Wolf Hall won the prize despite the bookies putting it odds on to win. Room, wholeheartedly recommended by my friend, had until then sold the most copies (no doubt because of the prurient subject matter), followed by Andrea Levy’s Long Song. And there were almost 9,000 fools (like me) who had wasted their money on Peter Carey’s dreadful Parrot and Olivier in America, putting it in the third place amongst the Booker short-listed novels.  I don’t know how many copies The Finkler Question has sold, but I should very much hope that the Booker win would give its sales a fillip. It is the first out and out comic novel since Kingsley Amis’s Old Devils that has won the Booker, which is great; it is not often that this genre gets the recognition it deserves.

The Finkler Question, Jacobson’s eleventh novel, an exploration of being Jewish, apparently starts with the sentence, ‘He should have seen it coming’. Did Jacobson see the prize coming his way? He claimed not, in an interview after the award. ‘Often I thought I was not going to win it,’ he said, ‘never thought I’ll eventually win it this time.’ Well, he has. And I hope the Booker prize will introduce this seriously funny (as the cliché goes) and underrated (another epithet Jacobson said after his Booker triumph he was very glad to jettison) writer, who has, at times, been described, much, apparently, to his annoyance, as the 'Jewish Jane Austin’ (I can fully understand his annoyance—Jacobson’s writing is nothing like that of Jane Austen, the most overrated and overhyped writer in English, or any, language, and whose Pride and Prejudice is almost as boring as Parrot and Olivier in America: if you want to have the experience of a minute seeming like a day and an hour seeming like a year, read a few pages of Pride and Prejudice), to more newer and wider readership. 

Book of the Month: All the Fishes Come Home to Roost (Rachel Manija Brown)

In the early 1980s, a precocious seven-year-old girl left California and, together with her parents, boarded a plane to India. She spent the next five years in Ahmadnagar, a provincial town in western India, in the state of Maharashtra. On the outskirts of this sleepy town was, still is, a spiritual commune formed by Meher Baba, the self-declared avtar of his age, one of the many mystics from India (a land that disgorges more gurus than Afghanistan does Talibans). During her stay, the little girl, named, to her eternal embarrassment, Manija—an ancient Persian name for precious gem, also the name of a female disciple of Meher Baba—was the only child in the ashram that was inhabited by some very curious individuals who, if they were not entirely out of their minds, did not appear to be entirely within them.

Five years in an Indian ashram obviously left a deep impression on the mind of the little girl, and, thirty years (and possibly several therapies) later, she has produced an engaging, highly readable memoir: All the Fishes Come Home to Roost. Uprooted from her idyllic childhood in America, little Manija Brown, the involuntary resident of the Baba-ashram, sets about making sense of the strange world she is unwittingly hurled into, with the enthusiasm of Alice in Wonderland. While Ahmadnagar has its occasional moments of excitement—for example, when a man who, having taken a vow of rolling across India, for reasons fathomable probably only to him, rolls into town, its inhabitants, instead of taking him to a place of safety (and arranging for an urgent psychiatric assessment), declare him to be holy and seek his blessings—it would be safe to conclude that it is not a happening place. Indeed Brown finds Ahamdnagar mind-numbingly stupefying—it is the kind of place where if an aeroplane goes overhead people rush out of their houses. There is no television in the ashram, all the movies in the cinema are in languages she does not understand, the Indian-style toilets (holes in the ground) are populated by giant rats, there are no facilities for hot showers, and the seasons consist of ‘unpleasantly hot, unbearably hot, and, for three months every year, soaking wet’. Brown is not allowed to visit the town library; stepping out of the ashram compound, in any case, can be a life-threatening experience as the entire population of the children of Ahmadnagar seems to have decided to use Brown as a target to practise rock-throwing. The ashram-society, Brown informs, was divided into ‘residents’ (almost all Americans), 'mandali' (a Sanskrit word meaning ‘inner circle’) comprising Indians (with an average age of hundred and eighty five) who were close to Meher Baba, and 'servants'. The 'residents', Brown recalls, in keeping with India’s cast system (which does not appear to be all that different from the class system in the West) did not mix with the 'servants'. Every year the commune was visited by pilgrims looking for inner peace (and, in some cases, lost marbles).  A few went spectacularly mad: such as the Hungarian Vladimir Vladimir who arrived one year dressed like the late Meher Baba declaring that he (Vladimir Vladimir) was indeed he (Meher Baba), and, as a reward, was beaten up black and blue by the Indian policemen (at the behest of one of the senior mandali) with a force and energy that would have had chairman Mao nodding with approval. (The readers are relived to learn that the duplicate, along with his consort (who shared his delusion), was eventually committed to an asylum in a nearby city where the treating psychiatrist got very excited about the rare case of shared delusions and declared her intentions to write a monograph on it.) Unable to adjust to a culture which she finds as different from her parent-culture as chalk is from cheese, not being allowed to fraternize with her peers (who wouldn’t accept her as one of them any way), Brown finds solace in reading about India’s colourful history. In particular she is fascinated by the heroics of Shivaji, a popular seventeenth century hero, an Indian Robin Hood, who fought battles, politically as well as on the battlefield, against the supposedly invulnerable might of the Mughals, and went on to establish his own kingdom, which, in the eighteenth century, grew into a pan-Indian empire. She also likes to read about women warriors from India’s history. Like a hungry caterpillar Brown absorbs these tales that are grisly yet strangely stirring.

The school into which brown is enrolled plays a major role in blighting Brown’s already unhappy existence in Ahmadnagar. She is enrolled into a private—rather than public—Catholic school where the subjects are taught in English as opposed to Marathi, the local language which Brown does not understand and can not speak. In this school, named ‘Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Saviour’, Brown, Jewish by birth and a Baba-lover by parental decree, encounters teachers and nuns straight out of Adam’s Family, and children who would make the bullies in the Lord of the Flies appear tame lambs in comparison. The teachers forever are in search of innovative and gory ways of torturing pupils—at one time Brown, with the rest of the class, witnesses the terrifying spectacle of the class-teacher frenziedly and repeatedly knocking the head of a boy on the stone-floor till he passes out and suffers an epileptic fit—while the bullies amongst children steal Brown’s belongings, pour ink on her back, and, when stuck for ideas, throw rocks at her. Brown admits that she was not the only pupil who was subjected to corporal punishment—the nuns just wanted to wring necks and weren’t fussy about whose necks they wrenched; if anything she got punished less than the Indian children— and, for the classroom bullies, she was just one amongst many whom they tormented; but this knowledge—that she was not the only one to suffer the excruciation—did not make the pain bearable. Her parents appear to be surprisingly oblivious to Brown’s plight—her mother claims, years later, that she genuinely did not know that her daughter was so desperately unhappy at school—, perhaps because of the knowledge that the only alternative available, a public sector Marathi school, was, if that was possible, worse than the Catholic school.

Young Brown is a keen observer of the peculiarities and frailties of those around her; and the adult Brown has a wonderful gift of narration. The conclusions she reaches are sometimes revealing, sometimes superficial, and always interesting. By far the most fascinating characters are Brown’s parents—her mother Da-Nonna and her father Joey, both confirmed Baba-lovers. Da-Nonna, we learn towards the end, is still living in the Ahmadnagar ashram; Joey returns to America after five years, having found a new soul-mate in the ashram, and their home in America is adorned by no less than eighty nine photographs of Meher Baba. Brown’s depiction of her mother has a touch of theatricality and farcicality about it. Da-Nonna is the stereotypical Westerner, who, unhappy with her lot in life, possibly damaged by traumatic experiences in her childhood, embraces the benign sect of an Indian mystic and its not-wholly-original philosophy with the avidity of an alcoholic clutching a bottle of whisky. She swallows all the fantastic stories of Meher Baba’s powers and his nifty deeds in previous incarnations (which include Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Zoroaster and most mythological figures from the Hindu pantheon), sees Baba’s face in the bark of a tree in the ashram’s compound, is overcome with happiness and gratitude when asked to serve tea to the senior mandali, and has the unshakable belief that Meher Baba is God. While Brown’s mother throws herself into the daily life of the ashram, its rituals and intrigues, her father is a somewhat detached onlooker at the periphery of the Baba-world and whiles his time pontificating with fellow Baba-lovers on whether or not life is an illusion. This man is not gullible, he is habitually inclined to scepticism, he describes himself as an agnostic; yet he travels across half the world and lives in dusty Ahmadnagar for five years. Years later he confides in his daughter that he agreed to go to India to keep the family together as his wife had made up her mind on the matter and would have gone on her own had he disagreed. Then there are a host of secondary characters, all permanent residents of the ashram, whose behaviour, judging by Brown’s account, ranges from eccentric to clinically insane. Ratanji, the librarian, has pathological hatred of all children, and keeps himself busy by grunting outside Brown’s window till late in the night; ‘Malik, the Mast’ is forever searching the ground and collecting items that are visible only to him, and such is the unpredictability of his behaviour that the mandalis feel compelled to put a notice outside of his hut advising women to keep their distance; ‘Coconut’—he is round, brown and hairy—a man in his fifties, insists that seven year old Brown is his mother because it is the Kaliyuga (The age of Kali, bad times, according to Hindu beliefs) age and ‘anything can happen then.’ Overlooking this disparate, ragtag collection of misfits and eccentrics is Meher Baba, rather his portrait, for he died, or, as his followers say, left his body, years before Brown was born. Although Meher Baba, a Zoroastrian by birth, declared himself to be God, he was careful not to start a religion; certainly his philosophy, such as it was, appears to have borrowed liberally from Hinduism and Buddhism. He also took a vow of silence when he was in his thirties—apparently because he was misunderstood in all his previous incarnations—and communicated in a sign language for the next forty-five years, till he died. Towards the end of his life, or, as his avtar as Meher Baba neared its conclusion, he spent his time by giving his disciples tasks such as killing all the mosquitoes in the commune’s campus (which suggests he was probably au courant with public health issues, or wanted to impress upon the disciples’ minds the futility of these tasks and by extension life, or had given up on the local pest-control measures) and asking them questions such as what they would do if he asked them to kill their children (which suggests that he was indeed God, or had read the Bible). The 1960s were boom times for Indian gurus, and Meher Baba was no exception; his popularity reached its peak in this decade, and among his followers at the time was Pete Townsend of the British rock band The Who. Townsend wrote songs inspired by his devotion to Meher Baba. He, Meher Baba, is the Baba in Baba O’rielly and it is probable that Townsend had him in mind when he wrote Parvardigar (an urdu word for God). Meher Baba’s tomb in the Ahmadnagar commune is visited every year by scores of Baba-lovers of whom there are apparently more than 100,000 in the world. By the time Brown comes to live in the commune Meher Baba formed in the 1930s, more than a decade has passed since he left his body, but the ashrmaites behave as if he is still alive. There is a consensus that anything and everything happening in the world in general, and the devotees’ lives in particular, is Baba’s wish. If something good happens, Baba gets the credit; if things don’t go according to plan, Baba is testing you. Baba’s name is on everyone’s lips—‘it is used as punctuation, as a greeting, as an exclamation, as a goodbye, and as a prayer.’ Brown’s mother uses the word ‘Baba’ in her speech the way some might use the word ‘f**k’. Brown clearly is not a believer in all the stories surrounding Meher Baba, neither is she particularly enamoured with his hotchpotch philosophy; however, either because of consideration to the feelings of the ashrmiates, not least her mother, or because of her humane disposition, she does not ridicule Meher Baba and his philosophy which, all things, considered, is essentially benign. Brown tends to view the love of some for the Baba-cult as a form of obsession, which, she implies, like all obsessions, is fundamentally arbitrary. She writes: 'We all have mental magnets for obsession . . . waiting to encounter an idea or person or practice of the opposite charge.' Her mother’s 'magnet was an exceptionally strong one, and it attracted her to Baba.' While Brown can’t identify with the object of her mother’s obsession, she can empathize with the obsession. She writes: ‘...when I was a child, I was obsessed with animals. Now I’m obsessed with martial arts ... some people are obsessed with Star Trek, ferrets or a person they’re stalking. I can understand the fascination even if I can’t understand its object.’ She admits that she probably ‘lacks the God-magnet’.

Wryly funny in parts, an undercurrent of pathos permeates the memoir. You can’t help noticing how isolated, and unnatural was the existence of the little girl. She spent five years in India, yet marooned as she was in the ashram, the diverse Indian culture simply passed her by. All the Fishes Come Home to Roost is an engrossing, bittersweet account of the five years of the author’s childhood that—we are left in no doubt of this—was less than wholesome, told in a manner that is witty, ironic, humane, compassionate and genuinely affecting. Brown is definitely a one to watch. 

Man Booker Short-list 2010

Howard Jacobson has been shortlisted for the first time for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. That is obvious: since there is only one 2010 Man Booker prize, whoever is short-listed, has been short-listed, can be short-listed, only once or for the first time. It is an impossibility to be short-listed for an award in a given year more than once. What I meant was Jacobson has been short-listed for the Booker prize for the first time. In other words, Jacobson has made it for the first time to the short-list of the Booker prize. Or, to put it another way, Jacobson has never been short-listed until now, circa 2010, for the Booker Prize in his career, or in the history of the Booker Prize. It has almost made up for the disappointment that David Mitchell, one of my favourite writers, has once again been overlooked.

Jacobson is one of the funniest (and vastly underrated) writers writing in English today. He was long-listed for the first time in 2002 for his novel ‘Who is Sorry now?’. It failed to make it to the short-list. Who is Sorry Now? was also the first Jacobson novel I read. I must say that I wasn’t enthused a great deal by it. The novel, if I remember correctly, has, as its central theme, the sexual desires and frustrations of two friends. Jacobson’s prose style was quite remarkable:  it was clever, bolshie and sharp. That, coupled with Jacobson’s coruscating wit, ought to have made the novel highly readable. But somehow I did not find the novel all that funny. The impression left on my mind was of a very intelligent writer who had a great way with words trying very hard to show how very clever he was. I decided that Jacobson was not a writer I was going to be very enthusiastic about. I did not buy Kalooki Nights, his next novel. It too was long-listed for the Booker, but did not make it to the short-list. A few more years passed. Last year, while browsing through books in a second-hand book shop, I came across two of Jacobson’s early novels: Coming from Behind and Peeping Tom. A friend of mine, with whom I share, to some extent, a taste in fiction, was with me at the time. We both like Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby (and agree that their recent novels were a tad disappointing). Both of us are fans of early Martin Amis, although we differ in our views with regard to his recent novels in two ways: first—I like them though perhaps not as much as The Rachel Papers, Money, and London Fields, whereas my friend is scathing about them; second—I have actually read Amis’s recent novels and he hasn’t. My friend believes that I waste my time reading too many substandard novels—‘Life is too short to read crap books,’ he informed me when I told him that I was reading Rachel Hore. On my part, I think he is one of those who will read one book and talk about it for the next three months. Anyway, this friend advised me to buy both the novels. I read Coming from Behind, Jacobson’s debut novel. It is one of the funniest novels I have read. The novel is in the same mode as many of the comedies of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge—a literary comedy for the want of better phrase—and Sefton Goldberg, its lustful protagonist, is a kind of Jewish version of Lucky Jim: every bit as observant, cantankerous and clever. The linguistic fireworks that light up every page are superb. I have since bought two more novels of Jacobson. I ordered The Mighty Waltzer from Amazon after I read in an interview of his that this was his favourite novel. And I bought Redback for the two reasons why I have bought many books in recent times: I spotted it in a second-hand bookshop and it cost nothing; and, having liked Coming from Behind, I have added Jacobson’s name to the list of authors I would like to read more.

Another author whom I would like to read more is also short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize for his novel In A Strange Room—the South African writer Damon Galgut. The only novel of Galgut I have read is The Good Doctor, which, I think, was short-listed for the Booker prize years ago (2002 or 2003). It was his third novel but the first one which brought him world-wide audience. I thought The Good Doctor was a terrific novel. Galgut wrote with an economy of prose reminiscent of that other great South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, whom I admire a lot. ‘The Good Doctor’ had echoes of Disgrace, Coetzee’s 1999 triumph (which won him his second Booker), although it wasn’t as relentlessly bleak. In his novel, which told the story of a young White doctor working in a dilapidated hospital in the post-Apartheid South Africa, in a region that was once a Bantu homeland, Galgut tackled big themes effortlessly, in a way that was entirely—alarmingly, even—believable. The Good Doctor is one of those novels that stay in your mind for a long time after you have finished reading them, the hallmark of a great novel, in my books. I am therefore disappointed, disheartened, dejected and downcast that I have not got round to read more novels of this very talented writer. After the world-wide critical acclaim of The Good Doctor one of Galgut’s earlier novels, Quarry, was re-issued (or issued for the first time) in the UK and I bought it. That was a few years ago. I am yet to read it, as also Imposter which I bought for 60 pence last Christmas when ‘Borders’ went into administration and was disposing off its stock of books.

Of the other authors short-listed, I have read Peter Carey, who has won the prize twice already, for Parrot and Olivier in America, and Andrea Levy for The Long Song. Andrea Levy is a favourite author of mine. The Long Room, I think, is Levy’s first novel since the Whitbread (now Costa) award winner Small Island, which was also her first novel I read. I enjoyed reading Small Island (although I felt the narrative didn’t flow smoothly). I then bought all of Levy’s previous three novels and have read two of them (Fruit of the Lemon, and Every House in the House Burnin’). I liked these early novels even more. Every Light in the House Burnin’ in particular was incredibly moving.

Every year, the short-lists of the major literary awards throw up authors you have never heard of (I had never heard of Andrea Levy until she won the Whitbread award for Small Island), and this year’s Man-Booker short-list is no exception. I had never heard of Emma Donoghue who has been short-listed for her novel Room, although she has written six novels before it, one of which, Slammerkin, published in 2000, so the dust jacket of ‘Room’ informs us, was a world-wide bestseller and which (I learnt after I googled Emma Donoghue), according to Wikipedia, won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian fiction. I had not heard of it (the novel as well as the award; I do not read much of Lesbian or gay fiction) either. The last of the shortlisted authors is Tom McCarthy, for his debut novel, C.

Whom would I like to win the award? Howard Jacobson is so spectacularly ugly he ought to win. But this is a non-literary reason. If Jacobson wins, it would be the first time in many years that comedy—a genre that, like suspense thrillers, is often overlooked at the major awards—will have won the prize. The great Kingsley Amis won the Booker for The Old Devils in the autumn of his career, and it would be sweet if Jacobson won it. If he does win, would he, nearing seventy, be the oldest writer to win the award?

I would be equally happy if Damon Galgut won. Apart from being a very talented writer, Galgut does not own either a car or a television, which— although it has nothing to do with literature— you have got to admit, is a feat of sorts. For that reason, if for nothing else, Galgut ought to win.

Andrea Levy is not ugly (judging by her photograph) and probably owns a car and a television and (I am going out on a limb here) even a cell-phone. But I shouldn’t hold that against her. Levy, like Jacobson and Galgut, is a terrific author and would be a deserving winner.

I shall not comment about the other two short-listed authors except to say that I shall not be reading their novels unless they win the prize. I wouldn’t have thought that either of them is considered by the bookies as the favourite to win the Man-Booker prize, but you never know. There have been instances in the last decade when rank outsiders like and DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little—2003) Arvind Adiga (White Tiger—2008) have surprised everyone (including probably themselves). If Tom McCarthy wins, it would be the first time in decades that a novel that has as its title only a letter of the alphabet (C) will have won the Booker. John Berger won the award in 1972 for his novel G. For that reason I wouldn’t mind if Tom McCarthy wins the award. That leaves Emma Donghue. Oh, what the heck! She shouldn’t feel left out. I would be very happy if Emma Donghue wins the award although I can’t think of any literary or non-literary reason for it. 

Celebrity Masterchef

I have been watching rather a lot of food related programmes these days. Indeed I am developing a serious interest in cooking, but more about that some other time.  One of the food-programmes I have taken to watching this year is Masterchef. This is a programme in which amateur chefs compete to win the title of Masterchef. The programme used to be hosted by Lloyd Grossman years ago (when I did not watch it). In recent years two geezers—John Torode and Greg Wallace—are the resident hosts and judges. Torode is an Australian who always wears a slightly spaced out look—as if he is nursing a particularly fierce hangover—and who has an unfortunate penchant for wearing drab-coloured cardigans. He is the real expert; he knows—or is supposed to know—what he is talking about. According to WikiPedia, he owns a chain of restaurants (probably specializing in burgers) around London and is a trained chef. Greg Wallace is an Englishman, with a slightly lop-sided face, as if someone took the individual parts  of his face apart—or maybe he had an accident in his childhood (a horse stepped on his face, perhaps) and put them back together ever so slightly out of kilter. I don’t think he has boiled an egg in his life. He used to be—probably still is—a greengrocer. Quite how and why this man, who does not seem equipped to fathom the more intricate aspects of cooking, came to be a judge on a cookery programme is unfathomable to me. Mind you, he looks a jolly enough fellow bordering on clinical obesity, and is moderately efficient in describing the food he is eating. But that is not saying much. Seeing as the guy brings no special culinary skills to the programme and is not exactly an oil painting (his physiognomy suggests he weighs a stone for every year of his life) you would have expected him to at least bring some linguistic brilliance to the programme. He is adequate, but that is about it. I guess it is difficult to describe the pleasures of eating a pan-fried breast of chicken using language that would have Martin Amis nodding with approval; and ‘crispy on the outside, moist and juicy on the inside’ (which is what Greg Wallace says nine out of ten times) is about as good as it is going to get. It is just a chicken breast, after all, not a Vermeer.  John Torode passes what seem like more technical comments. He is also better than Greg at ferreting out deficiencies or mistakes the contestants might have tried to camouflage. ‘The skin on this turbot is burned,’ he will announce, dislodging with his fork the mountain of grilled vegetables the contestant has arranged around and above said portion of the fish. ‘And the sauce is too thick; you have reduced it too much,’ he will add, just to make sure that the contestant is properly deflated. The consistency of the sauce is never right for Torode; it is either too thick or too watery. The same goes for seasoning: it is either too much or not enough. Still, he does not end every sentence with ‘mate’. However, they both spout the most hackneyed clichés at the beginning and the end of each episode with the air that they are revealing the Da Vinchi code. For example, John Torode might say, ‘We know all these people love cooking, but (with a significant pause and narrowing of eyes) can they cook?’, his expression and demeanour suggesting that he has been here before only to be let down and is expecting nothing to change. Greg Wallace will declare, with the air of a man whose ship has come in, ‘Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this!’ John Torode will nod and smile like a wise sage, before weighing in with his over-the-top banality such as ‘Only the best will survive!’ I would have thought that that was the point of all competitions. I have yet to come across any competition (except perhaps the rigged cricket matches in the Indian subcontinent) in which the mediocre survive. Interestingly, when they speak, neither looks directly at the camera (and the viewers). Both Torrode and Wallace are filmed in profile as they make their bombastic pronouncements, as if they are talking with the other guy. Except that the other bloke is not in the frame. So, when fat Greg is shouting that cooking does not get tougher ‘than this’, he is shouting at someone, presumably John Torode. Then the camera focuses on John Torode’s face (showing the ravages of decades of alcoholism) as he tries to arrange his facial muscles into a resemblance of appreciation and satisfaction. The two are never in the same frame unless they are speaking to the contestants. There are rumours that they do not get along and that they are filmed separately. However, I believe the real reason must be that it is impossible to be in Wallace’s vicinity as he unleashes a torrent of clichés at deafness-inducing volumes for more than five minutes without your mind escaping into outer stratosphere.

Recently the BBC finished showing ‘Celebrity Masterchef’. The format remains the same, but the participants are supposed to be celebrities as opposed to members of public. Except that no real celebrity has the time for it. So, what you get instead is a motley collection of has-beens (usually some sport personality—in the loose sense of the term—who represented the UK in some non-event such as rowing or yachting or 400 meter hurdles, and missed the bronze by hundredth of a second), or someone who once went out with the best mate of a Premiership footballer (who is in and out of rehab or mental institutions these days) and believes she is a model, or someone who presents a day-time television programme no one (save the geriatrics and the unemployed and the benefit-fraudsters) watches (or is even aware of), or someone who is just an obnoxious loudmouth and is considered a celebrity for these attributes. One of the celebrities in 2010 ‘Celebrity Masterchef’ who would come in the last category (obnoxious loudmouth) was Christine Hamilton. Why is this woman considered a celebrity? She is the wife of Neil Hamilton, a thoroughly corrupt Tory politician, who unsuccessfully tried to sue the ‘Guardian’ in the 1990s for libel after it published an article claiming that he accepted thousands of pounds from Mohammad Al-Fayed (who, I accept, is not exactly a paragon of virtue and may be mentally deranged into the bargain), and, as a result, went bankrupt. After his political career came to a deservingly disgraceful end, Hamilton, together with his wife, Christine (whose expertise until then consisted in its entirety of working as her husband’s secretary and accompanying him to evening dinners), reinvented himself as a media celebrity, and participated in chat shows and reality television shows. Last year Christine Hamilton changed her name by deed poll to ‘British Battleaxe’ thereby proving that there is no turpitude that is low enough for this woman so long as she gets her few inches of column-space on page 23 of the tabloids. The Daily Mail commented that with more women like Christine Britain would never have lost her empire (I rest my case). Christine Hamilton is a case in point that in Britain you can become a celebrity if you are (a) notorious, (b) shameless, and (c) White. For 2010 Celebrity Masterchef Hamilton was joined by other faux-celebrities that included, among others, Lisa Faulkner, a painfully thin actress with bad teeth who used to be in some long-defunct soap and paraded her fatless carcass in bikinis. Another ‘celebrity’ was Dick Strawbridge. He is supposed to be a television presenter and has more hair on his upper lip than Greg Wallace has on his head. Out of curiosity I googled Strawbridge and discovered that he has a website. This guy actually believes that his moustache is an asset; his website mentions that he is the owner of the most spectacular moustache in showbiz. This is like Jeremy Clarkson announcing that his face is his biggest asset. Quite why growing a moustache you can sweep the floor with qualifies someone to become a celebrity is beyond me. Strawbridge’s website also informs that you can sample the delights of Strawbridge’s cuisine for astronomical prices. (Going by the dishes he prepared on the Celebrity Masterchef, 2010—kidney and celeriac in cream, and something ghastly made from the innards of a pig—I would urge you to think very carefully before you decide to travel to whichever mud-hole in Devon colonel Strawbridge—he used to be in the army, apparently—is holing out, and part with your cash.) There was another television actor (I can’t remember his name) who probably harboured the delusion that a three-day stubble made him look cool (when in fact it made him look like a tramp who needs a bath), and an effeminate ex-athlete who was renowned for breaking down on the eve of major tournaments. Finally, there was Neil Stuke, who used to be in a popular sitcom fifteen years ago and would appear to have done nothing since other than cultivating a paunch and a no-fixed-abode look.

One of the tests the celebrity contestants have to pass is the so called invention test. They are asked to, say, fillet a fish or chop a chicken and then fry (or pan-fry) the ingredients. Torrode shows the audience how it is done, as Greg watches on, a dense network of frowns crisscrossing his broad forehead (that triumphantly extends all the way to the crown of his head). Torrode affects a demeanour of cool nonchalance as he carries out the procedure at a brisk pace, probably to show off his skills and expertise. But honestly, how much skill is required to remove a breast from a dead bird or to hack off half of a dead fish? All the expertise you would need is not to chop off your fingers. Still, it is a relief that Torrode does not pretend that he is performing skull-base surgery, which would have ticked me off. Greg Wallace then makes profound comments such as ‘This is not easy’ or ‘This requires real skills’. Anyway, I am convinced that the contestants are told in advance what the invention test is going to be. Who fillets a fish or a chicken these days? Nobody. We have got fish-mongers and supermarkets for that. It’s a bit of a con, if you ask me.

Another test is a palate test. Torrode prepares a dish. He will demonstrate to the audience and the frowning Greg Wallace (how much does this guy frown! Some mornings he must be getting up with a headache—with all that frowning and contraction of the forehead muscles—wondering who boxed him in the nuts). Invariably Torrode adds to the dish anything and everything he can lay his hands on, such as a dozen herbs and a couple of dozen spices, a few hundred salad leaves, several hundred cans of noodles or meat (or both), and incinerates the concoction at high heat. Greg then passes his expert opinion which goes something like ‘This is going to be interesting’ or ‘Let’s get them in’. Not infrequently he randomly selects one of the five thousand ingredients Torrode has thrown in the dish (which, by the time he is done with it, looks about as appetising as the boiled hide of an alligator) and declares that he would be ‘really interested’ to see if the contestants can identify it correctly. Sometimes the contestants identify the major ingredients wrong; for example, they might wrongly identify beef as lamb, which is a cue for Torrode to stare back at them as if they were grave robbers, and Greg to ask a subtle question like, ‘Do you eat a lot of beef?’ (if the contestant has wrongly identified beef as lamb or rabbit).

This year’s finalists were: Strawbridge—the fat ex-army man with a disgusting moustache—, Christine Hamilton—the shameless publicity-monger, who when she is not behaving like a bear with a raging headache, is acting like a camel in a filthy mood—, and Lisa-oh-I-am-so-cute-I-am-really-so-talented-but-I-don’t-have-confidence-Faulkner.

These three were asked to cook dinners in a variety of situations. They served up dinner for the guests on the Orient Express (I don’t know how much these chaps pay to travel on the Orient Express, but if I ever were to afford the trip, I would be mightily cheesed off if I were served a bizarre medley of various parts of rabbit with a stinking puree of oysters), for stern looking women from the Women’s Institute (who sternly told the camera that they expected nothing less than perfection, that they would have no hesitation in sending the dish back if it was not up to scratch, and then polished off three course meals with as much discretion as that of a pig working its way through a pail of garbage), for a bunch of athletes including Sebastian Coe and Kelly Holmes (non-sportpersons who used to compete in non-sport; why is running even considered a sport?) whom Christine Hamilton a.k.a. the British Battleaxe served practically raw flesh of a dead cow, and some very fussy Michelin star chefs (who nattered like old women on the presentation of food). I particularly liked the episode where the finalists prepared a three course meal for the headmaster of Harrow school and three of his sycophantic staff (who excitedly whispered to the camera what a great honour it was to have been invited by the headmaster and how finicky the headmaster was about food and what a great connoisseur of food the headmaster was). The headmaster leaned back in his chair like a Roman emperor and deigned ever now and then to make comments such as ‘This is perfectly adequate’, or ‘This is perfectly serviceable’.  He was hilarious.

At each stage of the competition John and Greg accompanied the contestants (all of whom told the camera how the competition had taken over their lives, how it has changed their lives, how it was scary and terrifying, and brilliant, and how much they would like to win it) and, when not wasting the contestants' time with their irritating, unhelpful comments, made their presence felt by wondering (to the camera) how on earth Lisa Faulkner (who excelled at giving a good impression of a rabbit caught in headlights) was going to get her pork medallions in creamy mustard sauce in time, or wondering whether Strawbridge’s combination of sheeps’s eyeballs in vinegar with the accompaniment of figs in wine sauce on which was sprinkled chilli reflected a sound judgment (or a sane mind, if you ask me), or tut-tuting that the British Battleaxe had once again put too many ingredients to her duck’s breast (it looked inedible).

At the end of it all Lisa Faulkner was declared the winner of the Celebrity Masterchef 2010. It was all good fun. I can’t wait for the Professional Masterchef to begin in autumn.

Book of the Month: The Hungry Years (William Leith)

William Leith, his website informs us, is a journalist, who has written about subjects as diverse as cosmetic surgery, Palestine, Hollywood directors, and drugs. He writes regularly for the Guardian, the Observer, and the Daily Telegraph. He is also a man, if his first (and to date only) published book is anything to go by, who has a love-hate relationship with food. (The clue is in the title of the book—The Hungry Years: confessions of A Food Addict.)

The Hungry Years opens with Leith describing how he woke up one day in 2003 to the ‘fattest day’ of his life. He had managed to achieve the weight—having eaten endless quantities of what he would later discover as refined carbohydrates and food with high glycemic indx—which, as a P.G. Wodehouse character might say, would test the perdurability  of most weighing scales. So how much did Leith weigh at that time? The answer: 235 lbs, which, I have calculated, is just over 16 stones. Now I am no nutritionist, but 16 stone does sound like a bit too much even for a man as tall as Leith (he informs us at the beginning that he is just over 6 feet tall).

What follows is a curious, slightly puzzling account—distinguished by mostly mordant (at times slapstick)—humour, and slightly affected solipsism punctuated by ersatz insights—of Leith’s adventures over the years with the Mars bar, so to speak. And not just the Mars bar: as the story unfolds and Leith’s mind (to paraphrase Charlotte Bronte) seems wholly taken up by reminiscences of past frolics and excesses, we learn that alcohol, cocaine, and prescription painkillers have, from time to time, vied for the top place in Leith’s impressive list of addictive substances. In an interview given at the time of the publication of his memoirs, Leith said:

I had been coming to a sort of realization that we as a culture were full of self-loathing; that we have not really acquitted ourselves well as regards the environment, and Africa and so on; that we are surrounded by endless stuff about getting fat and being unhealthy. And it occurred to me that I was not only slightly involved in this. I was fat, greedy, a drunk, a drug-taker, a heavy consumer of everything I could find. I was 42 and I thought that I had messed my life up at every available opportunity. There is a problem in society, I thought, and it's me. Or people like me, those who always take the easy option, who always want more ...

Leith is full of loathing for his fat self. Unsurprisingly, he finds it difficult to muster up adequate sympathy for those who are living rebukes to the tactics of moderation. ‘Fat people and their excuses,’ he snarls at one point. ‘It really makes me angry. They are always whining, the whiney fat pigs. Why don’t they stop whining and do something about it?’ Then—and this happens repeatedly—the anger is turned against self, and Leith concludes with the rhetorical question: ‘why don’t I stop whining and do something about it?’

What Leith decides to do on the fattest day of his life is to fly to New York and interview the controversial diet Guru, Dr. Atkins. He interviews the former cardiologist, who, we learn, himself weighed over 16 stones in the 1960s when he stumbled upon the idea of low starch diet after reading an article published in a medical journal. Over the next few decades Atkins transformed this idea into a multimillion dollars franchise. First published in the 1970s, the Atkins Diet plan—which essentially takes the position that carbohydrates make us hungry and overweight, and advocates curtailing of carbohydrates in your diet, not bothering about calories and fat—sold millions of copies before falling into disrepute in the 1980s and 1990s when low calorie, low fat diet plans became the flavour of the month. It made—as is the nature of such things—a triumphant comeback in the 21^st century. At the time of his interview with Leith, Atkins is enjoying an unprecedented uplift to the popularity of his diet—two months later Atkins would slip and fall while walking on an icy road, and die in an intensive care unit after spending nine days in coma, and the backlash against his diet would begin—and Leith becomes a willing convert. He convinces himself that carbohydrate is the problem, decides that the meta-scientific theories supporting Atkins’s claims are gospel, and, upon his return to England, takes to the Atkins diet like an alcoholic to the bottle. He gorges on bacon and eggs and goes into apoplectic fits when presented with risotto, cereals and white bread; he rants hysterically about the evils of carbohydrates to anyone who is brave (or foolish) enough to give him an ear. He stops drinking alcohol. And he shades weight, to the point where he is able to fit into his jeans he had bought fifteen years earlier (even though it does not make him feel good about himself—why, you wonder). When his mother phones him slightly concerned about his father who (presumably overweight like Leith) has started on his own version of the Atkins Diet, and begun feasting on sausages and black pudding, he feels able to blithely reassure her that it was the bread and potatoes that were the culprit all along. He sees food-conspiracies everywhere. The politicians are obviously the puppets of the Food Industry giants and that’s why they do not promote the low carbohydrate diet and continue to watch passively as the erroneous ‘low-fat-diet-is-good-for-you’ message is rammed down the throats of gullible consumers. (Could there be a less sinister explanation? Such as eating excessive fat, as many Atkins fanatics seem to do, clogs up your arteries and makes you more susceptible to suffering strokes and heart attacks—the good doctor himself suffered a severe heart attack a year before he died, although he claimed that it was the result of a chronic infection!) From the vantage point of sobriety, at the time of the writing of the book—we learn that after the Atkins Plan ended in the inevitable breakdown and an orgy fuelled by alcohol and drugs, Leith made a cautious return to the balanced diet and allowed pasta and bread to reenter his diet—Leith is able to look back upon the days of Atkins frenzy with a degree of equanimity; the narration, as a result, has a droll, slightly farcical, tone to it, which accentuates the absurdity of it all.

So, how did Leith reach his Shangri-la? Diet did not work, whether fat-free (and carbohydrate-rich) or carbohydrate –free (and fat-rich). What turned things around for him, Leith would have us believe, was therapy—80 hours of it. And what did he discover in his therapy sessions? He discovered a lot about himself: he was a procrastinator, he was a hypochondriac, he was a compulsive, he complained of feeling trapped when he had imposed the traps on himself. And finally—you will be surprised to know this—it was his mother’s fault. He realized that he was all these years repressing his deep seated misery and resentment about not liking the posh boarding school to which his family sent him while his father (ironically, a child psychologist) relocated first to Germany, then to Holland, and finally to Canada. Leith talks and talks in the therapy and, gently nudged on by his therapist, has a further insight: he is really furious with his mother for sending him to the boarding school while his younger brother was allowed to go with them to Germany. He feels angry not about what happened but about what happened when he tried to talk about it with his mother, who responded (quite reasonably, you can’t help feeling) that it was probably not as bad as he was making it out to be. A psychological Catch 22, then: as a child, Leith felt unsettled, displaced; he hoped that his parents did not know how bad he felt, and could not stand the idea that they did not know how bad he felt. How any of this is linked to his becoming a glutton, a problem drinker, and a cocaine-snorter in later years, is not immediately clear to you, but then you are not the posh child of posh parents who was sent to a posh boarding school and suffered horribly, so perhaps you cannot empathize. Leith believes that it is linked, and talking about it to a therapist helped him to get over his gormandizing (at least at the time of the publication of the memoirs).

The Hungry Years is the story of a fat, middle-aged freelance journalist, who is obsessed about eating, who tries various diets, who interviews fat celebrities like Dawn French and Robbie Coltrane, and, above all, who cannot stop talking about himself. Along the way, he pontificates on subjects as varied as changing styles of women’s pubic hair over the past three decades, the pros and cons of wearing flares, the Fat Acceptance movement, and why Robbie Coltrane became fat. It is not a particularly well-researched book, even though there are lists galore, and statistical observations (when they suit Leith’s arguments) appear every few pages; nor a coherent one (at one point he parlays, apropos de rien,  into cosmetic surgery and face uplift). He also, while he is at it, slags off his former girl-friends, who are control-freaks, shopaholics, domineering, mean, nasty, vicious harridans who make his life a misery and (eating problems worse): one insists on woman-on-top position while having sex as his weight balloons; another sighs theatrically every time he helps himself to an energy-rich item of food. One ex-girlfriend invites him to her mother’s place and sadistically does not offer anything to eat when he is clearly suffering from (carbohydrate-induced) hunger pang and would like nothing more than squaring his shoulders and tucking into some cakes and donuts.

The reason why the book works despite all this is partly because it—despite the author’s self-obsession—holds a mirror to how we, at least those in the Western world, are leading our lives in the 21^st century, but also because Leith has a wonderful way with words and manages to recount the most banal of incidents, such as eating toasts, entertaining and compulsively readable. What can one not get away with when one has the gift of words?