Orange Prize for Fiction: A Sexist Award

Barbara Kingsglover’s  Lacuna won this year’s Orange prize for fiction. According to the chair of the judges it was a book of “breathtaking scale and shattering poignancy”. Credit must be given to the judges who, despite the shattering experience, picked themselves up and presented a beaming Kingsglover, a finalist in 1999 for her worldwide best-seller, The  Poisonwood Bible, with the £ 30,000 cheque.

Some have suggested that the Orange prize should become a part of the ‘trinity’ of the UK literary prizes, along with the Man Booker Prize and the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Award.

I have a slight problem with this. Call me cantankerous, but to my mind the Orange Prize will never have the same shine as the Man Booker, for one simple reason: male authors are not allowed to compete for the Orange Prize; it is an award exclusively for female writers.

The idea of establishing the award exclusively for female writers was first mooted apparently by Kate Mosse, the best-selling author of the 2005 novel Labyrinth (I have to read it one of these days), who was mightily pissed off (allegedly) by the all-male short list of what was then the Booker prize, in 1991.

I really don’t see the point, in this day and age, of discriminating on the basis of gender. You might as well announce a prize exclusively for, I don’t know, people with Down’s syndrome or folk from Norfolk. I am sure these groups have also been consistently overlooked for literary awards. Indeed the prejudice might be such that they might not even find publishers for their literary outputs.

If we take a look at the winners of the Man Booker prize, generally considered to be the most prestigious literary award in the UK, we note that in the forty years since it was first launched, 25 men and 15 women have won the award. Hardly the case of women writers being consistently overlooked, I would have thought. True, some great women writers are missing from the list, such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Beryl Bainbridge and Anita Desai; but so are some very talented male writers, for example, Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, Martin Amis, and William Boyd. Indeed there have been occasions when female writers have even benefitted as the judges could not agree amongst themselves as to which amongst the shortlisted male writers should be awarded the prize, and ultimately chose the woman writer as a compromise choice. Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize in 1979 for Offshore. However, if the scurrilous memoir (Sir Vidia’s Shadow) of Paul Theroux, who was on that year’s panel of judges, is to be believed, none of the judges felt that the novel was worthy of the award. The reason Offshore was chosen, was the two groups that had formed within the panel simply could not agree whether V.S. Naipaul or Patrick White should be awarded the prize, and  settled for Fitzgerald in the end, towards whom, rather her novel, the warring factions were indifferent. Now don’t get me wrong; Penelope Fitzgerald is one of my favourite writers (although Offshore is not, in my humble opinion, her best offering (it goes without saying that what I think matters to no one save myself)); I am merely pointing out that Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker prize for reasons other than literary. The Bone People, the 1985 Booker winner, the debut (and to date only) novel of the Maori writer Keri Hulme, is one of the worst books I have wasted my money on. When I begin reading a book, I generally persevere till the end (especially if I have paid for it). When it comes to reading, I should like to think that I am a patient person by nature and have a high threshold for discarding a novel as bootless; The Bone People crossed that threshold by the width of Siberia. The book was unreadable; it is the only book I can think of in the last ten years I did not finish despite two or three attempts.  Mind you, Bone People is not the only disappointing Booker winner I have had the misfortune to read. There was Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, which was a monumental exercise in tedium. If the novel had any point to it, it was buried deep under the avalanche of trivia with which Carey deluged the reader. His second Booker winner, The True History of the Kelly Gang was much more interesting and readable, although his deliberate omission of any punctuation marks—allegedly to convey the fact that Kelly was semiliterate—was gimmicky and unnecessary. The joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize The Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unswarth (another writer I rate highly; his Pascali’s Island is a very favourite novel), was so relentlessly grim and dreary that by comparison the monthly Church newsletter is a bowl of strong coffee. However, neither of the books comes anywhere near The Bone People which leaves the reader comatose with the blahs.

The Orange Prize began its life for no other reason than that some female writers were cheesed off because of their ill-founded belief that female writers were consistently overlooked for major literary awards, and decided that the best way to redress was to blatantly discriminate against male writers. The Prize began its life out of pique.

Nevertheless, since the prize, like old age, cannot simply be wished away, I thought I should have a look at the Orange winners in the past 15 years, since it was established. Of the fifteen Orange winners, I have read eight. I have no intention of reading Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the 2009 winner, as I did not like at all her earlier novel, Gilead, for which she won the Pulitzer. I struggled to finish the novel, which seemed  like a long religious essay, and I doubt anyone other than a fundamentalist Christian would have enjoyed, or even understood, the soliloquy of its narrator that would have rendered a donkey catatonic. I most definitely plan to read Rose Tremain’s Road Home. I have read a few of Tremain’s novels and have loved all of them, Restoration being my favourite. I bought Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin the year it won the orange, but was slightly put off by the writing style, which I felt was tortuous. So I put it away, thinking I would read it some other time, and never really got round to do that. However, since it has been chosen as the people’s most favourite Orange prize winner, I shall give it a go. Interestingly Lionel Shriver’s real name is Margaret Ann, which she changed to Lionel because of her belief that men have an easier life (where did she get this idea from?), and I am sure the irony of winning a women-only prize will not have lost on her. I shall also read Chimamanda  Nagozi Addichie’s Half of A Yellow Sun (2007 winner), as I enjoyed her debut novel, inspired though it was (by the author’s own admission) by Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Of the Orange Prize winners I have managed to read, my favourite is Linda Grant’s When I lived in Modern Times which won the prize in 2000. I vaguely remember that anonymous charges of plagiarism were levelled at Grant within hours of her surprise win, piping the bookies’ favourite, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, to the post. Apparently Grant wanted to credit A.J. Sherman’s oral history of British Palestine, Mandate Days, but was advised against it by her publishers, Granta. The charges of plagiarism were probably motivated by that eternal human emotion: jealousy. Whoever had levelled the baseless accusation at Grant, who is a top rate novelist, did not even have the guts to come out in the open and chose to hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Zadie Smith (another writer who decided to change her name, Sadie, which she thought was not exotic enough, but stuck to her gender when selecting her new name) won the prize in 2006 for On Beauty. On Beauty is witty, entertaining, and eminently readable (reminiscent of vintage David Lodge, and, as with many of Lodge's novels, On Beauty has academia as its backdrop). The only problem is the plot structure is lifted lock, stock and barrel from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, without any acknowledgement. The late Carol Shield won the prize in 1998 for Larry’s Party which, in my view, is her weakest novel. A boring monotonous tale of the boring life of a boring man, the novel never really gets out of the left lane and Shield’s home grown truths begin to irritate you after a while. Larry’s Party is not a patch on her Pulitzer winner The Stone Diaries. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, which won the 2002 Orange Prize, is dreadful. Patchett  took a tired uninspiring idea and hacked out a plangent hackneyed novel. I did not like Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter, which won the inaugural prize in 1996, either. It was well written, but lacked fatally in animation. Reading it was like eating a highly orchestrated but flavourless salad. I have not read any of Dunmore's novels since. I quite liked Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, which won the 1997 Orange Prize (although I enjoyed Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which won the Booker that year, even more, heavily inspired though it was, in its narrative style, by Salman Rushdie). Michaels considers herself primarily a poet, which probably explains the excessively lyrical language employed throughout the novel (that rendered, to me, some sections of the novel almost undecipherable). I thoroughly enjoyed Suzanne Berne’s A Crime in the Neighbourhood, which won the 1999 Orange Prize. Simply yet beautifully written and hauntingly atmospheric, the novel, which was part whodunit (and sustained the reader’s interest until the end) and part rite-of-passage, was a superb achievement. (With great expectations and anticipation, I bought Berne’s next novel, A Perfect arrangement; it was competently written, but was a slight letdown.) The novel that won the Man-Booker in 1999, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, remains for me one of the greatest novels I have ever read.

A welcome aspect of the literary prizes is that the promotion of the short-listed novels and winners introduces readers to writers they might otherwise not have tried. I had never heard of Andrea Levy until she won the Orange and Whitbread award for her fourth novel, Small Island, in 2004. I bought Small Island only because it won the prize and liked it a lot. I then bought all of Levy’s previously published novels, and liked them even more. But for the Orange Prize, I would have missed out on an excellent writer. (This is true of any awards. DBC—Dirty But Clean—Pierre was the surprise winner of the 2003 Booker prize for his debut novel, Vernon God Little. It took me a while to get into Pierre’s (real name Peter Finlay) Tex-Mex saga of its titular fifteen year old protagonist (described by the New York Times as Holden Caulfield on Ritalin), but once I did, I found the book unputdownable. Pierre’s quirky sense of humour and unusual phraseology got me hooked till the end. I quite enjoyed his second novel (Ludmila’s Broken English) as well, although it did not match the success of Vernon God Little; in fact it pretty much sank without trace.

I remain opposed to the concept of Orange prize on matters of principles. I think it is a sexist award, and I find it surprising that so many established female writers agree to enter their novels for the prize. I am sure if ever a male-only literary award were announced, many amongst the established male writers would shun it for being inherently unfair.

Book of the Month: Diary of A Bad Year (J.M. Coetzee)

In recent years, J.M. Coetzee, the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, seems to have dispensed with the traditional way of story-telling that we generally associate with a novel. Some of his novels (Boyhood, Youth) were so heavily autobiographical, you wondered why they were not marketed as memoirs. (The third part of the fictionalised memoir, Summertime, was published in 2009.) In 2003, the year he was awarded the Nobel, Coetzee published Elizabeth Costello. The novel consists of seven lectures delivered by its eponymous heroine, whose oeuvre resembles closely that of Coetzee, on subjects as varied as the novel and animal rights. Some of the ‘lectures’ were delivered by Coetzee himself in real life. Quite why Coetzee decided to publish these lectures in the novel form—there was little or no thematic continuity—instead of a non-fiction compendium was not clear to many. Costello gatecrashed into Coetzee’s next novel, too, Slow Man, when she turned up uninvited at the doorsteps of the protagonist, a man called Rayment, and tried to take over his life, much to his resentment. It was left to the readers to figure out why Costello, a famous novelist, decided to descend upon the protagonist who was not a writer and had never met her. If Costello was Coetzee’s literary alter ego, Rayment, a sixty-something man, who lived alone in Australia (Coetzee’s adopted country for the past decade) also had some shades of the real life Coetzee.

In Diary of A Bad Year, Coetzee has created another literary alter ego. He is a famous novelist, originally from South Africa (Coetzee’s country of birth) but now living alone in Australia, who is one of the six writers from all over the world invited by a German publishing company to contribute to a book entitled ‘Strong Opinions’. The writer is referred to, throughout the novel, by his initials, JC (also Coetzee’s initials). JC is a troubled soul. He is troubled about a lot of things which he feels are not right with the world we live in. Since he has been given a cart blanche by his publisher he expatiates on wide-ranging subjects such as the origin of state, anarchism, democracy, terrorism, Machiavelli, asylum in Australia, probability, numbers, intelligent designs, and even Toni Blair. As with the ‘lectures’ in Elizabeth Costello, these musings have little thematic coherence. The conventional novel happens at another level. In the laundry room of his apartment block JC meets a young half-Australian-half-Philippino woman called Anya who lives in the same apartment block with her boyfriend, Alan, who is an investment consultant. She is between jobs and JC hires her as his typist. His eye-sight is deteriorating—so he says—and he can’t type easily—he may or may not be showing the early signs of Parkinsonism. However JC is also attracted to her, a fact that has not gone unnoticed either by Anya or by her world-weary boyfriend. Allan is in no doubt that the only reason why JC has employed Anya without so much as inquiring whether she can type or asking to see recommendations from her previous employers is because he letches after her. Anya has little interest in the topics on which JC opines—indeed she finds his ‘strong opinions’ uninteresting—however, the opinions soon become a regular topics of after-dinner conversations between her and Allan. Allan abhors the socialist idealism of JC—which he dismisses as naive—preferring to see the world in the light of harsh everyday realities. In their conversations Allan alternates between severe criticism and mockery of JC’s view. As the work progresses, Anya begins to suspect that Allan has been secretly reading the manuscripts she has been typing when, in the course of their conversations, he starts referring to JC’s opinions which she has typed but not mentioned to him. When confronted Allan admits to spying: but not on her; he has been spying on JC himself, having introduced a Spyware programme on the hard drive of JC’s computer. If Anya was in two minds about throwing a hissy fit upon hearing this, her doubts are removed when Allan informs her that it is not JC’s opinions—for which he does not care in any case—but his money—3 million dollars—that he is after. Allan has found out about JC’s will according to which his estate would be bequeathed to his sister upon his death. However, the sister has died seven years ago, which means—since JC has not bothered to make a new will—that when JC dies, all the money would go to an obscure animal charity for which JC’s sister used to work. It is an arrant waste of money, according to Allan; and if the doddering fool is disinclined to do anything about it, Allan would do it for him. The investment consultant has cooked up a fiendish scheme (worthy of a Jeffrey Archer novel or a threequal of Ocean’s Eleven) which involves fictitious companies in Switzerland and off shore accounts in the Cayman Islands, and results in Allan (and Anya, if she joins hands with him) becoming very rich and JC not losing his money, provided the stock markets behaved—as Allan is planning to invest the siphoned of money into the stock market (and is confident of reaping a healthy dividend). It is what they call a win-win situation. (If Allan could only look into the future, he would desist from going ahead with the scheme, as he would see the great recession and the collapse of the stock markets.) As it happens Anya threatens to leave him if he carried out his skullduggery. When faced with the stark choice between potentially unimaginable wealth and a trophy girlfriend Allan baulks. However, the lost opportunity, if that is what it is, still rankles in his mind. Therefore, when JC invites them to his apartment to celebrate the completion of the manuscripts, he has to get it off his chest, which he proceeds to do after helping himself to one too many glasses of champagne, and manages to make a fool of himself and insult Anya at the same time. The upshot is Anya leaves him. (One also hopes that JC, having been made aware of the heinous intentions of the investment consultant, would be more vigilant in future). The novel ends with Anya, who continues to correspond with JC, musing over JC’s death (‘We all have got to die, he is old, he is as ready to go as he will ever be.’) and how she would deport when his time comes (‘I will fly to Sidney. . . I will hold his hand. I can’t go with you . . .it is against the rules . . .but I will . . . hold your hand as far as the gate. At the gate you can let go and give me a smile to show you are a brave boy and get on the boat or whatever it is you have to do . . .sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest.’)

Diary of A Bad Year reads like two novels in one. The narration serves to make the boundaries between the different components more striking. Each page of the novel is divided into three segments, which are separated from one another by horizontal lines. The first segments in the first section of the novel (entitled 'Strong Opinions’) has little direct connection with the remaining two segments, and can constitute a novella in their own right, a la Elizabeth Costello). In the second section of the novel (entitled ‘Second Diary’), the first segments are of the same nature as those in the first section—JC’s musings on various issues except that they are not for the book the German publisher is planning to bring out. The second segment, in both the sections of the novel is about JC’s thoughts on and his interactions with Anya, while the third and the final segment is about Anya’s take on the same interactions plus her interactions with her boyfriend.

Despite the thematic incongruity between the different sections of the novel, it does not feel like a hodgepodge. JC’s views on democracy, terrorism, the response of the Western governments to the threat to their way of life, their treatment of asylum seekers et cetera are very left wing. JC holds Toni Blair—‘[a man with] no philosophical grounding, and little capacity for introspection, and no inner compass save personal ambition . . .’—in contempt and is an unabashed admirer of the late Harold Pinter, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize of literature. Pinter, who was in the terminal stages of cancer when the award was announced, launched a savage attack on Blair in a recorded speech for his part in the Iraq invasion and called for him to be put on trial as a war criminal. JC’s response is: ‘It takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken. . .there comes a time when the outrage and shame are so great that all calculations, all prudence, is overwhelmed, and one must act, that is to say, speak.’ A counterpoising argument to JC’s views is provided by Allan, who prides himself at dealing with realities. Allan tries to distinguish between the Communists, the old foe, and the Islamists, the latest threat to the Western way of life, along the predictable lines. And he is disparaging not just of JC’s views on politics, he also ridicules JC’s views on philosophy and mathematics: ‘Every words he [JC] says is bullshit.’ At times the reader gets the feeling that they are not so much reading a novel as witnessing an Oxford Society debate, albeit an absorbing and fascinating one.

J.M. Coetzee, together with V.S. Naipaul, is the greatest living writer writing in English. In his long and distinguished career he has handled many narrative forms with great success. Disgrace, arguably his most powerful novel (for which he became the first author to be awarded the Booker prize on two occasions), is in the traditional realistic style, as are some of his other novels most notably The Life and Times of Michael K (for which he won the Booker the first time round) and Waiting for the Barbarians. He used the stream of consciousness technique to devastating effect in In the Heart of Country. In all of his recent novels Coetzee has deliberately removed the space between the narrator and his narrative, and is choosing to appear in them under disguises that camouflage little. Thus the readers are encouraged to think that the views of the protagonists are Coetzee’s own view. He also seems increasingly preoccupied with panoply of contemporary issues, which force their way into his novels as essays. In one of the essays, entitled, ‘Authority in Fiction’ Coetzee, via his alter ego, JC, comes closest to revealing what it is that he is trying to achieve in his recent experiments with the form of novel. He invokes Tolstoy whom JC [Coetzee] greatly admires. ‘No one,’ JC remarks, ‘is better at building authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word Tolstoy is the exemplary author.’ JC then goes on to remark that in his later life Tolstoy was treated not just as a great author but as an authority on life, a great man, a sage. JC [Coetzee] then wonders whether authority couldn’t be achieved, not just by the trick of rhetoric, but ‘by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically.’

One wonders whether Coetzee is not aspiring to be a modern day Tolstoy, a great sage, a wise man, and commentator on the human condition.

Football World Cup 2010

I am dreading the coming month. The Football world cup will begin in South Africa. Already, I am spotting cars (usually Vauxhalls and Fords that look as though they were donated by the Bombay Municipal Corporation after they failed the roadworthiness tests) with St George’s flags fluttering, driven by men with tattoos on their arms.

I predict that the whole of England will willingly wallow in the thraldom of football over the next few weeks. The pubs will be overcrowded , and the roads will be deserted when England play, and, after each game, people—usually men whose flabby guts are testimony to decades of unhealthy eating habits, on to whom are clinging stout women (like the Baroque cathedral in Ghent, and a few teeth missing; whatever else they might be, no one in his right mind would describe them as pretty)—will disperse, like rats scattering out of a lab on fire, and discuss loudly the finer points—if that is not a contradiction in terms—of the game. They will agree (or disagree) noisily whether an offside ruling by the referee was justified, and, if the ruling has gone against the home-side, whether the referee was a c**t of the first waters.

If—God forbid—England manage to reach the semi-finals (though I doubt it), life will not be worth living. People will talk about nothing else. Each game will be awaited with the eagerness, alertness and avid anticipation of a Catholic priest waiting to have a private talk with the cutest choirboy. The prowess of individual players, both on and off the field, will be either admired or doubted, depending on their performances.  Tedious remarks such as ‘He won’t be able to score in a brothel’, or ‘He is not a real footballer; he is just a sprinter’ will be spouted across every corner by men whose careers have reached the dizzy heights of ‘waste management and disposal technician’ (otherwise known as bin men).

I don’t like football. I don’t know what the fuss is about. I can’t really see the point of it. Why anyone would part with even a penny of one’s money to watch a bunch of grown-up men running across a field, kicking about a ball, frequently tripping one another, with the ultimate aim of putting the ball into a net, is beyond me. Also, it is not as if there is even a result in every game. So, these guys run about helter-skelter for 90-100 minutes, and have nothing to show for it at the end of it. Their coffers are of course swollen by several thousand pounds every time they put in an appearance, but what about the spectators?  Are they coughing up eighty pounds to watch these overpaid, overhyped, overrated, overindulged, overinvested, inarticulate career delinquents (whose intelligence places them,  Darwinianly speaking, somewhere between a brachycephallic and a poorly trained gorilla, and, you can’t really see what use there could be for them, if they couldn’t play football, other than fighting wars on foreign soils, and only if you could teach them to read and write so that they can follow the instruction manuals ) attempting to cause grievous bodily harm to one another and exploding like an Iraq refinery bombed from above every time a decision goes against them? Is this entertainment? Why would anyone watch it? But you never know. People will pay cash, especially in England, to watch any nonsense. They will pay £ 8.50 per head or some such ridiculous amount to stand in queues in miserably cold and dismal weather to gaze at and take photographs of a pile of rubble that used to be an abbey five hundred years ago. I have it on reliable information that there is a tomato museum on the island of Guernsey. Then there is—and I am not making this up—a barometer exhibition outside met office. I recently read somewhere that there is a bee museum in Cornwall. What is there to see in a bee museum? You go to any town or city, and you will find at least one museum devoted to the history of the town (or the area) over the centuries, which only serves to underline the point that nothing of any great significance happened there. I mean, the tapestry of your life is unlikely to miss many threads if you did not know that for generations people have been growing cabbages or carrots or whatever. You might as well pay money to watch the paint dry or a scab form or watch a Duran Duran gig.

The only part of a game of football I find mildly entertaining (on the few occasions when I can be bothered to watch it) are the celebrations of the players when a goal is scored. The sheer inanity of the jubilation is breathtaking. The guy who has scored the goal might begin running wildly, either kissing his (sweat-soaked) t-shirt or waving his arms like a windmill. His team-mates pursue him and are in great rush to jump over him; within seconds the player disappears underneath a tangle of heaving and sweating mass of male limbs and torsos. It is a miracle he does not end up with fractured ribs and limbs when the celebrations finally finish. Then the players run in front of the section of the crowd that has the supporters of their club, and shout in a demented fashion, invariably pulling and pointing at the t-shirts they are wearing (why? It is not as if anyone is in any doubt as to which club the players represent). Their supporters go apeshit: the camera shows men with beer guts, their faces unclouded by anything resembling an intelligent thought (or just thought), jumping up and down, hugging and kissing each other, and shouting at the decibel levels that would have Quasimodo applying for a tourist visa to go to India on the off-chance that it would be quieter there. The whole spectacle, it would be fair to say, is enough to fill you, depending on your disposition and the time of the day, with wonderment (that there are people who think nothing of indulging in a senseless and probably emotionally detrimental quest for happiness) or despair (that there are people who think nothing of indulging in a senseless and probably emotionally detrimental quest for happiness). Sometimes the players mime certain actions after scoring goals, inciting the commentators (who generally speak as if they have undergone lessons in how to speak like a t**t who has an incurable addiction to clichés and aversion to syntax) into a frenzy of speculations as to what the asinine gesture might mean (as if anyone gives two shits); like the moronic robot routine of the moronic and terminally ungifted Peter Crouch on the (mercifully very few) occasions when he scored a goal.

Then there are the managers. Most of them seem to oscillate between only two types of emotions: either they are surly, grumpy, insolent, and snort like a maddened bull who has spotted a red flag when their teams lose, talking about the referees (who, in their views have treated their teams unfairly) as if the transgressions deserve nothing less than a hauling  in front of the commission in Hague (or, more likely—as I don’t think they’d have heard of Hague—, a public flogging that would have the Norfolk hicks nodding with approval); or, when their teams win, they are unbearably smug and crow as if they have conquered Afghanistan. Like the constantly-gum-chewing (with such gusto, you wonder if he isn’t wearing down his teeth) Alex Ferguson, of Manchester United, who, when his team loses or when he is contradicted, becomes frightfully rhetorical and hysterical, and does not realise (or mind) what a crashing bore he becomes when he goes on like it. Or Arsene Wenger, of Arsenal, who has come up with so many innovative excuses why his team hasn’t won a trophy in the last five years, you wonder whether he hasn’t missed his vocation as a novelist.

Football, I’d humbly put it to you, is, like homosexuality, French cooking, and Islam, not for everyone; and, over the next one month, if I find myself in a situation where the television is switched on to show grown men wearing shorts running about a field like chickens in search of their severed heads, I’d be out of it faster than an American says ‘Howdy’.

Dennis Hopper RIP

I watched David Lynch’s Blue Velvet years after it was first released in the cinemas. One of the scenes from that weird and surreal film that stands out in my memory is of the evil Frank Booth approaching Dorothy Vallens, an oxygen mask covering his face and breathing stertorously.  Frank Booth, the central villain in David Lynch’s landmark film, is one of the most unforgettable characters in Hollywood films.

Dennis Hopper, who died last month, succumbing (I am not sure that is the correct verb—it insinuates a weakness of character, obliquely suggesting that if only the sufferer were made of sterner character, had more will power, the outcome could have been avoided) finally to prostate cancer, played Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, one of the many memorable characters this versatile actor played over the years.

I am not a great film buff. The last time I watched a film in the cinemas was almost three years ago (it was a silly Harry Potter flick, and while driving home, an idiot drove into my car side-on round a roundabout); however there was a time when I used to watch films regularly. My taste, if my memory of those days which are increasingly becoming mist-filled, serves me right, was eclectic. I was not choosy. I watched any film that had a semblance of a plot, had some eye-candies (Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts, and the super-elegant Michelle Pfeiffer), and clever, witty dialogues (any of the Tarantino films). I wasn’t a great fan of a particular actor, although I admired, in no particular order, Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, and Dennis Hopper. The trouble was none of these three actors was terrifically choosy with their selections of films. The sheer dross they have acted in is mind-boggling. Michael Caine was unapologetic about it: he once famously replied, when asked why he had chosen to act in some dreadful flick—I forget the name; there were so many of them—, that it funded the extension to his house. I know not what Dennis Hopper’s excuse was to waste his awesome talent in rubbish films (perhaps to fund his costly divorces, there were five of them). For all I know he saw, in vehicles like Luck of the Draw and The Keeper, an opportunity to impress the viewers with his outstanding talent, but I doubt it. Chances are Hopper was driven by the same motives that made Michael Caine accept Asahnti.

I shall remember Dennis Hopper for his roles in Blue Velvet, Speed—which gave his career a new lease of life (and, I dare say, spawned many derivative villains roles, some of which he could have avoided), Apocalypse Now—in which he played an unsettlingly hypermanic photographer), and of course Easy Rider (a bit before my time, this one)—‘the ultimate road movie’, which he also directed.  

Dennis Hopper acted in some great films and lots and lots of not very good films. That detracts nothing from the fact that he was one of the most talented actors. 

May his soul rest in peace.

British General Election 2010

The most exciting general election in the United Kingdom in the last 30 years, allegedly, is concluded and in the words of Paddy Ashdown, the Ex-Liberal Democrat leader, the British Public has spoken, but we are not clear what they have said.

Although this is a blog mainly about books, I can declare that I am interested in politics. ‘Interested’ would probably be overstating it. I am interested in British politics in the same way I am interested in the non-fiction section of a high-street bookshop: I know where it is, but I do not have an overwhelming desire to visit it and pour over, say, yet another account of what the British did leading up to the D day in the Second World War, or a 'highly informative’ account that ‘reads like a thriller’ of the recession crisis engulfing the Western world by an expert (who wasn’t expert enough, it would appear, to predict it; but then, apart from Vince Cable and my friend John, no one in my knowledge saw it coming); however, I will visit it if there is a specific book I am looking for.

My interest in the British general election of 2010 was aroused after the televised debate—the first in British History—of the leaders of the three contesting parties. It was also an opportunity for me to find out the name of the leader of the Liberal Democrat Leader and see him. I thought that was essential, as I was planning to vote the Lib Dems in the election. My curiosity was also provoked by a phone call I received one evening a few weeks earlier. The woman at the other end claimed that she was phoning from the Lib Dems’ office and wanted to know which party I would vote if the elections were held the next day. I told her that I would vote the Lib Dems, and she thanked me. I felt compelled to tell her that those were only intentions and I might change my mind on the day itself. I warned her that I was known amongst my friends to be notoriously indecisive.

‘It’s OK; I only wanted to know your intentions,’ she said.

‘Even though they can change within hours of this conversation,’ I responded.

There was a pause, then the woman said, ‘Well, um.'

All the contestants in the constituency in which I live were men, none of them pretty. The Lib Dem candidate, the party of my choice, looked like the missing link between the Neanderthals and humans, and was of a height that would have required a ladder to get on to a chair. The Labour and the Tory candidates between them weighed 250 kilograms. The Labour guy looked as though he had an alcohol problem, his face permanently flushed and nose an angry red dotted with tributaries of broken veins. The Tory candidate was equally unprepossessing (I only saw his posters), with his hair looking as if a bird had attempted to build a nest on his head before giving up, and eyes glinting sinisterly from behind his glasses. I could not make up my mind whether the man, despite his prodigious bulk, was a mental midget (and therefore to be pitied), or despite his ridiculous appearance, was evil (and therefore to be feared). There was a candidate from the Green Party, too, who looked to be barely out of his teens, a galaxy of acne cruising across his face. I have never really understood the point of the Greens (probably because I have never tried). I knew that Hazel from office was a Green supporter—another reason why I viewed the Greens with some reservation. Hazel is a bit odd; she eats raw vegetables for lunch and has peculiar body odour (I also suspect she is a cat-lover). I logged on to the Green Party’s website, which informed me that it was not just another political party; Green politics was a new radical kind of politics guided by their core principles, of which they had listed ten. By the time I reached the end of the list (liberally strewn with words and phrases like ‘recognising human diversity’, ‘non-violent solution to conflict situations’, ‘Personal freedom, happiness, and human fulfilment’) tears of boredom were streaming down my face, even though I did not have any issues with the Greens’ idea of Utopia. I mean, I wouldn't mind at all living in a world where everyone is happy, everyone gets everything he wants, the Islamists and Jeremy Paxman chill out a bit—the former reconnoitring the route to paradise, and the latter adopting the philosophical position that there ought to be more to life than insulting politicians, and—my personal Utopia, this—I get to date classy birds who wear expensive knickers, own first edition Orwell, and who, when you take them out for meals, spend half an hour studying the menu before ordering green salad and a glass of fizzy water. But I am not sure that is going to happen, not at any rate by voting the Greens; you might as well flush your vote down the toilet. I wished I were living in the neighbouring constituency where there was a posh bird standing on the Conservative ticket against (it has to be said) a very ugly Labour man with gaps in his teeth.

‘I will be astonished if the lesbian wins,’ announced my friend John (a long-standing Labour supporter who hates New Labour; but he hates the Tories even more). ‘This is a safe Labour seat.’

‘You are calling this woman a lesbian,’ I felt I needed a clarification on this point, ‘because you have a specific knowledge about her sexuality, or as a term of abuse to express your contempt?’ I ended the sentence with an inflection to make it into a question.

‘Oh! She looks like a Les’, John Said. ‘And she is stupid; she probably thinks credit crunch is an expensive cereal,’ he added.

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

‘She just looks stupid to me.’

Anyway, coming back to the televised debates Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, judging from his (ham) theatrical performance, appeared to be auditioning for the role of an enraged brother-in-law in a Bollywood family potboiler. As for what he had to say, it could be summarised as follows: we are not Labour and we are not Tories; we can’t be held responsible for the mess we are in; so vote for us. David Cameron, the Tory leader, looked perplexed, as if trying to figure out how he ended up with the two other chancers sharing the podium with him.  What he had to say was about as clear as one of those Impressionistic paintings of Claude Monet when he began to lose his sight. Cameron’s main message was: we are in a mess; Labour did it; don’t vote for them, vote for us. We are not the nasty party any more; look at me; do I look nasty? (To be fair to him, when he was not looking perplexed, he tried his best to look concerned.) Gordon Brown, the prime-minister and the leader of the Labour Party, unlike Cameron and Clegg, managed effortlessly to be his natural self—awkward, grumpy, sullen, and with the attitude of a spoilt ten year old who has been told that he cannot help himself, for the sixth time, to the jar of sweets. His pitch to the public was: I am the prime minister and, unlike the other two jokers, I know what I am talking about; I have seen good times and bad times (in other words he knew how to wreck a perfectly working economy); the recession was global, and I am your man to steer the country out of troubled waters. (Entrusting economy to Brown, my friend John said, would be like handing over your best crockery set to the bull after he had rampaged through your China shop.) On immigration, especially illegal immigration, the Labour and Tories differed from the Lib Dem position. As I saw it, Nick Clegg was going to track down these illegal immigrants, living in the shadows of our society as he put it, and give them amnesty so that they could live here; whereas Cameron and Brown were not going to find them and deport them. On several occasions during the three televised debates, Brown looked disapprovingly at Cameron and Clegg. He informed Cameron that he was a threat to country’s economic recovery, and Clegg that he was a threat to country’s security. He was so severe, I feared Cameron and Clegg would need telephonic support from anti-bullying help-line.

In the middle of all this Brown had his granny-gate. While campaigning in Rochdale, Brown was accosted by an old biddy who asked him a lot of questions about economy and immigration, which confirmed that the old biddy, in addition to being of an advanced age and (by her own admission) a lifelong Labour supporter, was also stupid, ignorant, and very possibly bigoted.  That’s what Brown called her afterwards in what he thought was a private conversation with one of his aides. Except that he still had a microphone attached to his shirt, provided by SKY, and the remark was picked up by the SKY news, which, promptly, in line with its stoop-to-the-gutter-level-to-destroy-Brown-protocol, splashed it all over the place, forcing Brown to issue no less than six apologies over the next six hours. He even visited the bigoted woman at her house in Rochdale (that, you would have thought, was punishment enough) to apologise in person. Brown could have learned from Teflon Tony, his predecessor, slimier than a snail, who never accepted microphones from News agencies.

My support for Lib Dems began to waver after the ‘granny-gate’ and I toyed with the idea of voting Labour, so sorry did I feel for Brown, who was being be-shitten from everywhere.

On the election night, I started with the intention of watching the results throughout the night. ITV and BBC had rival shows, while Channel 4 had an ‘alternative election night’, fronted, amongst others, by the comedian Jimmy Carr, whom I do not find funny at all and whose habit of jerking his neck (like a hen picking up grains from a garbage pile) every time he delivers his un-funny punch line I find irritating. So I decided to watch ITV and BBC.

I shall not go into the details of what happened on the election night because I had had enough by 11.30 pm and went to sleep. I remember Ann Widdecomb, ex-Tory MP and dreadful novelist, her breasts splayed on the table in front of her, commenting that Paddy Ashdown, the ex-leader of the Lib Dems was being ‘pompous and premature’, before predicting with a school-girlish squeak that the Tories would have a clear majority when the first election result, from the piss-poor Sunderland, came out, which the Tories lost to Labour by a margin of more than 10,000 votes. On another occasion the mosquitoesqe David Miliband, while being interviewed—by that time it was clear as daylight that Labour, although not facing a rout, were losing badly— reminded George Osborne, the deathly pale right hand man of Cameron, that it was not a sixth form debate with the smirk of an eleven year old who thought he had made a clever point in the school debate.

It was also obvious that the Labour propaganda machine had swung into action with all the dexterity and panache of a charging rhino. The double trouble of Alastair Campbell and Piers Morgan refused to accept with the conviction of the deluded that it was turning out to be a bad night for Labour. Campbell tried to give so much positive spin to the undeniable reality that Labour had attracted less than 30% of the popular vote and were comfortably beaten by the Tories to the second position that I began to get vertigo. Piers Morgan was regrettably (but unsurprisingly) equally shameless in his refusal to see the blindingly obvious, and was concocting all sorts of permutations involving Labour and Lib Dems that would keep the Tories out. I could not help thinking that these freelancing wheeler-dealers—Campbell, an ex-alcoholic and discredited spin-doctor of a discredited, profiteering warmonger (liar BLiar, pants on fire); and Morgan, a disgraced former editor of a British tabloid who was frogmarched out of the office for being incompetent and who now earns his keep by being a reality television judge, sitting next to David Hasselhoff and Amanda Holden—were doing more harm than good to Labour’s (already tattered) reputation. It is not as if either of them has credibility or has anything intelligent to say. They are just a couple of chancers who turn up (probably uninvited) at these events. It is impossible to take such publicity-hoggers seriously. Morgan is at least entertaining; Campbell is just annoying.

Then I saw Jeremy Paxman—perhaps it was the next day—giving a grilling to a robot called Jack Dromey  (the husband of the deputy leader of Labour party, Harriet Harman), the newly elected Labour MP from Birmingham. Paxo tried his best-selling act of looking disgusted, contemptuous, incredulous, all at the same time (which had the net result of him looking as if he was choking on his own tongue) when Dromey informed him that the people did not want a Conservative government. However Dromey was having none of that. With no expressions whatsoever on his face and in a monotonous voice, in comparison with the standard recorded message on the telephone answer-phone was Laurence Olivier, Dromey kept on repeating that the Conservatives had not won the election and that people did not want a Conservative government. It was as if the man had no free will and was programmed to spawn the same response no matter what Paxman threw at him. Paxo gave up in the end, looking at Dromey as if he should be quartered and attempting one last bit of sarcasm by saying that he (Dromey) had made himself abundantly clear. The camera faded as Dromey, in response, was in the midst of saying that people did want a Conservative government.

Peter Mandelson was interviewed at one stage. He is another corrupt, discredited politician, in my opinion. Brown hated his guts for supporting BLiar for the Labour leadership in the 1990s, but recalled him from the cold when he began to lose ground. I am not sure if that was such a clever move. The views of most people of the ‘Prince of Darkness’ nestle between detestation and abhorrence. In the interview I watched, Mandelson did what he is best at: building sandcastles when the tide was clearly coming in. A malicious grin spreading slowly, like soft butter, across his unattractive face, Mandelson hinted and insinuated all sorts of possibilities in respect of post-election alliances between parties, indicating that Labour would be prepared to ditch Gordon Brown if it meant they could stay in power in coalition with the Lib Dems. It was a spectacle guaranteed to turn most healthy stomachs.

The final results were almost exactly as predicted by the exit polls, which confirmed that Lord Ashdown was talking from the back of his head when he asseverated that the Lib Dems would win more seats than that predicted by the poll. However that still left the Tories 20 short of an absolute majority. Any Labour hopes of forming an alliance with the Lib Dems were dashed when Cleggy announced that the Tories should have a first go at forming a government. I was pleased when I heard that for no other reason than that it meant the machinating toerags like Mandelson and Campbell would be frustrated and the smirk on the face of that picayune David Miliband would disappear.

Brown, in the meanwhile, had returned to Number 10, the official residence of the British Prime-minister. His initial announcement suggested that he was not ready to throw in the towel yet. He grudgingly accepted that the Tories and the Lib Dem should first try to form the government—not that he had any choice in the matter; the Lib Dem had not, at that stage, approached him—however, he declared, should those negotiations not come to fruition he would be willing to negotiate with them. The right wing Tory press was up in arms and one of the tabloids owned by the despicable Rupert Murdoch called him a squatter at number 10. (The same tabloid, eleven years ago, when BLiar was licking Murdoch’s rectum clean, had announced in a headline, after yet another deranged rant from the then Tory leader, William Hague, that the Conservative party had died, the cause of death being suicide.) Then El Gordo, the magician, pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He announced that he was stepping down as the leader of the Labour party, but was still keen to form what he termed as a ‘progressive alliance’ with the Lib Dems that would keep the nasty Conservatives out. Since it was no secret that Cleggy could not stand Brown whose idea of persuading others to his line of thinking was to throw the nearest heavy object in the general direction of their heads, the assumption (presumably) by the Labour Think Tank (if that is not overstating the case) was that the Lib Dems would be more amenable to forming an alliance with them if Brown were out of the way. The right wing, pro-Tory, press went apeshit.  Just two days before they were calling Brown a squatter because he was not resigning. Now that he had resigned, they were madder than a hatter, and accused him of trying shamelessly to keep Cameron out of power.

We do not know whose idea it was to advise Brown to link his resignation to the coalition with the Lib Dems (probably Mandelson's), but it was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty undignified, not to say stupid, thing to do. All it did was to give the Lib Dems more leverage in their negotiations with the Tories, who immediately announced that they would be prepared to offer the Lib Dem a referendum on alternative vote (AV).

Allow me to explain all this fuss about proportional voting. This is an old demand of the Lib Dems, who, for decades, have argued that the voting system in Britain, which is ‘first-past-the-post is the winner’, is unfair. In this general election Lib Dem got 24% of the popular vote, but their elected members were less than 10% of the total number. That is of course because majority of their candidates lost, which meant that the votes gone to them did not count. In Lib Dem’s ideal world, with 24% share of the popular vote, they would have almost 1/4^th the number of MPs. Quite how this will happen is difficult to say—there are several complicating formulae you can use, apparently—but it does not matter, because it is not going to happen. (Years ago, in 1997, BLiar led the Lib Dems up the garden path. He appointed the Jenkins Commission to look into it; but unsurprisingly, it came to nothing, as BLiar was not committed to it. And why would he? Labour, at that time, were winning landslide victories with just over 40% of the popular vote, and anyone who expected a dishonest politician like BLiar to make changes, however fair, to the electoral system that would harm the prospects of his party, was taking an excessively optimistic view of the human nature.) 

The Tory offer to Lib Dems, something which would be beyond the ideological pale of their grass-root members who are to the right of Genghis Khan politically (there is nothing wrong with our great country that cannot be cured if only the darkies went back to the jungles to beat their bongo drums, the smelly coloured corner-shop owners and landlords were deported along with their smelly coloured tenants, tree-hugging, vegetable-munching beardy socialists were gaoled without a trial, marauding low-class football fans were shot on the spot, and anyone with the name Mohammed was banned from entering the country; in the orderly climate thus engendered, where everyone knows his place, other problems like homosexuality and abortions would get sorted by themselves), and would eat virgins on the nights of full moon if only they had half a set of teeth in their mouths (the average Tory supporter is 176 years  old and thinks Britain still rules India)—was an indication that the panic had set in among the Etonians. One of Cameron’s allies, Michael Gove, who looked as if he was suffering from a combination of a muscle-wasting disease and exopthalmic goitre (or terminal stages of alcoholism) defended the decision by telling David Dimbleby how it was always on Cameron’s mind ever since he came out of his mother’s womb, but it fooled no one.

And then suddenly it was all over. The Lib Dems reached a deal with the Tories and entered into a full coalition. Cameron would become Prime-minister and Cleggy his deputy. Which also meant taxi for Brown. He didn’t hang around. He announced that he was resigning. His resignation speech was full of Brownian contradictions. Within half an hour of Brown meeting the queen, Cameron with his horsy wife was meeting the queen (she had a busy day) and being invited by the octogenarian monarch to form the government. The BBC reporter and the news-reader, in that uniquely British (and, to be frank, nauseating) way, prattled on about whether Cameron had kissed the queen’s hand and who was the last prime-minister before him who had done that. Cameron then returned to Downing Street and gave what I am sure will turn out to be the first of the many bland speeches as prime-minister. David Dimbleby then bored everyone by pointing out at great length, exuding air of smug satisfaction and pomposity in equal measures, the differences between the British and American system when there is a change of government / President. (Who gives a toss? Americans certainly don’t. The British elections did not feature even on page six of their newspapers.) The BBC reporter (a woman with a mouth like Shrek’s) announced that President Obama had phoned Cameron congratulating on his victory. When he heard that, Dimbleby looked as if he was going to ejaculate there and then. Obama, incidentally, was the second American politician to phone Cameron. The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had phoned him on the election night, apparently even before the Tories had won even a single seat, congratulating him on the victory. (May be Arnie was confused by the time difference between the two countries.).

The next day there were (at last) some indications that common sense might be returning to Labour ranks, and there'd be potential problems for Cameron. I saw an interview of Bill Cash, a Tory MP, and Diane Abbot, a Labour MP. Diane Abbott, who looked like she was either returning from or about to leave for, a pie-eating competition, was scathing of the unelected elements—when pressed to name them, she mentioned Mandelson and the improbably named Lord Adonis—interfering unnecessarily. She also said that the majority of the elected Labour MPs simply did not have the stomach to enter into what could only have been a very fragile coalition with the Lib Dems (not least because the two parties did not have the sufficient number to reach the majority and would have had to depend on the support of maverick fringe parties). The majority was also of the view that the party was crushed, trodden to the ground, and brought to a certain point of dilapidation (to these you’d have been tempted to add ‘debased’ and ‘diminished’ by the shenanigans of Mandelson, Campbell  et al) and should do the decent thing and be in the opposition. This view, also aired by the former Home secretary John Reid (in his monumentally irritating accent and patronising manner), suggested that not everyone in the Labour ranks was shameless or opportunistic or had taken leave of their senses. Bill Cash was scary; he would scare the flies off a manure truck. Firstly, he looked like a long lost cousin of Count Dracula; secondly he gave me the creeps when he launched into an inane tirade against Europe, his eyes darting everywhere, as if he was receiving messages from cuckoo land, and spit flying out everywhere from the slash that passed for a mouth on his face.

So, this is the state of play at the minute. Five days after the general election, Britain finally has a government. Cameron is in Number 10, and Nick Clegg has moved out of political obscurity to become the Deputy Prime-minister. (I wholeheartedly welcome this. Clegg is definitely an improvement on the thuggish, secretary-shagger John Prescott, the uncouth, semi-literate deputy of BLiar, who mangled the English language as a butcher cleaves meat and whose idea of sophisticated entertainment, you imagine, was to fart repeatedly and compare each explosion for volume, velocity and odourosity.)

Gordon Brown is gone. He is not just history; he is chemistry and biology. I suspect posterity will judge him as harshly as he is being judged now: he will always be remembered as the man who plotted for years to become prime-minister, but couldn’t hack it when he finally got the job. His legacy is economic ruins and near-bankruptcy of Britain. Bad as this is, he might derive comfort from the fact that at least he will not be remembered as the man who told lies and pushed his country into an illegal war. He is not a great orator, and it is unlikely that the Americans would pay astronomical sums of money to listen to him, as they are apparently doing to listen to BLiar. (Why anyone would part with even a pence of his hard-earned money to listen to BLiar blathering vacuously on peace in Middle East—would you listen to the Yorkshire Ripper lecturing on being kind to prostitutes?—is beyond me; but obviously there are parts of the world where they want to do that, allowing this war-criminal to trouser millions.) I guess Brown, who has a doctorate in History, will devote his considerable intellect to writing weighty books. A memoir full of spite and recrimination should not be ruled out.

Brown having made his long awaited (and much overdue) exit, there will now be a ghastly scrum to become the biggest bug in the pile of manure that is Labour party. Who will it be? David Miliband? Ed Miliband? Or Ed Balls? Surely they wouldn’t elect someone named Balls as their leader?

As for David—call me Dave—Cameron, he has shown that he can talk the talk. Can he walk the walk? Time shall tell.