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?

Book of the Month: Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)

Pale Fire is the epitome of post-modern fiction. It is also [as William  Boyd described] one of the most extraordinary and brilliant novels ever written, let alone in the twentieth century.

‘Pale Fire’ consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos written in heroic couplets (although the couplets are enjambed rather than self-contained), the last work of an American academician (in the Wordsmith college in New Wye, Appalachia) and a poet of moderate reputation called John Shade. The poem, titled ‘Pale Fire’ (taken from an obscure Shakespearean play, ‘Timon of Athens’) is preceded by a foreword and followed by a long series of explanatory notes (abounding in cross references) by one Dr. Charles Kinbote, a refugee professor from a country called Zembla (which, we learn is situated north of Russia), a colleague and neighbour of John Shade. The novel ends with an exhaustive index, also prepared by Kinbote. This is what Mary McCarthy described as the ‘ground floor’ of the novel. We also learn, early in the story, that John Shade was murdered by a killer who is considered to have been escaped from the local lunatic asylum, and who, according to Kinbote, has used a number of aliases such as Jack grey, Jack Degree, Jacques de Gray, James de Gray; his real name may have been Jacob Gradus. Kinbote has obtained legal permission from Shade’s widow, Sybil, and is editing the manuscript and preparing his commentary in hiding, away, he declares, from the machinations of rival Shadians. This is the first indication that things may not be how they appear on the surface.

As the novel progresses, the ‘piano nobile’ (to borrow another phrase from McCarthy’s celebrated review, which went a long way towards promoting the novel in the USA upon its publication), becomes apparent. As Kinbote explicates ‘Pale Fire’, the reader begins to wonder whether he isn’t projecting the troubled history of his country of origin, Zembla, in particular the life and times of its last ruler who, as it happens, shares his first name with Kinbote, onto his interpretation of Shade’s poem. Shade’s poem is an emotional, elegiac and above all autobiographical work, with musings on death and loss and redemption, in part inspired by the death of his fat, plain daughter (who probably killed herself after she was spurned by a blind date); Kinbote, however, plunges deeper and deeper into his personal tale of Zemblan manners and intrigues in his scholium. The doubts disappear when Kinbote lets it be known that he believes that the Zemblan stories with which he has tirelessly regaled Shade during their five-month-acquaintance were the inspiration behind ‘Pale Fire’. The reader also becomes aware that Kinbote had the rather disturbing habit of spying on his neighbour (ostensibly to check on the progress of Shade’s poem in which he had personal interest); that Shade’s wife treated him with a mixture of wariness and dislike; that he was loathed by other academicians on the campus—Kinbote reports in the foreword an exchange with a friend of the Shades, who tells him that she finds him a remarkably disagreeable person and, ‘exasperated by my polite smile’, adds: ‘What’s more, you are insane.’—; and that he is most probably a homosexual and pederast. The second story, the ‘piano noble’ of the novel, is the real story, or so it seems almost until the end. In his commentary, Kinbote tells the story of Charles Xavier, or Charles the Beloved, the poetry-loving last King of Zembla, who loved the ‘laddies rather than ladies’, and who was removed from the throne by the Russian (read Communist) backed local Extremists. With the help of the loyalists, who call themselves ‘Karlists’, Charles escapes from Zembla and makes his way to America. The Extremists then rope in Jacob Gradus, a member of the Extremists’ party that has usurped power in Zembla. Gradus leaves Zembla, Kinbote informs us, on the day John Shade begins writing what would turn out to be the last poem of his life. The reader gradually becomes aware, by degrees, of that which is lying subjacent to Kinbote’s highfalutin prose: he is Charles the Beloved; or he thinks he is Charles the Beloved. And, as observed by the disapproving faculty member, he is insane. He has deluged John Shade (who, the reader realises, has tolerated him out of pity) with fantastical stories of his delusional world, and, while interpreting what is clearly an autobiographical poem, is prone to see his fantasy world reflected in it. Shade gets killed, according to Kinobote, by Gradus—but is he really Gradus; can Kinbote be trusted in anything that he says?—because he is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time—Gradus has come to assassinate Kinbote a.k.a. Charles the Beloved, and the bullet that pierces Shade’s heart is meant for Kinbote. But then, if the killer is not what the deluded Kinbote thinks he is, then who is he? Is he the madman he confesses to the police to be, who has escaped from the local asylum, and has randomly killed Shade, who happens indeed to be the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place, but not in the way Kinbote imagines it? And who is Kinbote? What is his real identity? Could he be Professor Botkin, or Botkine (the anagram of which is Kinbote), a refugee professor who teaches in the Russian department and imagines himself to be the exiled king of Zembla? It is little wonder that ‘Pale Fire’ has spawned a plethora of interpretations and reviews speculating on the identity of Kinbote, and, by extension, the narrator.

Devilishly clever, Pale Fire works like a complex chess problem (at one point, the narrator even alludes to the ‘solus rex type’ of chess problem, one of the many clues Nabokov throws at the readers early on). Just as in the solus rex, the king on the run might be outnumbered but is not always disadvantaged, and the novel ends in a kind of draw, which is often the endpoint of a chess game with this problem.

Like many of Nabokov novels, ‘Pale Fire’ crackles with erudition, linguistic dazzle, and deadpan, wicked wit. Indeed the whole novel, from its ponderous foreword to the deadpan index—with line-by-line commentary annotated with fragments of arcane learning—from lepidopterology to Preterism —is one gigantic spoof, a farce; Nabokov is taking great delight in pulling the reader’s leg (assuming of course they will get or be willing to share the joke). Take the poem, for example. As one critic observed, it is not a bad poem, but not terrifically good either. With its conversational bend (and also because of enjambment) it does not read like a poem, even. When the reader plows  through the poem (the best way, I found, was to read portions of the poem together with the relevant—in a manner of speaking—bits of the scholium, which means you have to endure the annoyance of going backward and forward all the time; alternatively, you can read the whole poem first, make your own interpretations, and then read Kinbote’s commentary) he cannot but help noticing the disparity between the poem’s merit and the pedagogic reverence, albeit misplaced, of the commentary; it is a carefully built up farce. What about Zembla, the imaginary country Nabokov has invented?  What might be the inspiration behind it? There is actually a group of islands, controlled by the Russians, called Novaya Zemlya, known in English (and Dutch) as Nova Zembla, in the Arctic ocean, in the extreme North-East of Europe. It was apparently, a sensitive military area during the decades of the Cold War and the Russians had military presence there. It is possible that Nobokov, a Russian émigré, knew of Nova Zembla. However, it is also possible that through Zembla Nabokov is acknowledging his debt to Alexander Pope, an eighteenth century English poet and one of the most celebrated exponents of heroic couplets. The word ‘Zembla’ can be found in Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (Epsitle 2), where it signifies the land of the polar star:

            ‘But where the extreme of Vice was ne’er agreed.

Ask where’s the North? At York, ‘tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland, at the Oroades, and there,

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where;

No creature owns it in the first degree,

But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he.’

The murdered John Shade, incidentally, is an expert on Pope and has written a book on Pope titled ‘Supremely Blest’.  Whatever might be the inspiration behind Zembla, Nabokov goes about giving shape, colour and contours to this mythical country with great delectation; the invention of Zemblan words, technically neologisms, and explanations, for the benefit of English readers, of their English counterparts—all done with deadpan seriousness—is a remarkable sleight of hand. In addition to the Nabokovian linguistic pyrotechnics (the novel overflows with words such as ‘skoramis’, ‘pudibundity’, ‘fackeltanz’, ‘ancillula’, and ‘enceinte’, which would send many scurrying to the OED), the novel pullulates with references to culture, nature or literature. There are innumerable figurative allusions to the Greek mythology, nature, classical literature, and, of course, Shakespeare. Why, some characters from Nabokov’s own oeuvre, such as professor Pnin, make a guest appearance. Ferreting out these hidden references adds to the enjoyment of the novel. The novel is like a literary game show with secret passages, revealing doors and oblique clues (which, admittedly, very few other than the most anally retentive would be able to piece together). However, if, like me, you are not a person of what Charles Kinbote would describe as broad culture, you would still be able to enjoy the novel for its inventiveness and linguistic brilliance.

There is only one word to describe Pale Fire: brilliant; it is not just clever writing and devices; it is 24 carat gold. It may be ostentatious, but it is high-octane genius. I have never read anything like it. How does one describe a novel whose story takes place almost entirely outside of its own text? All literature, it can be argued, is an art of manipulation, and in ‘Pale Fire’ that sense is very strong. Mary Mccarthy described ‘Pale Fire’ as an ‘infernal machine’, a ‘trap to catch reviewers’, a ‘do-it-yourself-kit’, and a ‘cat-and-mouse game’. To these one can add: a self-contained puzzle that reforms itself just when you think you have cracked it; it is the literary equivalent of Maurits Eschar’s impossible structures. An ingenious masterpiece. 

Beryl Bainbridge

If I ever get round to make a list of my hundred favourite novels or a list of desert island novels, there will be at least three, possibly four, novels of Beryl Bainbridge, who sadly passed away last month. These will be: Every Man for Himself, Injury Time, The Bottle Factory Outing, and An Awfully Big Adventure.

In my more than two decades of (mainly) novel-reading, there is one novel, which I devoured in a day, a novel which was a page-turner, a novel I could not wait to get to the end of, and which, when it ended, left me feeling utterly flummoxed, indeed a bit stupid: Beryl Bainbridge’s Winter Garden. The plot of ‘Winter Garden’—an adulterous lawyer goes on a trip to Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia with his paramour  and gets drawn unwittingly into something which he does not understand (and neither does the reader)—is worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and the MacGuffin is so ambiguous that the reader, like the hapless protagonist of the novel, is left chasing the shadows until the end.  I read ‘Winter Garden’, first published in 1980, a couple of years ago. I thought I had probably figured out what the novel was about, but was not sure; so I ‘googled’ it afterwards to see whether there were any reviews or discussions that would tell me whether my interpretation of this devilish little (just over 150 pages) novel was correct, but could not find anything that helped. (I once read an interview of Bainbridge in which she said—tongue firmly lodged in her cheek, I suspect— that readers should read her novels three times if they were to get what was going on in them. In another literary event she admitted that on several occasions she had been told by readers that they did not understand what she meant. So, I guess I am not alone in struggling to come to grips with her novels, although, of the dozen or so Bainbridge novels I have read, only Winter Garden remains abstruse.)

An Awfully Big Adventure was the first Beryl Bainbridge novel I read. First published in 1989, this was the last of the novels she based on her early life in Liverpool (it was later made into a film starring Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, and an actress who played Stella, the female protagonist, the only thing about whom I remember is that she had perky breasts). I loved the novel. It was waggish and sardonic, yet the underlying pathos did not leave you unmoved. And it was all so understated. By that time I had already become a fan of the great Muriel Spark, and Bainbridge, with her coolly stylish and punctilious style, was in the same mould.

I then read most of Bainbridge’s subsequent novels, which, I suppose, would come under the general category of ‘historical fiction’. But there was a difference. While Bainbridge took a historical event such as the sinking of the Titanic or the Crimean war as the backdrop to her novels, her stories were not fictionalised versions of historic events; rather she focused on the obscure or not very well known elements of the historical saga, and made them interesting. Of these Every Man for Himself, Bainbridge’s take on the sinking of the Titanic, remains my all-time favourite. I would have no hesitation in selecting it as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Told through the eyes of Morgan, the rich nephew of the owner of the ship, Every Man for Himself had a fine ensemble of characters and told, in Bainbridge’s trademark meticulous, unostentatious prose, the story of the last four fateful days of the doomed vessel with devastating poignancy. This was followed by Master Georgie, Bainbridge’s take on the Crimean war, with the enigmatical surgeon, George Hardy, as the central protagonist. Master Georgie is a dark, intense tale. The reader gets to know the ways of Hardy, Master Georgie to his obsessively loyal Myrtle, from the points of view of others. Deliberately shunning the hyperbole usually associated with the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bainbridge presents the readers with a disturbing, alarming, even, at times, tale. And if at the end of it you are left feeling that you still do not know Master Georgie all that well and are a bit puzzled by the emotional sway he holds over others, the elegant, beautiful prose more than makes up for it. According to Queeney came out in 2001, the last novel Bainbridge published. It tells the story of the relationship of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, as told through the eyes of Thrale’s daughter, Queeney. Bainbridge was inspired to write the novel after she came across a letter by Queeney in which she observes that the reason why she and her sister ended up damaged was because their mother hated their father. Like all of Bainbridge’s novels, it was complex, subtle, with subterranean currents the presence of which could only be guessed at by the occasional ripples they sent to the surface.

Most obituaries of Bainbridge I read divided her novels in two phases: in the first phase, which ended with An Awfully Big Adventure, Bainbridge drew extensively on her own early experiences. These novels are set in milieus in which she grew up or spent her formative years, and many have female protagonists that could have been fictionalised versions of Bainbridge herself. The next phase, which began with The Birthday Boys, consisted of what I earlier described as historical fiction. However, this is not strictly true. There is an early novel of hers, published in 1978, entitled Young Adolph. It is a historical novel in the loose sense of the term. Young Adolph is another of my favourite Bainbridge novel. It tells the story of the young and not very gifted (although he did not know it) Adolph Hitler, fancying himself as a painter, staying with his brother and sister-in-law in Liverpool before the First World War. As with most of Bainbridge’s ‘historical fiction’, the novel had a kernel of truth at its core. Hitler indeed had an older step-brother (from his father’s first marriage) who had married an Irishwoman. This brother had stayed in England, Liverpool for a few months before the First World War. What is not proven—there is certainly no historical evidence to back it and Hitler never mentioned it—is that Adolph Hitler ever visited him in England. Then there is Winter Garden, of course, which belongs to her early phase, and is in no way ‘autobiographical’. That said Bainbridge did draw a lot from her own experiences when she wrote her early novels. A Quiet Life, for example, is based heavily on her formative years in Formby, near Liverpool. She said in an interview that in the mid-eighties she felt as though she had written out her own past and was casting round for new subjects and ideas. The novels from her second phase are bigger in scope and all have male protagonists.  They also brought her wider, possibly international, fame and financial stability.

While my most favourite Bainbridge novel (Every Man for Himself) belongs to her second phase, in general I enjoy her earlier novels a lot more.

Almost all of Bainbridge novels end tragically. What characterizes her early novels is the unexpected juxtaposition of the comic with the grotesque. Her early novels are horribly funny, but the comedy has an edge to it, and, even as you laugh, you are troubled by something dark and vicious lurking underneath, ready to strike when you least expect it. Therefore, when the expected unexpected happens, you are still taken aback by its force. The Bottle Factory Outing and Injury Time (which I have reviewed on this blog some time back) are outstanding examples of black comedy. In The Bottle Factory Outing an outing of the employees of a bottle factory—Bainbridge brilliantly captures the apparent commonplaceness of the small worlds of working classes that makes you cringe—, spearheaded by a young unfulfilled woman, is unexpectedly interrupted by a murder. The Injury Time deals with the quotidian intrigues of the middle-classes—Edward, the protagonist of this novel, is having an affair with a chronically unhappy woman, and, to assuage her anger and his guilt, is having an evening party at her place for which a discrete work colleague is invited —which are suddenly overshadowed by violence and destruction. As William Trevor commented (in his review of The Bottle Factory Outing), it is as though ‘Muriel Spark [is] prevailed upon to write an episode of Liver Birds’.

There are, I feel, similarities in the writings of Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. Both wrote with great economy of prose, in a deadpan style—pans didn’t come deader than theirs—and the writing was cool, stylish and elegant. And they both wrote books that were slender in volume. The longest book Bainbridge wrote was her last, ‘According to Queeney’, which was still less than 250 pages. Novels such as Harriet Said and The Dressmaker are testimonies that you do not have to write tomes to produce quality.

Bainbridge began writing when she was an adolescent. She wrote a novella, entitled Filthy Lucre, when she was 14 (much later included in a volume of her collected stories). The first novel she wrote in her adult life was Harriet Said, which she wrote in her early twenties, when she was divorcing her husband. This novel did not find a publisher for a long time—it was rejected by one publishing company which informed Bainbridge that they did not publish filth—and was eventually her third novel to be published. She published a couple of novels in the 1960s, which attracted lukewarm praise and did not sell well (she once claimed that she earned £ 25 from her debut novel, ‘Weekend with Claude’). Much later, Bainbridge said that both the books were under-edited. She stopped writing for the next few years until she was ‘discovered’ (strictly speaking, rediscovered) by the novelist Allis Thomas Ellis (real name Anna Haycraft) with whose son Bainbridg’s eldest son was friends. Anna Haycraft became her editor, and her husband Colin, who bought the publishing house ‘Duckworth’, became her publisher for the next twenty-five years. Bainbridge remained fiercely loyal to her friends and stuck with Colin Haycraft until his bankruptcy and death. However, the consensus amongst her obituarists seems to be that the rickety financial arrangements did not serve her interests well. Duckworth apparently paid her pittance—the highest she ever got paid was apparently £3000 (and that was in 1990)—and never printed more than a couple of thousand copies. Almost all her novels with Duckworth attracted very good critical reviews but sold poorly because of poor promotion. However, they sold well in paperbacks, and a few, such as An Awfully Big Adventure, were made into films, so Bainbridge, as she jocularly remarked, did not exactly starve. 

Beryl Bainbridge was not very lucky when it came to awards. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize no less than five times—only Iris Murdoch has been nominated more times than Bainbridge (and she won it once)—but did not win it even once. She withdrew Injury Time, which was published in 1977, as she was on the panel of judges that year.

In recent year Bainbridge was not very prolific. Her last novel, According to Queeney, was published nine years ago. At the time of her death she was putting finishing touches to what would have been her eighteenth novel, Girl with a Polka Dot Dress. While this novel, in keeping with her recent novels, has a historic backdrop—the assassination of Senator Bobby Kennedy—according to her publishers (who have announced that the novel will come out next year), it is more like her early, comic works.

Beryl Bainbridge once famously said that writing was easy; anybody could write. ‘You just listen to what people say and write it down. You think of a story, and then you write it down.’ This remark, I feel, is so like Bainbridge’s writing: unassuming, unpretentious, and absolutely brilliant.

Beryl Bainbridge’s death is a sad loss. She was a legend.

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.