Coming up on Vulpes Libris? Richard Armitage.

To represent the utter fabulousness of this week’s Book Fox offerings, for today’s image we give you not just any old fox but a Firefox* (yes, it’s more commonly called a Red Panda but for today’s purposes it’s a Firefox). Take a deep breath and be still your beating hearts because we have some amazing items this week, including a write-up of Rosy’s experiences at the Borders Book Festival and an interview with a very well-known actor.

Monday 6th - Jackie goes all political with Demagogue in which Michael Signer asks what makes a demagogue and then names names.

Tuesday 7th - RosyB “does” her first festival as an invited writer – the Borders Book Festival in beautiful Melrose in Scotland – and tells us why she thinks littler festivals can be particularly rewarding.

Wednesday 8th – On Wednesday, we have the fourth in our occasional “In Conversation with …” series, when actor Richard Armitage talks thoughtfully about the important books in his life, history’s favourite double-dyed villain and the redemption of Guy of Gisborne … among other things.

Thursday 9th – Kirsty dances around Dancing with Cuba.

Friday 10th - Anne sifts through the shadows of John Wray’s Lowboy but doesn’t find quite what she bargained for.

Saturday 11th – Eve is back with another review of a YA book.

Sunday 12th – Lisa enjoys profanity with Trevor Byrne’s Ghosts and Lightning.

*I spotted this Firefox roaming around Newquay last week and thankfully I had my camera at the ready. What a beauty.

(Okay, strictly speaking it was roaming around Newquay Zoo.)

My reading mojo

Reading was my first love. In the interim between my fifth birthday and the day I discovered alcohol and boys (discoveries that, as I remember it, both occurred on the same thrilling day) I was a bona fide bookworm. I was the sort of child who jumped feet first into a book, much like those chirpy souls leaping into that street painting in Mary Poppins. Reading wasn’t just a cerebral activity: on opening a novel I experienced the sort of adrenaline rush and stomach butterflies that others might reserve for bungee jumping. I was a greedy reader and I gobbled books with an insatiable appetite. I read at meals, during home haircuts and I even read as I walked to school, occasionally walloping straight into unforeseen lampposts. I read on holidays, I read sitting on uncomfortable black rocks whilst my brothers fished for mackerel, I read on the back of my dad’s bike as he peddled up and down dale. I read first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and when I slept I dreamed about my books. Twice-weekly trips to the library were more exciting than any shopping trip for clothes or toys could ever be. I read the Famous Five books in consecutive order and then backwards. I read the library’s selection of classics in a haze of elation, and found that I couldn’t get enough of Austen, Eliot, the Brontës and Hardy. Around this time my family started to notice that my vocabulary had expanded to include several irritating phrases including ‘pray tell’ and ‘I do not cough for my own amusement.’ Then I read all the American teen books I’d ever received for birthdays and felt sure I would never fit in at Sweet Valley High. Finally I discovered The Lord of the Rings, which filled a lonely summer that stretched between ages twelve and thirteen with such excitement and heightened emotion that I have never quite recovered from it. I was inconsolable on the day I finished the appendices at the back of The Return of the King. I felt bereaved, because I had not just lost a book, I had lost a world. So I read it again. Reading took me away from rainy Sunday afternoons when there was only cricket or snooker on the telly and showed me exotic lands and offered hot glimpses into earth-shattering love affairs. Reading was quite simply the best thing ever. And then when I hit fourteen, I stopped.

Suddenly I could spend weeks listening to one music album on repeat whilst staring at a poster of Kurt Cobain. I started painting my toenails black, dying my hair purple and fantasising about various rock concerts I couldn’t afford to attend. I skipped school and to my amazement I got served alcohol in bars. I drank cider by the litre and puked it up behind bus stops. I didn’t even look at a novel for months on end. I think even at the time I knew I had lost something. It wasn’t the loss of innocence that niggled me, it was the loss of my reading. But I was so busy trying to be a grown-up that I ignored what books could offer me.

At university I did an English degree but reading just wasn’t quite the same. I had lost my reading mojo, and where books had once been the be-all and end-all, they had become mere objects to help pass a few bored minutes in the bath or at the beach, and the classic texts that I had once loved with a passion were obstacles that needed to be surmounted in order to get a good grade. Reading was quite pleasant in its way, but I’d have rather been at the campus bar.

Writing my own novels initially took reading away from being a simple pleasure and morphed it into a complex activity ranging between market research, competitor appraisal, awe, ecstasy, and misery that I couldn’t write anything as wonderful as the offerings of my favourite authors.

I sometimes wonder if other people have lost the urgency and all-consumingness of their early reading passion, or if they still feel the same excitement for a book at age fifty as they did at age ten. Personally, I doubt that I’ll ever reascend to the giddiest heights of my early reading love, but the summit is, at least, in sight and a certain book blog with a funny Latin name is responsible. For the past eighteen months Vulpes Libris has filled my evenings with book after book, and the next time someone asks me why on earth I spend so much time reviewing novels without even getting paid for my efforts, I’ll probably blather about helping fellow authors get review coverage or the wonders of free books, but I’ll secretly be thinking that through book blogging I’m rediscovering my reading mojo, and to me that’s payment enough.

*Calling all bookworms, past and present, (of course including my fabulous fellow book bloggers: Kirsty? Lizzy? John? Stewart? Simon? Lynne?)* Have you experienced marked changes in reading excitement? Did adolescence remove some of the wonder of reading? Or are you still reading with the same passion as ever? I’d be fascinated to hear if anyone else has experienced peaks and troughs in their reading life. Thoughts welcome, as always, below.

Therapy by David Lodge

Despite several recommendations from various sources, I never managed to read a David Lodge book before but I hope this won’t be my last.

Therapy. Definition: remedial treatment of mental or bodily disorder.

Laurence Passmore, a 58 year old sitcom writer, known to everyone as Tubby, experiments with all kinds of therapy in an attempt to find a solution for his bodily disorder, a mysterious pain in his knee diagnosed by his doctor, Nizar, as IDK, Internal Derangement of the Knee or by another of his therapists as I Don’t Know.

‘We watched the video of my operation together…It was a brightly lit, colored, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. “There it is, you see!” cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn’t watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.’

His mental disorder is even harder to define and diagnose; a general sense of unhappiness and malaise unjustified by his apparent success in life. Tubby is well-off due to the popularity of his TV show ‘The People Next Door’, has a long-standing marriage to an independent, sexy woman, as well as a platonic mistress, ‘which is a sort of therapy too, I suppose.’

He undergoes physiotherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, aromatherapy and acupuncture but nothing seems to erase his sense of ”dread’. It sounds more like what I suffer from than ‘anxiety’. Anxiety sounds trivial, somehow. You can feel anxious about catching a train, or missing the post. I suppose that’s why we’ve borrowed the German word. Angst has a sombre resonance to it, and you make a kind of grimace of pain as you pronounce it. But ‘Dread’ is good. Dread is what I feel when I wake up in the small hours in a cold sweat. Acute but unspecific Dread.’

The style is a first person patchwork of stream of consciousness sprinkled with vignettes written by Tubby from the perspective of others in his life, a self-description and a short memoir. What makes it work so well is that Tubby is an enjoyable companion who, as in an explanation from his wife of why she married him in the first place, is fun to be with. He has an appealing habit of stopping to check out words and their origins and in one of these excursions he discovers Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher whose pessimistic approach to life rings a chord with him. But just as Kierkegaard gives him a new appreciation of the state of marriage, Tubby’s wife decides to leave him.

In shock, Tubby finally has a concrete reason for his melancholy and tries to find understanding and ultimately therapy in a desperate but fruitless search for sex, a spontaneous trip to Denmark in a crusade to find Kierkegaard and eventually embarks on a pilgrimage through Europe to find his first teenage love again. In a touching short memoir of Maureen, this lost love, Tubby recalls the selfishness, the joy and the insouciance of teenage love. When he does find her she has aged and lost that right breast that he had loved as an entity by itself to cancer but his renewed relationship with her brings a contentment and acceptance that he had not found before.

David Lodge captures very well that very modern anxiety of feeling purposeless in our lives and the desperate search to fill the void we persist in gazing into. Tubby finds part of his therapy in his relationship with Maureen although, (and this is one of the few things in the novel that I wasn’t entirely convinced about) I found the tying up of this particular loose end a little pat. Maureen is in a sexless marriage to Tubby’s old rival from the past, Bede, but she cannot leave him because of all the ties life has created between them. In an arrangement that seems to suit all three, they travel on holidays together while Maureen and Tubby have occasional, comforting sex which is a form of therapy for both of them.

Although less obvious, I thought David Lodge gave a inkling in his novel of another powerful form of therapy: humour. Throughout the novel, he walks a fine line between making Tubby a object of ridicule or pathos and making his predicament banal and self-indulgent but he succeeds perfectly. Tubby is very likeable and not least because he refuses to take himself too seriously. Just before he delves too deeply into his existential problems of life, he manages to stand back and laugh at himself and this keeps him firmly on the right side of pretentiousness.

For those who would like a life-tonic laced with a healthy dose of wit and intelligence (and don’t we all need that) then I strongly recommend Therapy.

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Thus edition (July 1, 1996) 336 pages ISBN-10: 0140249001

This Is How, by M. J. Hyland

*Contains some spoilers*

Are you dangerous? Can you imagine one moment of your own violence resulting in a person’s death? How would you react if you made one terrible mistake and faced serious punishment? If you’ve ever considered these questions, I suggest you get your hands on a copy of Maria Hyland’s This Is How.

Patrick Oxtoby is a tidy, quiet, handsome oddball. He has been dumped by his first proper girlfriend and he can’t deal with the pity and concern of his family, so Patrick runs away to a seaside town where he will work as a mechanic and live in a respectable boarding house. This is where Patrick will break free of familial bonds, old patterns and where he will become his own man. Except it doesn’t quite work like that because in a moment of anxiety and frustration, Patrick applies an adjustable wrench to a sleeping head.

And throughout the book the reader is presented with plenty of emotional wrenching, because while Patrick’s chosen murder weapon is easily adjustable, Patrick isn’t. Patrick is an outsider who lacks the knack for being happy. He doesn’t simply meet and chat to people, instead ‘he gets a chat going’ or he ‘gets a good mood up’. There was a lot that was familiar to me in Patrick: his detailed observations of the world, his self-consciousness when interacting with others and his quiet reserve. It is almost as if he has that famously writerly distance between himself as the protagonist of his life, and himself as the observer of it. Interestingly, Patrick does not unravel – he does not undergo a transformation for better or worse. He is much the same man at the end of the book as at the start, it is just that he has done something unbelievably stupid in-between.

Stylistically the book is straightforward with Patrick narrating in clipped, dialogue-heavy prose. Plot-wise This is How is straightforward: it is the tale of a man who kills someone without really meaning to, mostly because the victim happened to be quite annoying at times. Yet the whole is psychologically complex. Raskolnikov, our favourite idle student with an axe, had a much clearer motive for murder than Patrick. Patrick reminded me more of the Ancient Mariner, killing an albatross mostly because he shouldn’t. It’s the mad, instant allure of pushing a big red button that says DO NOT PRESS.

Reviewers have mentioned a gay subtext, and homosexual thoughts are present, but I wasn’t sure Patrick was solely supposed to represent a gay man denying his true sexuality. Patrick is so shut down and sexually inexperienced that it’s unclear if he has discovered much at all about his sexual self and preferences. I read Patrick more as an ‘everyman’ at the beginning of his sexual life, trying to figure out who he is and considering new options in new circumstances. The book seems to present us not with a gay/straight divide, but more with the ambiguous sexual possibilities available to any human being.

The novel is particularly gripping in the second half, when Patrick experiences something of the justice system. The book is meticulously researched and the characterisation of Patrick’s new friends is superb. However, I breathlessly awaited Patrick’s psychiatric evaluation which was certain to flag up some personality disorder – after all, this is a man who not only talks to himself, but shouts angrily. The evaluation would land him in a psychiatric ward, I was sure, but the evaluation never came. Initially, I thought this was a weakness of the text, but then considered that perhaps people do commonly slip through the net. I then questioned whether Patrick was indeed mentally unwell, and if extreme loneliness and social exclusion can ever count as extenuating mental disorders. Peculiarly, at no point could I decide whether I thought Patrick deserved his freedom. Matters are further complicated as Patrick shows little remorse for his crime – Patrick seems to regret ruining his own life more than he rues taking the life of another, and his prevailing feeling is embarrassment that he did something so reckless and stupid.

The intriguing title of the book answers particular questions that morph into other questions as we go along. Initially, I looked for the one question that the title answered. Was the book saying This is how (it feels to be an outsider) Or ‘This is how (a person becomes a murderer)?’ Or was it saying ‘This is how (very easy it is to kill a man)?’ At the book’s close, the title seemed to be answering the question ‘how can a sensitive man survive this?’

This Is How isn’t purely a voyeuristic look at a murderer. The reader might question Patrick’s actions and psyche but one also has the unnerving sense that the book is looking back and asking questions of its readers. Is murder not as difficult as it might seem? If the circumstances were right, could anyone murder? Could you? Hilary Mantel’s cover quote suggests that this is a book that ‘aims straight for the truth and heart’ and this summary echoes my own feeling about this incredibly powerful novel. For the insights it offers into complicated parent/child relationships and its exploration of the connection between human marginalisation and violence, This Is How is sure to win prizes. It’s a sad, truthful book, but there is a gleam of light at the end. On the final page there is hope that even after the most terrible mistakes it is still possible to move forward and find another way through.

Canongate, ISBN-13: 978-1847673824, 320 pages, £12.99, paperback.

FOR OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE BYNG OF CANONGATE, CLICK HERE.

*Apologies for any spoilers, but I felt it impossible to discuss the book without referring to Patrick’s crime.

With thanks to Darren Hester of Flickr for his splendid photo of an adjustable wrench http://www.flickr.com/photos/ppdigital/

The History of Love ~ by Nicole Krauss

In the first of a new regular monthly series, we welcome back Sam Ruddock who previously wrote us two popular Virginia Woolf-related reviews, Mrs Dalloway and The Hours.

Sam will be joining us as a regular guest on the first Wednesday in every month.  For his first review, he has chosen Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love.

o:~~

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past:

IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI’veneverloved anyone-Ithinkofmyselfasfunny Forgiveme…

“There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations…The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance the greater the need for the string.

“The practice of attaching cups to the end of the string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unravelled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

“When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”

When I first sat down to write this review I intended to use it as an opportunity to investigate gender stereotyping in the book industry. I even filled a page and a half with meaningless words and a rambling argument chronicling the similarities between the works of Nicole Krauss and her husband Jonathan Safran Foer, and the differences in the ways their books are marketed.** However, I then decided to take a metaphorical string out of Krauss’s bow and use it to guide my words so they don’t go so dramatically off course. What I want to say is actually very simple: Nicole Krauss is a fantastic writer and this is a book which demands to be read.

The History of Love is a beautiful, funny, nostalgia drenched novel full of mystery and uncertainty. And fittingly for a novel with such a grandiose title it is about nothing less than the entire history of love and life and emotional communication between people. It follows the interweaving stories of a series of disparate characters whose lives are linked by a lost book named (can you guess?) ‘The History of Love’. Leo Gursky is a lonely old man living in New York. He has had heart problems but now desperately wants to live just a little bit longer. Everyday he does something to make sure he is noticed, whether it is spilling his coffee in Starbucks or volunteering as a nude model for a life drawing class. Each morning when he wakes up he taps on the radiator to confirm to his neighbour that he is still alive. It is all a world away from the young man he once was, in Poland before the war, in love with a girl named Alma who inspired him to write a book and call it ‘The History of Love.’

On the other side of New York Alma Singer is a precocious 14 year old determined to find out more about the person she is named after, the main character from her parents favourite book, an obscure Spanish novel again entitled ‘The History of Love’. Gradually, and thanks to the input of a host of secondary characters, these two stories and the history of that mysterious lost book comes together. If this sounds like it might be complex, that is because it is. This is a literary whodunnit in which the truth is shrouded in mystery and the clues subtly scattered around the plot. Even the ending is uncertain. And yet.

In a sense all this hide and seek is just a subplot for Krauss’s spectacular centrepiece: the eponymous novel within a novel and its mystical history of love. Offered up in little vignettes here and there, these fantastically crafted passages are what turn a good novel into a very good novel. They are all like the passage quoted at the beginning, charting the mythological evolution of love in beautifully childlike simplicity. It is these playful and emotionally pinpoint passages which create that extra dimension and bring the novel to life. And yet.

In another sense it is really Leo Gursky who is the star of the show. He has a wonderful habit of using the phrase “And yet.” at the end of sentences, as a way of acknowledging all the things he has not said. It is a powerful and memorable motif. In those two words is carried the emotional core of his story, in the silence of what is not said. He is a tragi-comic one man show, obsessed with death but in a self-aware manner which makes his attempts to escape it in any way utterly charming. At one point early on he goes to the cinema and sits right at the front. “I like for the screen to fill my whole view,” he says, “so that there is nothing to distract me from the moment. And then I want the moment to last forever. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to watch it up there, blown up. I would say larger than life, but I’ve never understood that expression. What is larger than life?”

Nicole Krauss is a fantastic writer whose prose is so sharp and accurate it is as though it is carved into your spine. She is able to take an idea and distil it into purest essence, rich and potent and so very familiar. She employs a veritable menagerie of modernist devices to tell the story. Some of these, particularly the short stories within the story are startlingly successful. It is refreshing and delightful to read a writer so clearly convinced of the power of the written word, so willing to push the boundaries of what is possible in the novel.

If there is a criticism it is that perhaps The History of Love is a little too intricately plotted. There are just too many strings wrapped around each other so that when you try to pull them apart they end up a big knot. (This also makes it a difficult book to review, for there are many other aspects I want to share with you – like the fantastic fictional obituaries of famous writers or the wonderful anecdote of how Gursky learned the balancing act between fact and fiction – but there is not time.) At only 252 pages Krauss crams a huge number of characters and narrative devices into her story, producing a series of brilliantly realised little character portraits which, despite each focusing on that lost book, work just as well on their own. They don’t need the mystery to be so complex to keep you reading. And in the end the failure to offer a clear version of events detracts from what is otherwise a fantastic read.

But these are minor quibbles. I suspect that had I picked this up two years ago, before I fell in love with the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer I would have written a review similar to that I wrote on first reading Everything is Illuminated, in which I was barely able to contain my hyperbolic sense of awe. For each uses language in such a vivid way that reading anything they have written is an unmitigated pleasure. But that is the way with life sometimes, just as it is with love, the first time you experience something is always the most intense. It doesn’t really matter whether it is truly original or not.

The History of Love is a really good read, emotionally rewarding, structurally precocious, and intellectually thought provoking. There is an incredible vibrancy about the prose and invention of Nicole Krauss’s fiction. Along with fellow young American authors like Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon, and Junot Diaz she is one of the absolute must-read novelists of this decade.

o:~~

** If you wish to read this in its pointless, unedited form, please see my blog  Books, Time, and Silence.

Edition shown: Penguin.  Paperback.  2006.  ISBN: 978-0141-019970.  272pp.

Citizen Smith: There’s Something About Wolfie

So, do you want the short version or the long version?

For those interested in a more concise review, Red Footsie Pajamas Man and his captor (who I think of as “failed Colin Farrell lookalike”) are here with their views.  (Thanks Lisa for letting me steal your act!)  Some mildly strong language ahead:

However, for those who can bear with me a little longer, there is a lot more to say about the four seasons of Citizen Smith.  First aired between 1977 and 1980, this first comedy by John Sullivan was not (to my mind) just the forerunner of Only Fools and Horses.

This is not to say that there aren’t common factors at work.  The setup of Citizen Smith has many elements that would later be developed by Sullivan in Only Fools and Horses.  The charming, well meaning but somewhat morally flexible central character (Wolfie Smith, a self-defined urban guerrilla living with his girlfriend’s parents and doing all he can to avoid taking a job); the long suffering partner from a more aspirational class background (Shirley, the nice middle class girl whose romance with Wolfie drives her father to distraction); the nice but slightly dopey sidekick (Ken, Wolfie’s right hand man and a spiritual dabbler); the local businessman and crime lord (Harry Fenning, owner of Wolfie’s local pub and keeper of his slate); and an assortment of petty criminal types, more or less good at heart, who constitute both the membership and the immediate target demographic of the Tooting Popular Front.  There’s also a distinct similarity in the humour, including those jokes which were so current in the 1970s and so cringe-inducing right now.

There’s certainly a degree of continuity between the two, and the fact that Citizen Smith has hardly if ever (to my memory) been repeated on UK television – in contrast with Only Fools and Horses, which is more or less shown on a loop  – has done much to reduce it to the role of rough draft for a later masterpiece.  However, this would be an unfair assessment of a comedy series which is not only very solid in its own right, but enjoyed great success at the time is was aired.  As Wolfie might say, relegating it to the shadow of Only Fools and Horses is arguably a bit of false consciousness, innit?

I’m very much aware of this because I bought the complete Citizen Smith on DVD out of sheer curiosity.  Despite being a TV comedy geek, all I knew of Citizen Smith was that people kept mentioning it with relation to socialism in the UK; as if it were some kind of shorthand for British Trotskyism and socialist militancy, a shorthand that might be affectionate but was more often mildly derogatory.  So when I saw it on sale at a nicely reduced price, I thought I might as well see the damn thing and find out what all this Wolfie Smith business was about.  I didn’t expect to be so entertained, and I certainly didn’t expect to fall in love with Wolfie, who is every bit as charming and as fallible a creation as his successor Del Boy, albeit with a different dream.

What made Citizen Smith such an enjoyable thing for me (so enjoyable, in fact, that I just watched the entire run a second time)?  Part of it is undoubtedly what I have outlined above – the setup – which is one of the great strengths of Sullivan’s comic writing.  Another is the acting; I’d be hard pressed to say there’s a weak link in the chain.  Robert Lindsay brings out Wolfie’s charm as well as his flaws – I can’t help but wonder whether Wolfie, like Sir Humphrey, would be quite so endearing with a different actor – and his interactions with the loyal but vulnerable Ken, played by Mike Grady, see him shifting between self-defined revolutionary leader and soft-hearted best friend.  Cheryl Hall (who is only present in series 1 and 2) is an excellent counterweight to Wolfie’s frequent outbursts of revolutionary pompousness in her role as Shirley; while those same outbursts, often involving promises of revolutionary justice, are placed nicely in context by George Sweeney’s performance as thuggish comrade Speed, the only member of the Tooting Popular Front with more than a minor police record (until the finale of Series 3 and the invasion of Parliament).  Wolfie might threaten proletarian violence, but Speed will actually implement it, often to his comrades’ distress.

I particularly enjoyed Stephen Greif as local “legitimate businessman” Harry Fenning.  We never see Fenning lose his cool, because he never needs to; the viewer senses, just as strongly as the hapless Wolfie does, that the suave self-assured gangster is capable of terrible things.  Greif’s performance is such a gem and his character plays such a pivotal role in a number of great stories that I felt rather bereft when, at the beginning of Series 4, Harry Fenning was no more.

Indeed, my one real dissatisfaction was that Citizen Smith, like so many good comedies, went on a series too long.  Perhaps that’s a little unfair of me; the fourth series does have some truly enjoyable moments (particularly “The Final Try”, which is one of my favourite episodes overall).  But the events of the end of Series 3 constitutes such a natural high point, and the storyline of Series 4 requires such a series of twists and turns in order to right itself – right down to bringing back the occasional character of Inspector Tofkin, who was originally good comic relief but then became irritating to the highest degree – that I can’t help feel it’s all a little strained.

As for the question of politics and political satire: I feel that Citizen Smith is a satire on socialism only in the sense that Only Fools and Horses is a satire on capitalism.  Like Del Boy, Wolfie has a great dream that, in his mind, will one day solve all his problems; in his case, that dream is the revolution.  Making the revolution in North Tooting at that particular time is about as likely as becoming a millionaire selling knocked-off stereos in Peckham; and the comedy lies in that contrast between dream and reality, as well as in the gulf between Wolfie’s actions (or inactions) and his aspirations.  The nature of those aspirations is not as important as the way in which he wears them, and the ways in which he ultimately cannot quite live up to them.  That’s the comedy, and the tragedy, of Wolfie Smith.

Citizen Smith Series 1-4 is available on DVD from Playback.

Adventures With Ari by Kathryn Miles

Imagine having your attitude adjusted by a puppy. I know that sounds like a commercial tagline for a Disney movie, but trust me, this book is not a saccharine sundae. Instead it’s an insightful book that shows how our reactions and way of thinking can sometimes be changed by the simplest things.
The author and her husband, both teachers at a local university, live in a forested area of Maine, with a sprinkling of farmland. They are both intelligent, sensitive people who take great interest in the natural world outside of their cabin, including camping and kayaking. After adopting a husky/jindo(Korean breed) mix at a shelter, Miles is overwhelmed at the energy required to maintain a young dog. She also realizes the puppy, a shy female named Ari, can teach her things too. So she embarks on an informal experiment, spending a year being open enough to look at the world from a puppy’s point of view and expanding her own horizons. She focuses on Ari’s reactions to nature and other creatures, learning to slow things down and take a more Zen tone towards the world. Along the way we meet unforgettable characters such as Bentley the basset and the vole king.
It’s not all happy romps in the woods, there are crisises, grief and family difficulties. Even their idyllic location is threatened by development. But each of these experiences provide a platform for the author to mature and gain a better understanding of herself and her surroundings. She talks to naturalists, scientists and dog trainers about various issues, which, with her quotes from literature, raises the book from just a simple memoir. Each chapter is prefaced with a photo of Ari at various ages, which provides plenty of smiles. If you’re a sucker for animal books, but can do without excessive cutesiness, this is the book for you.

Skyhorse Publishing 2009 280 pp. ISBN 978-1-60239-638-8

The author’s blog, with photos, is where she charts further adventures with Ari at Out with Ari . At the moment, they’re near Niagara Falls, NY.

Coming Up Post (June 29-Sat 4th July)

Mad Dogs and Mojos…

Crumbs. How do I bring this lot together? Dogs, Marxism and mojos…not to mention David Lodge. In other words, just another typical week of madness on Vulpes.

We are delighted to welcome back, regular guest reviewer Sam Ruddock, who brought us recent Woolf-related pieces: on Mrs Dalloway and The Hours. You can check out Sam’s own blog, Books, Time and Silence here.

Russian expert, Kirsty, is back this week with a multimedia exploration of Citizen Smith. Yeah, we know, it’s not a book, but it’s fun. (And we have Lodge, Hyland and Krauss for you, so what more do you want?) Then Lisa is talking about her mojo at the weekend. What is it all coming to?

*Fiddles with twinset and rattle pearls in distress*.

Have we finally lost it?

You decide.

Monday 29
Jackie looks at the delightful dog book Adventures With Ari by Kathryn Miles.

Tuesday 30
Tuesday is the Glorious Day of Citizen Smith, as Kirsty brings us a mixed media review.

Wednesday 1
Vulpes regular guest reviewer, Sam Ruddock, who brought us recent pieces on Mrs Dalloway and The Hours,  finds his notions of originality challenged by Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love.

Thursday 2
Lisa reviews M.J. Hyland’s penetrating novel, This Is How.

Friday 3
Mary explores the healing powers of Therapy by David Lodge.

Saturday 4
Lisa is back with a short article, My reading mojo.

*Thanks to Jameskun for the dramatic image of snarling fluffball above, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.

Incidentally, when searching for “Mad Dog” on Flickr, the first image to come up was this:

Now, am I missing something or does that look like a pretty chilled out serene sort of canine to you? Hmmm. This doggie is much maligned. Still, such a wonderful pic I had to include it anyway so all credit to Foxypar4 on Flickr (Creative Commons License, remember, people!).

Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

This is a real Marmite book… it seems, you either love it or hate it!  I would like to explore why that might be and try to get to the bottom of why there is such a divide.

The subject matter could be a sticking point for some readers.  The blurb goes like this…

Fifteen-year-old Liga, emotionally and physically battered from bearing two children, one begot through incest, the other through rape, is magically granted her own heaven, a gentle patient version of the rough world she once knew.  Here there are no brutal fathers, no leering village boys; there is only a beautiful little cottage in the middle of a wood.  Here she brings up her two daughters, fair Branza and dark Urdda, in perfect peace.  But the membrane between Liga’s heaven and the real world has grown thin over the years, allowing some who are not as pure-hearted as Liga and her daughters to enter.  And likewise, the girls discover they can pass through into the real world of Liga’s tortured past.

Now, a book for teens with such a sensitive subject matter could be a sticking point for some readers and for their parents.  Anyone approaching Tender Morsels without prior knowledge might think it was a bit heavy or depressing or even nasty.  But they’d be wrong.  There are a few moments where things skirt close to all of these but overall this is handled so sensitively and with such huge emotion that it sweeps you up and focuses you on Liga’s inner turmoil rather than dwelling on her actual experience.  And this is a theme throughout Tender Morsels. There is emotion etched into every page which gave me more of a psychological experience than any book has for a very long time. I think people call it, being touched, but I would say this book does a whole lot more – it makes you see things differently.

I always like to comment on the writing and for me, Tender Morsels is in a class of its own.  I think this may be one of the reasons some people aren’t so keen on it.  It’s both lyrical and filled with stunning imagery and I think some teens especially may find some of it inaccessible.   However, if they stuck with it for a while they would see that the way this book is written has a very distinct function.  The story is based on the Grimm’s fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red and the writing matches perfectly to that age old spinning of tales round the fire.  It takes you deeper into the story rather than pushing you away.  I had to stop marking my favourite parts because there was pretty much nothing left over.  So here’s a passage to give you a taster…

‘Joseph!’ she whispered in fright. ‘Master Lathe!’

And his eyes were all kindness again. ‘Miss?’ he said.

‘My name is Liga,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ His hand lay warm in hers.  It seemed to Liga that he looked upon her much as he had been looking at the bowl as it came into being against the lathe.

‘What was that?’ She was hot with fear. ‘What happened to you just now?  To your eyes?’

‘You asked too much of me, Liga.’ He lowered his eyes, but she had seen the sky rushing in them again. ‘I was not made for it.’

‘For what?’ She hardly wanted to ask.

‘To… to feel anything for myself.  Lonely or no.’

Liga was stiff with terror.  The wind, the frost,and worst of all the vast emptiness she had seen behind his eyes translated itself into his voice.  If she could see them now, they would be blank as the moon.  But he had just used her name, Liga. He had known her better than Joseph the Lathe ought to, better then Ada Keller or Wife Taylor or anyone in the town or country did, better maybe even than she knew herself.  To her very depths, with all her secrets, she was known by everyone here, by everything.

Joseph kept his gaze of their hands , but the light form his eyes stuttered in her lap. The world was flimsy around her; it rippled like embroidery on a curtain, and beyond the curtain was chaos, and a light that might blind her.

Tender Morsels is a book to be savoured, to be appreciated and to become lost in.  It almost seems like a Classic in the best sense of the word… as though it was written longhand with a quill by the golden glow of candlelight.  While reading you get the impression that this book was written to stand the test of time, like a piece of fine furniture or intricately painted masterpiece.

By now, you’ll be well aware that I’m in the love-it camp!  Although I do understand that there may be certain aspects of Tender Morsels that some people find less appealing, for anyone sitting on the fence out there, wondering which camp they would join I would advise you to read it and decide for yourself.  If you don’t you may well be missing one of reading’s greatest experiences.

Truth and Lies in Murder Park: A Book About Mr Luke Haines, by Tim Mitchell

Guest review by Alex Pheby.

At the beginning of this year, Luke Haines – Britpop’s eccentric genius, late of The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, et al. – published Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall, a bitter and hilarious insider chronicle to which Tim Mitchell’s Truth and Lies in Murder Park makes a brilliant companion piece. Taking a completely different tack, Mitchell succeeds in the almost impossible task of rendering Haines acerbic, antagonistic, but always fascinating lyrical style in fiction.

Mitchell’s novel centres on Haines fictional mansion, Eastworth Hall, and takes the form of the diary of a writer invited there to write a book on Haines, but who instead finds himself in the middle of a world populated with characters and scenarios from Haines’ music. We quickly realise that he isn’t going to get the interview with Haines that he hopes for, and what seemed to be a simple assignment becomes something much more sinister.

From here we are deeply in Haines territory: showgirls and terrorists, murderers and victims, lost children and superior domestic staff, art and politics, truth and lies, are all paraded before the writer (and the reader) as Haines’ songs are dramatised in the grounds of the mansion. What starts as a kind of spectacle gradually becomes more and more real for the writer, until he becomes trapped in a confusing and nightmarish alternative reality, watched over by the belligerent ‘editor’.

It is a rich and varied literary playground which, for anyone with an interest in the material, is going to prove irresistibly attractive. Over 250 pages Mitchell takes us on a unique tour of Haines’ mind and there is not one point at which he loses the feel. If you like Haines, you are going to like this book.

Which is also part of the problem. This book is so consistently – one might say remorselessly – Hainesian that the general reader might not be able to tolerate it. Many of the decisions Mitchell takes as a writer are directed at establishing and maintaining atmosphere and mood and, if you don’t enjoy these aspects of the book, you’ll probably be unwilling to overlook the fact that the writing doesn’t give you a traditional reading experience. Mitchell shifts from fiction to fact and from narrative to journalistic style without much warning. At the end of every chapter the story is recapped from the editor’s perspective, explaining events and undermining the mystery of what we are being shown. The editor regularly tells us which songs the writer’s experiences represent, and while Mitchell is understandably keen to document his allusions, it takes the reader out of the fictional world, and is a hand-holding that risks patronising the book’s core market – people who might be expected to enjoy getting the allusions on their own.

That said, the editor, like the rest of the book, is well written and anyone reading this will not be disappointed by the quality of the writing. Mitchell’s prose is accomplished and, given the diversity of the material, he does a brilliant job of maintaining consistency. His history as a chronicler of musicians serves him well here, and while there is an occasional slide into the biographical, fact driven, completist, hero-worshipping anality that characterises the band book, this is undeniably a valuable addition to music literature, and something any fan of Haines should immediately pick up.

benben press 2009 250pp ISBN 13: 978-0955631948

Tim Mitchell has also written books on Jonathan Richman, John Cale and Television. You can find out more at www.timmitchell.org.uk

Alex Pheby’s first novel Grace is about a matricidal and delusional asylum escapee’s relationship with an orphan and her reclusive grandmother. It is available from Two Ravens Press. You can read Alex’s blog at The Story of the I.