The TLS blog

To anyone still listing!

 We've been wondering here whether we should reform our Books of the Year feature.

Show we have more offerings or fewer? Should our editors give their own choices or should we ask only a selection of our distinguished contributors? And so on - through various more complex permutations befitting our about-to-go-on-holiday team.

Unlike other papers, we didn't ask for  Books of the Decade this year. It would have taken too much argument at the TLS to decide when the decade ended. Maybe next year.

Someone did ask me for  my own Books of the Noughties. Another asked for a single book of the Noughties.

The one book was easy.

Richard A. Talbert (ed): The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World;  the most beautiful pink-and green guide to antiquity, accurate maps of emptiness, showing only what was there at the time, not what we have come to think of as important.

 I couldn't have gone On the Spartacus Road, or even had the idea of writing that book (see previous post)  without its help.

The others - for anyone still listing - were:

Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong?: Islam vs the modern world explained.

Michael Moore: Stupid White Men: the book they tried to ban after 9-11

Ian McEwan: Saturday: a novel of brain damage and other protests

Philip Roth: The Plot Against America: fictional appeasement in the White House

Linda Colley: Captives: how the British Empire became a prison for the British

Mary Beard: The Roman Triumph: ambiguous celebrations of victory and defeat 

Tom Holland: Rubicon; a Julius Caesar for the Noughtie decade

J.N. Adams: Bilingualism and the Latin language: why Romans wrote like their enemies

Barack Obama: Dreams From My Father: the new President can write. We learnt that before he was elected. But what else can he do?

Happy Holidays to all.

On the Spartacus Road - with new friends

This week I did an indulgent thing. I travelled to Bungay, a Suffolk village set in what is the most beautiful landscape in England for those of us whose childhood eyes were imprinted with the lesser flatlands of Essex.

And I watched a book of mine bounce, bind and bundle itself off the Clay Printers' presses, a great experience although few authors that I've spoken too seem ever to have experienced it.

Only three days ago, On the Spartacus Road, a diary of a trip along the route in Italy of the Spartacus Slave War, originally written in notebooks night by night last year, emerged from the squashing and gluing of the Suffolk machines as a fully formed book for the January buyers. And, with a mixture of mild wonder and mostly concealed pride, I watched it happen

These are busy machines. On the Spartacus Road was proud to share the conveyor belts of Compac1 (I hope I have its name right) with the latest Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years, and the latest reprint of Wuthering Heights. All around there was verdigris ironwork purring 24/7 to produce teenage vampire treats, stocking-thrillers and the paperback of this year's great masterwork, Wolf Hall.

Convention and good sense dictate that On the Spartacus Road will not be reviewed here. There is a fine review in the current Literary Review and Conde Nast Traveller magazines but not online. So, for the time being, you can only trust me.

[Note: 18 January: review in The Scotsman]

The next stage, I am told, after a shrinkwrapping from a machine fit to clothe a million Lady Gagas, is that the books will sit in a 'hub' whence shops and Amazons can claim them - and if any reader of this blog wishes to pre-order a copy, that will enhance the speed of their escape.

I may say more in future posts about this book and its post-Christmas progress. In the meantime, I'll report instead on my fellow occupant of Compac1, the latest Adrian Mole, whose covers and 'blocks' were piled up waiting to chug-chug for hours and days after my own work was completed.

An excellent book, not least because it is so much about love for book-selling. Poor Mole, aged now 39-and-a-half, has a bookshop job that is on the brink; his novels and non-fiction are as unwanted as ever, his home is a Leicestershire pig-sty, his wife prefers sex with the  low brow Lord of the Manor, the Prime Minister refuses to help him with the tax man and he has prostate cancer.

The hero of Sue Townsend’s ninth volume of eponymous diaries, a man additionally beset in the age of post-office closures and 10p-tax rows by his mother’s bid to star on reality TV and one of his customer’s desires for a copy of Ulysses signed by the author for Christmas, is having a hard time. Millions who have followed him loyally from the age of 13-and-three-quarters, through the Wilderness and Cappuccino and Weapons of Mass-Destruction Years will be sharing his further pains.

Books are poignant punctuation marks of this latest diary year, June 2007 – April 2008. A gratifying sale of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Margaret Drabble) is slightly marred by the shop-owner’s remarks upon Mole’s frequent lavatory visits. The discovery of his mother’s copy of Angela’s Ashes  comes with  the somewhat less welcome companion volume, still in manuscript, A Girl Called ‘Shit’ by Pauline Mole. Jordan’s A Whole New World  sells splendidly even though his boss had ordered it on the basis that it was a contribution to the Middle East peace debate. His wife is studying closely, and menacingly, Christopher Hitchens’ For the Sake of Argument. A copy of John Donne’s poems from the ‘over-fifty-pounds’ box is not, Mole decides, a successful way to counter the attraction to Mrs Mole of ‘a manor house, a canopied bed and sexual fulfilment with a handsome aristocrat’.

 He does, however, have his own lady admirer, a doctor who queries the stock-status of Yes, I would like to have sex with you  and with whom he shares an enthusiasm for Mill on the Floss. There may be hope for him yet.

Satanism and politics: a call to investigate.

In the Essex village  library of my youth what could not be discovered about sex from James Bond had to topped up by the hardly more helpful or healthy Dennis Wheatley. I haven't read one of Wheatley's virgins-and-satanism novels for forty five years but am intrigued by the review of his Life and Times in this week's TLS.

Biographer Phil Baker judges this failed wine dealer and enthusiastic habitue of prostitutes as  the greatest nonliterary writer in twentieth-century Britain.

He apparently had no belief in his satanic subject matter, despised Christianity but instinctively associated the Devil with sex. In Baker's words this allowed allowed him 'a classic puritan double take' , lushly describing the orgies of Satanists and their sexual degradation of beautiful women while deploring them and having his heroes rescue his heroines from similar fates.

Apart from making himself very rich, did he have any other reason to publicise an imaginary danger to innocent youth?

According to Baker, as reviewed in the TLS by Ronald Hutton, he always made Satanism stand as a metaphor for the bogies of his embittered brand of politics. His novels portrayed it as the hidden force behind, variously, Communism, Nazism, the trade union movement, avant-garde art and music, and Black Power. Hatred and fear of the working class, non-whites and cultural modernism were his propelling emotions.

Hutton suggests an inverstigation of  the link between right-wing politics and occultism in the early twentieth century - and that Baker might be just the man for the job

The editorial 'We'

Frederik Van Dam points out (re my five books in The Browser for an aspiring newspaper editor) that Trollope himself became the the editor of Saint Paul's Magazine and a principal founder of the Fortnightly Review and thus, during the 1860's and 1870's developed a better understanding of the sweat and tears involved in the job, not merely the unaccountable power to hurl leader-writer's thunderbolts that he criticised in The Warden.

Trollope remained, however, troubled by the anonymity of the leader writer. There is a famous cartoon by Harry Furniss (I cannot find it online so here is another one by him) in which, to cite a new book by Matthew Rubery, 'signed contributions in the French press fostered rapier-like thrusts, feints, and parries as opposed to the pugilistic model of brute force delivered under the cloak of anonymity practiced by the English.'

 Victims of these blows, as he puts it, had little recourse beyond condemning the unnamed antagonist, as Trollope’s novels from The Warden to The Prime Minister illustrate in dramatic fashion.

'Any journalist in a Victorian novel is likely to be an editor since this was the only named figure on the publication’s staff.  The rest of the staff remained veiled from the eyes of the public no matter how controversial their contributions to the periodical in question.

 In the short stories from Saint Paul’s Magazine collected in Trollope’s An Editor’s Tales (1870), for example, the narrator exploits the editorial privilege of speaking in the first-person plural “we” to comic effect since he is a lone individual directly addressing the audience of a work of fiction.  But these humorous anecdotes belie the seriousness with which Trollope treated “The great WE” when dealing with political as opposed to literary evaluation.  His essay “On Anonymous Literature” clearly expresses his distaste for the anonymous publication of literature:  “The man who puts forward his printed words, whether for instruction or delectation, and publishes, that is makes public, his own thoughts and creations, should never be ashamed to say from whom they come.”

 Surprisingly, then, Trollope defended the use of anonymity for political editorials in the newspaper despite strong disapproval of the policy for other forms of writing.  According to Trollope’s defense of this exception in the Fortnightly Review, the newspaper’s value to ordinary readers was enhanced by collective rather than individual instruction from a diverse group of experienced professionals: “The newspaper is not a lamp lighted by a single hand, but a sun placed in the heaven by an invisible creator.”  The identity of this “invisible creator” would nevertheless come under intense scrutiny in Trollope’s fictional representations of journalism despite any professed tolerance of editorial anonymity.'

Rubery's book, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News looks fascinating. And, if an editor's time allows, I am going to read some more of it.