The TLS blog

Won't Speed Again

 'Speed awareness, sir?'
 
The quick and quiet answer was 'yes'.
 
In the foyer of the Comfort Hotel this morning there was no special gain to had from such whispered discretion. It was not as though our band of middle-aged males were queuing for cures to diseases we had brought upon ourselves by inappropriate behaviour. We may have worn 8 am faces like the denizens of an STD clinic and don't-look-at-me grey clothes; but our number plates had merely been photographed travelling at speeds beyond those designated by the Thames Valley transport authorities. On the condition that we did our 'speed awareness' - and were deemed to have done it satisfactorily - we would be spared further punishment.
 
It would be wrong to describe the mood on arrival as joyous. Outside, on the other side of the A4 dual carriageway, were signs to enticing alternative venues, the 'Wolf Trust Open Day' and an opportunity to buy Berkshire chainsaws. Inside, on the leaf-patterned Comfort carpet, the only obvious comfort came from a  woman in a Beefeater-themed smock, pushing a coffee trolley. But we knew that we were lucky to be there, our licences soon to be saved from three-points along the road to disqualification as long as we cooperated with the man who was to make us 'speed aware' - and we didn't bunk off in the first break for refreshment.
 
Some of us were expecting snuff-videos and the latest in road safety ads deemed too nasty for day-time TV. But there was to be no 'shock and awe', we were told as we sat down at our tables. Younger drivers of the boy-racer tribe  might be treated more roughly. We instead were a select band of the respectable who had not transgressed too much, a few mph over 30 outside St John's College, Oxford, on the way to an Onassis Foundation think-fest (yes, I confess) or a few more mph over 50 on the Bracknell bypass.
 
How has this opportunity for redemption come to pass? Education, it seems, is the latest of the E's to be added to road safety regulation, alongside Enforcement, Engineering and probably some other E which (apologies to our excellent tutor) I have already forgotten. We were told much about the dangers of speed which we admitted we didn't know. In my case I learnt a good deal about cars in general, including my own car, that I didn't know. As for the meanings of white lines, they seem to have moved a long way in range and quantity since I last addressed their semiotics in 1969.
 
I am a convert. We had a fascinating history lesson about how sensibly, and without help from computer-modeling or other modern aids, our twentieth century elders had set the limits that we had all broken so ungratefully. There was one especially tricky set of questions about the road not far from the Prime Minister's country house at Chequers, and another about a sequence of mass-destruction on a nearby motorway. The construction of the four-hours was clever, almost artful, in its mixture of social and personal messages. I drove home slowly, carefully and with a new self-consciousness which I hope has done me good. No, as I firmly said in the questionnaire at the end, I am sure it has done me good.

One lesson of the Figes affair

In today's issue of the TLS we print our account of a story which we began last week, a sorry tale that has become known in Britain as the Orlando Figes affair.
 
There is no reason to repeat the details here. Read JC's account instead.
 
It has certainly been an unusual saga, set out well also in yesterday's Independent newspaper. Many other writers have played their part, drawn by reports of literary skullduggery and arguments about the ethics of reviewing in the internet age.
 
Only one point of substance, however, needs to survive into next week. It does not concern the anonymity or otherwise of comments about books or the equally longstanding sensitivity of authors to adverse criticism.
 
The issue is only that scholars, more than all others, should think long and hard before hiring lawyers to stop publication of material about themselves that they dislike - however much they may dislike it.
 
The Figes family has fallen in the mire by forgetting this week that the ethics of a celebrity footballer or actor, whose lawyers will regularly use libel and privacy law to prevent discussion and disclosure, are not to be aped by those whose primary duty is to those very virtues.
 
Professor Figes's lawyer not only attempted to gain silence and his costs from newspapers, those who need no sympathy here for we can care for ourselves. He attempted  on behalf of his client  to suppress the wholly legitimate questions of one of that client's more distinguished colleagues and, still worse, to point out the financial risk of libel damage that this colleague risked by refusing to comply with his demands
 
A footballer may buy a reputation as a litigious man, enjoy it even, and hope that it may protect him. No serious scholar should wish for the same.

Granta to Glenda

If my dying laptop were capable of a picture-upload (I never thought I would use such a phrase: it may not even be right) I would be heading this post with pink female genitalia in the form of a purse or maybe a purse in the form of pink female genitalia. If you want to know which formulation would be the more appropriate you can go to Mary Beard's blog, have a look - and come straight back of course.

Last Sunday I was at the Cambridge Wordfest event to discuss the state of literary journalism and had watched the excellent Granta's editor, John Freeman, present his SEX edition of Granta, with full frontal/small-change cover, at an audience, many of them women critics, who had quizzed me, even before we began our debate, about the ratio of female to male reviewers at the TLS and elsewhere.

I admired John's boldness in presenting his magazine in what might (well, at least might) have been hostile feminist territory.

I shared Mary Beard's sense that something could have gone wrong, though, since it was a Sunday breakfast event, we were none of us perhaps in the most feisty state ourselves.

The Granta launch party was a few days later, and the venue was a place called Coco de Mer.  By that time I had put the issue out of my mind. I supposed that Coco de Mer had to be some sort of seafood restaurant - and told the taxi-driver so. She hadn't heard of it either.

So, when my next conversations about Granta's SEX issue cover came along, I was a bit surprised to be talking about it in a South Kensington lingerie-and-fetish shop, even more than I had been in Corpus Christi Cambridge's McCrum Theatre.

But I didn't meet any woman at Coco de Mer, among the glass designer phalli and soft leather collars, who disapproved of it either.

Many loved it. One said we would be collecting the items in future, including our Granta, like antiquities from Pompeii.

I didn't take names but Kit Alexander's response to Mary's blog
 was typical enough.
"We received our copy through the post the other day, and, although I'm a very strong feminist, my first reaction was just to laugh. I was surprised Granta had the balls, if you'll pardon the expression.

I suppose the line between comical and offensive is partly determined by the level of wit. For me, it was witty enough that it achieved the provocative purpose of art. How different would it have been if it were a photo, or a painting, or of male genitals? It has to be subjective - so although I can see why you might be offended, I wasn't."

I even met one woman who agreed with Mary's commenter, Itumpi

"I’m surprised that no-one in your gathering mentioned the magazine cover. It is stunning. It is a shockingly powerful image. No art director or editor would refuse this cover - it’s a winner. As a graphics person I’d be very interested to see the rest of the choices the designers offered the editor. This image sustains its double identity effortlessly. When you explore the purse image you come to its movement, the click of the snapping shut of the purse and your mind jumps to paintings of women by William de Kooning where he takes the mouth with its teeth and moves it through 90 degrees and places it where the vulva should be. This is powerful stuff. It’s really difficult to use a metaphor for the male genitalia as successfully as this. You end up in the really banal territory of bananas and oranges or snakes or guns and so on. No contest."

I might have read more of the issue itself by now - including the respectable showing by women writers that John had spoken of - if I hadn't agreed to chair one of our local hustings debates for the Hampstead and Kilburn parliamentary seat on Thursday night. Politics is getting quite nasty on our streets, especially since the esteemed success of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in the national televised debate also on Thursday night.

It's like a playground fight here - with two always ganging up on one. The Tory and Labour candidates abuse the Lib Dem for even existing, such is their certainty that only one of the main parties can win. The Lib Dem and Labour gang up on the Tory over fox-hunting (which he is not unequivocally against) and over whether the Tory's would-be Home Secretary should be sacked for privately defending an owner of a small hotel who wanted to exclude gay couples. The Tory and Lib Dem ought, one might think, to try to gang up against Labour's veteran MP, Glenda Jackson, but that seems harder. Those two really, really hate each other.

Nationally, we are waiting till next Thursday to see how the sides line up.

Meanwhile I am much looking forward to my Granta - and to getting away to rerun our Cambridge debate at Perugia for a day or two as soon as the volcanic glass cloud from Iceland  blows away.

Critics for breakfast by the Cam

“In an age of the TV Book Club, tweeting, blogging and citizen journalism, when anyone can broadcast an opinion, what part do our most vibrant and respected literary journals play?”

That is the question facing us on Sunday morning at the Cambridge Wordfest when, as the invitation continues:

“The editors of the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta and Cambridge Review will discuss the importance and future of literary journalism and critical writing.

This is a good subject.

And since it will be “chaired by Mary Beard, professor in Classics at Cambridge University”, blogger on this site and famed for her intolerance of self-serving blather, we ought to be forced to give some good answers or, the venue being Cambridge, be given some.

At a similar event I did at Princeton last year, many of the best answers came from the audience.

Someone has just asked me whether, London literary society being such a ‘closed elite etc etc’, I wasn’t tired of eating and drinking with my colleagues at the LRB and Granta. I could honestly reply that we have never sat down together before to discuss this or anything else.

On Saturday lunch-time I’m talking to Philip Pullman about his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. That one is sold out but there are tickets left, I’m told, for our Sunday breakfast. If you’re close to Cambridge this weekend, come and join us.   

Visions of the economy

Looking for an imaginative approach to our economic catastrophe - with concealed crimes, obscure motives and unreliable narrators?

You would, it seems,  be better off even with this weekend's political wrangling than with any of the latest literary fiction on the subject.

We are still waiting for a great novel - or even a very good novel - of the financial crash. But attempts have still been piling up in the offices of the TLS and our critic, David Horspool, has been searching for decent nuggets like a voter seeking a believable promise in the budget debates or creditor sifting through the relics of the Madoff empire.

Take Henry Sutton’s Get Me Out of Here. It shows a familiar descent from self- deception into orgies of sexual violence and self-destruction, but is too heavily reliant, Horspool says, on the high-end consumerism that Bret Easton Ellis employed two recessions ago in American Psycho - and without any of its antecedent’s dispassionate amorality.

In Talitha Stevenson’s Disappear, we are with Charlie and Leila, a gilded couple, he a hedge fund manager, she a doer-up of flats in the seemingly endless property boom. Trouble strikes and Charlie’s father offers to give him his inheritance early. “His face was elated, strangely radiant now. Charlie’s body felt cold, his head felt hot. He pictured putting the keys into the ignition of his car – but then he remembered he didn’t have one". Perhaps one for would-be Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, to flick through over Easter,.

 Paul Torday's The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers includes a man  whose family crest shows a cat licking its paws, along with the no-nonsense motto “Semper plus”, a charming bully who will do business with anyone and inevitably, rather too inevitably,  it is not he who suffers when his fund runs out of money. Charlie Summers' own business ventures, Japanese dog food and Dutch wine, do not spare him a tragic end. Take your pick of recipients for this effort.

 Like Torday’s narrator, Alex Preston’s hero  Charlie Wales works for a hedge fund during the collapse of the bond market, and the wiping out of funds totalling millions. Charlie Wales? Remember the name? No, you haven't read This Bleeding City in your sleep, you are merely recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story about the aftermath of an earlier economic crash, Babylon Revisited (1940). 

To different degrees, says Horspool, all these new novels reflect a theme of Fitzgerald’s story about a man returning to the scene of his excesses and his downfall, the idea that market corrections are not only financial episodes, they are also moral ones. But only one of them takes the risk of identifying so closely with the master of the crash craft. 

The search for truth goes on.