The River In The Sky (Clive James): This is an epic poem which takes readers on a grand tour of “the fragile treasures of his life”. Powerful, poignant, and often very funny, recollections of places, people, books, art, music, cinema, regrets, high points, Cambridge and his family and much more, as he comes to the end of his life (I wrote to him more than 3 years ago… at a time when it seemed he didn’t have long left!). I love James’s writing - his wit, his eloquence, the breadth of his knowledge. I had originally wanted to read the whole thing out loud, but all too frequently found myself stumbling over classical names, exotic places lines of Latin and the like! But I did succeed, in my rather stumbling way, to do so for pages on end and, although there was much of the poem that I didn’t fully understand (due to my lack of knowledge and intellect!), I was completely bowled over by his ability to write such beautiful prose. From his previous books, I was well aware of his love of the Tango and, sure enough, the book contained a wonderful, evocative passage - that runs for a couple of pages (pp35-6) - about the “most delicately gracious of all the dancing ladies” who was “stone blind” and “danced like a dream”. It brought tears to my eyes. It’s a stunning book – which I’ll dip into constantly over the coming years. It helps put the ‘meaning of life’ into grateful context. A real treasure.
Milkman (Anna Burns): This won The Man Booker Prize 2018 and it’s a wonderful book. Extraordinary, in fact. It’s set in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s (in an unnamed city). The entire book is written in the first-person through the eyes of an intelligent, well-read, 18 year-old woman (‘middle sister’ as she calls herself). It’s a story of gossip and hearsay; when being on the ‘wrong side’ could have severe consequences; about power and fear; where life is cheap; about rumour and counter-rumour; about control and defiance; about ‘renouncers’ and ‘non-renouncers’; about the state and the paramilitary; about innocence and naivety. The book is, in turns, frightening, hilarious and joyous (that might seem hard to grasp, but that’s exactly how I experienced the book). No ‘proper’ names are used – instead there are characters referred to by such names as ‘Somebody McSomebody’, ‘tablets girl’, ‘nuclear boy’ and ‘maybe-boyfriend’. Although the book is set in a world dominated (in all senses) by men, there was, for me, a real sense that women-power was ultimately going to play a huge part in bringing peace and commonsense to the Province. I was quite captivated by Burns’ exceptional, original writing style. Quite, quite brilliant. A truly remarkable book (in my view!).
Sincerity (Carol Ann Duffy): Duffy is clearly a very gifted poet and this is the third book of hers I have. Although, over perhaps the last five years or so, I’ve become a great lover of poetry, I still struggle with a lot of individual poems… and such is the case with this book. However, there are perhaps a dozen poems that I think are quite wonderful (and, no doubt, there’ll be others that I will come to love as I re-read them over the coming months and years). I particularly like her ‘take’ on political situations… Overall, I have to say, I was a little disappointed (there’s still part of me that wants poets to provide postscripts giving some context for their ‘less obvious’ poems to help those of us who struggle to understand them!).
Playing To The Gallery (Grayson Perry): This was published in 2014 (one might describe it as a tidied up version of his brilliant Reith Lectures from the previous year). I’m a huge fan of Perry and think he has a real gift for words as well as art. The book underlines his commitment to ‘making’. At the beginning of the book, Perry says: "I firmly believe that anyone is eligible to enjoy art or become an artist – any oik, any prole, any citizen who has a vision they want to share" and I’m absolutely with him on this. He talks about judging quality (in a chapter entitled “Democracy Has Bad Taste”) and about his own pathway into the art world (in a chapter entitled “How do you become a contemporary artist?). It’s all very profound, straightforward and amusing. He’s very good at exposing artistic pomposity and I loved his tongue-in-cheek contention that developers should pay artists to live somewhere for 10 years rent-free (on the basis that “artists are the shock troops of gentrification”… moving into cheap housing, do their work and, before you know it, a buzz starts up and people start describing the area as “interesting” and “cool”). He clearly feels that ‘learning a technique’ is crucial to any individual artistic development (“my imaginative possibilities have expanded”). Although he freely admits he didn’t make a profit from art until he was 38, I think it’s definitely a book written from the perspective of a ‘successful artist’. He talks enthusiastically about students attending art college being allowed “uncertainty” and “the need to find themselves, the desire for freedom but also the desire to know what to do”… and, for me, as someone who frequently struggles with trying to understand ‘contemporary art’ (with countless experiences of attending Fine Art Degree Shows and feeling utterly depressed by most of the work I see!), these were important observations. Nevertheless, it still made me feel that for every ‘successful’ artist, there are thousands (some of whom are quite brilliant) who ‘just about’ survive (and only thanks to having a determination not to be beaten). Thought-provoking, stimulating, joyful… and funny.
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