'William Golding was an ambitious and complicated late starter who did not understand the impulses behind his own books'. Allan Massie reviews John Carey's biography of the novelist in the UK Times Literary Supplement.
"Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
A peer and a Knight of the Garter.
Clement Attlee’s neat summary of his career might be adapted for William Golding. He too was a late starter, one oppressed in youth by doubts and feelings of social, and perhaps intellectual, inferiority. Until his middle forties he was a poor, reluctant and unsatisfied provincial schoolmaster. But, like Attlee, he outstripped many who had a head-start on him and he ended with a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English novelist to be awarded it since Galsworthy. His life was transformed in 1954 by the publication of Lord of the Flies, the novel to which his biographer has thought fit to call to our attention in his subtitle - in case Golding’s name might otherwise be unfamiliar. Yet Lord of the Flies came close to sharing the fate of three novels Golding had already written, which had failed to find a publisher. Five publishers and one literary agency returned it, and the reader for Faber & Faber recommended its rejection as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . . Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.
It was fortunate for Golding that a new editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, had picked up the scruffy typescript, read a few pages, found himself gripped, and managed to persuade his colleagues that they should publish the book if the author would be prepared to revise it. Golding was very lucky indeed. Monteith would remain his editor, friend, comforter, confessor and encourager for more than thirty years, a rock on which Golding’s enviable career was built. And Lord of the Flies was an almost immediate success. It made Golding’s reputation and his fortune. It was soon adopted as a standard school text, eventually selling several million copies in Britain and the United States."
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'Thomas Keneally's Australian Reds' is the title also in the TLS of a review of his book The People's Train which "lurches from event to event, and would benefit from more saturation in contemporary sources. A popular Russian narrative joke of the post-Stalin era visualized Soviet history as a train whose erratic running generated characteristic responses from successive leaders - Lenin, “Passengers, get out and finish building the line!”; Stalin, “Shoot the driver!”, etc. The first part of Thomas Keneally’s new novel, The People’s Train, takes the Russian Bolshevik Artem Samsurov to Australia in the 1910s. Here, a monorail model built by a radical dreamer in Brisbane is neglected, apparently bare of signification. In the second part of the novel, after Samsurov has returned to Russia in 1917, “the people’s train” stands for revolution itself - literalised in the characters’ feverish to- and fro- motion between the capital, Petrograd, and other places of unrest or political significance."
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Ten of the best books written in prison according to John Mullan in The UK Guardian.
The first two books are:
Le Morte d'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory
Malory's collection of knightly yarns has served as a sourcebook for every Arthurian since. Imprisoned during the 1450s, perhaps for rape as well as theft, Malory filled the years he spent waiting for trial recalling the tales of chivalry that he then collected as one of Caxton's first bestsellers.
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Cervantes was jailed two or three times, and he claims in his prologue to Don Quixote that his great mock-romance was "begotten in a prison". Confined to a cell, the author's imagination wanders with his crack-brained knight over the dusty roads of Spain."
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The October 8 issue of the New York Review of Books has a number of articles online, including Garry Wills: Entangled Obama and Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson.
British novelist, Andrew O'Hagan has an article on the Powers of Dr. Johnson.
"Samuel Johnson could never have been described as nice. He lacked good manners, an easy disposition, a sunny outlook, a helpful quality, an open spirit, a selfless gene, a handsome gait, or a general willingness to put his best foot forward in greeting others. If niceness was the only category known to posterity, we would long since have lost Johnson to the scrofulous regions of inky squalor, for he could be alarmingly rude."
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Out-of-print and in demand
BookFinder.com has tracked the most sought-after out-of-print titles in America. The newly-released seventh annual edition is based on aggregate reader demand between July 2008 and June 2009. This years list was influenced by both pop culture and financial chaos, each driving readers to seek out-of-print books ranging from a saucy memoir revealing a real housewife of New Jersey to nearly forgotten exposes on the Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve.
The following books have been out-of-print for years, but media interest in the past 12 months helped to create a surge of interest in each title.
Cop without a badge: the extraordinary undercover life of Kevin Maher by Charles Kipps
It wasn’t the life of Kevin Maher that cased demand for Cop Without a Badge to spike, but the hi-jinks of his ex-wife, and star of The Real Housewives of New Jersey TV show, Daniel Staub. For the show’s entire season, Staub's co-stars had been alluding to her appearance in the book (where she is portrayed in a less than positive light) until the final episode when Cop Without a Badge was flashed on screen. Since that time, the book has gone from flea market fodder, to an out-of-print collectible, to being re-printed in August 2009.
Indigo Blue by Catherine Anderson
Having been publishing since 1988, romance writer Catherine Anderson only reached the New York Times bestseller list in the last few years. There is now a massive demand for her early works. In 2008, Comanche Moon was reissued and made its way onto the NY Times bestseller list and this year Indigo Blue, her 1992 romance novel, is among the most sought-after out-of-print books in America.
The recently deflowered girl; the right thing to say on every dubious occasion by Edward Gorey
In January 2009, a blogger with a LiveJournal account found a copy of this long forgotten Edward Gorey gem and posted scans online. The post became an Internet sensation with hundreds of thousands of people viewing the post, crashing the LiveJournal blog. The book, which is an etiquette book parody that instructs young ladies on what to say after losing their virginity, will be republished in November 2009 by Bloomsbury.
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Richard Holmes wins the Royal Society prize for best science book
Holmes visited Canberra last year with his book The Age of Wonder, giving a major lecture at the National Library. My interview with him appeared in the Canberra Times blog for 15 September 2008. Now the Guardian reports he has won the Royal Society Science book prize for 2009. Holmes writes:
"The prize was established some 20 years ago, when "popular science" was just beginning to find its new readership, and previous winners have included such household names as Bill Bryson and Stephen Hawking. The trophy sits on my desk, a solid and extremely heavy column of glittering perspex, not unlike a miniature version of the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001. I am waiting for it to bleep and flash, and boot me into another dimension.
But as a literary biographer who has space-walked into science writing, perhaps I have already been teleported to that other zone. The paperback edition of Wonder appears in a quite different and sparky section of bookshops than my lives of Shelley and Coleridge, and with a new style of cover, described by my publishers as "really edgy". My signing queues have become alarmingly younger, and I feel correspondingly more steam-age. I am invited to "talk" at the Science Museum, London, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, but told I need Powerpoint A/V.
People ask how on earth did you make the change? Is writing science biography very different from the literary stuff? And what about the "two cultures"? (CP Snow's baleful lecture of that name was delivered exactly 50 years ago.) Well, for me it probably all began in 1999 when, with much trembling, I gave a lecture at the British Academy entitled "Coleridge among the Scientists". At the end Lewis Wolpert sprang up from the front row and wittily derided my suggestion that there was anything scientific about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That set me thinking.
It took me the best part of 10 years, much reading and reflection, and numerous field expeditions - to laboratories, hospitals, mines, hot air balloon clubs - plus two wonderful summers among the mathematicians and astrophysicists of Trinity College, Cambridge - to find an adequate reply. Finally I came to the conclusion that in the Romantic period, scientific discovery and invention were quite as important as poetry. Moreover, the two were intimately connected - not opposed as had always been thought. There was no two cultures gap, at least not then. ...
I believe that we are now in a great age of popular science writing, on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Fortey, Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, Dava Sobel, Janet Browne, Simon Singh, Martin Rees ... So I like to think the notion of two cultures will soon become entirely extinct, like the dinosaurs. Unless of course we fail to heed science, and become extinct ourselves first, through climate change. I'm watching my perspex monolith for a hopeful gleam."
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Mary Queen of Scot’s Last Letter
The Rare Book Review blog reports that "only hours before her execution at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots penned a letter to her brother-in-law Henri III of France. In it, Mary describes how she had been forbidden to see Roman Catholic priest and was, instead offered a visit by an Anglican minister. Mary depicted herself as a martyr, who was condemned for her faith as much as her “God-given right to the English crown.” She also asked the French King to pay her servants what they were due.
This fascinating final letter, written by the Queen as she faced execution, went on display at the National Library of Scotland from September 15 for just one week. It will form part of a showcase to mark the opening of NLS’s visitor centre.
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Who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year?
The Guardian reports that "Israeli novelist Amos Oz is the favourite to take this year's Nobel prize for literature, according to the bookies. Ladbrokes has backed Oz at 4/1 to take the 10m Swedish Krona (£815,000) prize, ahead of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar at 5/1, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo at 6/1 and American novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth at 7/1. But Oz needn't start preparing his Nobel speech quite yet: last year's eventual winner, the French novelist JMG Le Clézio, was initially given odds by Ladbrokes of 14/1 - although these fell after a sustained gamble down to 2/1 before Ladbrokes closed its books with Le Clézio as 1/2 favourite.
Odds on reclusive American writer Thomas Pynchon have narrowed to 9/1 - last year he was at 20/1 (and 40/1 to win and attend the ceremony). Ladbrokes's top 10 is rounded out by Syrian poet Adonis at 8/1, with last year's favourite, the Italian scholar Claudio Magris, at 9/1 together with Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi and Japanese author Haruki Murakami. British writers have little chance of taking the prize this year, if Ladbrokes are to be believed. It puts AS Byatt at 50/1 (well behind American folk troubadour Bob Dylan at 25/1) with Salman Rushdie at 80/1 and Beryl Bainbridge and Ian McEwan at 100/1.
The Nobel prize committee usually receives around 350 proposals for Nobel candidates a year, and whittles this down to a longlist of 20 names which it presents each April to the 18 Academy members who select the winner. By now, the Academy will have shortened this list to about five names, and will reveal its choice in early to mid-October."
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ODD BOOK TITLE OF THE WEEK
Castration. The advantages and disadvantages. By Victor T Cheney. Bloomington. Authorhouse. 2003.
No library in Australia has this book, but Libraries Australia reports a later work about the same topic by this author, which is also "not yet in any Australian library" http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an2683 9143.