E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Howard Jacobson has just won this year's Man Booker Prize - hats off to him.  I am sort of glad he pipped the expected winner, C, to the post, because C was a semi-unreadable pastiche of modernism (post-modernism_ about semi-conductors, etc, that couldn't get its horticulture right.  Cue famous quip. Uncue.  Jacobson got a lot of press this week in many papers, bemoaning the state of the serious UK novel, and he is right, to a point, but don't tell me Waugh, Amis and Wodehouse are not revered, in their own way.  His argument on the BBC this morning that novels should always be funny (read a poem he said, if you want seriousness!) rings hollow.  Comedy as an element in all great works of literature: absolutely!  But should the default position of any form or genre be one tone, one vision?  I am not so sure.  Tragi-comic, seems the way to go.  Best of both words.

I walked past a bookshop today, filled with Freedom , the new novel by Jonathan Franzen .  On top of the book, with the pride of the Iwo Jima flag, flared a sign quoting Blake Morrison : For now, the only show in town is Jonathan Franzen .... I am sure London is big enough for two shows, but last night, Franzen's infamous spectacles were stolen from off his face, and briefly ransomed for £100,000 before being recovered after helicopters and frogmen searched near the Serpentine.  Someone has suggested this was the work of an over-imaginative PR. Like a eunuch in a harem, I find myself utterly disinterested in this most marvellous, extraordinary book.  The idea of Freedom leaves me cold.  No, that is too mild.  It leaves me -273 degrees Celsius.  I think I may have literary exhaustion - I can no longer get it on with such things. I know 100 brilliant gifted poets scattered around the world, each with a few books out, or one, that I enjoy reading. ...

Cars and books get recalled for different reasons.  But the brakes should have been put on this recent publication in the UK of Freedom , which careened foolishly, skidding on typos.   Franzen has insisted his fans be allowed to exchange their compromised copies for the real thing, the final draft, though 80,000 copies in hardback remain in Britain, tantalisingly full of subtle characterisation alternatives, and spelling differences.  Does such a multiplication of authorial intent wonderfully express the liberating nature of published text, which surely must resist the author's will, or is it merely slipshod and annoying? No writer wants typos; each gets them in their turn.  Like other physical deformities (one leg shorter, a pimple, a tic), each carries them as best they can - all books are marred by them, as all bodies have their imperfections.  Typos can lead to value - collectors often like such flawed variants, but in this case the market is flooded with...

This just in - the Man Booker shortlist has been announced, and it includes Damon Galgut , one of my favourite writers - as well as other leading lights, and a few surprises, especially the absence of The Slap .  I am pleased to see Howard Jacobson here - he is a brilliantly funny writer.  C will likely win, from what I have heard.  Have it at home, yet to dip in fully.

Back from Ireland.  I must stop eating lobster smothered in butter.  But those trolley dollies with their heaps of cream and custard and berries!  Agggh.  Croquet is not, may I add, an aerobic activity...Just read Forster 's first, Where Angels Fear to Tread - a bit odd stylistically.  Does anyone else have any thoughts on his sentimental-ironic melodramatic tonal shifts?  Also enjoyed the first 95% of Netherland , until the cornball London Eye/ family values ending.  A missed opportunity to create a true classic.  Still, I actually find cricket bearable after that.

Sad news. Jose Saramago has died.

Meanwhile, an American pips a Brit to the post at the Orange Prize, as Kingsolver wins , and Mantel does not.

I've just picked up the latest Alan Brownjohn novel, his fourth, Windows on the Moon , set in 1947-48 (Austerity) Britain - the period of my doctoral research.  I like Brownjohn as a critic, poet, and person, and think I may like this book, also.  It opens well, and intriguingly.  It comes with blurbs from Margaret Drabble , Jonathan Fuller and David Kynaston (the leading popular historian of this period).

It has been a bad last few days for brilliant octogenarian writers and poets of Britain - first Peter Porter , now the legendary Alan Sillitoe , has died.  I find this very sad news indeed.  Sillitoe is one of the truly iconic voices of British writing of the post-war period, and his books and screenplays, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , are classics of the Kitchen Sink manner.  I had a most memorable dinner and drinks with Mr. Sillitoe at the Groucho Club a few years ago, and he was charming, funny, smart and slightly grouchy.  He had lots to say and great stories to tell.  He'd lived in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and knew Sylvia Plath .  He was a smoking advocate.  He was an Angry Young Man who didn't like the term.  He was a famous novelist for more than fifty years, and a good poet whose prose overshadowed that side of his writing.  Sillitoe is survived by his wife, the important A...

Oddly, the head judge of the forthcoming Orange Prize, Daisy Goodwin , has claimed that too many books by women involve sexual abuse, rape, and Asian twins. Instead, she would like more humour. Her complaint is that books seem dark, and focus on depressing issues. Where is the light stuff? The dumbing down of British culture continues apace. Where novels, such as Hard Times , or Middlemarch (to name one by a woman), once dealt with the struggle and hardship of human existence, now it appears, contemporary novelists who actually explore themes and concerns that are of relevance to actual women (alas, these include incest, abuse, rape, as well as twins) are in danger of boring readers like Goodwin. Perhaps the problem is such prizes themselves. Asking anyone to read 120 or more novels over a limited period is a marathon a day sort of madness. Instead of savouring, one begins to look for ways out of the tedium. So - a good laff. Ironically, whereas British novels are apparently ever-less...

Two men with an interest in younger women seemingly created the teen dream - the teenage imaginary - in the Eisenhower Era - Nabokov and Salinger . Lolita became the young one as agent and provocative force of energy, and Holden Caulfield became us all. The death of Salinger is an airless chamber; he'd been dead to us since 1965, more or less. Or, perhaps, alive forever since 1951, when his immortal Catcher In The Rye was first published. It had an immense and immediate effect on my youthful sense as writer and reader when my Aunt Bev gave it to me in the late 70s. Many of my early poems are Salingeresque - and I continue to argue for the legitimate expression of the adolescent sublime in mature creative work. It is an irony of fate, or merely a coincidence, that the day of his death I was listening to the new and brilliant Beach House album, Teen Dream . It is Dream Pop via Mazzy Star , true, but Bowie -like, stately, weird, haunting, sexy and nearly as great as Siamese Dream...

Dan Brown's new book, launched at midnight, has sold more books in its first seconds than all the poetry books in the world will sell this month. Or than all the Booker books will sell this year. This is a fact - combined with his relatively artless prose - used to demonise Mr. Brown in certain quarters. But as a film buff and creative writing teacher, I have thought about this. What Brown does is eventing. That's right, a new genre title: eventing. That is, it isn't just writing, or entertainment, but creating an event. It's not just event publishing - the event is the sort of book it is. The use of plot, the style, is pre-cinematic, or post-cinematic, or maybe supra-cinematic - the book-as-movie-as-shared-experience. The popular interest means there is no use in saying it shouldn't be popular - it is popular. We can analyse why and how. But perhaps it is not a bad thing that it happens. I don't think it adds to literacy - people are not reading bu...

Adam Foulds was a poet. Now he is a Booker nominated novelist who writes about poets - and a poet. Foulds is on a meteoric trajectory. Good luck to him. I think all poets should write novels. They pay better and get more attention. Do more people read them? How many poetry books get optioned? What is writing for in the 21st century of celebrity? Poor Mr. S. Fry has begun to discover too much occasional tweeting is damaging his rep. A Sunday Times article lambasted him for being so obnoxiously omnipresent. Fry has the Welles status - media type with big brains - but sadly, looks more like Wilde than contains that man's genius. Good luck to him.

The dumbing down of Britain and America continues, with ITV's broadcast, over the last two nights, of a new version of Wuthering Heights , destined to be aired in America, too, and then let loose on the world in the form of a DVD. That this latest heap of rubbish was masterminded by the creator of Desperate Romantics - a bodice-ripping series that lays waste to the Pre-Raphealites - should surprise no one. The media has discovered - again - that high culture and emotionality and poetry can sell - if commodified and repackaged to be all about sex and violence - which, as Frankie said a while back, were "the new gods". Though Tom Hardy is rather good at being handsome and menacing as Heathcliff, everything else about this adaptation is beyond poor. I don't want to flog a dead horse, but le me briefly explain. The novel, on which this TV two-parter was based, is, as we know, one of the greatest books in the English language. Its passionate exploration of the psycholog...

I've guest-blogged for the Oxfam Bookfest blog , today, on the over-valuation (maybe) of The Great British Novel.

Browsing in a bookshop near Hampstead Heath yesterday, I came across Nick Laird's new novel , which I flicked through, before going on to other novels there, including my favourites, such as The Great Gatsby and Brideshead Revisited - works of masterful stylishness. I wouldn't want Eyewear 's readers to think I don't enjoy good prose - sometimes, it can almost be as good as poetry. Anyway, back to this new novel. I haven't read it, of course, but I've read bits of it, in situ , and there seems to be a key character in the novel who is a thirty-something, chubby, frustrated Londoner who has a blog, where he basically rants about TV shows, films, albums he likes, books, etc. Now, Laird has been lurking on the blogosphere, no doubt researching this character for his novel. I know this, because he's read Eyewear at least once or twice. I am glad to see bloggers in novels. It's a bit like Conrad tossing in an anarchist; or Maugham a scientist. Bloggers ...