Book Reviews: 1. A A Gill on Autobiography by Morrissey

As Noel Coward might have said, nothing incites intemperate cultural hyperbole like cheap music. Who can forget that the Beatles were once authoritatively lauded as the equal of Mozart, or that Bob Dylan was dubbed a contemporary Keats? The Beatles continued to ignore Covent Garden, and Mozart is rarely heard at Glastonbury; Dylan has been silently culled from the latest edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English.

The publication of Autobiography was the second item on Channel 4’s news on the day it was released. Krishnan Guru-Murthy excitably told the nation that Morrissey really could write — presumably he was reading from an Autocue — and a pop journalist thrilled that he was one of the nation’s greatest cultural icons. He isn’t even one of Manchester’s greatest cultural icons.

This belief in high-low cultural relativity leads to a certain sort of chippy pop star feeling undervalued and then hoitily producing a rock opera or duet with concert harpsichord. Morrissey, though, didn’t have to attain the chip of being needily undervalued; he was born with it. He tells us he ditched “Steve”, his given name, to be known by his portentous unimoniker because — deep reverential breath here — great classical composers only have one name. Mussorgsky, Mozart, Morrissey.

His most pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing is having this autobiography published by Penguin Classics. Not Modern Classics, you understand, where the authors can still do book signings, but the classic Classics, where they’re dead and some of them only have one name. Molière, Machiavelli, Morrissey.

He has made up for being alive by having a photograph of himself pretending to be dead on the cover. The book’s publication was late and trade gossip has it that Steve insisted on each and every bookshop taking a minimum order of two dozen, misunderstanding how modern publishing works. But this is not unsurprising when you read the book. He is constantly moaning about record producers not pressing enough discs to get him to No 1. What is surprising is that any publisher would want to publish the book, not because it is any worse than a lot of other pop memoirs, but because Morrissey is plainly the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.

The book falls into two distinct passages. The first quarter is devoted to growing up in Manchester (where he was born in 1959) and his schooling. This is laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine Cookson. No teacher is too insignificant not to be humiliated from the heights of success, no slight is too small not to be rehashed with a final, killing esprit d’escalier. There are pages of lists of television programmes he watched (with plot analysis and character criticism). He could go on Mastermind with the specialist subject of Coronation Street or the works of Peter Wyngarde. There is the food he ate, the groups that appeared on Top of the Pops (with critical comments) and the poetry he liked (with quotes).

All of this takes quite a lot of time due to the amount of curlicues, falderals and bibelots he insists on dragging along as authorial decoration. Instead of adding colour or depth, they simply result in a cacophony of jangling, misheard and misused words. After 100 pages, he’s still at the school gate kicking dead teachers.

But then he sets off on the grown-up musical bit and the writing calms down and becomes more diary-like, bloggish, though with an incontinent use of italics that are a sort of stage direction or aside to the audience. He changes tenses in ways that are supposed to be elegant but just sound camp. There is one passage that stands out — this is the first time he sings. “Against the command of everyone I had ever known, I sing. My mouth meets the microphone and the tremolo quaver eats the room with acceptable pitch and I am removed from the lifelong definition of others and their opinions matter no more. I am singing the truth by myself which will also be the truth of others and give me a whole life. Let the voice speak up for once and for all.” That has the sense of being both revelatory and touching, but it stands out like the reflection of the moon in a sea of Stygian self-justification and stilted self-conscious prose.

The hurt recrimination is sometimes risible but mostly dull, like listening to neighbours bicker through a partition wall, and occasionally startlingly unpleasant, such as the reference to the Moors murderers and the unfound grave of their victim Keith Bennett. “Of course, had Keith been a child of privilege or moneyed background, the search would never have been called off. But he was a poor, gawky boy from Manchester’s forgotten side streets and minus the blond fantasy fetish of a cutesy Madeleine McCann.”

It’s what’s left out of this book rather than what’s put in that is strangest. There is an absence of music, not just in its tone, but the content. There are emetic pools of limpid prose about the music business, the ingratitude of fellow musicians and band members and the lack of talent in other performers, but there is nothing about the making of music itself, the composing of lyrics, the process of singing or the emotion of creation. He seems to assume we will already know his back catalogue and can hum along to his recorded life. This is 450 pages of what makes Morrissey, but nothing of what Morrissey makes.

There is the peevishness at managers, record labels and bouncers, a list of opaque court cases, all of which he manages to lose unfairly, due to the inherited stupidity of judges. Even his relation with the audience is equivocal. Morrissey likes them when they’re worshipping from a distance, but he is not so keen when they’re up close. As an adolescent he approaches Marc Bolan for an autograph. Bolan refuses and Morrissey, still awkwardly humiliated after all these years, has the last word. But then later in the book and life, he does exactly the same thing to his own fans without apparent irony.

There is little about his private life. A boyfriend slips in and out with barely a namecheck. This is him on his early sexual awakening: “Unfathomably I had several cupcake grapples in this year of 1973… Plunge or no plunge, girls remain mysteriously attracted to me.” There is precious little plunging after that.

There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.

AA Gill. The Sunday Times. 27 October 2013.

Book Reviews: 3. Ron Charles on Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

MARTIN AMIS recently abandoned London for Brooklyn, and now he’s published a satire of Britain’s moral decrepitude subtitled “State of England.” Just a coincidence, Amis claims, but naturally the Brits are feeling a bit stung by this one-two punch. And if Lionel Asbo is the sort of ham-fisted novel we get in the bargain, maybe we should send him back.

Amis’s previous offering, The Pregnant Widow, was a flawed book laced with one brilliant, witty sentence after another. Unfortunately, Lionel Asbo is a far more meager meal. The story opens with a bloom of grotesque comedy: A 15-year-old orphan named Des Pepperdine is in a relationship with an older woman. “The sex is fantastic and I think I’m in love,” Des writes to a newspaper advice columnist. “But ther’es one very serious complication and i’ts this; shes’ my Gran!” As he readily admits, “It’s not an ideal situation,” but incest and statutory rape are only minor concerns; Des’s real problem is that if his uncle Lionel Asbo finds out, he’ll kill him.

Welcome to the fictional borough of London called Diston, “where calamity made its rounds like a postman.” The schoolchildren — “all morbidly obese” — suffer from diseases not seen elsewhere in years. This is a place famous for its “auto-repair yards, sawmills, and tanneries, and for its lawless traffic . . . its burping, magmatic canal, its fizzy low-rise pylons, its buzzing waste.”

The most outrageous character in this hellhole is Des’s guardian, Lionel Asbo, a Dickensian contraption of implacable muscle. “Des saw his uncle every day,” Amis writes, “and Lionel was always one size bigger than expected.” The teeth in his giant bald skull are broadly spaced, like “a cut-out pumpkin on Halloween.” British readers will hear Lionel’s last name as an acronym for Anti-Social Behavior Order, a kind of restraining order introduced by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to combat everything from swearing to arson. Lionel set a national record when he was arrested at age 3. Since then, he’s grown into a shocking thug, “a subsistence criminal” who crashes through life accompanied — during brief respites from prison — by two psychotic pit bulls that he keeps hyped up on liquor and Tabasco sauce. “They not pets,” Lionel reminds his nephew. “They tools of me trade.”

The first section jangles along with some broad comedy and even offers a little suspense as Des tries — with deadly repercussions — to keep Uncle Asbo from discovering his tryst with Gran. There’s something sweet about this bright young man and his “anti-dad,” his “counterfather.” Asbo doesn’t understand his bookish nephew — “Do something useful,” he tells him. “Steal a car” — but he watches out for the boy and allows him to grow up under the protection of his citywide terror.

The novel quickly falls apart, though, when Lionel wins 140 million pounds in the lottery and becomes a national media sensation. “It’s like a fairy tale,” Des tells his uncle, but it’s actually like a wheezing burlesque show about the crude desires of an ignorant, violent man and London’s appetite for reading about him. Rowdy reporters and paparazzi follow the “Lotto Lout” from brothel to brawl as he storms around in his “shahtoosh dinner jacket (woven from the wool of the chiru, an endangered Tibetan antelope).” His grasping brothers slither in to get their share, but Lionel won’t give them a pence as he enjoys a lunch that costs thousands of pounds, orders a Bentley and moves into a 30-room Gothic mansion built during the 14th century. His crass new girlfriend is a half-silicone creature named “Threnody,” who publishes saccharine poetry and hawks a line of “intimate garmenture.” “Glamour and myself are virtually synonymous,” she tells the Daily Mail.

Don’t low-bred people say the darndest things!? I haven’t laughed so hard since my butler got his head stuck in a bucket.

Even Lionel’s accent is over-mined for comic effect, as though Amis were Henry Higgins shaking his head over Eliza Doolittle’s dialect: “Truck: pronounced truc-kuh (with a glottal stop on the terminal plosive.). . . . ‘Labyrinth’, for instance came out as labyrinf, rather than the expected labyrimf.” A little of this goes a long way (pronounced “a looong way”).

As Amis’s class mockery curdles, we’re left with a misanthropic vision of human suffering compounded by venality and lust. The novel’s meandering middle section has the grating tone of an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” sketched on the back of an envelope by England’s finest stylist. If only Amis watched more TV, he’d know from “Roseanne” just how badly things go when a crass lower-class family wins the lottery:

1. Describe an outrageous purchase.

2. Describe a hilarious misunderstanding.

3. Repeat until ratings crash.

The problem is really one of initiative, even effort. In “Super Sad True Love Story,” you could smell Gary Shteyngart sweat as he labored to keep his outrageous satire one step ahead of dismal current events. Here, Amis seems unwilling to exert more effort than it would take to change the channel from “Jersey Shore” to “Half Pint Brawlers.” He’s ambling years behind The Situation and the Kardashians, serving up blanched stereotypes on the silver platter of his prose as though it contained enough spice to entertain or even shock. “You go numb,” Lionel tells his nephew. “Not happy. Not sad. Numb.” Halfway through, persistent readers will feel the same way.

Does any other truly great writer make us wonder whether his brilliant parts are worth the wearisome whole? Almost every page in Lionel Asbo contains an example of Amis’s marvelous style, from “the muscular violence that lies in coiled clouds” to “the unlooked-for prettiness of young wasps” to Lionel dressed as the “supervillain in a risque cartoon.” Hearing the details of his uncle’s sex life, Des “felt that a damp cobweb was being dragged across his face.” And at the end, Amis offers a surprisingly tender portrayal of a new father’s love — a section that echoes the author’s recent statements about the delights of parenthood that he’s rediscovered late in life.

But enduring this frayed satire for these moments of pleasure is a deal only the most devoted Amis fans should accept.

Ron Charles. The Washington Post. 21 August 2012.

Book Reviews: 4. Nicola Barker on Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

In the cover photo on the back inside flap of Lionel Asbo: State of England, the book's haughty scribe ("Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction and 12 previous novels...") gazes out, in glowering profile, at an anonymous London street. The pavement appears moist from a sudden rainstorm. (Has Amis been drenched in the downpour on his way to the photo-shoot? Is that expensive grey suit peppered with damp? The trademark tousled mane weighted by droplets, only recently – and impatiently – combed aside before he sits at a cafe table and glances into the melee?)

Behind him (having survived the withering coruscation of his writerly stare) a black family (mum pulling a pushchair, dad in 50s-style hat and raincoat, toddler clutching his hand, struggling to keep up). Approaching him, a white man in a white T-shirt and jeans, shaven-headed – the generic English lad – lopes, hands shoved into his pockets, deliciously framed by the outline of an old red phone box. Facing this man, a headscarf-wearing woman, in full-length, enveloping black, bag slung over her arm.

And Amis? Slouched into his chair, relaxed mouth, eyes hooded but somehow expressing an ineffable sadness bleeding into disgust. Left hand obscured from view, right hand lifted and holding… What is that he's holding? A small packet of Japanese incense? A party popper? A slim salt dispenser? A roll of Semtex? Are we witnessing Amis – frozen in time – mere moments before the hand tightens further, he straightens up in his chair, grimaces and steadies himself to hurl this mysterious object? But at whom? And why?

Perhaps he already knows that the early word on his new novel is that it's depressingly bad. A stinker. Perhaps he is thinking about his imminent move to New York. Perhaps he is looking at these streets, these wet London streets, and cursing them for not appreciating him – a great author, a great English author – nearly as much as he feels they should do. Perhaps he is thinking about his father. Perhaps he is thinking about becoming his father or not becoming his father. Perhaps he is remembering his old friend, Christopher Hitchens, to whom his latest novel is dedicated.

The look in his eyes is one of wistful disappointment. Of hurt.

So what about this seductive and garishly entitled Lionel Asbo, then (with its curious and provocative State of England adjunct)?

Is it – as nay-sayers believe – a savage, uncontrolled and splenetic attack on modern British life, culture, mores and tropes? Is it a casual bit of GBH against the working classes? Is it a parting shot (a carefree moon from the back window of a retreating National Express coach?); a final, well-aimed kick in the teeth to the doubters and the gloaters, the prize-givers and the father-haters?

Because – like it or not – he is the father; the current father of English letters. Amis is the daddy – something his own daddy never really was (much as Martin persists in believing otherwise). Amis is the don. And anyone who has read Sophocles or Freud knows that while we all love our dads, we all still harbour a deep, secret urge to kill them. And then to have sex with our nans.

In the opening chapter of Lionel Asbo, the young hero, Desmond Pepperdine, mixed-race 15-year-old resident of Diston Town or "Town" ("Diston – a world of italics and exclamation marks", part of "the great world city") writes a letter to an agony aunt about his incestuous relationship with his nan, Grace. Des's mother, Cilla, is dead. Des lives in a tower block with his Uncle Lionel, a psychotically violent local hoodlum, "a kind of anti-dad, the counterfather", a man with a genius for "disseminating tension", a man who has made stupidity into an art form ("Why did he work at being stupid?").

Des, by contrast, has a gentle and persistent intelligence. The plot is disarmingly uncomplicated. If Lionel finds out that Des has slept with his mother, he will kill him. But of course he probably won't find out (at least we sincerely hope he won't find out), not for 270-odd pages, and in the meantime he will win millions on the lotto and become ever more powerful, more wonderful, more hilarious, more disgusting, more visceral and more magnified. He will spew out his extraordinary vitality and violence and (better still) charm and ugly, irrepressible genius into every urgent, thuggish chapter.

And it will be filthy and endlessly inventive, and the language and the imagery will fizz and glow in a way that only Amis – at his very best, his most carefully careless – fizzes and glows. This is both a paean to and an attack on London:

"To evoke the London borough of Diston, we turn to the poetry of Chaos:
Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight."

It is a masterclass in the strange variability of modern language and diction. Amis can do the accents. In fact he can do them so well, so effortlessly, that he undoes some of them. He performs guerilla surgery on them – nips and tucks – then sews them back together again. And he never pauses for breath. The novel comes at you and comes at you and keeps on coming. It never flags.

Is this an offensive book? Hell, yes. Deeply. But then maybe modern England needs offending. Is this a readable book? It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon. Is it a clever book? Clever and ignorant and topical and sad and cruel and ridiculous and breathtaking.

It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake. And the biggest joy is that Amis seems to find himself (and finds us, by extension) loving the thing he loathes. It is a great big confidence trick of a novel – an attack that turns into an embrace – a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve. So let's give thanks that Martin Amis was bad enough and brave enough to write it.

Nicola Barker. The Observer. 13 June 2012.

Book Reviews: 5. Peter Kemp on The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt isn’t one to ditch a winning formula. Her phenomenally successful debut novel, The Secret History (1992), opened with murder in Vermont. The Little Friend (2002), its bestselling successor, opened with murder in Mississippi. The Goldfinch, her third book, opens with murder in Manhattan.

As 13-year-old Theo and his art-loving mother walk round an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Met, she tells him that her favourite — a small picture of a goldfinch — is by Carel Fabritius, who died in the gunpowder explosion that devastated Delft in 1654. Moments later, an explosion devastates Theo’s life. A terrorist bomb blasts through the Met, killing his mother and others. Shell-shocked, Theo stumbles out of the wreckage-strewn building clutching the Fabritius painting which, as the novel chronicles with ever-dwindling credibility, he will keep for many years.

Already abandoned by his alcoholic father, Theo finds shelter in the Park Avenue apartment of a classmate’s upper-crust family and in another, warmer surrogate home: the quaint Greenwich Village household of Pippa, a captivating, musically gifted girl injured in the bombing, and her guardian, a saintly cabinet-maker. A plot twist yanks him away from this to Desert’s End Road, Las Vegas, where his sleazy father cohabits with sun-raddled Xandra amid garish kitsch and copious supplies of pills and liquor. Aesthetically lean years follow. Only the painted goldfinch (“like a holy icon carried by a crusader into battle”) reminds him of higher things. Underworld figures increasingly congest the story line as — with his louche friend, Boris — Theo spirals down through drink and drugs. Can the painting of the goldfinch — emblem of his mother’s love and the redemptive power of art — save him?

Shifting from the concentration on a semi-closed community (a college, a little town) that intensified the atmosphere in her previous books, Tartt seems to be aiming in The Goldfinch to ­emulate the breadth of 19th-century fiction. Although themes and situations show her usual indebtedness to JD Salinger, Truman Capote, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, Dickensian parallels are prominent (a vulnerable orphan, an elderly benefactor, a waif-like heroine). But while the social range is wide, there’s no matching depth.

Outdoing even The Little Friend, famously a decade in the writing, The Goldfinch has taken 11 years to appear. These epic gestations are attributed by awed Tartt admirers and devotees of websites such as Donna Tartt Shrine to uncompromising perfectionism. “It’s because of perfectionism that man walked on the moon and painted the Sistine Chapel, OK? Perfectionism is good,” she has stressed. But it’s hard to spot much of it in this ineptly put-together book.

Lists clutter its pages — as in brochure-like cameos of festive-season Amsterdam where Theo is holed up after a heist backfires: “canals and bicycle racks and Christmas lights…”, “Christmas, lights twinkling on the canal bridges…”. Stupefyingly long stretches of near inertness (especially those documenting Theo and Boris’s marathon ingestings of drugs and drink) are interspersed with frenetic bursts of mayhem where assorted gangsters and swindlers clash in heavily entangled plots and counter plots.

As if The Little Friend — a 555-page whodunit that ended with the revelation that its author had no idea whodunit — weren’t adequate proof that suspense isn’t Tartt’s metier, The Goldfinch can read like a parody of a crime thriller. The solution to the predicament presented by Theo’s possession of the painting is glaringly obvious hundreds of pages before it is finally realised (“I wish I had thought of it myself, years ago…shining in plain sight, like the sun!” Boris remarks). The exorbitant amount of detail Theo heaps into his narrative is explained away with equal clumsiness when he belatedly discloses to the reader that he isn’t writing “from memory” but, for the past 15 years, has been keeping extensive records “detailing exhaustively what I ate and drank and wore…”.

Keen responsiveness to objects is, in fact, the book’s strength — as in an alertly sensuous description of wood in a workshop: “the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut…spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood”.

When it comes to people, though, Tartt’s imagination blurs and coarsens. Melodrama and sentimentality abound (Pippa, “like a fairy” in a gauzy green dress, is a particularly fey fabrication). Similar-seeming formulations recur. One character is “like an elegant weasel”, another like “an elegant…polar bear”, a third has an “elegant black-clad body like a python”. Where The Little Friend sought to make its readers’ flesh crawl by dropping actual cobras, cottonmouths and copperheads into its story, this novel seeks to provoke shudders with figurative snakes: a “viper-eyed thug”, a killer with “eyes…like a puff adder’s”, a villain who has “the unsettling stillness of an anaconda”.

Tartt’s fictional world has always been one of opposing extremes: preciousness and sensationalism, the rarefied coterie of students in The Secret History and the bloody violence they get mired in, the gracefully declining aristocratic Southern family in The Little Friend and the near-feral trailer trash around them. In this novel, creepy lowlifes — hitmen, conmen, fakers — are opposed to beglamoured art-lovers. Fervent pages pay throbbingly emotional tribute to the latter and art’s power to soar above death and corruption. But no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.

Peter Kemp. The Sunday Times. 30 October 2013.

Book Reviews: 6. Stephen King on The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Let us consider the problems of the long novel, in which the heft is apt to come in for almost as much critical examination as the content. There is, for instance, Jack Beatty’s famous critique of James A. Michener’s “Chesapeake” (865 pages): “My best advice is don’t read it; my second best is don’t drop it on your foot.” Presumably, Beatty read it — or at least skimmed it — before offering these helpful hints, but you get the idea. In this hurry-scurry age, big books are viewed with suspicion, and sometimes disdain.

The book buyer’s suspicions are more justifiable. The critic, after all, is being paid to read. Consumers must spend their hard-earned cash for the same privilege. Then there’s the question of time. Prospective buyers have every right to ask: “Do I really want to give two weeks of my reading life to this novel? Can it possibly be worth it when there are so many others — most a good deal shorter — clamoring for my attention?”

Last, consider the novelist — in this case Donna Tartt, whose first novel, “The Secret History,” published in 1992, was greeted with critical hosannas and excellent sales. Her follow-up, “The Little Friend,” was published 10 years later. This means she labored over “The Goldfinch,” her latest novel, for at least as long. Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there must be periods of self-doubt. To write a novel this large and dense is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting. Especially when there are storms. Suppose, the writer thinks (must think), this is all for nothing? What if I’m failing and don’t know it? What if I make the crossing and am greeted not with cheers but with indifference or even contempt?

It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. “The Goldfinch” is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of “The Goldfinch,” they never do.

Like the best of Dickens (I will not be the last to make this comparison), the novel turns on mere happenstance — in this case, a heavy rainstorm in New York City. Theo Decker, our adolescent narrator, has been suspended from his school. He and his well-loved mother (“Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light”) set off for a “conference” with school officials but duck into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to get out of the weather. There is a terrorist bombing, and many people are killed. One is a woman with a spray-on tan and a blouse printed with Fabergé eggs: “Her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.” Audrey Decker, Theo’s mother, is another casualty.

Of course, all this is an alternate history (or a secret history, if you prefer). No such bombing ever happened, and the painting that a dazed and frightened Theo spirits out of the wreckage — “The Goldfinch,” made in 1654 by Carel Fabritius — was never stolen. It resides in the Royal Picture Gallery of The Hague. This in no way spoils Tartt’s charmed narrative, which follows 10 years of Theo’s adventures.

The first note is one of “Rebecca”-like anxiety. The unnamed narrator of that book begins by saying, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Theo starts in a fashion so similar it could be an hommage (but probably isn’t): “While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.” He may not often dream of her, but Audrey Decker rarely leaves this 21st-century Oliver Twist’s mind. Surprisingly few novelists write well of grief, but Tartt — whose language is dense, allusive and so vivid it’s intoxicating — does it as well as it can be done. “I had fallen off the map,” Theo says. “The disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, . . . groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost. . . . I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.”

Theo washes up with the poshy-posh Park Avenue Barbour family instead of in the workhouse, and meets a kindly furniture restorer named James Hobart (“but everyone calls me Hobie”) — a Dickensian character if there ever was one — who will become a friend for life. He also re-encounters Pippa, a girl he observed with fascination at the Met just before the world exploded around him. She has been badly injured but will recover and, as in Browning’s “Pippa Passes,” her periodic appearances in the narrative signal large changes.

If there’s a Fagin in Theo’s life, it’s his father, who spirits him away to Las Vegas — not the gaudy Strip, but a sinister exurban development where most of the houses are empty, the streets fill with blown sand and Domino’s won’t deliver. Theo regards his new room with dismay. “It seemed like the kind of room where a call girl or a stewardess would be murdered on television.”

Dad is an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. His girlfriend, the hilarious (and ultimately sympathetic) Xandra, pops pills and snorts coke. With such adult caregivers, we aren’t surprised when Theo hooks up with Boris Pavlikovsky, Tartt’s take on the Artful Dodger and this novel’s most brilliantly drawn character. Boris may be a little too naïve about America for such a wise child, and his constant patter is sometimes reminiscent of Boris Badenov (“Must find moose und squirrel!”), but his jittery good humor, boundless energy and flash charm are impossible for Theo — and us — to resist. Tartt depicts the friendship of these two cast-adrift adolescent boys with a clarity of observation I would have thought next to impossible for a writer who was never part of that closed male world: the interminable talk and speculation, the endless TV watching and pizza eating, the dope smoking and small thefts, the kind of rapport in which a single cocked eyebrow can provoke howls of helpless laughter.

Yet always, running through the novel like a power chord that may modulate but never quite dies, is the painting of Fabritius’ goldfinch, which Theo smuggles through his troubled early years — it’s his prize, his guilt and his burden, “this lonely little captive,” “chained to his perch.” Theo is also chained — not just to the painting, but to the memory of his mother and to the unwavering belief that in the end, come what may, art lifts us above ourselves. “The painting,” he observes, “was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.”

We get Dickensian dollops of suspense — most notably a hair-raising Nighttown adventure in pursuit of dangerous gangsters — and plenty of brilliant characterization. Of Mrs. Barbour, for instance: “Even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri.”

There are a few missteps, yes. It’s hard to believe that television coverage of a terrorist attack like the one Tartt imagines would be interrupted with mattress commercials, and there’s a lot more about furniture restoration than I needed. But for the most part, “The Goldfinch” is a triumph with a brave theme running through it: art may addict, but art also saves us from “the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.” Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction.

That said, don’t drop it on your foot.

Stephen King. The New York Times. 10 October 2013.

Book Reviews: 7. Toby Clements on The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” So says Adrian Finn, one of the largely unknowable characters in this vivid, thoughtful novel narrated from deep in middle age by Tony, now divorced and bald, who casts his mind back first to his adolescent friendships, and then to his own relationship with Veronica, “about five foot two with rounded muscular calves” whom he meets at Bristol university.

At the core of the novel is the memory of a weekend spent with Veronica’s family at their house in Kent. It is an unhappy memory. Her boorish father, her oafish brother, her enigmatic mother, all three in their different ways seem to have conspired with Veronica to make him feel uncomfortable, and it comes as no surprise that soon afterwards he and Veronica break up. But a few months later, Adrian writes from Oxford to tell Tony he and Veronica are now seeing one another. Tony takes it as badly as anyone might and breaks off his friendship with Adrian. Three months later, Adrian kills himself.

Tony lives his life, nurdling the memory of that weekend and of his frustrating time with Veronica through various relationships, a marriage, a family, a lifetime. Then Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony £500 and Adrian’s diary covering, one presumes, those last few months. Why? It is a mystery only the diary will answer, but Veronica has stolen it and so Tony is forced to deal with her, and in doing so, he comes to see not only the inadequacies of the remaining documentation, but also the imperfections of his memory.

A curious aspect of this book is that even though it is brief, it requires an exaggerated act of memory from the reader. By the time I’d finished it I was not absolutely sure which bits I’d remembered correctly, which bits he’d remembered correctly and which bits were “philosophically self-evident”. I started rereading it instantly, hungry for the clues that might or might not be there.

Barnes is on absolutely top form here. His sentences, each one so simple and precise, are as iridescent as tropical fish, each one individual and distinct, each one expressing a single revelatory insight, thought, image or joke, and yet they work together to produce a perfectly wonderful harmonious shoal, a work of rare and dazzling genius.

Toby Clements. The Daily Telegraph. 1 August 2011.

Book Reviews: 9. David Sexton on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first new collection of poetry to be published since she was appointed our Poet Laureate in 2009, in succession to Andrew Motion. It's also her first since Rapture, the ecstatic sequence about the rise and fall of a lesbian love affair which won her the T S Eliot Prize in 2005.

The Bees is not so ruthlessly focused but it has nonetheless been artfully organised around the bee as a symbol, boasting a cover honeycombed in gilt around a glittery bee. The book begins and ends with specific poems about bees and there are others scattered here and there, such as, for example, a lovely riff on Book IV of the Georgics, Virgil's Bees, which she wrote in response to the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen. Throughout, bees stand for endangered nature - and they appear glancingly in the book in other poems, as do allusions to flowers, pollen and honey.

However, there are many other themes. The volume includes, for example, such commissioned poems as Last Post, marking the deaths of the last First World War veterans, and Big Ask, a sarcastic question and answer piece about Saddam and Iraq. There are poems about the Cockermouth floods of 2009, about the vanished elms, Dorothy Wordsworth, the joys of Scotch, the river Nile, the Arvon foundation near Loch Ness, and Luke Howard, the Londoner who named cloud formations.

There are poems once more briskly revising classical myth - Echo, Leda, Atlas, Achilles - and others glossing anthology pieces by Shakespeare. "Where the bee sucks ..." was never going to be missed out and has been turned into a rough assault on modern farming: "Where the bee sucks/ neonicotinoid insecticides/ in a cowslip's bell lie..."

The best, because most personally felt, poems are those mourning the death of her mother from cancer and rejoicing in the life of her teenage daughter, Ella. Water, for example, beautifully recalls this being her mother's last word to her, calling for a drink - just as the poet herself had called out to her mother when a child, and as her own child does to her now: "Water./ What a mother brings/ through darkness still/ to her parched daughter." An inevitable and touching rhyme.

Duffy's predecessor as the Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew, was in important ways not suited to the job, for, although he could act the poet dashingly and represent poetry in general admirably in public, he never managed to write a single memorable line himself. He couldn't make words do anything, simply.

Duffy has almost the opposite problem. Her poems are not just well worked, they are nonstop workouts. Each and every one of them is like a creative exercise taken to the limit. They nearly all take up the kind of challenge that could be set to a whole class, and then go for it absolutely. It all feels very GCSE, in the end. 
Thus Parliament is an updating of The Parlement of Fowles, in which each bird describes how its particular environment has been devastated by pollution. The Woman in the Moon - "How could you think it ever a man up here?" - also sorrowfully contemplates the mess we've made of the earth: "deserts / where forests were, sick seas".

Sometimes Duffy's careful charms, or as she says, "spells", are appealingly modest. There's a nice series of three-line epigraphs on the joys of whisky, called Drams: "Barley, water, peat,/ weather, landscape, history:/ malted, swallowed neat."

But the ways she has to show how deliberately she has woven her words soon become tiresome. She uses far too much alliteration, never a tasteful activity at the best of times. Cockermouth and Workington begins: "No folk fled the flood,/ no flags furled or spirits failed - / one brave soul felled" and carries on in that vein.

She has far too many word combinations designed to prove her attentiveness to the way their sounds interknit with each other. Those elms have been "overwhelmed". "So glide,/ gilded, glad, golden", she commands the bees, in the first poem. In the last, she hears of "honey so pure,/ when pressed to the pout of a poet/ it made her profound". Please!

She overdoes lists and names. Oxfam poignantly lists items that have been donated for sale; John Barleycorn cheerily runs through evocative pub names; The Counties trips through, well, the counties ...

Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds, ends in the doting recitation: "Cirrus. Cumulus. Stratus. Nimbus." It's a pretty effect but it's exactly the same cadence she used in her anthology piece, the shipping forecast poem, Prayer (voted the nation's second favourite in a poll, trailing only The Whitsun Weddings): "Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre."

Both Duffy and Motion show clear influence from the man who refused the Laureateship, Philip Larkin (better digested in her case than his) but neither has anything like his authority and memorability. With Carol Ann Duffy, there's too much verbal prancing, too little that's original being said, particularly when the poems are not personal. You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it's a trivial art. But it is not.

David Sexton. London Evening Standard. 22 September 2011.

Book Reviews: 10. Liz Lochhead on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy

In Rapture in 2005, Carol Ann Duffy wrote a fevered volume-length hymn to the "glamorous hell" of a love affair. Then, after the death of her mother in that same year, she could, she said, for the longest while write no poems except those for children.

She's back now, with a collection that is wonderfully varied for someone who's had, in the past, a bit of a penchant for the book with a theme. Here's a mixter maxter of every kind of Duffy poem: angry, political, elegiac – elegiac about every endangered or disappearing thing in the natural world or the individual psyche – witty, nakedly honest, accessible, mysterious. Here are the willed, the skilled, the passionate ecological pleas and exhortations, the other voices – though less frequent than before – the lists and litanies, and, above all, the lovely lyrics of longing and loneliness and sorrow laced with ephemeral moments of almost-acceptance, lightness and grace.

In The Bees she sings a love song to the lyric muse. A true votaress, she here vows fidelity to the art of Virgil and Sappho, to the purity of her vocation: to sing "childbirth's song, the lover's song, the song of death".

The examples of the latter will sting you to tears. The elegies for that much-missed mother are the most moving poems in the whole book. "Cold" will stop your own heart for a moment. While in the briefly consoling fiction of "Premonitions" time is going backwards, nevertheless Duffy is clear-eyed about the ordinary, universal, mundane things: "… the slow weeks removing the wheelchair, the drugs, / the oxygen mask and tank, the commode, / the appointment cards".

Again and again, in songs of renunciation and loss ("Ballynahinch", "New Vows" and "Valentine's", with its bitter brio) we find that the – implicit – answer to "what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?" is: go on, sing it.

"Sung", a perfect wee lyric take on Burns's “Mary Morison” (even the name on the overgrown gravestone is turned into a Sappho-like fragment here), says, in its last couplet, that the song's the thing that will survive: "– a skull for a bonnie head / – and love a simile, a rose, red, red".

Other notes are struck, good fun stuff. At the end of the deadpan and surreal "The Human Bee" it's great to get the rock'n'roll riff of "… I'd known love / and I'd saved some money / but I could not fly and I made no honey". Try saying that aloud without going all Buddy Holly.

Duffy is brazen enough to write words such as besotted, smitten (several times), enchantment, legend, shadow, soul, garlanded and (again and again) moon, and to bring it all off brilliantly. To float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. A word of warning, though: don't guzzle all these poems at once or they'll cloy. Sip and dip. Poetry, like honey, is the product of toil and craft but, after the willed alchemy, still has to slip down easy. And when it comes to "Cockermouth and Workington", with its second stanza "Fouled fortune followed, / but families filed into the fold / for a fire flared", the "???" pencilled in my margin flags up the way that that overworked alliteration stuck in my craw. In "Rings", a too-forced list includes "the ring of an owl's hoot as we headed home in the dark" (my italics). Eh? Can't hear that, sorry.

But that sojourn with children's poetry has done her no harm. It's liberated her – who was already, God knows, so bold and free – and given her the nerve to go for the pursuit of pure pleasure in language: sounds, rhymes and half-rhymes, clever consonances and assonances, sheer love of words, the simple saying of them, the surprise of hearing them new again. These poems are often like nursery rhymes for grownups. In "Scheherazade": "Dumb was as good as dead; / better to utter". "Abracadabra" actually gets back the old magic of your first childhood encounter with it.

As always, she is big on buzzwords; the cliché deftly, definitively subverted. So here we get "Big Ask", "The Shirt", "Politics" and "The Female Husband", full of the old Duffy breenge and swagger before its quiet (beekeeping) end.

In this collection – from the poet who's always lived so defiantly in the real here-and-now world of "feedback, static, gibberish", of extraordinary rendition and David Beckham – are Achilles, Echo, Leda and ("give him strength") Atlas, as well as such old English folk archetypes as John Barleycorn and the white horses of Wiltshire. Indeed, Englishness is satisfyingly celebrated here, albeit elegiacally: the counties, the "masterpiece elms". There's an icy new take on Chaucer's “Parlement of Foules” wherein all the named birds of the air sing their songs of devastation.

Duffy is a popular poet, with the emphasis firmly on the poetry, not the popularity. She has us listen in to the music of the quotidian, develops our litmus for lies. Even “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE”, a piece of old-style Duffy ventriloquism in the voice of the cloth-eared and irony-deficient English teacher whose objection to another Duffy monologue had it banned from the curriculum for glorifying violence, takes flight and asks the examinee to do the impossible, and "explain how poetry / pursues the human like the smitten moon / above the weeping, laughing earth".

Liz Lochhead. The Guardian. 4 November 2011.