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March 22, 2004

SCOTS UNITE

In an attempt to fight what they describe as the growing impact of a globalising book industry, Scottish writers and publishers will be offering recommendations to the Scottish Arts Council -- amid some intramural squabbling.

The sense of crisis in the industry has been highlighted by pressure from a sector-wide pressure group, the Literature Forum for Scotland, calling for literature to be taken out of the hands of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and put in the hands of a new body, Literature Scotland.

In a paper circulating in the past few days, the proposal criticises the SAC for failing to give adequate funding to writing, to make clear that literature is included within “the arts”, and to give it the inter national profile the sector says it deserves.

That audacious plan in turn reflects widespread expectations that the Scottish Executive is soon to deliver a death-blow to the SAC as the body in charge of steering public funds in support of the arts in Scotland. A statement is expected within weeks by arts minister Frank McAveety.

In other Scottish news, the Scotsman adds Andrew Crumey's take to the growing pile of reviews for Colm Tóibín's The Master.

In fact, the book often feels more like a biography than a novel. "As transatlantic travel became easier, and more comfortable, it also became more popular" is a sentence whose bland acceleration of time belongs in non-fiction, as do countless other examples such as an infuriatingly vague description of Venice: "neither tourism nor time had harmed the city’s mixture of sadness and splendour… Venice was laden down with old voices, old echoes and images; it was the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts." Ask yourself what time it said on James’ pocket watch when all this was happening. And for comparison, consider a very untypical but strikingly good moment, as James remembers a childhood outing with his father: "They had been to a cafe with large clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that for Henry gave it something of the charm of a circus."

There is not enough bran in this book, not enough of the tangible grit of reality, happening at a specific instant in a precise place. Instead there is a formless narrative stodge, a summary report of a life, high on biographical fact and very low on the literary qualities James valued most.


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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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