In the Bookswap Bag

Literature, Money and the Market – Paul Delaney (from Trollope to Amis)

I feel like I’ve gleaned random facts from this book but not much else. For example it led me on to two other books – The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble, and The Information by Martin Amis, which last is mentioned both because it is about writing, but also because of the size of the massive advance Amis got, which I do dimly remember there being a bit of a ‘the end is nigh’ flutter about at the time, even in the national (non-bookish) press, although I couldn’t have told you the name of the book and would have assumed it was London Fields. It’s amusing to me that his real big hitters were not the ones he got the most money for.

That incident is also mentioned by David Lodge in the last read book on this pile. Lodge’s take is that you can’t really blame Amis for taking the money. He also describes Amis (this is in the 90s) as being ‘famous for not winning the Booker’ which sent me off to Wikipedia to check – and astonishingly (and I say this even though he’s not really my cup of tea and I’ve only read 2 of his books) Amis never did.

I’ll let you know what I think of The Information. I'm cat sitting at my Dad's this week, so will take this one along. 

 

The Ice Age – Margaret Drabble

This is the other book mentioned in the Delaney above. Written in the mid 70s, the height of the energy crisis, with the property market having collapsed and inflation running at 25%.

Anthony Keating (described on the back of my 1979 copy and in several places in the text as ‘middle-aged’ despite being in his 30s) has recently had a heart attack. And well he might do, frankly, even at that age. A business associate is in jail for fraud, the country property he bought for a fortune is worth a fraction of the price he paid for it, the London house can’t be offloaded and has squatters in it, and the riverside location he and his friends bought for development is a white elephant. Oh and a friend has recently died in an IRA bombing and his step daughter been arrested behind the iron curtain for a traffic offence.

This book is almost entirely backstory – how did Anthony, his ex-wife, his friend in jail, and everyone else in these pages get where they are now when the 60s looked so bright?

It manages to avoid being a misery though, through humour and an awareness that at least part of the reason it’s hurting so much right now is how spoilt everyone has been up to this point. Drabble has a knack of making the reader empathise with people they might not really agree with, and this is of course a fabulous snapshot of a point in time.

Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

Both the above are covered in my post here: Briefer than Literal Statement: Brand and Lorac. I was in two minds about whether to let Checkmate to Murder go, but I'm determined to get the double shelving down and there are so many books out there. 

Death of an Author – E C R Lorac

This book is reviewed extensively and well on a number of blogs I follow and read. You don’t need my take. Very entertaining, but I won’t read it again.

A Natural Curiosity – Margaret Drabble

I started this after The Ice Age but its not working for me. It was under £1 in a charity shop, so I’m not going to fret about it.

The Practice of Writing – David Lodge

This is a book of essays and reviews over a period rather than a consistent book about writing or a book about how to write. I do find Lodge a tad academic at times (unsurprising since he was a lecturer in Birmingham) but his awareness of it is very disarming. He also sends this up beautifully in his campus novels.

This was most interesting when he was writing about adapting his own novel for tv, and adapting Martin Chuzzlewit, or casting and tweaking and finding a place for his play. 

The Empty Space – Peter Brook

This is about the theatre and different theories, or perhaps it would be true to say different kinds of theatre.  It’s a nice length for this sort of book – short enough that the lay person doesn’t get bogged down. 

Content With What I Have – C Henry Warren

This was a rather charming book of vignettes of rural life in the 60s and concerns about what was being lost. 

Strange Journey – Maid Cairnes

Another from the British Library, this time their Women Writers series. Arguably this book is a fantasy book, given the bodyswap element, but there was also humour and middlebrow is probably as good a genre to file it under as anything. 

I enjoyed it but couldn’t read books like this the time, any more than I could Amis’ oeuvre or constant spy novels (although I’ve read and enjoyed Amis and Buchan occasionally). I do wonder, if I hadn't gone in expecting it to be the kind of book it was, with the nice cover and the genre it's placed in, whether there might have been more tension to it. As it is there's more comedy of manners than any fear something more sinister is going on. 

Lions and Shadows – Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood advises the reader to read this as fiction, which I did my best to do, even though the central character is called Christopher, and has a life not a million miles from the author, starting with his school career, then sabotaging his university years, then trying to write a book while also trying to find something to do for a living. Overshadowed by something he describes as 'the Test' - the expectation boys of his generation had that they'd be growing up into a war, which then ends before they get there, leaving them with a feeling of displacement.