Trust

One thing that the late and unlamented News Of The World was respected for (and for that matter, its sister paper the Sun) was its sports coverage. By this I think we all know we mean football; I'm sure Mr Murdoch didn't get where he was today by aggressively pursuing the Crown Green Bowls-playing demographic. There's no hint on the tabloid back pages that papers have any bias towards particular major players or teams, whatever skullduggery might or might not be going on under the surface. This independence reflects the isocline between the players and managers on one hand and the press on the other, and the suspicion with which the former regard the latter. Long may that remain so, if the alternative is the cosy punditry of Alan Shearer.

I mention this not because I care deeply about football, but because of envy. Sometimes I wish I could read a review in the Guardian's Review section, for example, and have the same confidence that the journalists were not mixing for social drinks with novelists; that novelists did not have a career path into journalism; that journalists did not have a career path into novel writing. There is a telling lack of honest loathing in our book talk, and when we do it, our criticisms are so broad-brushed that we can barely discern the guilty party. But we know that books can really suck, don't we? And not just collectively, when they're out with their mates. Sometimes particular books can suck, all on their own, in their own special way, whatever the hype in the media. And just occasionally, I suppose, writers work to live up to that hype they never deserved at the start.

I wrote a much more honest version of this, ten minutes ago, and thought better of it... By way of analogy, I might have called it Steve McLaren, England Manager.

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Hot & Bothered

Liars League, tomorrow @ 7:30, The Phoenix, explores a theme of 'Hot & Bothered' featuring

- Underneath by Erinna Mettler
- Brothers' Eyes and Curtain Rods by Robert Long
- This Isn't Heat by Richard Smyth
- Pampas Grass by James Holden
- Kenny by Frances Clarke

I'll be there, and I'd encourage you to be there too!

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M*a*s*h (u*p)

Why the asterisks? Because it pains me to be so modern when the thing is so old, and the fashion comes and goes. This is, depending on your bent, might go back to Laurence Sterne, E.T.A. Hoffman et al in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or was reinvented with Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At it's simplest, it might be a pleasant parlour game (though possibly not so compelling when approaching it sober: see what you think - me, I'm distinctly underwhelmed). Or, why not a whole novel?

Personally, I'm not sure there's very much more to be achieved by this than a certain comic effect. It's a bit much to hope for pathos:

I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, and you couldn't have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn't have stated absolutely that it wasn't. Perhaps the word 'pensive' just about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen.

'Control,' I said, 'do you know what?'
'No, sir.'
'Riemeck's dead.'
'Yes, indeed,' Control declared.
'Awkward, what?'

That, you may have identified as P.G. Woodhouse (Thank You, Jeeves), with a sprinking of two or three lines from John Le Carre's classic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. This is in fact only the smallest extract of an exercise I did for the sake of exploring the concept for this piece; I need not trouble to include any more of it here as I think the concept is clear enough (and I have no wish to bring upon me the wrath of the copyright police). My personal taste forbids the union of concepts that simply jar (Jane Austen + Zombies = a first year undergraduate's desperation for effect, in my book). In this case though, I thought there was actually surprising common ground between the two novels I was sampling, not least in the characters of Control and Jeeves. At the start of both novels, both these characters utter the very same words in response to the main protagonist - 'Yes, indeed.' Both stories are grounded in English culture and manners, albeit from slightly different backgrounds and eras, and have a similar interest in what Bertie Wooster might have called sportng behaviour, or the lack of it.

How far could this have gone? In all honesty, probably not that far. The best sampling probably comes unconsciously to both the writer and the reader. It's also quite hard to do well. If nothing else, it should make anyone complaining of writer's block reflect that writing from scratch might actually be easier.

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