MPs And Misdemeanours Essay, Research Paper

MPs and misdemeanoursAnn Widdecombe is a virgin. It’s one of the few facts we know about her, observed Sam Leith in the Telegraph, reviewing her new novel, An Act of Treachery . It ought to be as irrelevant as knowing “that Philip Larkin was an onanist or that Malcolm Lowry was an alcoholic or that D H Lawrence had a profoundly obnoxious beard”, but it isn’t. Leith hunted down two coy references to “lovemaking”, the first, “sometimes leisurely and sometimes urgent”, the second “wild, ecstatic, all-consuming”. Sexual innocence, he suggests, leaves an emotional vacuum at the heart of her novel: “That a Catholic girl in Occupied France allows herself – at the cost of rejection by everyone she loves – to be deflowered by a married officer of the invading army is surely the most important psychological fact of the narrative. The reader is not asking for porn, only a sense of what she felt.” Sarah Curtis in the TLS also found the novel unconvincing. “It strains belief that a daughter of a professor of English at the Sorbonne, with a brother fighting for the Free French, would cadge chocolate from the kindly German officer who helped her out of a scrape.” Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times thought it a plot worthy of Colette, but, “the pen seems to have been snatched up by Enid Blyton”. News that Granta will announce the Best Young British Novelists early next year prompted the TLS to get its bid in first. James Campbell rounded up “some literary folk around here” to nominate their choices. Here are the names to watch out for: Diran Adebayo, Trezza Azzopardi, Nicola Barker, Glen Duncan, Will Eaves, Giles Foden, Lavinia Greenlaw, Niall Griffiths, Philip Hensher, Tobias Hill, Hari Kunzru, Toby Litt, Paul Magrs, Andrew Miller, David Mitchell, Maggie O’Farrell, Andrew O’Hagan, Zadie Smith, Marcel Theroux and Jonathan Tulloch. Let’s hope they have more fun than Philip Kerr, who penned a bitter piece in the New Statesman. He was delighted to be chosen in 1993, but, “it wasn’t long before people started pissing on our parade… Like a great vintage from Bordeaux, the ‘83 was so good that the ‘93 could not fail to disappoint. The likes of Barnes, Amis, Rushdie, Ackroyd, McEwan and Swift trashed not just the generation before them but the one that came after as well.” In the Financial Times, Holly Finn was dissecting Janowitz’s latest offering, Area Code 212 : “Fifteen years ago, Janowitz (Slaves of New York), Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) made a precocious literary triumvirate. Now they – and their style and subject matter – seem a quaint marketing phenomenon, like the Young British Artists.” Finn was bored with New York (”If you’re a writer, you’re meant to write what you know. But if New York City is what you know, you’d better have something else up your sleeve”), and concluded that Janowitz “might have whole-baked her thoughts. Instead she leaves us with canapés.” The Independent agreed, complaining that, “Janowitz’s concentration, like her air conditioning, seems to cut out when you least expect it”. As the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York approaches, a squadron of books have appeared. Mark Huband in the Financial Times gamely took on seven of them, including Malise Ruthven’s A Fury for God. While respectful of this eminent scholar of Islam, he found the book “somewhat rushed” and “unoriginal”, much of it having appeared in print already. In the Telegraph, Marcus Warren looked for enlightenment in Jane Corbin’s The Base: In Search of al-Qaeda, but was disappointed. “If this is the current state of our knowledge of our most deadly enemy,” he concluded, “we had better prepare for some more defeats.”