The Book Tower

Quite often one book can suggest another. Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? made several references to Harold Pinter’s long standing friendship with Simon Gray, including Pinter’s reaction to Gray’s death in 2008. Gray’s own volume of memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, makes several references to Pinter, including observations of his own failing health. Ruminations on mortality can be depressing, although Gray successfully manages to invest a degree of warmth and humour into things. The Smoking Diaries reflects upon his own sixty a day habit (halved by the early 2000s when the memoirs were written – he’d already given up on the four bottles of champagne a day), observations of (mostly senile) fellow hotel guests, a troubled relationship with his father and the sorry alcoholism of his younger brother. Even the terror of a panic attack – where Gray rushes from his shed unable to remember his exact age. Whatever he writes about, however troubling, it is always compelling writing.

I’m sorry to say that I followed Simon Gray with two writers who couldn’t be less engaging. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is possibly the worst book I have ever picked up. It is pretentious, poorly written, dull and ultimately pointless. Its only achievement is recruiting more manpower for the anti-Amis brigade. Unfortunately things hardly improved with The Ghost by Robert Harris, a book recommended to me and one I was interested in because of the forthcoming Roman Polanski film. Sadly The Ghost is an unconvincing thriller in the Dan Brown mould. It’s predictable, the characters are wooden and the outcome is laughable.

But don’t despair. I’m now into The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and it’s the best thing I’ve read for ages. A review will follow shortly…

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Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is an okay film. Alright, it’s quite a good film. As long as you don’t equate originality with quality, and don’t mind making a mental note of all the Harry Potter comparisons you will inevitably find. This film is very much School of Harry Potter, and gets tops marks for the Hogwarts Formula module. The Hogwarts Formula module is a course that teaches the following bullet points for success in creating a Potter clone:

• Your hero lives quite a grim life, either under the guardianship of a grotesque Dahl-inspired uncle or an abusive stepfather. Later we learn that, in a perverse way, he is actually here for his own protection.
• Your hero is an unlikely hero inasmuch as he learns very suddenly, and very quickly, about his true parentage when he is thrust into a new and very magical world.
• Your hero has two best friends, a boy and a girl. There is some initial love interest with the girl, who is quite feisty. In a further instalment the hero and best male friend may quarrel over the girl.
• The magical world is entered via a secret gateway not accessible to normal humans. This could either appear in the form of an extra station platform or, erm, a not particularly secret looking gateway.
• The magical world focuses on training our heros, either in the form of a school, or an open air camp where you can do archery and stuff. A bit like Centerparcs.
• a wise, big-bearded, authoritative figure oversees our hero and his gang. Richard Harris is the model although Michael Gambon will do. Pierce Brosnan will also do.
• The director Chris Columbus will do.

And so on. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson has an advantage over Harry Potter in that it weaves Greek mythology into its universe, this giving the opportunity to use recognisable stories (whereas Rowling writes herself into a corner where she is forced to invent everything from scratch). Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief features a host of Greek Gods played by English actors, including Sean Bean (Zeus) and Steve Coogan (Hades) and a good share of mythological monsters, the best of these being Medusa (played rather well by Uma Thurman). The film gives an excellent take on the Medusa tale with Percy using the back of his iPhone to deflect the deadly gaze of the serpent-headed one. Similarly, the story of the Lotus Eaters receives a modern treatment when the gang go to Las Vegas.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is driven by an obvious plot that is nevertheless still enjoyable. Percy’s mum is kidnapped by Hades, he must travel to the Underworld to rescue her but must first find three pearls that will get him and his friends back safely. There’s an obvious villain, and so on. Where this film doesn’t have an advantage over Harry Potter is in that is rather too cynical in taking up the Hogwarts Formula module. There aren’t enough strong supporting players (no equivalent Hagrid or Snape, for example) and, whatever you think about Harry Potter, it does have buckets of enviable charm which is beyond any formulaic approach.

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A vast arrangement of flowers including foxy lilies and other glories in the window, and another on the mantlepiece, and in the back room, all luxuriant, then on up the stairs … I shall never forget them. Or Harold’s expression. A mixture of excitement, triumph and laughter. It transpired he asked the flower lady from Grosvenor House and commissioned them. ‘Is it for a party?’ she asked. ‘No it’s for Sunday night.’

In 1975 Harold Pinter met Antonia Fraser. They were both in their mid forties and both in long term marriages; Fraser to a Conservative MP and Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant. Must You Go is an account, mostly gathered from Fraser’s diaries, of more than thirty happy years they spent together. For any reader interested in Pinter the artist, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Michael Billington’s excellent biography instead, but this is nevertheless a very good at at times very moving book.

Unlike Billington’s portrait, which drew attention for revealing Pinter’s long affair with Joan Bakewell, Must You Go doesn’t set out to spill any beans on the great man. In fact we can only really gather things from what is left out of the story, for example the abandonment and eventual decline of Merchant and Pinter’s estrangement from his son. Neither receive too much attention here, with Fraser keeping her distance from the people he chose to leave behind. There’s more emphasis on his lifelong friendships, which included Robert Shaw, Simon Gray and Samuel Beckett, and his new extended family (Fraser had six children from her first marriage).

It could also be argued that by the time Pinter had met Fraser he had already made his most artistic achievements, with his best works The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming already established as masterpieces. Perhaps happiness dulled his creative edge, and although he continued writing (Betrayal appeared in the early 80s) he did increasingly concentrate on poetry. And as the years march on, Pinter’s passion for politics begins to take prominence. Much of the book chronicles ugly moments in history; IRA bombs in London, The Rushdie affair (Salman Rushdie visits the Pinters under armed protection at the height of the Fatwa) and the Iraq war. Fraser is frank about their own shifting politics; Pinter voted conservative in 1979, SDP in a subsequent election and then finally Labour. In 1982, surprisingly, he supported the Falklands War.

Must You Go alludes to Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter’s very first meeting, and these are the first words he ever said to her. The phrase echoes through the book right until the end, and the closing diary entries recall an increasingly frail Pinter and he battled cancer. It’s a very intimate portrait of a fascinating man who enjoyed life as much as he could. In 2007, very sick, he appeared onstage for a short run in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, relishing again the joy of an actor that he had originally discovered at sixteen. Around the same time he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature, and enjoyed a revival of The Birthday Party. Busy until the end, his inevitable passing in 2008 was still a shock.

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