Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location. 

Supping in the seventies

I've just finished reading Keg, an overview of British brewing in the seventies by Ron Pattinson.

I was born at the start of the decade so only have fragmentary memories of the mid to late seventies, but certain things continued into and up to the end of the eighties, when I began drinking in pubs.

The consolidation of British brewing in the sixties into the Big Six national groups (Allied, Bass, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys and Whitbread) with their large tied estates only began to break up after the introduction of the Beer Orders in 1989 - the first pub I drank in as a teenager was a Whitbread house, originally built by Manchester brewery Chester's and acquired by them when they bought Threlfalls in 1967, which finally shut last summer. The lack of choice and imposition of overpriced keg and bland national cask brands by them was a major factor in the formation of the Campaign for Real Ale in 1971 and the Big Six became their primary target throughout the seventies and eighties, although the fight against them ultimately backfired as they all subsequently sold up to global brewers with even less interest in cask beer or transformed themselves into non-brewing hotel, leisure and pub companies.

The seventies also saw lager's rise to dominance in the draught beer market, with the section on it here a snapshot of the longer, and fascinating, version in another of Ron's books, Lager.

Things which Ron mentions that I recall from the late eighties and early nineties, and which have either now disappeared or become far less common, include outside toilets, afternoon closing, drink driving, bottle-conditoned Guinness, milk stout, bottled beer mixed with draught, and not having a problem being served under the legal drinking age of 18 (the first place I drank draught beer as a 16 year old was a Labour club, after joining the Young Socialists in the 1987 General Election campaign, and which somewhat ironically is now a children's nursery. Around the same time, a couple of mates and myself sipped halves of Boddies bitter at dinnertime in a rather rough Salford estate pub, on a break from a Sixth Form thing across the road at the university, in our school uniforms). 

Smoking was of course ubiquitous and unremarked upon in pubs - the idea that it would become illegal within a couple of decades would have seemed incredible to most drinkers had it crossed our minds (I had an old coat that I only wore to my very smoky local and which stank of tobacco until I hung it out to air the next day). Other things in pubs that seemed immovable back then included men selling seafood on a Friday night and the football newspaper (pink in Manchester) on a Saturday evening, football pools coupon collectors and darts boards. You still occasionally saw older women having bottles and jugs filled with draught beer to take home. I'm not sure what the reaction to that request would be now, or to heavy drinking during working hours (Friday afternoons at Stockport social security office, where I worked in my late twenties and early thirties, were never the most productive after our extended dinnertime session at the Robbies pub round the corner).

I also recall as a kid in the seventies seeing lots of home brewing kits for sale in high street shops, the popularity of which was no doubt linked to the rising cost of draught beer in pubs, illustrated in the book by a handy table showing the average price of a pint of bitter increasing from 10p at the start of the decade to 34p at the end of it (Holt's cask bitter cost 79p a pint when I first drank it in 1989, and is now between £3 and £4.50 depending on the area the pub is in and how much the brewery has spent refurbishing it).

Books of the Year

I read a dozen books this year, mostly in short bursts rather than spread across the twelve months, including a few I've been meaning to get round to for a long time.

The Hard Life/At Swim Two Birds/The Dalkey Archive/The Third Policeman/The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien

I've read quite a bit of Flann O'Brien before, especially his Myles na Gopaleen columns in the Irish Times, and his novels are an extension of those, mixing Gaelic mythology, surrealism, philosophy and wit, including the archetypal Dublin character The Brother. Naturally pubs and boozing feature quite heavily too.

The Dead by James Joyce 

Back to Dublin again for this long and ethereal short story which I wrote about here.

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

Another long short story, about two French army officers fighting a series of duels throughout the Napoleonic Wars, which was made into a memorable film by Ridley Scott in the late seventies.

Catherine, or The Bower by Jane Austen 

I thought I'd read everything by Jane Austen until I came across this unfinished teenage novel by her. It's often included amongst her juvenilia, but the themes and settings are much closer to her later published works.

Munichs by David Peace

I've read Peace's other two football novels, The Damned United about Brian Clough's six week spell at Leeds and Red or Dead about Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, but this is understandably much darker than either, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in the offices beneath the stands at Old Trafford, the rainy streets of Manchester and the snowbound Munich hospital and hotel where the survivors of the 1958 air crash are taken.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I read this story about a young Indian man's encounters with the Buddha and lifelong journey of self discovery after seeing an interview with former Chelsea and now US women's football coach Emma Hayes in which she said that she gives it to new players when they join the squad.

My Century/The Call of the Toad by Günter Grass 

Two later, and less regarded, works by my favourite German writer, although, like his Crabwalk which I read last year, I enjoyed them both in different ways, the former a fragmented series of snapshots spanning each year in twentieth century German history and the latter a heartfelt piece about Polish-German reconciliation set in his native Baltic city, Danzig/Gdansk.

Kafka and The Dead

I haven't read as much as I normally do so far this year for various reasons, but yesterday I got round to something I probably should have before, James Joyce's short story The Dead, from his 1914 collection Dubliners.

As well as his novels, I've read other short stories from Dubliners, my favourite being Ivy Day in the Committee Room with its famous scene of bottles of stout being opened in the absence of a corkscrew by placing them in front of the fire and waiting for their stoppers to pop out (The Dead has a few beery references too: "three squads of bottles of stout and ale...drawn up according to their uniforms...black, with brown and red labels").

One of the things that struck me about The Dead is its almost Kafkaesque atmosphere, its plot resembling in some ways that of the short story A Country Doctor (a journey by horse-drawn cab through a dreamlike snowbound landscape late at night, awkward encounters with servants, and an epiphany about life and death).

Apart from being leading figures in modern European literature, Joyce and Kafka share a surprising number of similarities once you start thinking about them: born within just over a year of each other, in countries at the edge of multi-ethnic empires and with a growing national consciousness, expressed in both politics and culture, which would see them become independent states after World War I; writing in a language imposed by the colonial power rather than that of its native people; from prosperous middle class backgrounds, which they later largely rejected; plagued by health problems; a more prominent posthumous reputation than when they were alive; and having complex and ambivalent relationships with their fathers, women and religion.

Books of the Year

What I've read in 2023. As ever, it's an eclectic collection, largely based on films I've seen and then sought out the book or short story that they're based on.

A Laodicean/The Hand of Ethelberta/Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy 

I  completed my reading of Hardy's prose works with three of his minor, and least regarded, novels.

A Laodicean, a novel about the clash between modernity and tradition, has a remarkably similar opening to Franz Kafka's The Castle (a young surveyor walking down a country road at night, lost and looking for the village inn he is to stop at, before unexpectedly coming upon the castle where he has been hired to work).

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Maybe not quite up there with her major novels, but a thought provoking story nonetheless, set in her familiar Midlands countryside.

Tom Jones/Joseph Andrews/Shamela by Henry Fielding 

The first two are picaresque novels about young men making their way in the world, and getting into scapes as they travel round the country, and the last is Fielding's spoof of Samuel Richardson's best-selling epistolary novel Pamela.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson/Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood 

Having read the spoof, I moved on to the original, and then another parody of it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

A novel about the cultural limitations of a small Midwestern town before and during World War I, based on the one where Lewis grew up, with echoes of the small town Minnesota-set Lake Wobegon Days stories that I read as a teenager (there's also another very Kafkaesque scene in it, when a country doctor sets out on a winter night in a horse drawn carriage to visit a dying patient on an outlying farm).

Crabwalk by Günter Grass 

The quality of Grass's literary output definitely declined in his final decades, but I enjoyed this 2002 work about the sinking of a Nazi recreation ship packed with refugees by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic towards the end of World War II, mostly because it features characters from his earlier Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum , Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, which propelled him to fame.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean 

The novella on which the Hollywood film was based, it centres on the relationship between two brothers and their flyfishing father in early twentieth century Montana.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

I continued my out of sequence reading of Trollope's Barchester Chronicles with this entertaining tale about the political and clerical machinations around the appointment of a new bishop in a West Country cathedral city.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

A 1909 sci-fi short story about a future world whose inhabitants live in isolated pods which is an eerily prescient description of the Zoom age ("the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.").

Tomorrow by William Faulkner

A short story set in Faulkner's fictional Yokanapatawpha County, like Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now this is a good example of how you can turn ten pages of text into a two hour film (in this case, a stark black and white 1972 one starring Robert Duvall).

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball

Like the film, this features a black detective passing through a small Southern town, but there are some major plot differences between the novel and the the screenplay.

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

A fantastical tale about a larger than life Alabama salesman, later played on film by Albert Finney.

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Another sci-fi short story, from the fifties, about a future society where the Christmas shopping rush starts in September!

The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern

Rounding off the reading year, a festive short story which formed the basis of the classic Christmas film It's A Wonderful Life.

Resurrection of the Boddies

I went into town last night for the launch of a new CAMRA book, Manchester's Best Beer Pubs and Bars, at Café Beermoth. I bought a copy while I was there and am looking forward to perusing it.

The other draw was a beer brewed specially for the event by Runaway, Manchester Best, based on a seventies recipe for Boddingtons Bitter.

I drank Boddingtons, and the similar Chester's Bitter, as a teenager in the late eighties. Book and Bailey wrote here about a distinctive Manchester sub-style of very pale and dry, well-hopped beers, which Marble's Manchester Bitter is another attempt at recreating. There was also a beer from Blackjack on the bar last night which fitted the description as well.

Manchester Best has been distributed to the free trade in the area, so should be available on the bar of some of the city's many good pubs that are featured in the book soon.

I also popped into a couple of pubs that have opened in the last few weeks, the Victoria Tap at the railway station of that name and Pomona Island's new place in the city centre North Westward Ho, and was impressed both by their retro feel and reasonable prices for their locations.

Kafka and beer

I've been re-reading in the last few days some of the works of Franz Kafka, which I first discovered as a teenager in the eighties.

As with Dickens, Orwell, Patrick Hamilton, and his compatriot Jaroslav Hasek, there are very few novels or longer short stories by Kafka which don't feature pubs, beer, or the effects of drinking, often in the opening chapter or even paragraph: the young land surveyor K. in The Castle who arrives late on a winter night at the village inn where a "few peasants were still sitting over beer"; the victim of The Trial, Josef K., who on leaving the office at nine would "go to a beer hall, where until eleven he sat at a table"; and Metamorphosis, which can be seen as a description of a hangover.

Coming from a well-off, German speaking Jewish family, Kafka felt alienated by his class, language and religion from much of the society around him in early twentieth century Prague, but there was one thing he shared with his fellow Czechs: an appreciation of good beer, still ubiquitous in his native Bohemia.

Kafka's relationship with his father was a difficult one, but dying of tuberculosis at the age of forty in a sanatorium outside Vienna in 1924, and unable to swallow much, he wrote to his parents about how "during heat spells, we used to have beer together quite often, many years ago, when Father would take me to the Civilian Swimming Pool" and recalled the same childhood memory to his girlfriend Dora who nursed him there:

"When I was a little boy, before I learnt to swim, I sometimes went with my father, who also can't swim, to the non-swimmer's section. Then we sat together naked at the buffet, each with a sausage and a half litre of beer...You have to imagine, that enormous man holding by the hand a nervous little bundle of bones, or the way we undressed in the dark in the little changing room, the way he would then drag me out, because I was embarrassed, the way he tried to teach me his so-called swimming, etcetera. But then the beer!"

I'm still hoping to go to Prague myself one day, possibly when the sleeper train from Berlin starts running there next year; I'll be sure to raise a glass of pivo to him when I finally get there.

 

Books of the Year

I seem to have read a few more books than normal this year, partly because I've got into online and eBooks (Project Gutenberg is a good resource for that). Many of my choices have been inspired by watching TV or film adaptations of novels.

The Adventures of Phillip by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started the year with the sequel to the unfinished novel I ended 2021 with, A Shabby Genteel Story.

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc 

Belloc was a great walker and this travel journal with his own illustrations documents the pilgrimage he made in 1902 from Toul, the French town where he had completed his military service, to Rome.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

I've had this on my bookshelves for years, and finally got round to reading it after seeing another TV adaptation of it. 

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

A very topical novel set in a plague struck seventeenth century Lombardy, with both religious and class themes.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I read this after watching the film, which has significant plot differences from the novel. Steinbeck interleaves his tale of Dust Bowl refugees in thirties California with political commentary generalising from the experiences of its characters.

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

A classic example of how you can turn a longish short story  into a two hour film.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

Having read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's famously long novel In Search of Lost Time, I moved onto the second, in which the upper class Parisian characters travel to a Normandy seaside resort for the summer.

The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

France appears as a character in Proust, which led me to this, his best known work.

The Card by Arnold Bennett

Having lived in Stoke as a student in the early nineties, I recognised many of the locations in this Potteries-set comic novel about an ambitious young man.

Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt

A modern recreation of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic interwar tramp across Central Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musill

Also set in Central Europe, at a military academy on the edge of the Austria-Hungarian empire before WWI, this novel strongly prefigures the militarism and fascism about to overwhelm the continent.

Hell Is A City by Maurice Proctor

I blogged about the film based on this Mancunian detective thriller here, although there's a major plot difference at the end of the novel.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I think we all know what this book is about.

Ritual by David Pinner

The novel on which the film The Wicker Man is loosely based, although again there are major plot differences.

Adam Bede/Felix Holt/Middlemarch by George Eliot

A midsummer blitz of works by the English Midlands most famous novelist.

The Professor/Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Some unkind critics have claimed that this is really the same novel written twice, one with a male and the other a female protagonist, and both draw on the author's experiences teaching at a school in Brussels.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Political crisis wracks England as a mysterious virus from the Far East sweeps across Europe and climate change threatens human existence in this prophetic sci-fi novel.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré

Somewhat ironically, I read this Cold War spy thriller straight through while sheltering indoors on the hottest day of the year.

The Decembrists/The Devil by Leo Tolstoy

An unfinished sequel to the much longer War and Peace, although started before it, and a short story about a love triangle involving a rich young man who inherits a country estate.

The Misfits by Arthur Miller

A cinematic novel based on the screenplay for the modern Western which was the last film of both Miller's then wife Marilyn Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable.

The Attack on the Mill/The Flood/The Fête at Coqueville by Émile Zola

Having  read most of his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, I whipped through a few of Zola's short stories, the first two about disasters striking rural communities, and the last a comedy about washed up barrels of wine overcoming ancient enmities in a Normandy fishing village.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame based the character of Toad in his Thamesside children's story on the politician Horatio Bottomley, but his boundless ego and reckless self-promotion inevitably brings to mind the first of this year's three Prime Ministers.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

You can't read this novel, which combines espionage, comedy, romance and religion, without thinking of the title character in the film version played by Alec Guinness (like Greene, a convert to Catholicism who often struggled with his faith).

 

 

Books of the Year

I don't seem to have read quite as many books this year as I normally do, averaging about one a month, although some of them were quite lengthy I suppose.

Between the Woods and the Water/The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started the year where I had finished the last, on a bridge across the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary, following a young Patrick Leigh Fermor on his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople through interwar Central Europe, and then onto Greece and the monasteries of Mount Athos.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

I first saw the film of this years ago, and finally got round to reading the novel it's based on.

The West Pier/Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse/Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton

The final novels by one of my favourite writers, published in the early to mid fifties before his decline and death from alcoholism, about a psychopathic conman moving around southern England between the wars.

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Another TV adaptation I watched years ago where I finally got round to reading the novel it's based on. I especially enjoyed the description of the countryside around the Malvern Hills where it's set.

Oliver Twist/A Tale of Two Cities/Barnaby Rudge/Nicholas Nickleby/The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Or How I Completed My Reading of the Works of Mister Charles Dickens, Including His Final, and Unfinished, Novel.

A Shabby Genteel Story by William Makepeace Thackeray

Another unfinished novel, about the characters inhabiting a run down boarding house in the seaside resort of Margate one winter in the 1830s.

Ageing (dis)tastefully

I've just picked up online a cheap secondhand copy of Vintage Beer by Patrick Dawson. 

The book includes includes the basics of conditioning beer for months, or even years, at home, from the right environment in which to store it (ideally a deep cellar, but failing that somewhere cool and dark where sunlight or rising temperatures aren't going to affect the taste of your beers) and the beer styles that age best (high in alcohol, dark and bottle-conditioned, so strong ales, imperial stouts, Belgian lambics and sour brown ales). 

The author concedes that, after a revelatory moment sipping a three year old bottle of Duvel, his first attempts at ageing were a disaster, and that many beers still taste best fresh, including IPAs (although Worthington's White Shield is noticeably different at varying stages of its development and, as David Hughes says in his book A Bottle of Guinness, Please, any bottle-conditioned beer is going to undergo changes over time, both good and bad - that natural variability is part of the experience). He also notes that other beers will never taste right until a few years in the cellar have knocked the rough edges off them, citing Thomas Hardy's strong ale (having only drunk it young, I concur).

My main problem with ageing bottled beers - whether Fuller's Imperial Stout or Vintage Ale, Courage Russian Imperial Stout, White Shield or Duvel - is that having bought them I invariably want to drink them, and the longest I've managed to keep my hands off them is a few months before Christmas and New Year, when I've raided my stash until the cupboard is bare (I suppose I need to misplace one and then find it a decade later). The other thing is that, as with fine wine, you really need a century or so to bring out some of the deeper flavours in these beers.

Brooklyn beer and baseball

I've just read Beer School: Bottling Success At the Brooklyn Brewery, a cheap secondhand copy of which I picked up online. It's an unusual book, a cross between a company history and a business manual.

I first drank their flagship Brooklyn Lager, an amber, all-malt brew loosely based on the Vienna-type beers produced in the United States before Prohibition, about twenty years ago. In the early to mid 2000s, I also went on three holidays to New York, each time making at least one trip out to Shea Stadium in Queens for a Mets game, and picked up in a bar at JFK Airport the Brooklyn beer mat that still sits on my desk (since the late fifties, when the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, the borough of Brooklyn has been bereft of a major league baseball team, and by the mid seventies lacked a brewery too. In the summer of 1986, as the Mets batted themselves towards their second World Series championship, Brooklyn Brewery's founders were watching on a TV set - drinking homebrew and sketching out their business plan - in the backyard of the apartment building they both then lived in. They are also linked by graphic design: the brewery's swirling logo was based on the Dodgers' iconic "B", while the Mets' combines their colours with those of the city's other lost National League baseball team, uptown Manhattan's New York Giants).

Being based at first in a still edgy section of a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn means that amongst the entrepreneurial advice are stories of hairy experiences in those early years: threatening calls from besuited Italian guys in limos befitting "business agents" of Mob-fronted construction union locals; burglars dropping through the skylight to steal crates of beer later retrieved from a neighbourhood convenience store; and armed robbers holding guns to the heads of warehouse workers before emptying the safe.

Fifty Years of Beer

I've just got my copy of 50 Years of CAMRA by Laura Hadland, an official history published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Campaign for Real Ale, which was founded on a drinking holiday to Ireland in March 1971.

As you'd expect, the book has material in it from every part of the country and decade of the campaign's history - much of it from its newspaper What's Brewing, which has just been axed to cut costs - but the section on the early days has a definite tilt towards the North West, which is unsurprising given that the four founder members all came from Lancashire, including two from Salford.

So how different does the campaign look now as it enters its sixth decade?

The organisation in the early seventies was obviously a lot smaller - although it grew from the original four to five thousand in the first couple of years - and had a much looser structure, with fewer branches covering larger areas, a single employee, to process membership applications, and initially didn't do either of the things it is now probably most associated with - organising the Great British Beer Festival and publishing the Good Beer Guide - but on the other hand undoubtedly had a much higher proportion of young and active members, ready to turn out for meetings, demos and social events  (more than a hundred and fifty thousand overwhelmingly paper members, who joined at a beer festival or through a gift membership, but are never seen by their local branches, and a national executive elected on a very low turnout, and known only by a handful of activists, are both relatively recent phenomena).

Like other parts of society, CAMRA has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, with pubs shut for most of the last year and financial pressures forcing it to furlough many of its headquarters staff as two of its major income streams - new membership applications and beer festivals - respectively slowed down and disappeared entirely, and the decision to press ahead with a third, publication of the Good Beer Guide with its lucrative pre-Christmas sales, looking more like a commercial decision than a campaigning one.

So what now for CAMRA?

Two of the issues it faces - the ongoing closure of pubs and an ageing active membership not being adequately replaced by younger people at branch level - each predate the pandemic, even if it will likely worsen things on both fronts, and in the latter case is something seen across all voluntary organisations and societies.

In the future, I can see CAMRA becoming something like a beer drinkers' equivalent of the National Trust, an organisation that people have a direct debit to because they broadly support its aims and/or like the benefits that membership brings, but aren't willing to give up their spare time to work at festivals for or interested in becoming involved with the running of, with the labour of a decreasing band of volunteers increasingly replaced by that of paid staff (obviously I will be attempting to swim against that tide myself by resuming activity with my own local branch in Stockport and South Manchester, now like all the others in lockdown-induced hibernation, once I've had my Covid jabs and the pubs are back open as normal).

Books of the Year

I've had a bit more time than expected for books this year, for obvious reasons; getting out into the countryside regularly for long walks also enhanced my appreciation of the rural scenes in some of the novels I read.

The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll 

I read this short novel, about a young German soldier travelling by rail towards the Eastern Front in World War II, and what he thinks will almost certainly be his death, after hearing it recommended on Radio 4's A Good Read.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Another novel about a young soldier in World War II, an American prisoner of war who experiences the Allied firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe 

I read this novel about life in a postwar Midlands factory and the terraced streets around it after watching the film based on the book, part of the new wave of social realist film and literature by working-class actors and writers.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

This had been on my bookshelf waiting to be read for a while. It combines time travel and gender switching in a very postmodern way for a novel written in the late 1920s.

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

Another postmodern novel which I read after seeing the film adaptation of it, starring Meryl Streep as the title character and Jeremy Irons as the upper middle-class fossil collector who meets and falls in love with her while walking along the shoreline near Lyme Regis on the south coast of England (and which I might just get to return to the still closed public library almost a year after borrowing it).

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe 

I don't need to tell you why I read this in March. Some of the parallels with the current pandemic are uncanny: people shielding in their houses, or being confined to them, while wealthier families bribe officials and escape London to their second homes in the country, thus spreading the disease there, cash being seen as a potential source of infection, wild rumours and theories about the causes and origin of the plague sweeping through the city.

Summer by Albert Camus 

A short essay about Camus' native Algeria, famous for the line "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer", a sentiment that seems particularly apt this year.

The Mill on the Floss/Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot 

A mill on the bend of a river outside a small town on the Lincolnshire-Nottinghamshire border and the flat land around it are the settings for a tragic story about a brother and sister growing apart until finally reunited in death. The second book is a collection of three short novels, the first volume of fiction Eliot published, about Anglican clergymen in the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwen

A dark novel which switches between the emotions sparked by  the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disturbing legacy of wartime German occupation in rural southern France.

The Scorpion God/Envoy Extraordinary/Pincher Martin by William Golding

The first two are novellas set in the ancient world, and the last a short novel about a drowning sailor in the North Atlantic in World War II, in which Golding served as a naval officer, whose plot is almost impossible to describe without revealing the twist at the end of it.

 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 

This rambling shaggy dog story about a young man and his battle recreation-obsessed uncle, complete with lengthy diversions, diagrams and squiggles, was considered unfilmable until a screen version starring Steve Coogan was released in 2006.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

I read this Trumpian tale of a self-made American businessman after seeing this, banned by Amazon, review of it.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall/Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë 

The two novels by the youngest and least known of the there literary sisters both deal with the position of women in mid-Victorian society, one the estranged wife of an alcoholic gentleman and the other a farmer's impoverished daughter forced to become a children's governess.

The Good Soldier Sjvek by Jaroslav Hasek

I picked up this long comic novel about the wanderings of an eternally cheerful soldier through the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I after seeing this article by Adrian Tierney-Jones (I finally got round to reading A Time of Gifts, the first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his walk across interwar Europe, from Rotterdam to Constantinople via Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for the same reason).

When the weather is warmer, and the virus has been suppressed, the vaccine proved effective and travel restrictions lifted, so probably in the spring of 2022 now, I plan on finally making my own trip to Austria and Bohemia and, as Richard Boston said of his visit to Prague on a mid-sixties rail holiday through Central Europe in his book Beer and Skittles, spend a few days "going from place to place drinking this wonderful beer and feeling more and more like the good soldier Sjvek".

Really the Blues

Having listened to the post-war recordings of blues pianist Cousin Joe Pleasant on which he plays clarinet alongside Sidney Bechet on soprano saxophone, I was prompted to pick up Really the Blues, the autobiography of Mezz Mezzrow, who was known in the jazz world as much for being a raconteur and sometime drug dealer as he was for his playing.

Born Milton Mesirow in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family of "doctors, lawyers, dentists and pharmacists" on Chicago's Northwest Side, he was soon running with a street gang which congregated at the corner of Western Avenue and Division and as a teenager spent time in juvenile detention for car theft (the book's memorable opening lines are: "Music school? Are you kidding? I learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory."). He also found his way to the South Side Chicago jazz clubs, including the De Luxe Café at 35th and State where he first met Bechet.

In 1928, Mezzrow moved to New York, living on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from the African-American section of uptown Manhattan whose clubs he began playing in, and where he became friends with Louis Armstrong.

In 1941, he was sentenced to 1-3 years for possession with intent to supply marijuana and sent to Rikers Island, where, in an echo of the Rachel Dolezal case, he managed to "pass" as black and be allocated to the block for African-American prisoners which housed friends and fellow musicians from Harlem. Released at the end of 1942, he resumed playing on the New York jazz scene before leaving for France in the early fifties, where he died in 1972 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The book includes an appendix that discusses the technical differences between New Orleans and Chicago-style jazz, an afterword that describes the "transculturation" by which Mezzrow came to see himself as "a pure Black", a self-identification which would surely, and rightly, not go unchallenged now, and a glossary of "hip" slang, including "mezz" for marijuana, as in this song by Stuff Smith.

Books of the Year

My annual review of what I've read in the last twelve months.

Lady Susan/Sanditon/The Watsons by Jane Austen

Sanditon, Austen's last, and unfinished, novel, was filmed by ITV this year in an adaptation that I unexpectedly enjoyed. As it's quite a short book, the volume also includes the epistolary novel Lady Susan and an early, also unfinished, work, The Watsons, and thus I completed my reading of her entire oeuvre.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The archetypal Dostoevsky, and indeed Russian, novel, dealing with religious themes through the framework of a murder mystery within the network of an extended family made up of contrasting characters, including the titular brothers.

The Manchester Man by G.L. Banks

This rags to riches story of the main character, Jabez Clegg, might be a bit corny, but is also full of descriptions of early nineteenth century Manchester, from the River Irk at Smedley, into which he is swept as an infant, to the area around the Cathedral and Chethams School, which he later attends as a foundling scholar.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I was prompted to read this by the thirtieth anniversary of the furore around its publication (I'd already read pretty much every other Rushdie novel).

The Third Man/The Basement Room by Graham Greene

I read Greene's classic novel about post-war Vienna after watching the film, together with one of his short stories included in the same volume which he also wrote a screenplay for and Carol Reed directed, The Fallen Idol.

A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving

I read The World According To Garp a few years ago, and have also seen the film Simon Birch, which is loosely based on the diminutive title character of this book, that you could call Irving's Vietnam novel.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

The first of seven volumes in Proust's multi-million word work Remembrance of Things Past. Some people seem to struggle with the first section, about his childhood in Normandy, but I thought it was the best, that the middle section, about his love affair with the courtesan Odette as a young man in Paris, dragged a bit, before picking up with a return to the countryside of his youthful memory in the final section.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

This novel about bored rich Americans wandering around post-World War II Europe drinking and falling in love reminded me a bit of one of my favourites, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Being Hemingway, there's also lots about bullfighting and fishing.

Two On A Tower by Thomas Hardy

We're back in Hardy's familiar Wessex territory here with a story about two star-crossed lovers (literally: the young astronomer in it meets his future wife atop the tower which the older, richer woman lets him use for his observations of the night sky).

Oh Manchester, so much that Pevsner saw

I was reading a blogpost last week by an American visitor to the Marble Arch, the classic pub on the Ancoats/Collyhurst border a few hundred yards up Rochdale Road from Manchester city centre, and noticed a reference to a description of it in the Pevsner Guide to the Architecture of Manchester ("unusual jack-arch ceiling with exposed cast-iron beams supported by tile-clad brackets. Walls and ceiling of the main bar are lined with glazed bricks and tiles and a lettered frieze advertises types of drink") published in 2001.

I've got the South Lancashire volume of Pevsner's The Buildings of England that covers Manchester, which he wrote after a visit here in 1967 and published in 1969, but didn't realise that the series had continued after his death in 1983. I've just picked up a cheap second hand copy of the Manchester guide online.

There are a few other pubs in the book, including the Britons Protection ("early C19 revamped in the 1930s, with much interior decoration"), Circus ("an almost miraculous survival considering the tiny scale of it") and Hare and Hounds ("late C18 origins with a remarkably complete interwar interior"), but the main interest is in how the city is described in that period, between the opening of what is now the Manchester Central conference centre in 1986, the 1990 Strangeways prison riot which destroyed much of the Victorian gaol just north of the city centre (next to the tower of Boddingtons Brewery that survived until 2007), the coming of the Metrolink tram system in 1992 and the 1996 IRA bomb, which triggered much of the redevelopment of the centre, and the rampant skyscraper building which has transformed it in the last decade, including an artist's impression of what the new Piccadilly Gardens with its now much criticised wall would eventually look like.

The Missing Page

I've been watching, and unexpectedly enjoying, Sanditon, ITV's adaptation of Jane Austen's final and unfinished novel about a town on the south coast of England being transformed into a Regency seaside resort, which she was writing until shortly before her untimely death at the age of 41 in 1817.

Although sequels are almost always inferior to the original classics whose success they seek to cash in on (Lewis after Inspector Morse, the awful Blues Brother 2000), finishing uncompleted novels either on the page or screen tends to work better (I'm also a fan of prequels which establish the background and motivations of well-known characters - as Endeavour does with Inspector Morse, or, in one of my favourite novels, that of Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea).

The text of Sanditon is only about sixty pages long, so most of the TV series is the work of screenwriter Andrew Davies who, rather than messing around too much with the plot and characters, has managed to extend some of the novel's themes - slavery, racism, financial speculation - that are only hinted at by Austen.

The pre-eminent example of an unfinished work of literature is of course Lady Don't Fall Backwards by Darcy Sarto, as brought to life by East Cheam's inimitable man of letters Anthony Aloysius Hancock.

Auf Wiedersehen Yet?

I've just picked up online a cheap secondhand copy of the Good Beer Guide to Munich and Bavaria, published by CAMRA in 1994 and written by Graham Lees, one of the four founders of the organisation (I especially like his dedication of the book "to all who appreciate good beer, regardless of borders").

Although I went to pubs in Dublin and the West of Ireland in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was as much for their historical/political and literary associations (notably the Brazen Head and McDaid's) as the beer (invariably Guinness), and my first specifically beer trip was to Germany at the end of 2009, to Düsseldorf and Cologne, followed by one to Munich and southern Bavaria in the summer of 2010 (when I accidentally attended the wedding of footballer Philip Lahm in Aying). I've been back to Düsseldorf and Cologne numerous times since then, and to the nearby towns Aachen, Bonn, Ratingen and Wuppertal, and in 2012 travelled to Upper Franconia in northern Bavaria to sample the very special pubs and beers of Bamberg and Forchheim.

Apart from some brewery takeovers and reorganisations, not that much seems to have changed on the beer front in south-eastern Germany in the last twenty-five years, thanks no doubt to the Bavarians' well-known conservatism (in both brewing and politics). The beechwood-smoked malt lager Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen is described as "virually black as coal" rather than the dark brown that I remember it being on draught in the brewery tap, but I think that might just be a question of perception rather than any change in the grist, and the warning that train travel around the state is expensive unless you book tickets in advance has been superseded by the relatively inexpensive Bayern day ticket, which covers buses, trams and underground services too. The advice that "Bavaria, especially in country areas, is likely to be a little stomach-shrinking for vegetarians" is probably still true given the locals' propensity to wash down huge plates of pork and sausage dishes with their litre steins of lager, and the description of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich as "plagued by coachloads of gawping tourists" (not to mention the oompah band) certainly is.

The next beer trip I'm planning is to central Europe, travelling by train from Prague to Plzeñ, Regensburg, Freising, Munich and Salzburg, although it'll probably be in the winter rather than summer months given the punishingly hot weather that now seems to afflict that part of the continent almost annually, and that direct flights between Salzburg and Manchester only appear to depart during the skiing season (assuming that planes and visa-free travel are still operating then).

Catch-22 on TV?

Last night Channel 4 broadacast the first episode of a new adaptation of Joseph Heller's anti-war novel Catch-22, starring George Clooney.

Catch-22, set on an American airbase on an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy in World War II, is regularly listed amongst the greatest novels of the twentieth century which everyone should read (I first read it about thirty years, pretty much straight though in a single day). The "catch" of the titles refers to the fact that to be withdrawn from combat duty pilots and aircrew have to be diagnosed insane, but them asking to be so is taken as indicating their sanity.

As with the earlier film adaptation in the 1970s, I'm not sure that Catch-22 really translates to either the big or small screen. It's not just that the structure of the novel, with many of the early chapters focusing on the foibles and interior life of an individual character, has to be altered to fit a more linear narrative on TV, but the zaniness, transmitted in its five hundred or so pages by Heller's prose, in descriptive passages as well as dialogue, can't really be rendered either.

When you don't laugh at an adaption of a novel which almost defines "black humour", that's a problem.

In and Out of Some Stockport Pubs

The chairman of Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA John Clarke is putting together a list of pubs which have closed in the branch area since it was formed in 1974.

As part of the discussion around that, someone mentioned a book I hadn't heard of before, The Inns and Outs of Stockport Taverns by Coral Dranfield, so I got myself a copy of it.

Since the book's publication in 2011, quite a few of the historic pubs it lists have closed, including the Florist, Shaw Heath, the Flying Dutchman, Higher Hillgate, the Waterloo just off it, the George, Wellington Road North, and Winters, Little Underbank; one, the Pack Horse/Cocked Hat, has shut and then re-opened, whilst another, and possibly the oldest of them all, the Angel Inn on the Market Place, has recently reverted to being a pub, having shut as one in the early 50s.

Although I've been on guided walks and cellar tours around them, I didn't know that the Bakers Vaults and Boars Head on the Market Place once had, respectively, marines billetted with them or a pole in the bar where you could tie up your pig, or that the steps next to the Queen's Head on Little Underbank used to be closed one day a year to stop a public right of way being created there. I also didn't know that the Blossoms in Heaviley used to be called the Wellington Arms, or that the now closed Wellington Inn (also known as the Ups and Downs because the upper half was above the elevated Wellington Road South and the lower half beneath it, close to Mersey Square) was originally called the Wellington Bridge Inn to avoid confusion with the former.

Stockport's obsession with the  Anglo-Irish general and politician (I once worked for the civil service at Apsley House on Wellington Road North, next to Wellesley House, before transferring to Heron House on Wellington Street, just off Wellington Road South, and round the corner from the Waterloo) continues with the Wellington Free House, which opened last year a bit further up the A6. We once had a works Christmas do at the White Lion, also now closed, another contender for Stockport's oldest pub.