Books of the Year

In which I run through the novels I've read this year, and what inspired me to read them.


Notes from Underground and The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Continuing the Russian theme from the end of last year, I read these two short novels, the latter of which can be seen as an early sketch for his much later masterpiece Crime and Punishment.

The Return of the Native, The Well-Beloved and A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

Continuing my Thomas Hardy binge from last summer, I read one of his major and two of his minor novels.

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo

I read this novella, set in a dystopian Manhattan of the near future, after seeing the film version, which I didn't think really worked. The book is much better, as you'd expect from a writer of DeLillo's skill.

Metroland by Julian Barnes

I picked this up after reading a piece about it in The Guardian. It's a semi-autobiographical account of a young man growing up in the London suburbs in the fifties and spending time as a student in Paris in the late sixties before moving back to the Metroland of the title.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

This classic of mid-twentieth century teenage alienation had been on my bookshelf for a few years so I thought it was about time I read it.

Brighton Rock, A Gun for Sale and England Made Me by Graham Greene

Greene called these gangster thrillers "entertainments" but they nevertheless contain many of the moral and religious themes of his later novels.

Nemesis and The Human Stain by Philip Roth

I saw a review of Nemesis when it was published in 2010 but only got round to reading it this year. It's basically a reworking of La Peste by Albert Camus, relocated to mid-forties Newark, New Jersey. I read The Human Stain after seeing the film version with Anthony Hopkins. Its tale of a black man "passing" as white has echoes of one of this year's strangest news stories, that of Rachel Dolezal attempting the reverse.

The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

Like her better-known The Group, this, her debut novel, is another semi-autobiographical account set in New York in the thirties of a young women encountering its intellectual, political and literary milieu.

The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud

I love sequels, or prequels, to other writers' works (Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is one of my favourite novels) so I was attracted to this reworking of L'Etranger by Albert Camus, seen from the viewpoint of the victim rather than perpetrator of the murder on the beach.

Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn

I find the period between the wars in Britain, described and explored by some of my favourite writers such as Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton, fascinating. This murder mystery is a pretty convincing depiction of it.

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

A sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, written before it but only published this year, which I blogged about here.

Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri

Another reworking of a famous novel, this time transposing Joyce's early twentieth century Dublin to mid-eighties London and replacing Ulyssses' Stephen Dedalus with an Indian student of English Literature.

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea

This novel about the relationship between Mancunian-Irish sisters and mill operatives Mary and Lizzie Burns and the factory owner and Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels ticked quite a few boxes of things I'm interested in: left-wing politics, history, Germany, working-class feminism, and Manchester and Salford.

Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler

This had long been on my "must read" list and, like Forever Flowing by Vassily Grossman and The Case of Comrade Tulayev which I had read before, is about Stalin's Great Purge of the late thirties.

List of the Lost by Morrissey

Not quite as bad as the reviews suggest but could still have done with an editor chopping the text and Morrissey's long rants about his favourite subjects (vindictive judges, veganism, sadistic teachers).

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Dickens' first novel isn't much regarded by critics but I enjoyed this rambling tale of a group of gentlemen getting into scrapes as they travel around 1830's England.

My favourite Alt

I spent a few days in the Rhineland last week, going round pubs, Christmas markets and cathedrals in Düsseldorf and Cologne, which I've made half a dozen or so trips to in the past decade. I also went to Aachen for the first time.

I kicked off at Brauerei Schumacher on Ostrasse, partly because it's only a short walk from Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, but also because it's got a special place in my beer memories: in 2009, it was the first pub in which I drank Altbier.

When I last went to Düsseldorf a couple of years ago, I wrote that Uerige Alt was "fast approaching Füchschen as my favourite Alt". I reckon it's now finally made it to top spot: it seems far darker, heavier and hoppier than when I first drank it six years ago.

Zum Uerige is easily my favourite pub in Düsseldorf. The first time I went, it was summer and I sat at the tables opposite, drinking Alt and eating sausages from the pub's own butchery under the shade of a canopy, but the real magic is inside the pub itself. I love wandering along its narrow corridors discovering different rooms, each with their own distinct atmosphere, from the long-tabled Neweaan dining room to the large, standing Brauhof at the back. My favourite though is Der Uerige, the taproom at the front, not just for the theatre of wooden barrels being hoisted up from the cellar and lifted onto the bar by the waiters, before being swiftly emptied, but also because sharing the small tables with the mostly sociable regulars means it's easy to strike up conversations with your fellow drinkers, albeit thereby inflicting my no more than passable German on them.

Knock on wood

On Saturday night in Bar Fringe, a Belgian-style bar on the edge of Manchester city centre and Ancoats, I picked up a leaflet produced by the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood.

Although founded in 1963, eight years before CAMRA in 1971, the SPBW is much smaller and its role in promoting cask beer far less well-known. That's largely down to the esoteric name: as far as I know, the famously traditional Samuel Smith's in Yorkshire is the only British brewery which still regularly uses wooden casks. Even the SPBW's moniker has been kept solely for tradition's sake and it has no problem with draught beer dispensed from metal casks.

It also seems to be more of a social rather than a campaigning organisation, although CAMRA has a social as well as a consumer protection side too, and mainly based in the South of England, albeit with trips organised to pubs and breweries around the country. I'm tempted to send off my fiver and join and would be interested to know if anyone else has, and if so what their experience of it has been.

Then and now

I went to The Crown in Cheadle last night for the presentation of Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's Pub of the Month award.

In 1990, I worked round the corner as an office junior at a firm of solicitors for a few months before going to college and drank there at dinnertime occasionally, but I haven't been back since. So what's changed in the last twenty-five years?

It's still a smallish, L-shaped one-room pub (it was originally converted from a shop) although it's been opened out slightly, especially at the front which, as the photo from 1990 below shows, used to be a brick wall with windows along the top, giving the place a bit of a hole-in-the-wall feel. There's also the now obligatory smoking shelter outside at the back. It still sells well-kept Hydes mild and bitter, as well as a few guest beers now too.

And most importantly, it's still not just a pub but a regulars' local with a real community atmosphere.

The Pub and the People

Among the presents I got for my birthday last week was The Pub and the People. It's a study of pubs in a Lancashire town called "Worktown", actually Bolton, carried out in the late 1930's as part of the Mass Observation project.

Boak and Bailey and Ron at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins have both blogged about what a mine of information the book is: having read it, you feel as though you could recreate a 1930's Bolton pub.

Nearly all the draught beer drunk in "Worktown" is mild ale, either dark ordinary or light best (my local brewery Robinson's of Stockport had a light and dark version of their mild until they stopped brewing it earlier this year, and Hydes in Salford still do), and most of it comes from large regional breweries, Magees, Walkers and Threlfalls (my grandmother grew up in a Threlfalls pub in Wigan in the 1920's and in the 1930's worked as a barmaid at another in Stretford, where she met my grandfather, a toolmaker at the Metrovicks engineering factory in nearby Trafford Park).

A couple of surprising things: almost all the men in "Worktown" drink half-pints (women tend to drink bottled beer, mainly Guinness but also pale and brown ale), although both sexes switch to spirits, cider or bottled beer for the highlight of the "Worktown" calendar, the annual, booze-filled trip to the Lancashire seaside resort of Blackpool (where my grandparents spent their honeymoon). One lucky local is hired by the researchers to do an early evening crawl of the pubs in the town centre, getting through eight and half pints in, presumably, seventeen of them by half past nine.

The vault and the taproom are also separate rooms in the pub when I've always thought of them as being the same thing: the main difference seems to be that there's a bar in the first and you can play games in the second.

The pub is the centre of social life, hosting sporting and other clubs, trade union meetings and societies such as the Buffs (the Wigan branch of which met above the pub where my grandmother spent her childhood: she always referred to them, like the book does, as "the poor man's Masons"), as well as illegal, but officially overlooked, activities including gambling and prostitution.

The book also gives an interesting overview of the influence of religion and politics on "Worktown"'s drinking scene, from the fiercely teetotal Nonconformist sects and non-pub going middle-class councillors to the boozy working-class Irish Catholics who run the local Labour Party.

Zola on the radio

I listened to the first episode of a new dramatisation of the Rougon-Macquart novels by the French writer Emile Zola on Radio 4 yesterday.

I've read a few of the novels in the series, subtitled "Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire": Germinal, about a miners' strike in Northern France, La Terre, about life in the countryside outside Paris, La Bête Humaine, a psychological thriller about a homicidal railwayman, and Nana, about a prostitute/actress. The overall idea is to use the novel as a sort of science lab in which the effects of heredity and environment on human behaviour can be studied.

Glenda Jackson is convincing as Tante Dide, the matriarch of the extended Rougon-Macquart clan who narrates it, and the whole thing moves along at a smart pace. It seems to be fairly loosely translated from the text: a woman who in 1852 goes off to join Republican rebels fighting the National Army, after Napoleon III  has overthrown the Second Republic proclaimed in 1848 in a coup d'état, exclaims on seeing her new comrades for the first time "Cool!". I'm pretty sure that's not a line lifted from Zola.

Overall though, it's a enjoyable, and accessible, way of experiencing the novels and I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of the series,

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The actor Warren Mitchell who died yesterday aged 89 was best known for playing the working-class racist Alf Garnett in the 1970's TV comedy Till Death Us Do Part.

Unlike out-and-out racist comedies of the 1970's like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, it was Warren Mitchell and scriptwriter Johnny Speight's intention that viewers should laugh at, rather than with, the character they had created, but it didn't work out like that and Garnett became a hero to the bigots who took up his lines as their own. In an interview, Mitchell recounted how he, unlike West Ham-supporting Alf, a Spurs fan from an East London Jewish background, had once been embarrassed at a football match to become the subject of supportive chanting by racists on the terraces.

Garnett's views are challenged in the show, by his long-suffering wife and his left-wing "Scouse git" son-in-law (played by Labour-supporting actor Tony Booth), but they both tend to come off second best to him. A much better attempt to challenge racism by way of comedy in the 1970's was Rising Damp in which the reactionary views of boarding house landlord Rigsby are made to look ridiculous by a black and a white lodger, played by Don Warrington and Richard Beckinsale respectively, and the audience does end up laughing at his backward attitudes rather than having their prejudices reinforced.