So what about all those books?

Phillip Marlowe: more integrity than any Nabakov creation

After all the fuss about what books I was going to cart from London to the south of France, the question now is: was it worth it?

Well, the list ended up very much as I wrote on 6 August: I was half way through Marco Vichi’s Death in August, the first Inspector Bordelli mysteries, and so brought that to finish it.

Then, in order of how they were read, came Gore Vidal’s Julian, Nabakov’s Laughter in the Dark, Paul O’Grady’s At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and finally, a collection of Thomas Mann’s short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan.

Briefly: it took me until about half way to get into Vichi’s tale, but once there, I was planning getting the subsequent books.

An intriguing and pleasantly intricate plot, plus some very human development and back story.

The Chandlers are – well, wonderful. Chandler was a poet. And Marlowe is a superb creation.

The Newman was thoroughly enjoyable: I was slightly wary of his era on this one, being as the first world war was so horrific, but I think he gets away with it (it is an alternative history, after all). It’s well written and loaded with very clever literary and history references. This is vampire fiction for people with brains.

Paul O'Grady as the magnificent Lily Savage

The first volume of Paul O’Grady’s autobiography is excellent – I bombed through 500 pages in little more than a day. Massively readable – a superb and utterly convincing memoir of growing up in post-war working-class Birkenhead: funny and poignant and very honest. I look forward to reading the second volume.

Now (cracks fingers) for the somewhat longer considerations.

Vidal’s Julian is superb: light and yet based on serious historical knowledge and understanding. It’s not for nothing that Vidal was so highly regarded as a writer of historical fiction.

It’s witty, catty, bitchy, sharp, and also humane, human, poignant and, in the end – and despite what one might expect – very moving. Remarkably, even though he doesn’t create a set of characters that are intended to be easily likeable, by the denouement, you actually hold the eponymous Julian in enough regard that you care what happens to him and how.

In the meantime, the book has Things to Say. And the biggest thing that it has to say is about the nature of religion as a whole and Christianity specifically.

The dominant point about Christianity that Vidal makes is that none of it was unique: that it was all plagiarised from other, older religions.

But he does it, as you would expect, beautifully.

Then we move to the Nabakov.

Now I’ll say, to begin with that I rate Lolita as an astonishing and brilliant book, and Pale Fire is just sheer genius. I don’t think that anyone in the 20^th century used language in the way that Nabakov did.

The Blue Angel – well before Laughter in the Dark

And to be strictly fair, the author himself never claimed to ‘say’ anything or ‘mean’ anything.

But in lacking any morality – for want of a better word – his books leave a certain coldness. And Laughter in the Dark is no exception.

Indeed, the idea of the upright man brought low by a woman wasn’t even an entirely original premise: to mention just one, Heinrich Mann had done it in 1905 with Professor Unrat, which became the iconic movie, The Blue Angel.

So what does Nabakov bring to that theme? Well, nothing, except the cleverness.

Yes, it’s clever: he wrote it in Russian originally, but translated it into English himself – another mark of the genius of the man – but for all the cleverness, it’s lack of a soul is telling.

I wonder how much Nabakov has influenced more recent English literature (and the “English” is deliberate and intended to be quite specific).

How many writers have felt that they wanted to rise to the challenge of Nabakov’s literary brilliance, but cannot offer even that in order to compensate for what are, essentially, the stories of nasty people with no redeeming features?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I won’t read any more. Nabakov can dazzle. But his entire oeuvre doesn’t have the integrity that Chandler brings to a single short volume.

And it leaves you with a slightly uncomfortable taste – almost as though you were guilty of some verboten indulgence.

And so to Mann. Well, I’ve only just started the collection in question, but what a joy to be back with him. And he makes for a fascinating comparison with Nabakov.

Maybe it’s just my rather puritanical, northern European Protestant background, but I found myself relieved to be back with Thomas: moral, ethical, thinking, questioning, doubting Thomas. Nothing rushed, but everything planned and executed with the greatest care and deliberation.

Mann might have lacked the obvious flair that Nabakov had, but I know which I prefer. And I know which, in spite of the surface cleverness, I think is actually the better writer – and the writer whose work and thought continues to have genuine relevance for our times.

Although the more I think of it, perhaps Nabakov is the writer for our days: all style and no substance. Just as Dalì was an artist that was the father of an art for our times, in much the same mode.

So if you don’t like such depressing thoughts, stick with Mann for real substance: or Vidal, for that matter. For all the literary fireworks, both ultimately show Nabakov wanting and leave him standing. And if that's heresy, I'm with Vidal on that subject.

How many books can I pack?

Gore Vidal – purveyor of light fiction?

It's the time of the year of The Book. Or rather, The Books. How many? What sort? Light? Heavy? Fiction? Non-fiction?

This year, the great debate about holiday reading matter has only begun earnestly far later than usual.

An initially rather ambitious list had been sketched out in my mind for some time, but the ensuing weeks had seen it redrafting itself in less literary terms.

It was the moment, I'd decided, for Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The chance to spend pretty much entire days reading is the perfect time to get into such a book.

But with a certain rueful sadness, I've been pushing that idea toward touch. Frankly, I'm just too tired.

I had also been contemplating Lewis Lockwood's Beethoven: The music and the life, but have abandoned that in favour of the first volume of Paul O'Grady's autobiography, At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, which has been recommended as a damned good – and very funny – read.

But then something rather unusual happened – unusual, that is, because in general, I'm a rather slow reader and because, right now, I'm spectacularly knackered.

Yet in successive weekends, I've swept through The Lady in the Lake and The High Window, with Simenon's Maigret and the Black Sheep (poorly translated, since you ask) in between, so it struck me that a full-blown Raymond Chandler binge seems to be on the cards.

In which case, my Book Club 1979 omnibus, containing Playback, The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister, looks set to travel. It was one of my first real adult books, and it's got Bogart on the cover.

St one time or another, I've read all the Philip Marlowe novels, but with the exception of The Big Sleep, none of them for a good 20 years or more.

No extra Maigret will travel, because they're so short that I've had to take a shed load to make it worth while.

It did raise the point in my mind, though, of the snobbery that still surrounds genre fiction. Chandler's novels are superbly written – there's a poetic quality to the prose – with both intelligence and an understanding of the universal human condition.

I'd suggest that they have far more to say to us (and are a vastly better read) than much of what I've read in recent years that passes as modern English 'literature' (it's a wonder how Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend, for instance – a book that I was handed to review when a positive review was demanded – has ever received plaudits: it has so much less subtlety than anything Chandler wrote, yet it's 'literature').

Jean Gabin: 'Maigret needs you!'

Simenon may not be in quite the same class – although that may not be helped by translation matters – but the Maigret novels are still stylish and tight, with an underlying empathy for the ordinary man and woman in the street.

Only a short while ago, Iain Banks died. Hailed for his literary works such as The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, but less so for his sci-fi novels, which were even published under the ever-so-slightly different name of Iain M Banks.

Literature and genre fiction, it seems to say, can never quite meet.

But Banks's Culture novels are not simply great yarns -–and they are most certainly that – but they also have depth, and use the world he created to explore some fascinating ideas.

And Consider Phlebas is, for me, that very rare beast: a sci-fi novel that I've read more than once - a stonkingly good space opera that goes beyond any confinements of (sub) genre and into being a good piece of literature.

Terry Pratchett is another who suffers from this snobbery about the divide between genre fiction and Literature, although the volume and overall consistency of the quality of his satire has, to an extent, forced the naysayers' backs against the wall.

Admittedly, that's partly because satire is a very English form of literature, with a long and glistening tradition - even if some people seem to have forgotten that Pride and Prejudice is essentially a satire and not an 18th-century rom-com.

Tom Sharpe – another who has lately departed this life – was a particularly savage example of the species and, as a satirist, his work was never subject to stuck-up-nose syndrome.

Incidentally, if you haven't read them, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two novels, which are an assault (and battery) on apartheid in South Africa, are well worth a read. Having visited Pietermaritzburg, where both novels are set, it's almost frightening real. Indeed, I'll swear blind I've actually met one of his characters there.

Personally, I think Pratchett is better: where Sharpe most often seems just to be rage, with Sir Terry, there's a deep underlying humanity, and his characters are far more rounded than Sharpe – or, for that matter, PG Wodehouse.

Finally – the light fiction.

Samuel Vimes, for instance, who appears in a number of the Discworld novels, is a delightful and enormously believable creation.

And Pratchett too is the one author I can think of who has made me howl with laughter on one page and shed a tear just a turn of the page later.

If the difference between literature and popular fiction is that, at core, the former makes you think, then Pratchett does that. As does Iain M Banks.

But back to the books list. After such a sudden spurt of reading, I'm back in the mood for some more serious stuff.

So the pile – and it does exist as a real, actual pile – is now made up of a collection of Mann's short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan, plus Gore Vidal's Julian and Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark.

Then there's the O'Grady, plus the second installment of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula alternative history/horror/steampunk/fantasy series, The Bloody Red Baron (I read the first part in Collioure last summer and it was very good).

And some more crime fiction in Involuntary Witness, a police procedural from Italy's Gianrico Carofiglio.

Now remind me: this is the easy reading selection, right?

Farewell Ratzi and thanks for all the bigotry

Thomas Mann – damned by the Pope.

Isn’t identity a funny thing? Okay, let me try to be clearer: isn’t how we choose to identify ourselves a funny thing – what labels we decide fit us; what tribes we decide we belong to?

To be honest, I’m not personally a big fan of identity politics – or, indeed, of labels in general. So often it seems simply to point up what divides us rather than what unites us.

So it was not uppermost in my mind to consider penning something around February being LGBT History Month.

But then something happened that made me change my mind.

The Pope decided to retire.

That’s right: because Joseph Ratzinger has called it a day, I decided to pick up the LGBT baton for a post.

Many of us might prefer that no religious leader have any meaningful power in the 21^st century world, but whether we like it or not, that is not the case, and the office of pope still commands a great deal of clout and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Before his own elevation, Ratzinger had previously been grand inquisitor for John Paul II: when Karol Wojtyła was getting a tad past it, it was undoubtedly Ratzi who was really pulling the strings, so he’s had power for rather longer than simply his ascension to the top job in 2005.

Now, number one point to make: beating Ratzinger up because he was a member of the Hitler Youth is just plain daft. You don’t have a to be a fascist sympathiser to comprehend that children, at that time, would have had little safe choice in the matter.

So that isn’t going to be this blog’s complaint.

The problem with Ratzinger is that he has used his office to push lines that are sexist and homophobic.

Clare Balding – damned by the Pope.

His rhetoric about how those dodgy gays will essentially kill off civilisation cannot simply be taken as the rantings of an elderly person – not least because he/the office has the authority mentioned earlier.

And whether the Pope realised or intended it or not, his pronouncements have lent a veneer of legitimacy to those who would discriminate against LGBT people – and even do violence toward them.

His stand against contraception in general – and, in particular, the use of condoms as a method of safe sex – has been detrimental to the fights against poverty and against HIV/Aids.

He would rather a married couple produce far more brats than they can care for than that they use contraception. He wants every act of sexual intimacy to be heterosexual, monogamous, married and with getting the bird up the duff in mind.

He would rather that people died of Aids-related conditions than that they use condoms.

This is also an individual who has played a role in the protection of child abusers by his organisation.

Jodie Foster – damned by the Pope.

But then again, this he has also headed an organisation that believes that the victim of rape, even if a nine-year-old child, should not be allowed an abortion if made pregnant by her abuser.

It is an organisation that does not value women, but would rather a woman die than have the abortion that could save her life. The realised human being is worth less, in Catholic orthodoxy, than the potential of her producing a (male) child.

These are the attitudes that Herr Ratzinger has chosen to uphold in the name of a belief in something for which there is not a solitary shred of evidence.

Thus his faith cannot be viewed as somehow ‘cute’ or ‘quirky’, but for what it is: a stick with which to beat many, many other human beings whose lives and whose intrinsic being is different to what he wants it to be.

Let's also be quite clear: there really is not much difference between the likes of Ratzinger and the likes of the Taliban: and yet we (rightly) condemn one, but allow the other great respect and clout.

There’s something very wrong with that; very wrong indeed.

Oscar Wilde – damned by the Pope.

And it is worth noting that it is far from certain that the cardinals will elect a new pontiff with more 'liberal' credentials. Ratzinger is not the first 'traditionalist' to occupy the role of pope, and he is highly unlikely to be the last. In other words, his reactionary attitudes are far from unique.

I hope that Ratzinger has a peaceful retirement. There would be something rather pointless and sad about wishing him, as an individual, ill. But he is most certainly NOT some sort of saint. And the organisation that he has spent a lifetime promoting and defending is, frankly, immoral and corrupt and well past its sell-by date.

Now, since I have mentioned LGBT History Month, let's be a little more positive. Here are a few of my own household gods – who just happen to be or have been part of the community of which I myself am also a member. They're not my only "household gods", and they are not "household gods" because of their sexuality, although it is not hindered by the sense of connection that flows from that.

And perhaps, in that, I have just countered my own arguments against identity politics.

Remember: every one of these extraordinary people would be damned by the man who is just about to retire, and by his organisation. And yet he and it would almost certainly applaud Tony Blair.

Alan Turning – damned by the Pope.

Alan Turing – massively instrumental in the defeat of fascism and in the development of modern computer science, but effectively driven to his death afterwards simply because he was gay.

Thomas Mann – one of the greatest authors ever; a principled and humane giant.

Virginia Woolf – wonderful, wonderful writer, and hugely innovative. If you haven't done so already, do read Mrs Dalloway.

Quentin Crisp – England’s real queen.

Oscar Wilde – greatest wit ever? And yet one of my favourite quotes of all time is more poignant than Wilde’s reputation would lead one to expect: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

Stephen Sondheim – what a god of the musical theatre. Forget Andrew Lloyd Whatever He's Called.

The Pope.

Clare Balding – breaks down barriers all over the place, not least by being a ‘posh bird’ introducing Rugby League for the BBC. In line for national treasure status – and it will be utterly deserved.

Alan Bennett – just a wonderful writer; such a great ability to understand human beings and the smallnesses of their lives.

Nigel Slater – quite simply the best food writer that this country has produced since Elizabeth David. Nobody else, currently writing, has anything close to his sense of food and time and place and memory.

Jodie Foster – a wonderful screen actor, and has managed an amazing career without getting caught into all the crass celeb gossip etc.

Gore Vidal – oh how we miss him; an intellectual giant and iconoclast.

Making the most of a cloudy day

Saturday might not have been quite as clear-skied as the forecasts had suggested, but it was still hot and sunny enough to sit out for most of the day, and enjoy a spot of Man Cooking in the evening – a whole week earlier than the first braai of last year.

The weather – which I seem to becoming obsessed with, in a typically English way – has certainly been a boon to my efforts to stick with a much more Mediterranean/Italian style of eating: and to boost my early tan.

Apparently, the British Isles enjoy more cloud than any other part of Europe. So it could hardly be considered a shock when today, unfortunately, the cloud returned. Desperately trying to get outside for the intermittent patches of sun has proved futile – and the chatter of a large group enjoying a BBQ in the carpark just beyond our tiny garden has rendered it well nigh impossible to concentrate on Gore Vidal's writings on sex. A loud and lengthy discussion about car insurance is not making it easy to concentrate on an essay about W Somerset Maugham.

So I've given up and returned inside.

Food will just have to compensate – and it's not doing badly thus far.

The first broad beans of the season were available on Broadway Market yesterday – cause for celebration and a late breakfast of these little emerald gems with some feta.

That was followed by a Collioure salad – I'd found good anchovies at Waitrose last week and combined these with some roasted pepper, a few black olives and a half each of hard-boiled egg, plus a large sprig of lamb's lettuce on the side.

Dinner was simply some boerewors that had been in the freezer since last summer, small steaks and a lamb chop each, plus a salad of orange segments and beetroot, and a nice bottle of a chilled Languedoc white.

Today, with The Other Half in sunny Yorkshire for the Rugby League, I prepared a simple tomato and basil sauce, served with penne, for lunch (the rest will be reheated for him tonight). And later, I'm going to try a vegetable dish of asparagus, broad beans, peas and potatoes, 'stewed' in olive oil – a Roman dish from one of my River Café books – followed by simply grilled Dover sole and courgettes.

I've made some more chocolates (double cream, infused with vanilla, heated and then poured on chocolate to melt it, before being dolloped onto greaseproof paper and popped into the fridge to set) and even processed a load of pictures I took on Thursday for an organisation, and which will inevitably end up as my second photographic charitable donation in eight days.

I've even managed to order some clothes to pep up my summer wardrobe, which is, to be perfectly honest, in need of a serious overhaul.

Because I've slowly been losing weight for a few years now, I didn't get anything new last summer. My collection of linen trousers were already descending of their own free will then – and it's not different now. And further up, tops that once seemed quite smart are beginning to look decidedly the worse for wear. The next thing will come tomorrow – when I actually take a binbag to the wardrobe and actually strip out all the things I won't wear again or which, bought at The Wrong Time of the Month, were mistakes in the first place. Shopping might be a form of therapy, but there are periods when that therapy is more expensive than ever: and that's particularly true of periods. Shopping trips undertaken in such an hormonal state leave you with stuff that your rational self would never touch with the proverbial bargepole.

But back to today: depending on how energised I feel, I may actually get the camera out in a while and see if I can't manage some more indoor still life shots – I have a couple of ideas and it's enjoyably creative stuff to try.

The sun may have disappeared at present, but there's no shortage of things to occupy my time.

In the presence of greatness

Barack Obama’s inauguration is going to be one of those moments where people will recall, years from now, where they were.

But as the public looked on with a sense of hope that suggested Obama has something of the divine about him, one of my own household gods was being transported into a committee room at the Westminster Parliament to talk to a few dedicated souls.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, America’s foremost man of letters, Gore Vidal, had flown in to tell his small (but perfectly proportioned) audience about the “spitefulness” of the Kennedy brothers toward the island.

Wheelchair-bound and struggling with an obstreperous microphone, Vidal held us rapt; we leant forward to grasp every last intonation in the soft voice, to see every faint roll of the eyes or barely-perceptible shrug.

Not only were we honoured by the presence of Gore the great writer, but also of Gore the performer.

History concertinaed before us, time shrinking as he reminisced, almost as though to himself. “The beach was milky white as I played backgammon with Jack. He lost as usual”, and he mimicked the petulant pair’s favoured response to anyone who dared to object to their plans: “They’re just jealous”.

He brought us “a gift” too – as though his presence were not enough. Introducing his young carer as ‘Flavian’, this smart, conventionally-attired young man turned out to be rather openly AWOL from the US navy. Now mentored by Vidal (as the great man had himself once been “mentored by Eleanor” [Roosevelt]), he explained that, after realising that his role in Iraq was just “guarding oil”, he felt that he was no longer prepared to be “a muscleman for the thugs in the White House”.

Of course, there were one or two of the more knowing members of the audience who, being a tad more aware of Vidal’s proclivities, smiled and gave an extra round of silent applause. It’s hearting to know that pleasure is not the preserve of youth.

Struggling in my new, pink patent pumps by Marc Jacobs, I scrambled straight for the platform at the end of the meeting, with two aims firmly in mind: one, to talk to the great man and two, to ask him to sign a copy of The City and the Pillar, which I’d managed to find in the gay bookshop near work at lunchtime, a total lack of any greater notice of the event having prevented me from bringing a copy of anything that I already possessed.

Is it acceptable protocol in such a situation to go autograph hunting? I really don’t know, but was working on the basis of it possibly being my last such opportunity.

As I stood politely waiting to catch his eye, he was tapped on the shoulder by a middle-aged man, who exuberantly informed him: “Hello, I’m ******** ******** and I’m the leader of Britain’s biggest trade union”.

Well to be strictly accurate, dear – you’re the leader of half of Britain’s biggest trade union. Protocol nearly took another bashing, but I fought my gut response – to make a gesture at him suggesting solo sexual habits. The onanist, having said his piece, disappeared rapidly, presumably self-satisfied and leaving Vidal looking as inscrutable as ever.

It was my turn. I burbled a greeting and profuse thanks for his talk. I managed to call it “erudite” – and brought forth a smile. Even household gods enjoy a bit of flattery.

Then I proffered the book. I felt a twinge of guilt later, looking at the crabbed hand and wondering if such a visible reminder of his present infirmity aggrieves him more than any pleasure he gains from the recognition that being asked shows. But you take such chances when they occur – household gods don’t visit every day.

I caught the highlights of the inauguration later, after adjourning to a pub right opposite Westminster for a suitably boozy interlude with journalistic friends and colleagues. But when anyone asks me where I was that night, I shall have no problem remembering a very special literary audience.