Day 15 in the Big Brother House…

How are you all getting on? The gilded cage that is Vole Towers has not yet descended into the Ballardian anarchy of High-Rise or his under-rated later novel Millennium People, but I like to think that JG would have enjoyed a roasted dog's leg on the decking with me, nodding in appreciation at his own foresight.





Last week I talked about the British 'cosy catastrophe' subgenre and its more recent American offshoot, but Ballard's chilly work is much more grounded in the new turn in British SF from outer space to inner space (sadly I can't find a copy of his 1962 New Worlds essay 'Which Way To Inner Space?' to link): often urban, and always more interested in psychological and cultural reactions to social and technological change than in rockets and dilithium crystals. I'm struggling to remember whether Ballard sees any cause for optimism and coming up with nothing, so perhaps I shouldn't recommend his work right now, but the pictures of supermarket stampeded are very reminiscent of the shopping mall that becomes a prison, a cult cathedral and a consumerist utopia in suburban London in Kingdom Come. Think of it when you're wrestling the last jar of truffles from a tired nurse in M+S Food.

I gather the craze for dystopian reading and gaming is slightly subsiding. People have now read La Peste (in which the plague is an allegory for fascism) and watched Contagion and now want something more comforting so I've probably missed the window for recommending Connie Willis's Doomsday or Wiliam Owen Robert's astoundingly good postmodern novel Y Pla, translated from Welsh as Pestilence. If he was writing in English he'd be the darling of the literary press, by the way. Anyway, a few friends have been asking for comfort-reading recommendations. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster and the Psmith novels are perfect, as long as you ignore his shady WW2 behaviour and the endless shelves of golf humour he also wrote. If you're in the mood for Wodehouse-influenced silliness, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide middle-class-Englishman-lost-in-space series is perfect, and I've a soft spot for Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and its sequels.

One of my other addictions is re-tellings of and unofficial sequels to Jane Austen novels, occasioned by early exposure to Clueless, the Hollywood adaptation of Emma that set the bar very highly indeed.



They range from wonderful to awful, and sometimes it's the most well-known authors who produce the worst books. PD James's Death Comes To Pemberley is particularly dreadful: it's as if this very accomplished author has a grudge against Austen and indeed the Austrian sentence. Also mentioned in despatches for horror despite my admiration for her other work: Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. In the Good column are a mix of call-out novels defending minor or uncherished characters and out-and-out gleeful trash. Jo Baker's excellent Longbourn is much more high-minded: Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective. It's just a good, thoughtful novel. For cheaper thrills, Seth Grahame-Smith's exploitation-thriller Pride and Prejudice with Zombies displayed more understanding of Austen's writing style than Death Comes To Pemberley and is a hoot (just skip the film and the various attempts to extend the franchise). Similarly Arielle Eckstut's Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen fills in Austen's narrative gaps in eye-opening fashion and with tongue firmly in…cheek. Lady Catherine would send no compliments to her mother.

Instead of watching the dreadful ITV attempt to finish Sanditon, try Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe detective thriller based on it, The Price of Butcher's Meat. Apparently Hill liked to pastiche other authors' work in this series. I haven't read any more but this one really works. I'm also a fan with some reservations of the vlog The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. There's also a recent retelling centring on Lydia Bennet which I enjoyed a lot but I can't remember its name. If you're more of a Northanger Abbey type, you can now get all the 'horrid novels' Isabella Thorpe presses on Catherine Morland: for years it was thought that Austen made them up, but copies of the actual texts started appearing in the early twentieth-century so Regina Roche's Clermont, Lathom's The Midnight Bell, Kahlert's The Necromancer, or the Tale of the Black Forest,  Eliza Parsons' The Mysterious Warning and The Castle of Wolfenbach, Grosse's Horrid Mysteries and Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine will pass away the hours beautifully. For someone who inhaled Ann Radcliffe's superior Gothic thrillers while a students, this is manna. If you're a Regency type of person, I also can't recommend Maria Edgeworth's novels highly enough, from the social comedy of Castle Rackrent to Belinda.

Crowley's Little, Big, which I've just finished, is one of the most magical, layered novels I've read in a long time - an amalgam of mythology, fantasy, Shakespeare and much more beside, shaped with the most delicate of touches. It reminded me - not just for its mash-up of Americana, Shakespeare and magical realism, of Chris Adrian's San Francisco retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Great Night. I haven't yet got round to his The Children's Hospital (Adrian is also a paediatrician) but I'm looking forward to it. For comic legal thrillers, I'm grateful to my friend Gaby for recommending Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered and its sequels - witty, arch, packed with in-jokes and with decent plots and some stylistic quirks. It's just a shame Caudwell wrote so few before she died. For big enveloping novels, go for Kate Atkinson or Byatt's Possession, a sweeping and very knowing return to the Big Victorian Novel with plenty of twists. Or if you're in the mood for eccentric families, I Capture The Castle can't be beaten: a seemingly slight novel which sneaks up on your emotions.

For something a bit more demanding, try Aidan Higgins' 1962 modernist Irish masterpiece Langrishe, Go Down. I picked it up after many years, triggered by seeing someone on Twitter getting a PhD on his work. If you've read JG Farrell's later Troubles, you'll know the territory: the fading away of the Ascendancy, maundering away in their crepuscular Big Houses and learning (or not) how to cope with a social structure turned on its head. Higgins' novel uses a gentle stream of consciousness technique to explore the lives of three sisters trapped with each other and going nowhere. The opening pages, depicting Helen Langrishe struggling to cope with the sweaty, smelly hot confines of a bus on the way back to Kildare was presumably meant to convey her discomfort with the hoi polloi but reads very differently in a time of 'social distancing'. There's so much richness to this novel, but one motif that keeps cropping up is distorted vision: mirrors, windows, reflections, peeping and spying recur again and again. I haven't yet seen the film, but it was scripted by Pinter and starred Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons, so it's probably worth catching.

Talking of being trapped with people, one thing I've noticed while watching TV (mostly old Doctor Who and Channel 4's 2002 The Book Group (I'm missing awkward discussions with strangers about books, seeing as the university is closed) is quite how much hugging goes on, no doubt an American habit imported with the talkies. All these pre-'Rona people can't keep their hands off each other, pawing and stroking and caressing. I'm firmly of the view that an affectionate handshake at Christmas between close relatives should quite sufficient for anyone, and I trust that recent events will see a return to the brief bow/curtsey as the height of physical expression. If anyone tries to hug me in future they'll feel the point of my rapier in their gizzards.

Anyway, that's enough from me for one day. I'm off for my state-approved constitutional. Look after yourselves.