Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Literature

While I was at university (1971-5), studying English Literature, my taste was shaped not so much by the syllabus of the courses I was following or the academic criticism I read for my essays but by the books pages of the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. In the Sunday Times I went — unfailingly, immediately — to Cyril Connolly’s weekly review, and in the back half of the New Statesman I read everything that was on offer.

The seduction of Connolly’s hedonistic, unscholarly, romantic enthusiasms is easily explained. I have read, over the years, almost every word he has written and he figures frequently in these pages. The New Statesman had an altogether more acerbic, influential effect. In the early 1970s I waited each week for its arrival with a hungry expectation that has never been repeated with any other publication. The literary editors in those years were Claire Tomalin and Martin Amis and when you draw up a roster of its contributors at that time some of its allure can be explained: Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Blake Morrison, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Conrad, Jeremy Treglown to name a few. The house style was mordant, knowing, witty and took no prisoners. It shaped my own reviewing practice and my early reviews, including one for the Statesman itself that I present here for sentiment’s sake, were an effort to achieve a similar cool, intellectual stringency. As a result I have to admit that, while I hope I was never ruthlessly or maliciously savage, I was often very harsh as a reviewer in my early days — something I take care to recall when I receive the odd critical spanking myself.

Later, in the early 1980s I became a regular reviewer of novels in the Sunday Times. This is perhaps the most thankless form of reviewing available, but a good apprenticeship for the tyro critic. To be given four novels and, say, 800 words in which to summarize and review them — amusingly, cleverly, accurately — is a taxing and demanding subclass of critical writing whose particular merits are very hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t attempted it. However, as you are at the bottom of the contributors’ food chain, your copy is also the first to be cut if space is required. This happened regularly and the corresponding terseness has not made the reviews wear all that well. Consequently, only a few of my Sunday Times reviews make it into this volume.

My first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981 and as I published more books myself and gave up my teaching at Oxford (I was a college lecturer there, at St Hilda’s College, from 1980-83) to move to London and write full-time I was happy to give up the three-weekly review. It’s hard work; you burn out. I carried on reviewing but I felt I’d paid my dues in the salt-mines of critical writing.

The organizing principle in this section has been to present the reviews as I wrote them, starting in 1978 and moving on, rather than arrange them under any thematic or geographical scheme. This is what came across my desk as the years went by. As time has progressed the space provided in which to write has steadily grown. It is a welcome corollary: the luxury of having a few more pages in which to expound your opinions is all the sweeter because of that earlier discipline.