Books

The panel discussed the years books.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
Germaine, first, one of the controversies of this year was what was off the Booker short list rather than on it, and we'll come to Martin Amis in a little while. But the other one was the Mark Haddon book, which I know that you loved.

GERMAINE GREER:
I do love this book. But I'm not surprised that it wasn't short-listed because it's completely unpretennious. And the first thing about books that get short-listed for the Booker is that they have to have obvious ambitions to be a great book. This is such a modest book. I think it's infinite riches in a little room because it does so much so smoothly, so cleanly. It presents you, first of all, with a completely believable character who is unlike you as may be, because he is severely autistic. It takes you into the way he lives his life, the way he defends himself against the world he doesn't understand. And at the same time, you see why he doesn't understand it because the behaviour of everyone around him is actually insane and incomprehensible. It's so subversive; I think this is a really important book.

PAULIN:
It's completely original, like Germaine is pointing out. It's like nothing else I've ever read. The empathy, the way it makes you understand what it's like when someone is autistic and the detail in it and the organisation and the obsessiveness in it is very fascinating. Also the take on adult life.

BONNIE GREER:
I admired this book a lot. I thought it was very, very beautiful. Very beautiful construct. But there were moments because the book asks you to believe this boy, believe his world. There are moments when I was pulled out of it just by certain sentence constructions that sort of jerked me out of it and made me look at this book as a construct, whereas, the Martin Amis book which, for me, was one of my books of the year, along with Love, this book, I think, is a total construct. It's beautiful in that idea. It's in its own world. It's flawed, but why it got dumped on this much, it just perplexes me really. I thought it was a book unlike many that was published this year, where it attempted to deal on several sort of ideas and worlds.

GERMAINE GREER:
I've always found a problem with Martin's writing ever since Dead Babies, that he knows that truth is stranger than fiction. He's in a state of sort of weary astonishment at the vileness of the world. But he keeps trying to outdo it. Whereas, it would be a safer narrative posture to actually retreat slightly from it, so it appears to reveal itself. He keeps trying to elaborate the awfulness of the world and he gets into a field of total incredibility.

WARK:
Tom, you chose three big door stoppers, all poetry books; the Lowell, the Ted Hughes, the collected works, not the complete works and the Yeats.

PAULIN:
The great biography of Yeats which is completed with the second volume, Roy Foster's biography, which is a masterpiece. This feeling that here, this great imaginative life and great political life has found a proper record and a proper interpretation, because unlike most biographers of poets, he doesn't simply quote the poems to advance the narrative. He actually talks sensitively and subtlely about the poetry. So it's a marvellous book. It completes this great epic.

WARK:
Come on to the Hughes for a moment, it's collected and not complete, and we have unpublished fragments. Do you think it's a melange?

PAULIN:
No! No. It's been brilliantly edited. What Paul Keegan the editor, has done is to bring in all sorts of pamphlet poems and poems from magazines that weren't put in collections. So there's a whole lot of new material and then some very early work that he wrote when he was sixteen.

GERMAINE GREER:
I couldn't disagree more. I think this is a terrible thing to do to a poet. You know from being a poet yourself that most of what poets do is misses. The hits are seldom. If you bury the hits in the misses, you end up with this enormous doorstep which makes you look at his work as if it's a great wodge of verbiage that goes round and round the same areas. This is really not fair. You know what Ted Hughes deserved? He deserved a careful editing and contextualizing of the work, he deserved more respect for the small presses he was involved with. It should not be printed in this awful typeface with this dreadful greyish paper. This is a really ugly book.

PAULIN:
That will happen eventually, there will be a great annotated edition, but we've got these poems which were unobtainable before except in these very fugitive, expensive publications and they're all there. It's a great treasure trove, I think.

MORLEY:
I've chosen Andrew O'Hagan's book. It's essentially about the life story of Lena Zavaroni which I think that everyone who goes on Pop Idol should get a copy of and read. There's a wonderful dream sequence with Hughie Green as a philosopher. He says, 'talent is the fight against quietness. And you can weep for applause but silence is your destiny.' I think we should think of that while we're watching Pop Idol final tomorrow.