Written for The Guardian A Borgesian Maybe-Murder Mystery Towards the end of this impressive and finely textured debut, there is a chapter entitled “What Happened to Carlos – Suspicions, Rumours, Links”. This is the only named chapter and it lists a series of variations related to the disappearance of the novel’s missing person –…
Written for Prospect Magazine: By the weekend, this grim and unhappy referendum on our membership of the European Union will have passed from our national life. And what a relief for us all that will be. It has divided us against ourselves and made enemies of friends. We have seen too much of the…
For Prospect Magazine: The first time I came to London on my own, I came to see Bob Dylan. He was playing at the Hammersmith Apollo. I had tickets for three of the shows. I remember freezing in the queues outside. I remember the stampede to get to the front when the bastards finally…
Witten for Prospect Magazine: The Komedia Kvizo had started. Perhaps this would be instructive. I had hoped to get to the heart of the matter straight away. I had hoped to re-examine the biggest question of our times—the European Union referendum—but to come at it from deep within the pan-European hinterlands of Remainia. But instead, the…
For The Guardian: I once had a discussion with my first US editor, an old-school literary titan of 40 years’ experience, on the subject of overt existential angst in the novel. Her main message was that if you’re going to do it, then you’d be better off keeping it Beckettishly short – a view, I…
Written for The New Republic Magazine (USA): Despite being just a short hop across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, Vauxhall used to be London’s least fashionable borough, an area known only for its outdoor urinals and irredeemably depressed bus station. But this atmosphere is now changing. Damien Hirst, ex-enfant terrible of…
Written for The Guardian: There were two oppositions in the last parliament: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And, this week more than ever, it is worth saying that only the latter made any difference to the real lives of real people. Why? Because they were in government. But thanks to their brutal contraction and the…
Written for Prospect Magazine: The European Union referendum now lies splayed across the political event horizon like a giant jellyfish with which we are all soon going to have to wrestle. History will explain how Nigel Farage, whom I have interviewed for this magazine, tortured the Conservative Party into wasting the nation’s time and…
Written for The Guardian: My favourite interview with John Lennon was by “whispering” Bob Harris in 1975. Throughout, Harris is the opposite of incisive, but his warm, respectful, almost innocent presence seems to relax Lennon into being unusually open and collusive; sure, the acerbic wit and that compulsive self-awareness are there as always, but in the last few…
Written for The Guardian: Myles Jackman is on a mission to change Britain’s obscenity laws. For him, it’s more than a job, it’s a moral calling… 1. Tiger Porn One evening in the late autumn of 2008, Andrew Holland returned from holiday to discover that the front door to his home in…
Written for Prospect Magazine: The greatest sporting spectacle that I have ever witnessed live took place on a day of freezing rain, bitter winds and unimaginable mud in Leicestershire in April 1993. I had come seventy miles across the Pennines with my brother and a friend to camp for the weekend in a wind-ravaged…
Written for The Guardian: This is it, at last: a fine work of fiction set in the present day that kicks all those asses that so urgently need to be kicked. Twenty pages in and I wanted to tour the nation’s nine remaining bookshops with Murray and shout from the back: “That’s what I’m…
For The Guardian: Note to all readers: keep going. I spent 137 pages of The Ecliptic thinking it was a very good but misconceived novel in which a talented male author had taken an artistically self-sabotaging decision to make his first-person protagonist – Elspeth Conroy, a Glaswegian painter – a woman with an oddly oblique antiquarian voice…
For Prospect Magazine: Hell yeah, we were pumped up. And so we came at last to Sheffield Hallam, the constituency of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, a national media seeking answers. How many red lines were needed to draw a U-turn? On which party would he bestow the still-glittering orangey-gold crown? The Tories might do…
For The Guardian: This allegorical story of territory – alluding to the Roman invasion, the Vikings and Christianity – is a singular meditation on history, immigration and fellowship… Magnus Mills has a reputation for great originality. His first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, in which two men erect high-tensile fences across a bog, set the tone and…
For The Guardian: The Sandman author’s new collection veers from masterful prose to embarrassing poetry… This is a new collection of 23 short stories and poems that will delight Gaiman’s army of fans. But what about new readers? Almost alone in the universe, I found his last novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane,…
For The Guardian: This is an accomplished and, at times, harrowing novel full of the kind of psychological power and exactitude that first-rate fiction does so well. I found myself wincing half the time, whispering, wishing, willing the characters to take other courses. For those unfamiliar with Richard Bausch, he has long been celebrated in America as a practised…
Written for The Guardian: The first time I thought consciously about Leonard Cohen’s death was in 2002. I was listening to his 2001 album Ten New Songs while crawling my way through the writing of a novel in which each chapter took its title from one of the poems in The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. I remember hearing…
Written for The Guardian: In his latest novel, the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’ has created an awe-inspiring vision of social, moral and human chaos in wartime LA… There is a little-known Austrian documentary about James Ellroy entitled The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, in which the Los Angeles author can be seen…
For The Guardian A doubting Thomas kidnaps and interrogates significant people in his life in Dave Eggers’s ambitious, dialogue-only novel Dave Eggers is a one-man essay in the value and virtue of a life in writing in the 21st century. This is his third published novel in three years. And yet his work never drops below…
For The Guardian: The story of the impact of a woman’s suicide through anorexia on her brother and her father I was always going to like this novel. It is about Russia and Russian-ness and America and American-ness, about the relationship between the generations, history, atonement, fact, fiction, biography, literature and the process of writing…
For The Guardian: The story of the impact of a woman’s suicide through anorexia on her brother and her father… In his 1967 novel, Gargoyles, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has the following passage: “Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on … We follow the course of the life he has now so…
For The Guardian: This ‘romantic comedy’ set on the Sussex coast is dazzling… when Barker remembers to let the reader in on the fun I loved this book. I hated this book. I was amazed by it. I was bored by it. I thought it beautiful, skilful, profound. I thought it clumsy, callow, silly. I…
For Prospect Magazine I sit down opposite the Deputy Prime Minister just as the Prime Minister calls. We’re on a Great Western train from Bristol to London. Outside, the English afternoon is passing by in a blur of Betjeman and Brunel. We have cups of tea. Over the fields are massed a flotilla of Boris…
For The Guardian: The Man Booker-nominated author is overwhelmed by his own tortuous plot… I once had a wise old American editor who believed that the secret to becoming a great novelist lay in learning the lesson that a brilliant facility with language is beside the point. This advice was near-impossible to digest – not least,…
For The Guardian: The story of two flawed-but-good men in a world of government corruption and cock-up – pure pleasure John Le Carré is one of a handful of writers whose every book I buy. And I always read them. Even better, I sometimes go on flights or car journeys with his…
For the Guardian: Ex-marine Phil Klay inhabits more than a dozen different voices in these compelling short stories of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan One of the many things I learned in reading this book was that during the Iraq war the mines were often laid in “daisy chains”. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs)…
For The Guardian: An engaging story of love and imprisonment in Peru is let down by its narrator Donna Tartt recently described the process of writing a novel as like “painting a large mural with a brush the size of an eyelash”. My own favourite is that it’s like trying to fill a swimming pool with…
For The Guardian This is a tricky novel to review. I’m not even sure it is a novel. And I’m not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let’s-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer’s desk.…
Written for Intelligent Life Magazine: Philip Roth turned 80 in March and announced his retirement after 31 books. He is going out on a high. He has more prizes than most novelists have procrastination tricks—36, including the Pulitzer. Half the literary world is aghast that he has not been awarded the Nobel; the other half…