Joking apart
Sir: Thank you for Christopher Bray's excellent review of my novel The Mother-in- Law Joke (Books, 6 June). As he refers to me throughout as `Martyn' I fear he may be an old friend of mine, though for the moment I cannot recall having met him.
Nor do I remember having said of my first book: The biggest problem was ... how do you make a couple of set pieces and a minorly amusing cast span out for 100,000 words?' I did not think that book was more than 55,000 words long, but as an old chum Mr Bray will remember it better than I.
Mr Bray is also kind enough to credit me with having been influenced by David Nobbs (whom I confess I have never read, nor heard of) and by a natural childbirth class in the novel Jake's Thing by one `Kingers'. This, I suppose, is Sir Kingsley Amis, who must be another close friend of Mr Bray. Hunt as I may, I cannot find a natural childbirth class in that book and must confess to having drawn my own from tedious life. Mr Bray also points out, in the spirit of helpfulness, that it is purposeless to include a joke about a character who `read Barthes in the bath and Loos on the loo'. Fortunately there is no such character in my book and no such quotation.
The post-modern critic of course has no truck with the intentions of the author, with what he actually said or what he actually wrote. As a parody of this pretension, writ- ten in a clever pastiche of the constipated, Latinate prose of the worst Edwardian crit- ics, Mr Bray's review was superb.
Martyn Harris
16 Hewitt Road, London N8
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