'The London Magazine's summer edition 1 carries an interesting interview
with Martin Amis, bloodied but apparently unbowed after the critical pasting that his last novel, Yellow Dog. received. 'I can,' he says, 'bloody well take it.' Students of his over-discussed public dust-up with Tibor Fischer will be amused to hear Mr Amis's final verdict: 'Tibor Fischer is a coherent psychological case of corrosiveness that will self-destruct in the near future. He'll only be remembered for his review of my novel. I know it and he knows it. He's an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite know what's going on and gives himself away in every point.'
lso in what might be called the Rising
to the Bait department is Anthony Seldon, author of a generally well-received new life of the Prime Minister. The former Tory minister and semi-professional old grump George Walden did not admire it, however. He opened his Sunday Telegraph review: 'Ten weeks, Seldon informs us in his introduction, is all it took him to write this book. Since it is 755 pages long readers will have plenty of time to decide whether that is a boast or an apology ... Welcome to quick grill, Big Mac biography.—Pedestrian and overlong' was another phrase that will have stung. Most readers will judge for themselves, however, whether Mr Seldon was wise to write a letter to the paper telling the world how 'unimpressive' he found Mr Walden's review: 'Apparently determined simply to be snide, cheap and offensive, he failed utterly to understand the purpose of my biography of Tony Blair ... a review in which Mr Walden merely told us about his own character.'
Robertswatch, this column's most popular feature, was originally intended as a short-lived occasional series devoted to the instances in which Andrew Roberts has managed gratuitously to plug his girlfriend Leonie Frieda's book. No doubt Agatha Christie thought The Mousetrap would run for a month or so. On it goes. At the inaugural Althorp Literary Festival, Mr Roberts was asked from the audience why, when England survived three changes of religion without substantial bloodshed between 1536 and 1689, France suffered eight religious civil wars over the same period. The only satisfactory discussion of the subject. Mr Roberts replied, was to be found, guess where...? Hordes of film critics, fair-weather classicists and Brad Pitt aficionados have piled in to offer their views on Troy, Wolfgang Petersen's blockbuster film based, as it were, on an original idea by Homer. But what of Homer's most distinguished modern adapter? The poet Christopher Logue has, for a good 20 years now, been writing a wonderfully sanguinary poetic Englishing of the Iliad. called War Music. He bursts out laughing when I call to ask whether he's seen the film. Turns out he has, after a friend inveigled him into the Odeon in Leicester Square. He gives it two rosy thumbs down. 'It's so bad,' he says, 'that it doesn't even come into the category of Hollywood epics worth going to see just for the hell of the thing. We went in the middle of the afternoon, and there were only three of us in the cinema.' Had it been an evening screening, he says, they'd have given up and gone for a drink, but they stuck it out, with the exception of a 'doze' during the grand finale. Brad Pitt, he thought. was 'wooden': the money spent `wasted'; the script 'extremely poor'. 'It's one of those "they went across the veldt as fast as they could pelt" sort of movies.' Ask me a question. he says. 'OK. Who would you get to play Achilles?' I said, "Ask me a question" ,' he says. 'Not "ask me a difficult question." 'And with that, he is gone.
They do not make them like C. P. Snow any more: novelist, scientist, aphorist, cultural theorist and all-round clever-clogs. So it's nice to learn that he was not so unworldly as to be above angling for a company car. The historian A. D. Harvey has truffled up from the Public Record Office a Uriah Heepish 1964 memo from Snow, then at the Ministry of Technology, to Derek Mitchell, Harold Wilson's private secretary: 'Dear Derek, I do not really
want to worry the Prime Minister [inserted by hand: (or you)] when he is so very busy, but, hoping it is of no great nuisance, I should like to trouble you a little with the matter of having an official car made available for my use And on it blethers, with hand-wringing mentions of his inability to drive himself since an eye operation, and the claim that he is 'perceptibly handicapped in getting hold of public transport, taxis etc.' Surveying the letter, typed, he obviously thought it needed an extra little something, and adds a manuscript PS: 'I hate being so heavyfooted over a matter like this: but the sheer mechanics of living are rather difficult just now.'
John Carey, chair of the Man Booker judges last year, still seems to be sore over his fellow judges' refusal to admit his preferred winner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, even so far as the shortlist. Speaking on the television programme Battle of the Books. Professor Carey said that the author. Mark Haddon, was able to generate suspense with rather more elegance than the eventual winner, D. B. C. Pierre: 'He doesn't need a highschool massacre — that's going over the top a bit.' His fellow judges, however, disagreed. 'They thought it was monotonous — which seemed to me a very crass criticism, to be honest. It seemed as monotonous to me as Jane Eyre.'
This weekend, Cranleigh Preparatory School welcomed a well-known popular historian who went there as a child to officiate at speech day. Imagine that historian's delight to discover that, by coincidence, the young lady who had won the history award had selected as her prize a biography of Catherine de Medici. The historian — best not to name him — maneouvred the book to face the crowd as he handed it over to her, and announced that he thought she would `go far in life'.
Sceptre's invitations to the launch party for Matthew Sharpe's novel The Sleeping Father are in questionable taste. The novel deals with a man whose use of anti-depressants has given him a form of brain damage called seratonin syndrome. The party invitations, then, arrive in a jiffy bag: a big jaunty bottle of pills with a childproof cap and the greeting printed on the label. The pills inside tasted like Smarties — which I hope is what they were, since I ate them all in one go.
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