William Scammell
John Murray is the only novelist I know with a direct line to Rabelais and Flann O'Brien. Radio Activity: A Cumbrian Tale in Five Emissions (Sunk Island Press, P 0 Box 74, Lincoln LN1 1QG, £7.99) is a gloriously funny and accurate account of life m west Cumbria, with excursions to Tangiers, Sudetenland, and the three-ring public-relations circus run by British Nucle- ar Fuels. It is told by a contestant in the Biggest Liar in the World Competition, in broad dialect, translated back into manic English by a fictitious editor. Thanks to a defective valve in the old radio he is addict- ed to, the hero finds himself shuttling between third-world Cumbria and third- world Morocco at the whim of a waveband. It's as angry about mental and physical pol- lution as it is exasperatedly affectionate towards the 'Lai fowk' dependent on bland technocrats for a living. Usually we get stylish inventiveness (Amis, Self) or subject-matter. This one has both.
The poetry books I enjoyed most were Glyn Maxwell's Gneiss the Magnificent (Chatto & Windus, £8.99), three verse plays packed with talent of a high order, which may help to revive that moribund genre, and Selima Hill's A Little Book of Meat (Bloodaxe, £5.95), distinguished by fearless emotional honesty. Fergus Allen's The Brown Parrots of Providencia (Faber, £5.99), just out, is an excellent debut by a poet in his seventies. On impulse I re-read Salinger's Franny and Zooey — much better than I remem- bered it as being — and this sent me off to Ian Hamilton's In Search of J. D. Salinger (Minerva, £5.99), an excellent read but skewed by the author's pique at losing his court case against the legendary recluse. Odd, morally and intellectually, that a critic should grudge a writer the rights in his own life.
Remembering the rave reviews and uni- versal delight that greeted Adam Thorpe's Ulverton (Minerva, £4.99) I caught up with that too, or tried to, but got bogged down in Cold-Comfort sludge.
Revived myself with Zbigniew Herbert's wonderful Pan Cogito poems, all available now in Mr Cogito (OUP, £7.99) and Yehuda Amichai's Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, £8.50).
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