Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, Literature

Who will win the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Literature?

SHORTLIST

In The Running…

. Milkman by Anna Burns (published by Faber for £14.99)

Milkman

PLOT: The Troubles provide a subtle backdrop of simmering threat to this inventively written novel, set in Belfast in the 1970s and narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old, whose semi-abusive relationship with a creepy older man is the subject of prurient gossip among the close-knit community.

Critic: Against a bomb-shattered landscape, rendered toxic by a climate of prejudice, intimidation, suspicion and half-truths, Burns explores to exhilarating effect the treacherous nature of language.

Chance of winning: 6/1

. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (published by Serpent’s Tail for £14.99)

Washington Black

PLOT: Beginning on a 19th-century cotton plantation in Barbados, this genre-mashing historical romp is the story of an artistically gifted teenage slave who endures great brutality at the hands of his master. When he is taken under the wing of his master’s brother, a scientist and explorer, he manages to escape, setting the stage for a quasi-fantastical run across Europe and North Africa.

Critic: Fascinating and enjoyable, but rather like the hot air balloon that took Black from Barbados, it sometimes drifts off course.

Chance of winning: 4/1

. Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (published by Cape for £14.99)

Everything Under

PLOT: The debut novel from 27-year-old Johnson is modern-day reworking of the mythical story of Oedipus with a feminist twist. Gretel’s mother left when she was a teenager and now Gretel is an adult, she wants to find her – a search that takes her back to the semi-lawless marginal world of Oxford’s boat-dwelling communities, where she grew up.

Critic: For all the atmosphere of menace, Johnson’s handling of her Sophociean themes can be remarkably clumsy.

Hums with an electricity pylon-charge of danger.

Chance of winning: 5/1

. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (published by Cape for £16.99)

The Mars Room

PLOT: A former stripper, Romy is serving two life sentences after killing her stalker. There’s not a great deal of plot in this cacophonous novel which, alongside Romy, features the voices of fellow inmates to give a rare insight into America’s punitive justice system.

Critic: The final pages are likely to leave you in tears.

Kushner revels in her characters’ vitality, showing how they work the system to their advantage by exploiting every loophole.

Chance of winning: 7/1

. The Overstory by Richard Powers (published by Cornerstone for £18.99)

The Overstory

PLOT: Multiple stories make up this epic, centuries-spanning environmental novel in which a wide cast of characters, from a Vietnam vet to a party-loving undergraduate, are brought together across time and space through their shared determination to save America’s last remaining acres of virgin forest.

Critic: Powers, always a writer of big ideas, has dropped one of the most thoughtful and involving popular novels that you are likely to have read for years.

There is a great deal of evangelism to absorb.

Chance of winning: 5/2

. The Long Take by Robin Robertson (published by Picador for £14.99)
The Long Take

PLOT: Not a novel, but a 223-page-long narrative poem. This is the story of Walker, a Canadian D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who, after the war goes across the U.S. in search of work – and himself.

Critic: Robertson’s The Long Take shows it is perfectly possible to write poetry which is both accessible and subtle.

It builds to a bravura climax but lacks the pace to carry off pages of exposition.

Chance of winning: 4/1

– The Man Booker Prize winner will be announced on October 16

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Arts, Books, History, Literature

(Biography) Book Review – Thomas Cromwell: A Life

REVIEW

IT is generally through Hilary Mantel’s inspiring and prize-winning novels, such as Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, that most people today have come to know the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell. TV adaptations of the books, through the glowering performances of Mark Rylance, have also added to our understanding of Cromwell’s character.

But, what kind of man was the real, historical Cromwell? Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental biography attempts to answer that question in painstaking, and even in excruciating and fine detail.

It comes as no great surprise that some of the most memorable scenes in Wolf Hall have no basis in fact. Novelists do that as they are prone to make things up.

The book’s opening sequence has a young Cromwell taking a terrible beating from his father. Not true, according to MacCulloch. There is no real evidence that the father was a brutal bully. There is little record of Cromwell’s early life at all. He was a little-known and obscure brewer’s son from Putney.

What is striking is how often and how closely Mantel did follow the historical record.

Cromwell’s most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that abundantly clear. He achieved it because he found a solution to what was known as “The King’s Great Matter”.

Henry VIII had decided that he had breached a biblical prohibition in marrying Katherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brother’s wife. The lack of a male heir was proof of God’s wrath.

Henry’s eagerness to annul his marriage was increased by his passion for Anne Boleyn. Unexpectedly, Anne insisted that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. (Her sister Mary, an earlier lover of the king, had displayed no such scruples.)

It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfill the King’s wishes. He smoothed the path to Anne’s royal marriage.

Yet, when she also failed to produce a male heir, he turned on her. Anne already resented her husband’s chief minister. She was heard to say that she would see “his head off his shoulders”.

But it was Cromwell who saw her to the scaffold. Henry already had his eye on a young noblewoman named Jane Seymour.

He complained that “he had been seduced and forced” into marriage with Anne “through spells and charms”. The speed with which Anne was toppled is remarkable. Cromwell was behind charges, almost certainly untrue, of adultery. She was even accused of incest with her brother.

She was executed in the Tower in front of a thousand spectators. Prominent amongst them was her nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. Eleven days after her death, Henry married Jane Seymour.

Throughout this biography, MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwell’s character that is absent in Mantel’s depiction. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, “pinch him with pains”.

When he heard that some monks from the London Charterhouse had died in Newgate prison, he was furious. He swore that he’d had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.

Cromwell’s own tragedy was that he served a master even more ruthless than he was.

Mantel will tell of her hero’s downfall in the third, as yet unpublished, volume of her trilogy.

MacCulloch’s final chapters show Henry’s willingness to cast off his chief minister as soon as his usefulness came to an end.

Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of his downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill.

Unfortunately, when she arrived in England, Henry was appalled by her.

To his embarrassment, he couldn’t make love to her either on his wedding night or on any succeeding night. Cromwell had to face the fact that “his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the King’s humiliation”.

Even worse, Henry came to believe that his chief minister was gossiping about his problems between the sheets. Cromwell was doomed.

 

HE was arrested on June 10, 1540. From prison, he wrote to the King, ending his letter with the words, “I cry for mercy! mercy! mercy!”

The only mercy he was given was the privilege of being beheaded rather than facing burning at the stake (for heresy) or hanging, drawing and quartering (for treason).

Even then, one account suggests that the executioner botched the job and took several swipes of the axe to kill him.

On the very same day that Cromwell died on the scaffold, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.

There is a paradox at the heart of this epic work of scholarship. Despite the relentless accumulation of detail, Thomas Cromwell himself remains a mystery. He is as unknowable at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.

It might even need a novelist of Mantel’s exceptional gifts to bring such an enigmatic character fully to life.

– ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Allen Lane for £30

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Architecture, Arts, Culture, Scotland

The V&A Museum of Design

SCOTLAND

DUNDEE’S equivalent of the Pompidou in Paris or Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now on full view. The V&A, designed by Kengo Kuma, is simply staggering.

With its instantly recognisable outline – part sea cliff, part galleon – the £80.4million V&A Museum of Design may soon find itself revered as a global design icon.

Certainly, few who have seen Scotland’s first dedicated design museum are likely to be left unmoved by its dizzyingly ambitious zigzag slabs of rough concrete, described variously as a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid, the ribbed carcass of a beached whale and the ragged remains of a mighty shipwreck. Art in its full splendour and glory.

On display: The £80million museum’s collection is expected to attract 500,000 visitors in its first year.

Following its official opening, the “V&Tay”, as it is ostensibly and affectionately known to its London colleagues, is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors from around the world in its first year alone, generating tens of millions of pounds for the local economy.

Critics may welcome a time when this controversial project starts to pay its way, having been blown off course by years of construction delays and escalating costs before finally anchoring itself at the heart of the city’s £1billion waterfront regeneration.

Since its conception, the original £45million budget has almost doubled and its Japanese architect and designer had been forced to tow his initial plan for a water-bound structure back to dry land.

On the V&A’s opening, however, a preview which was attended by dozens of the world’s media, Mr Kuma pronounced himself satisfied that his vision to create a “living room for the city” had been realised.

The attraction’s galleries showcase 300 objects, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room and the painstakingly reconstructed interior of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom which has not been seen for 50 years.

Mr Kuma said: “It is fitting that the restored Oak Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is at the heart of this building as I have greatly admired his designs since I was a student.

“In the Oak Room, people will feel his sensibility and respect for nature, and hopefully connect it with our design for V&A Dundee. I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity.”

He said the magisterial light-filled atrium with its sweeping staircase and waves of oak panel boards was a nod to Mackintosh, who was deeply influenced by oriental art and design.

Mr Kuma said: “When I saw [Mackintosh’s] buildings as a student I was very surprised at how Japanese they were. Japanese quality, [and] Japanese sensitivity exist in his designs.”

Everywhere in the museum, glimpses of the Tay can be caught through small windows, while the hall and stairs glint with fossilised coral set into limestone flooring.

Complementing his daring design are the – often quirky – exhibits of the Scottish Design Galleries, from the so-called Valkyrie tiara, created by Cartier using more than 2,500 diamonds for Mary Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe, in 1935, to cutting-edge environmental material crafted from the fibres of stinging nettles by Dundee-based firm Halley Stevensons for Glasgow backpack-maker Trakke.

There is also some hand-coloured Beano artwork for a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from 1960.

Also in the collection is the largest remaining fragment of the Titanic – part of a door from the first-class lounge of the liner – and a costume worn by Natalie Portman’s character, Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which was created by Trisha Biggar, the Glasgow designer.

A full-sized clay model Jaguar car sits between the entrants to the permanent collection and the opening touring show, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which tells the story of Scotland’s role in the golden age of cruise liners.

V&A Dundee’s director, Philip Long, said “it was with some emotion” that he was finally able to unveil the museum and that the challenges that beset the huge project had been overcome, more than a decade after it was originally proposed.

Another V&A director, Dr Tristram Hunt, said Ocean Liners: Speed and Style could “not be a more appropriate inaugural exhibition for Mr Kuma’s amphibious, semi-nautical, wonderful museum that is so successfully reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront”.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told invited guests to the first viewing of the museum that he felt a “tremendous sense of pride” in the building.

He said: “There’s a fire in the bellies of Dundonians that wasn’t there ten years ago. Dundee is leading the charge in cultural-led regeneration.”

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