Review: The Power Of Yes, Lyttelton

STAGE
The Power Of Yes, Lyttelton Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Political playwright David Hare dramatises his own exploration of the banking crisis with input from insiders, experts and observers.

REVIEW
Apparently, those boxes the ousted employees of Lehman Brothers carted across Reuters Plaza last year were full of Milky Ways and Mars Bars.

Not, as we had fondly imagined, folders packed with bonkers currency trade contracts or kneelers neatly embroidered with the Black Scholes formula for valuing stock options. The thing is, you see, the Lehman employees still had credit in the canteen when the curtain fell and, like all good bankers, they weren't leaving without their money's worth.

We learnt this from Masa Serdarevic, a 23-year-old banker and refugee from Sarajevo, as played by the delightful Jemima Rooper. She was one of David Hare's guides to that moment in history when the banks had a cardiac arrest, a grand idea died and we all became very much poorer.

Hare - played with unassuming curiosity by Anthony Calf - announced from the start that this wasn't a play, although it was a story.

The re-enactment of his conversations with a variety of experts, onlookers and insiders about the intricacies of credit defaults swaps and sub-prime shenanighans should have had all the allure of a swine flu jab in Gaza but, strangely, cleverly and beguilingly, this half-documentary, half-lecture gained its own dramatic energy and impetus.

While many of the facts are well-known, there was a dramatic tension of sorts offered by the Emperor's New Clothes question. In the midst of all this bingeing and spending and profligacy and stupidity, why did no-one spot calamity?

The answer is they did. It was obvious. But everyone - bankers, politicians, speculators, economists - were too scared to jump off when there was still money to be made. They were hooked. Gordon Brown funded hospitals with the illusion. Bush fought a war. Buccaneers built empires on nothing but air and promises and no-one dared look down.

George Soros refuted Alan Greenspan's warning against "irrational exuberance" declaring that it was perfectly rational to make money when there was money to be made. It was all a matter of timing.

In Hare's version of history, villains emerge, clearly painted. Gordon Brown saw that the financial services provided 27 per cent of the tax take and stuck his moral compass in the bottom drawer.

He established a system where everyone - therefore no-one - was responsible for governing the system and then, when it all went south, stuffed billions of pounds of public money into the gaping wound while flailing around looking for someone to blame.

It was hailed as "a new kind of socialism. Socialism for the rich".

Fred the Shred did the deal because that's what he did and he saw no reason to apologise. Alan Greenspan inflated the market after 9/11 and left the world awash with cheap cash. The cautious old school bankers were abandoned by me-too investors who ran blindly to the false prophets hailed as geniuses even though it was market doing the work.

As a spectacle this was a collage of intersecting interviews and soundbites, assisted by neat staging and a screen illuminated with redolent images of the drama (queues outside Northern Rock etc).

In charge of this kaleidoscope was director Angus Jackson who gave room on the cavernous stage for each to say his or her piece before the next insight promptly arrived and was efficiently delivered.

The actors are proficient in their albeit limited roles. Jeff Rawle, Jonathan Coy, Richard Cordery, Peter Sullivan and Claire Price stand out in a vast cast that contributed to an uncomfortable dissection of where it all went wrong.

This was not a pantomime but the villains earned knowing, half-gulped groans from the tax-paying audience while the ugly sisters of greed and fear were given a good kicking.

Sadly, the only available hero in this tragedy was "Harry Hindsight" and a fat lot of bleedin' no good he turns out to be when the bill finally arrives.

Spiral Notebook: Land of the Freeview?

Giles Broadbent, not unlike his Freeview box, has a meltdown about the State's institutional mistrust of its citizens.

So, a while back, when I was supposed to, I retuned my Freeview box. I promptly lost half the channels but they were the poor half so I figured I could live without them.

I could be culturally diverse and read Proust and create shadow puppets and learn the names of the bones of the body. ITV One thru Four had blocked my creativity long enough. This was my liberation.

But then I thought - best do it properly, best try again. And my Freeview box eyed me up and down and let out a plaintive cry as if to say - again? Seriously? Again? We've gone through this routine before and you know how fragile I am, what with my dodgy diodes and crackling cables and that thing I do if you change channels too fast. I'm an 100-year-old in an old people's home - you try to move me, improve me, badger me and I'm pegging out, right here and now in the middle of The Bill and that will just plain ruin your day. How lucky would you feel then, huh, punk?

And its afflictions and ailments were sad but true because, for many days leading up to the upgrade, the box had been pixellating almost everything - so, watching The Bill, I knew who the victim was and I knew who the officer was but the suspects were obliterated which, in some not so far-fetched future, will the norm under a new Data Protection Act making it illegal to possess a face in case it excites a paedophile.

And, so, at the third attempt, like the end of one of the Terminator movies, the little red eye at the front of my Freeview box blinked, issued forth one salty tear and finally died*.

(*One of these actions is a fiction - but not the good one, the useful one, the one that would meant I didn't need to stir myself and spend money and miss The Bill).

But that's not the point. This is the point -

I bought a new Freeview box at Tesco, where interaction, emotional investment and interest are, at best, minimal. However, this time it was different.

I was informed I would have to report my purchase to the licensing authorities. I had to fill out a little form there and then. The thin till girl gave me a fat pen and the little till issued forth a fat form and I had to fill it out while those waiting behind me with overfull trolleys tapped their feet and tore off chunks of French bread for sustenance.

So between packing away my Covent Garden Soup Company Leek and Potato and Tropicana Orange With Bits and Bachelors Original Mushy Peas, I told Gordon Brown that I was planning to replace a broken Freeview box and was that alright with him. Sorry to disturb and all that. Know you're busy.

And I thought this has gone too far. Seriously. They're hunting me down in Tesco now. I can't purchase a simple electronic device - a replacement for one that went before - without alerting the all pervading system to my activities.

Why could they not - I mean - why could they not - here's a thing, just a little thing - why could they not, I don't know, like - trust me or something?

Why could they not assume that the chances are that I wasn't a felon, a tax dodger, an itinerant, a gangmaster, a safe-cracker, a lowlife, an off-the-grid runaway, a ducker, a diver, a skiver, a shyster? Why could they not do that?

I mean, they know who I am. Every step I take, every move I make, they're watching me on their cameras. They know when I speed, park askew or for too long, fail to pay just the right amount of council tax (for too much is as tricky as too little).

They know when I haven't filled out my income tax return or beeped my Oyster or stood for too long or too strangely at the kerbside. They know all this. Why do they still want me goaded, perplexed, infuriated, inconvenienced, belittled, humiliated, distracted, delayed at the till at Tesco.

When did their hate become so all-consuming that the last vestiges of humanity went out like the light on the front of - ah, you get the picture.

Leave me alone.

Wouldn't it be easier if the Government fined us all £1,000 by default at the beginning of each week just for being alive and consuming things and having vague thoughts about seasides and teapots and moving from place A to place B and interacting with other humans and all the other activities that indicate we still have a degree of (dammit) freewill.

And then every other Friday we would line up Soviet-style outside the community centre and we would have to plead our case and account for our actions to some bureaucratic numpty in order to reclaim the fine back.

Like, like we could say: We know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did applaud your scrappage scheme; or, or we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did buy a house at the second tier of stamp duty; or, or, we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but my name is Baroness Scotland and I do declare this is a technical breach.

Is that what they want? Seriously?

At one point between the signing of the Magna Carta and my trip to Tesco to buy a Freeview box did we all sit round the table and fess up like some 12-step alkie that we weren't to be trusted, that there was a power greater than us and it would be best all round if we were treated like habitual offenders who would inevitably transgress.

When did that happen? When did we all become nine-year-old boys in a room with a vase of humbugs teetering on a coffee table edge, requiring of a stern warning, constant monitoring and enclosure in a general fog of mistrust? I didn't get the memo, the vote, the say, the pamphlet, the instruction, the talk, the telling-to, the telling-off.

When did the State start getting in my face about my home entertainment arrangements?

Why can't I - I mean - why can't I go and buy a perfectly normal piece of electronic television-receiving equipment in a dingy Tesco in Beckton without some rat-faced box-ticker in a breeze block office in an industrial estate in Reading twitching and stirring and sniffing the air and deciding that somewhere out there, in the real world, someone was doing something that the State needed to know about? Needed to get involved with. Needed to interfere with. Needed to delay and obstruct.

"Alert! Alert! Someone just did something. We need his form right away. Then we can add him to our database and cross reference him with other things he might have done in case some of them tally and we need him to fill out another form. Or some of them don't tally at all and there's an anomaly and we can fine him.

"Either way, let's monitor this piece of work because somewhere down the line I bet he's the kind of guy who puts out paper on plastic day. In fact, let's fine him for that ahead of time because - excellent - his name's come up on the new £2bn "He'sThatKindaGuy" database which proves my point."

Go away.

Leave me alone.

I just want to watch The Bill and eat unmolested mushy peas. It's not much. Can't you, can't you go next door or start down the other end of the street first or call me on a Sunday afternoon when I was only about to do some washing anyway and I'm grateful for the distraction?

Can't you do your thing and I'll do mine and let's see how we rub along?

How about that? Yes? What do you say?

Review: Prick Up Your Ears, Comedy Theatre

STAGE
Prick Up Your Ears, Comedy Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Daniel Kramer's new telling of the life and death of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell features a insightful turn by Little Britain star Matt Lucas.

REVIEW
With Alan Bennett's screenplay making Stephen Frears' film and John Lahr's biography drawing on playwright Joe Orton's diaries, the question hangs - why another version of Prick Up Your Ears?

The answer, I guess, is Matt Lucas. A meeting between the playful, bald and camp Little Briton and the similarly attired (if more unstable) Kenneth Halliwell has less the appearance of a happy coincidence than an artistic inevitability.

For this reason alone, it seems, writer Simon Bent attempts a new, if blunted, take on the story of the co-dependent and ultimately fatal relationship between Halliwell and Orton.

Despite a jolly re-creation of their early vulgar playfulness, we all know where it's heading and we monitor Halliwell's leg-jerks, count his Nembutal intake and observe his sweaty perambulations like cod psychiatrists waiting for the moment he blows.

But up until that point this is a game of two halves. The undiscovered pair spend their days writing unpublished works, defacing library books and re-working Mrs Dale's Diary into grubby farce. In this enterprise, Halliwell is the cultured engine of invention, Orton the brusque and unformed mentee.

A spell in prison for the vandalism separates the two and sends their strained partnership on darker and different routes. Orton starts to work alone. He's harder, more focused, more dangerous, more talented. Halliwell, the martyr snob, the babyish brat, is a wreck, popping pills, agoraphobic and fearful of losing Orton.

Their spirit of bawdy excess lingers, though, in the form of landlady Mrs Corden, who pops in occasionally ("Only me!" she screeches). Sitcom staple Gwen Taylor is no stranger to the art of the coy glimpse, the deliberate pause and the ramrod punchline and her broad and lascivious housewife channels Irene Handl by way of Bennett.

Chris New takes Orton on the brisk journey from hedonistic outsider to Swinging Sixties totem with sinuous efficiency. His indulgence of the lachrymose Halliwell is all the more touching after his own heart has been hardened by the hot and cold of literary fortune.

Lucas draws on some rampant forces to bellow and gallop like the raging Halliwell. His performance, as chaos descends, is affecting and rich and there's no shortage of investment in his attempts to deliver the destructive demon dwelling within.

As he sinks further into his jealous rage, craving and loathing his partner, his collages grow up the walls like poison ivy, betraying a frantic and disjointed mind. Designer Peter McKintosh turns the small Islington flat into a fiendish Bedlam predicting the horror that follows.

By the final hammer strike, the cheeky star of Little Britain has been subsumed by something altogether more tangled and tortured. His final stillness, after so much agitation, is all the more disturbing.

The cast features high among the many plus-points of Daniel Kramer's production. But, ultimately, the evening falls just short of the operatic grandeur and forensic insight required to nail the tragedy of two people who forfeit all possible happiness to attend instead to the demeaning rituals of casual cruelty.

Review: A Week In December

BOOK
A Week In December
by Sebastian Faulks
Hutchinson, £12.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In an authoritative and biting state of the nation novel, the author aims to capture turbulent times through the eyes of seven characters that typify the times, including a Muslim extremist, a hedge fund manager and a Premiership footballer.

REVIEW
With this commanding state-of-the-nation book with rotten finance at its core, Sebastian Faulks looks to emulate Tom Wolfe without the literary tics.

He takes seven days in the life of the capital in December 2007 and he takes seven characters. He walks in their shoes awhile and watches where their paths cross and, tellingly, where they find no common ground.

Faulks' journalistic background is wonderfully in evidence here, as he negotiates the complex patterns of London, probing a myriad sub-cultures and illuminating strangers with delightful detail. He picks upon the scourges of our age - a hedge fund manager, a druggie, a suicide bomber, a Premiership footballer - and uses their lives to paint a grander picture of end-of-empire indulgence.

Although he is dryly efficient in his prose Faulks rouses himself to glorious indignation to unleash a bitterly comic satire, savaging contemporary betes noires like education, reality TV and the internet. Yet amid his wicked comedy, he still finds the warmth in the heart of even the most deluded and venal of his septet.

Faulks dances across the big themes of the day with such thoroughness there is little doubt this will become required reading when future generations come to wonder where it all went very wrong.

Review: Breakfast At Tiffany's

STAGE
Breakfast At Tiffany's,
Theatre Royal Haymarket
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Sean Mathias directs a playful Anna Friel in the iconic role of good-time girl Holly Golightly.

REVIEW
Anna Friel is a conqueror of worlds. She conquered TV, here and in the US, she conquered movies and now she has magnificently conquered the West End.

Unquestioned acting talent aside, this may be because Friel has a sweet and winning way. She is not boringly beautiful, instead she is an attractive, feline and playful presence. This ensures the role of generous good-time girl Holly Golightly fits her like a rather stylish hat atop a perfectly tailored dress.

That's not to say her performance does not require work - she sings, she plays the guitar, she dances, she maintains a Texan accent, she traipses around naked - but such is her rich accrual of experience, she trips through this multi-tasking with winsome ease.

Against this star turn, William Parsons has a far more arduous and gritty job, forever twirling in the perfumed wake of his enigmatic love.

Joseph Cross puts in the hard yards to keep up. He deserves great credit for supporting the structure of the play on his shoulders and from an overwrought beginning, he brings light and depth to the young writer.

Sean Mathias's production is closer to the Truman Capote original novella than the spritely Audrey Hepburn remake and Friel is perfectly adept at drawing out the heartache behind the smile that is Holly's crowded secret.

Notable among an army of support is James Dreyfus as Hollywood schmuck OJ Berman. Dreyfus gives a broad and entertaining comic cameo perfectly attuned to the '40s screwball motif running through the piece. Dermot Crowley is a neat portrayal of battered desire as barman Joe Bell and Suzanne Bertish gives Madame Spanella a fruity edge for laughs.

Special mention also to Jasper the cat which, although required to do very little, did what it was supposed to do and, crucially, didn't do what it wasn't.

The story centres on the writer's enchantment by a Texan rose with a prickly past who has come to New York seeking excitement and glamour.

Her freewheeling, carefree flirtation with dangerous cads is destined to catch up with her but she keeps her inevitable - and moving - downfall at bay with a balancing act of evasion, charm and puckish high jinx.

The plot is urgent and demanding, and Antony Ward's design requires jack-in-the-box tricks to keep up the frenetic pace of the story.

Two zig-zag fire escapes waltz across the multi-level stage and there's forever something going on, up there, down here, over there. Cinematic in structure, scenes collide, come and go in an instant and nothing lingers for long.

This is, I suppose, to capture the elusive and teasing nature of the minxy main character but, boy, do you have to keep your wits about you.

The early scenes are crammed to the gills and it is only later that everything settles to an accommodating pace, allowing for a more measured exploration of the relationship between Parsons and big-hearted Holly.

Breakfast At Tiffany's is wonderful West End fare - a spectacle, an occasion, a night to remember - with Holly's dashing blonde bob leaving a long comet trail in the memory.

Until January 9.

Review: An Inspector Calls

STAGE
An Inspector Calls, Novello Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Director Stephen Daldry's award-winning and visionary revival of JB Priestley's classic chiller returns to London for a short run.

REVIEW
A dilapidated telephone box stands at an angle, like a drunken grenadier, and, to its right, the boards of the theatre splay and bow, hit by some unseen bomb. That's the first clue that this revival of JB Priestley's classic is going to be emphatically askew.

The curtain rises. Downstage, rain-swept cobbles where Lowry-esque urchins kick through puddles in the gutter. Upstage, a glittering doll's houses on stilts erupts from the street, a Faberge egg opening to reveal its treasures.

It is a staggering set, designed by Ian MacNeil, and one itching to show off its panoply of dramatic fireworks but for now, this one will do - for silhouetted under a street lamp stands trench-coated Inspector Goole, re-creating the iconic image from The Exorcist. He's out to snare him some devils.

Stephen Daldry's ambitious, award-winning, punctilious production, back once more in London, is the reason "revival" is in the dictionary.

Re-imagined, polished, expanded (the core cast of seven is supplemented by a dozen or so silent extras) and choreographed to within an inch of its life, the Billy Elliot director gives the hoary am-dram familiar a miraculous new sheen.

The story is well known - and flawless. A comfortable Midlands family, the Birlings, celebrate the engagement of daughter Shelia to Gerald Croft giving dad Arthur (David Roper) the chance to expand on his theories of wealth acquisition, self-reliance and social division.

Into this cosy pomposity sidles Inspector Goole who tells them a girl has killed herself hours before. He proceeds to examine their foibles and prod their self-satisfaction until they unwittingly reveal how each of them had, in turn, contributed to her downfall. The twists and turns are shattering.

In this overtly political piece (written after the second world war when Priestley was advocating a Labour government's egalitarian agenda), the Birlings one by one descend from their lofty home into the muddy gutter.

Daldry finds comedy too, notably in the figure of the matriarch Sybil (a glorious Sandra Duncan) whose bickering descent from stately galleon to sunken paddle steamer is tweaked neatly for laughs.

Goole (Nicholas Woodeson) and Sheila (Marianne Oldham) hold the moral centre of the piece with affecting power and subtlety. The Inspector rages wildly at the thoughtless mores of the me-first capitalists while the erstwhile prig of a daughter performs the only genuine transformation of the piece.

They are more than ably supported by Roper and Duncan while Robin Whiting (Eric) keeps his performance the right side of indulgent adolescent self-pity.

Daldry's tics and additions - the mute presence of a phalanx of common folk to watch and judge, the direction culled from film noir and the silent era - settle the era and the politics but it is the house on stilts, bowing under the weight of the guilt (and gilt), that makes this the definitive modern revival.

Until November 14.

Review: The Fastest Clock In The Universe

STAGE
Fastest Clock In The Universe,
Hampstead Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In this revival of Philip Ridley's black comedy, a mock birthday party is laced with menace.

REVIEW
Early on in this production, Captain Tock screams out the window. He frightens the birds that occupy the decaying former fur factory in the East End where he lives with narcissistic psychopath Cougar Glass. The screeching of the birds is exquisite and irritating, frantic and menacing.

It is, therefore, typical of Philip Ridley's 1992 unsettling black comedy.

Ridley's portrayal of the destructive homosexual relationship between the middle-aged and balding Tock (a compelling Finbar Lynch) and the self-involved peacock Glass (Alec Newman) has echoes of Orton/Halliwell as imagined by Pinter.

Tock is revolted by his role as the monster's aid yet he is unwilling to rid himself of the hunk of beef sizzling under the sun lamp who lends to him a fleeting sense of worth. Glass requires only to be serviced in his delusion of eternal youth.

As they prepare for Glass's latest 19th birthday party with fake cards, cake and bottles of vodka they fence and bicker like a sick Steptoe And Son in the darkened junk shop of a home surrounded by Tock's stuffed birds and knick-knacks.

Atrophy and cruelty are everywhere, not least in Glass's black heart but also embodied by ageing lank-haired neighbour Cheetah Bee (Eileen Page), wrapped in her fur coat like a '40s Miss Havisham.

In contrast, guest of honour at the mock celebrations is the youthful and exuberant 15-year-old Foxtrot Darling (Neet Mohan) whom the predatory Glass has groomed with sick efficiency.

But Foxtrot has a birthday surprise of his own, bringing in tow the teetering, screeching Sherbert Gravel (a pitch perfect Jaime Winstone). Her fearless unpicking of Glass's fragile self-deception is the comic heartbeat of the production which manages to be both pitch black and gaudy at the same time.

Until October 17.

Review: Turner And The Masters

ART
Turner And The Masters
Tate Britain
5/5

IN A NUTSHELL
JMW Turner pits himself against the great names of art in a blockbuster exhibition that tells a compelling story.

Picture: JMW Turner, Dutch Boats in a Gale (The Bridgewater Sea Piece) Exhibited 1801. Private collection

REVIEW
It might on paper sound like a Channel 5 pop doc or a high-brow fantasy fiction mash-up, but JMW Turner going head to head with the Old Masters in the ultimate brush-off may well just be the 19th century painter's dream realised.

For as this blockbuster exhibition confirms, Britain's favourite artist actively sought comparison with the icons who went before. Less reverentially, he fostered a keen sense of rivalry with his contemporaries - sometimes coming off a poor second.

While he professed he paid homage to the past "con amore", there's no escaping the sense that Turner was constantly measuring his worth against the greats in a calculated strategy to fix his own immortality.

If you want evidence, there's evidence. John Constable's Opening Of Waterloo Bridge and Turner's Helvoetsluys are placed side by side for the first time since their unveiling in 1832.

Back then Constable was still feverishly adding colour as the painting hung on the wall at the Royal Academy when, with a flourish, Turner arrived and added a circle of red to his own more muted seascape as if to say - less is more, old friend. "He's been here and fired a gun," said Constable in response.

So there's drama in the juxtaposition of Turner and his heroes and rivals. But, away from the adrenalin of one-upmanship, the exhibition, room by room, offers a simple narrative on Turner's restless struggle to capture his trademark hazy style and his self-conscious challenging of artistic conventions.

From his slavish copying of his early days and his fidgety combative challenge to himself over technique, a singular voice begins to emerge. His attempts to emulate the Masters expose his weaknesses - form and figure - and his strengths - landscape impressionism - pinballing him towards the moment he fully flowers in an explosion of colour and energy.

"Atmosphere is my strength," he finally concedes, almost breathlessly, in the last of the six packed rooms once his long expedition through the history of art is done.

The Tate Britain has worked marvels to prise some heady masterpieces from the Louvre and other major galleries (Rembrandt's The Mill and Poussin's La Deluge are just two such coups). So, for the first time in many cases, direct and obvious comparisons can be made between Turner and Titian, Claude Lorrain, van de Velde, Canaletto, Rubens et al, just as he had wished.

This is close to perfect for the Turner newcomer, who can experience and understand what he was trying to do and when and why he was trying to do it.

The exhibition has been years in the planning and no doubt entailed lengthy emails, lots of arm twisting and sleepless caffeine-fuelled nights. Worth it, worth it, worth it.

This combination of beauty, context and big name art makes for a substantial exhibition and, crucially in its quest to capture a wider audience, a compelling story of feuds, trials, triumph and magnificence.

Turner And The Masters is undoubtedly the real thing.

Until January 31, 2010.

Review: Sure And Certain Death

BOOK
Sure And Certain Death by Barbara Nadel
Headline, £19.99
1/5

IN A NUTSHELL
An East London already subject to the Luftwaffe's attentions fears that the Ripper is at work once more.

REVIEW
East London is rife with rumour - there's a new Ripper at work, using the cover and indifference created by the Blitz, a more effective and grislier killer, to pursue a bloody quest to do away with women of an uncertain age but with an uncertain connection.

A reluctant investigator fills in where the second rate police fail. His name is Francis Hancock and he is well placed to go a-hunting as a funeral director, although he is dogged with flashbacks of the trenches of the Great War and seen as an outsider because of his Asian background.

From this promising beginning and with an impeccably realised setting, author Barbara Nadel frustrates the reader, not by the usual means of red herrings, blind alleys and the steady accumulation of evasive clues, but by doing nothing much for 200-or-so pages before wrapping the piece up neatly with a loosely-tied melodramatic bow.

Pity that such a great background is wasted with vague plotting and indistinct characterisation.

Francis Hancock is a case in point - a theoretically interesting construct - his supposed psychological flaws are no more than irritations. He resorts to reminding us he's bonkers in case we should be unconvinced by his timely bouts of anguish.

Review: Who's Afraid Of Jane Austen?

ESSAYS
Who's Afraid Of Jane Austen? by Henry Hitchings
Published by John Murray, £7.99
2/5

IN A NUTSHELL
The author aims to bring the big beasts of literature down to a size snug enough to fit in your frontal lobe.

REVIEW
So many books, so little time. Henry Hitchings has an idea to tackle the imbalance.

This premature stocking filler is a collection of mini essays on the big hitters - the Austens, the Joyces, the Homers - with the stated aim of bringing the blighters down to size.

The book is subtitled ... "How To Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read" and the temptation to point out that a work aspiring to the affectation of literary snobbery should perhaps think again about the deployment of a split infinitive is too easy. So I won't go there.

Instead, I'll point out another flaw. The author talks about how books are talked about and talks about the "dangerous high-brow types" and how they talk about the books they talk about but fails to give the lowdown on the books themselves. No help there then.

However, these essays are broadly entertaining and informative in a general way.

Unfortunately, they also have the tone of a well-meaning school special assembly in which some colourfully-jumpered loon blows a raspberry and shouts "Hey kids, I'm Christopher Cannabis. See what fun I am." Pause. "But I'm deadly serious too."