Nicci French Blog

The Long and the Short and the Tall

How tall do you think Thom 'Radiohead' Yorke is? What about Joe 'Is She Really Going Out With Him?' Jackson? It's not exactly obsessed me, but if pressed I think I would have said that Yorke sings in a tall sort of way. And Joe Jackson seems to sing with the resentment of a small man, the napoleonic urge to revenge yourself on a tall world. Can it really be true, as I read here that Thom Yorke is five foot five and Joe Jackson six foot six? 

Of course, it's a rule of thumb (as it were), that famous people are much smaller than you think they are, unless they are Clint Eastwood. I once stood next to Paul McCartney and he was like a miniature toy version of Paul McCartney. I was once introduced to Paul Newman who looked like the third doll down in the Russian Doll version of Paul Newman. (In fact, I've now done some research, and there is some controversy about McCartney's height. And even more about Newman's. Not much about Paul Simon though. The only dispute seems to be about whether he is five two or five three. He sort of sounds short anyway.)

Something Nasty in the Woodshed

From my new favourite website, longform.org, a horribly hilarious account of a boy scout who, for one of his badges, built a nuclear reactor in his garden shed. How Wes Anderson or Spike Jonze hasn't made a film version of this yet, I do not understand.

McGuinness isn't Good for You

Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, has written an article in GQ (this sounds like the beginning of a nursery rhyme), attacking 'free' music. So far so predictable. The fun part starts when NoRockandRollFun.com dismantles his argument line by line. Wonderful, and the sort of thing that could only be done in a blog.

Reading it reminded me of Clive James's account in his memoirs of a disastrous stage performance he gave at Cambridge which was reviewed by Germaine Greer. She wrote that 'watching my performance was a strange exercise in compassion, like seeing a man who deserved punishment being beaten up more thoroughly than his crime warranted.'

And What I Read On My Holidays

Are you researching something? someone asked me as I read yet another war book. Before going on holiday, I'd already finished Sebastian Junger's War, an account of fifteen months he'd spent with a US army platoon trying to secure a godforsaken valley in eastern Afghanistan. Then, on holiday, I read David Finkel's The Good Soldiers (about a US army platoon taking part in the 'surge' in Bagdad), followed by Dexter Filkins' The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror. Finkel got such a level of access to the soldiers' private thoughts, their emails, their diaries, that his book reads like a novel. They are all terrific, but Filkins' is perhaps the best. His reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq is almost suicidal in its bravery. Geoff Dyer wrote an interesting article arguing that novelists aren't going to be able compete with books like this, and he's probably right. After reading these books, I found the idea of someone sitting at home trying to imagine what it's like when someone gets blown up by an I.E.D. very much beside the point. 

No, I wasn't researching anything. But there are young men the age of our son out there (a couple of whom were at school with him) and I thought I should find out what it's like. It's not a comfortable experience.

On a not much lighter note, I read Scott Turow's Innocent. His debut novel, Presumed Innocent, is one of the best thrillers ever written and I was dubious about the idea of a sequel. I was wrong. It's both a brilliant achievement in its own right, but also brilliant as a demonstration of what a sequel can be, returning to the themes of the earlier book and playing with them, deepening them. 

Anyone who has any ambition to write a thriller (and assuming of course that they have already read all the Nicci French books, and then reread them and lived with them as if they were their children) could do much worse than read these two books and consider the sheer skill with which they are constructed - and also the masterful use Turow makes of his knowledge of the legal milieu.

What else? I read Steven Pinker's Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. It has, of course, some interesting information in it, but I would say that there are four Steven Pinker books you should read before this one.

And I lay on the top bunk in the ferry cabin reading George Eliot's Silas Marner, and when I got to the bit where... well, I won't give it away, but if you've read it, you'll know the bit I mean...the tears were running down my face. It's a book of many great qualities, one of which I particularly like, and which is particularly rare among Victorian novels: it's short. 

What I read on holiday

Every summer we travel to Sweden. Luckily, we go by ferry and car - luckily, because then we can take as many books as we want. And we take lots of them, dozens and dozens: books we know we're going to read and books we think we're going to read and books we might possibly read or dip into and a few reference books, who knows why?, and some poetry books so we can learn poetry by heart, and then there are the books we want other people to read because we love them so much and the just-in-case books which we are pretty certain we won't have time to read, but what if a day suddenly has more hours in it, or if we break a leg and spend all our time lying in bed.... In fact, I blame it on Sean: usually only six or so of the books are my choice, and the rest are his. He is tremendously ambitious: he always takes several classics that are hundreds of densely-typed pages long. I remember that the first holiday we ever went on together was a walking week in the Provence, and he carried the new, heavy (unopened) translation of War and Peace in his rucksack, from hotel to hotel. 

I always promise myself I am going to keep a book diary for myself. Sometimes i forget what I have read; I regularly forget when or where I read it. The two things often go together - where and when you read a book changes how you read it and how you remember it. The leaking tent in Wales where I first read Middlemarch (decades later, I still have the battered blue copy); the long train journey through Italy in winter, feeling homesick, where I first read To The Lighthouse. But this summer I read two books which I am not going to forget. Because it rained, on and off, for two weeks, I read them both sitting on the sofa inside the house, looking up every now and then to watch the baby swallows learning to fly outside the window. T

he first was Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. I don't like the title, but I do love the novel. It's funny (sometimes hilarious), sardonic, painfully sad. The voice of the narrator is wise-cracking and poignant. I couldn't believe this novel didn't win the Orange prize - but then, I haven't yet read Barbara Kingsolver's winning Lacuna, though it's one of the novels that went with me on holiday and I didn't quite have time to open. 

The second novel I read while outside it drizzled and poured, and the swallows swooped past (they seem to fly for the sheer fun of it), was Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit. I'd read it before, but many years ago. It's one of those long, sprawling, episodic Victorian novels you have to settle into, a long haul. My edition - in print so tiny it hurts the eyes - is 700 pages. And it's a very messy, blemished, ramshackle book - if it were published today, it wouldn't win any prizes, even though it's such a mighty wonder. It's too wild and too uncorrected. Randall Jarrett once wrote that 'the novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.' Little Dorrit's immense, unwieldy plot creaks and groans, the expositions make your brain ache, half the characters are caricatures, Little Dorrit herself is almost as absurdly sentimental as Little Nell (of whom Oscar Wilde said that 'one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter'), the different parts of the novel aren't really coherent. And yet it's magnificent and adorable and its urban vigour thunders in your mind long after you have finished it. Dickens manages to write about the huge tides of history as well as about the small lives of ordinary people; he conjures up the chaos and squalor and corruption of the time, and the decency of invisible citizens. Its sweep and its vividness are unrivalled.