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To celebrate the DVD release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on Monday 30th January, we've teamed up with Studio Canal and have 5 copies of the book Smiley Versus Karla to give away, a collection of three of John le Carré's famous Cold War spy thrillers, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.
All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is answer this question correctly.
What is the name of George Smiley's wife?
Send your answers to untitledcompetition@gmail.com by Sunday 29th January and the five winners will be chosen at random on the DVD release date.
To participate in future competitions, make sure you register your email address, on the right hand side of this page, to receive our monthly newsletter.
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Monday, 23 January, 2012
"The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger. They write with literary inheritance. But at the same time I'd say they're fiercely individualistic writers, and that's what I'm aspiring to, a voice that's completely my own."
Noughties is 24-year-old Ben Masters' debut novel. It's a coming of age story, set over the course of a group of students' final night at Oxford as we follow them from pub to bar to club in what Masters explains is a "tongue-in-cheek Miltonic descent". The novel is told through the voice of Eliot Lamb, English undergraduate and, as we learn as we piece together the events of his university years through his flashbacks, our somewhat unreliable narrator.
Masters wrote the novel after his own student days in Oxford. Regarding it as "prentice work", he completed the first draft in a mere five months. "I just wanted to get it done," he says, "I was always quite hesitant about spending too much time on it. I knew I wanted to be a writer so I wanted quick feedback, I wanted someone to tell me whether I could write or not. I was always going to carry on regardless, but I wanted that affirmation from an agent and publisher."
By far the best advice he received during this period came from his "then literary god", Martin Amis. Queuing up to have a him sign a copy of one of his books after hearing the author speak, Masters told him that he was an aspiring novelist. "Get it finished" was Amis's recommendation, and so that became Masters' working motto.
Although, he assures me, the novel is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the term - "my university experience was too standard, too boring, to be turned into a novel" - Masters, like his protagonist Eliot, also read English at Oxford. He admits that he drew on his experiences to a certain degree though; after all, he was only 22 with "very little life lived" when he wrote it, so "what else are you going to write about?" he admits.
"But I don't see it as an 'Oxford novel' per se," he adds, "so much as a university novel. After all, the last fifteen to twenty years has been quite a peculiar time in university student history, what with the idea of mass university-going - something that could be about to come to end now. If you think about it, it's a standardized experience, but where's the novel that encapsulates that?"
"Perhaps Noughties fills a hole there," he suggests, not least because campus novels like Lucky Jim or Wonder Boys tend to focus on the university staff rather than the students.
But Masters' experience at Oxford informs the novel in more ways than one. Knowing that he wanted to be a writer, he saw his degree as "preparation", again referring to his work as a vocation: "I saw my apprenticeship as reading the canon."
Noughties is an incredibly intertextual piece as well as being markedly stylised, and is self-consciously literary in terms of the many allusions and quotations that pepper its pages. This doesn't necessarily mean that a reader has to be well versed in literature to appreciate the novel, but Masters admits the intertextual moments "are there for a reason".
He describes the book as a "comedy of the intellect": it's a novel about Eliot's maturation, "the story of three years of his head being filled with this highbrow arcane knowledge, and he's finding his voice and working out what to do with it."
It seems fair to make a comparison here with what Masters himself is doing: finding his own voice amongst those already out there, not least because of the emphasis he places on reading as his preparation.
"The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger," he explains, "they write with literary inheritance. But at the same time I'd say they're fiercely individualistic writers, and that's what I'm aspiring to, a voice that's completely my own."
He goes on to tell me that his second novel - which he's working on right now - is even more intertextual than Noughties. It's full of pastiches, or what he prefers to call "loving emulations". It's style however that really excites him - he's currently writing a PhD on the subject at Cambridge - and I have to admit that that's what really stood out for me in his own work.
"I don't like critics who dismiss ornate writing as being all style and no substance," he declares. "So much substance is in the style, and style can shape content."
This is something he feels particularly passionately about when it comes to debut novels: "If you're a first novelist and you haven't got a certain amount of stylistic gusto, what are you doing?" he asks. "There should be an energy there. So many of the works I admire - The Rachel Papers, Lucky Jim, White Teeth - that's how it should be, something that overflows its boundaries. There has to be a certain amount of joy in the prose if you're a young writer."
Despite the fact that his own prose is well articulated, it's clear that Masters is aware he's a young novelist still finding his voice. Noughties, he says, is "the beginning of something. I'm not happy with it, it's going to be bigger and better, I'm going to go on and write more."
I joke that it's refreshing to hear that he sees himself as an evolving author with a trajectory ahead of them, rather than resting on more egotistical laurels. "Oh, there's a lot of egoism," he replies with a laugh, "of course there is. But I'm also well aware that there's the danger of seeing the publication of Noughties as an 'I've arrived' moment. I prefer to maintain the attitude that I'm only as good as my next novel."
Noughties is published by Hamish Hamilton.
Lucy Scholes, January 2012
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Thursday, 12 January, 2012
A very happy 2012 to all our readers. As the last discarded conifers head off to be recycled into next season's book tokens, it's time to take stock of what the new year has in store for all things literary, and the Guardian has duly obliged with a nifty calendar of events and publications that matter.
Among the more intriguing is a marathon Shakespearefest at the Globe Theatre, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which promises 37 plays in 37 languages from April to June including a Bangla Tempest and a Hip Hop Othello: "I hate the bastard, hate the Moor. I hate his rhymes, I hate his whore."
If your resolutions extend to reading more short stories you can't go wrong with Adam Ross. Sample one of his offerings in his just published collection here. You will also enjoy Penguin Shorts, and their digital take on classically styled affordable tales for a mass audience.
On the subject of captivating design, the short film The Joy of Books has been a recent Twitter sensation, recalling Spike Jonze's equally lovely Mourir Auprès de Toi, an animation set in the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris.
Last but by no means least, this week saw the Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 shortlist announced. Not the usual five, but seven, titles have made the final list, with stories ranging from "the arid borderlands of Pakistan, the crowded cityscape of modern Seoul, and the opium factories of nineteenth century Canton". A resolution you may not yet have thought of could be to read each of these novels before the winner is declared on 15th March.
On your marks...
Farhana Gani, January 2012
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Thursday, 12 January, 2012
"Austen novels are comedies, but as the 19th century goes along
marriage plots follow the women into the difficulties of marriage, and
become darker. Those novels - Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina - are the ones I love."
On the face of it, The Marriage Plot is more conventional - and far less experimental - than Jeffrey Eugenides' previous two novels, The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), though they all deal - to various, startling degrees - with mixed-up youth. How did this a campus novel, with its themes of 19th-century romance, manic depression and the search for religious truth, come about? Mark Reynolds investigates.
I was writing another novel, about a rich family that was throwing a debutante party, and I suppose even that idea was less outrageous than Middlesex. But out of that book three characters appeared who, the more I thought about them, didn't belong in that novel. That was Madeleine and Mitchell, basically, and Madeleine's boyfriend Leonard, and at the start I wasn't sure how important a figure he was going to be. And I took those characters out of that novel and gave them their own novel.
Madeleine's story began with the sentence "Madeleine's love troubles began at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love." So she came with semiotics attached, and she came in the midst of a romantic predicament. And then later on I realised she was a devotee of 19th-century fiction, especially Austen and Elliot and James, and in a way was trying to emancipate herself from the romantic illusions those books had fostered in her.
I'm not an Austen scholar like Madeleine, but The Portrait of a Lady is my favourite Henry James novel, and probably more than any book that Madeleine reads looms large in my affection and looms large in my conception of the marriage plot. If you think about the Austen novels they always end in weddings and they're comedies, but as the 19th century goes along marriage plots follow the women into their marriages and into the difficulties of marriage, and they become darker. Those novels to me - Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, even Anna Karenina is a marriage plot - are the ones I love from that era.
I think it's possible to convey meaning with a novel, to say true things about people and society. I'm not with Derrida that all texts have apparent contradictions that will render them incoherent or meaningless. Maddy's old professor says that "the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot" and it's certainly a valid position to hold, but perhaps a reactionary and outmoded one. It's one I've toyed with, but I don't share it. I began reading novels because of James Joyce and the modernists, so I came in long after the marriage plot was dead and it didn't bother me, so it's not something that has been central to my conception of the novel. But obviously I was playing with the idea of the marriage plot here, and the extent to which what we read affects our actual life. It's not just the marriage plot: Mitchell reads many mystical books that affect him; Madeleine reads both Victorian novels and French theory that affect her. And, especially for people in college, what you read gets into your bloodstream like a drug and affects your life, and that's really what I was trying to examine in this book.
Deconstructivism and semiotics were coming into play in America in 1978 when I got to college, and it was causing a great disturbance in the English department, so you had a schism where some professors either were ignorant of it or distrustful of it, and others who were enthusiastically adopting it. So if you were a student then, you were kind of a child of divorcing parents, and perhaps had an affection for both parents, but would shuttle back and forth between the houses, and that was my own experience as an English student. And that's why I gave Madeleine this predicament of being both attracted to the new, hip philosophy of semiotics, and also rooted in a more traditional pedagogy of literary preferences. I was just trying to reflect the time.
I've been influenced by French theory and Foucault. One of Foucault's books led me to write Middlesex. There are certain post-modern elements in my fiction, but I resist the notions that the author's dead. Again, I resist the idea that text can't convey meaning, and I resist some of their more doctrinaire positions. And I love narrative, I love storytelling, and I believe in creating characters with whom the reader can identify or whose story is compelling to the reader. So I have affection for a lot of traditional elements of novel writing, as well as many theoretical agreements with the semioticians.
It seems like there's lots of social conduct that tries to keep us from behaving badly, and many of the things that are so-called PC are probably good sense. At its heart it means trying to be sensitive to the feelings of other people, especially disadvantaged people or people who have been discriminated against. So it doesn't seem in the main a wrong emphasis. Is it against human nature? Yeah, it's perhaps against male nature not to go and grab every woman that looks attractive to a man, but it wasn't PC that got men to behave a little bit better than the brutes that they are in the jungle; it's not so different from the many religious teachings that have formed our culture.
I remember graduating and seeing that people were going off to interviews with investment banks, and I had no idea what that meant. Now that's partly because I'm stupid, partly because I was an English major, but also because in general people weren't talking about it that much. And this entire move to Wall Street on the part of our best and brightest hadn't quite begun. It was a much smaller part of the economy. Since then it's grown and grown and grown so that a place like where I teach at Princeton, something like 40 to 60 per cent of the graduates might end up working for Wall Street in one way or another. You know, you have the 'quants', the brilliant mathematicians, being hired to do that instead of figure out how to run NASA. This has nothing to do with my novel, but in my opinion the financial sector has grown far too large. It's a necessary thing to have in a capitalist society, but the fact that so many of our smart kids are going into a line of work that is really not innovative, creative or productive, but necessary in some way, doesn't seem to be a great trend. But it hadn't quite started at the time I'm writing about at Brown.
When Madeline leaves college she has the summer with Leonard, taking care of him, that is difficult. It was important to show both the neediness and magnetism of the manic-depressive. I was trying to imagine what such a person would be like, and the difficulties of being in love with someone like Leonard: from both sides. I was trying to show Maddy's point of view and Leonard's to the best of my ability. Had I not conveyed that, I don't think I would have conveyed the essence of the problem at the heart of their relationship.
I think there's been a lot of attention to depression, but not to mania, so I felt that, in writing the scenes where Leonard becomes manic, I hadn't read an account like that before. And going back to this novel seeming more conventional, I found that some of my most experimental writing ever occurred in trying to map and describe Leonard's overheating mind in Cape Cod. So I think in so-called realistic novels, there are many places where the novelist is called upon to work experimentally, just in order to try and describe how a person's mental processes are working, and that the labels realistic and surrealistic sometimes don't do justice to what is actually going on inside a book.
Mitchell I think discovers a certain amount of truth in his searches. I mean he's someone who was not brought up religiously, and embarks on a real investigation of religion through his studies, and then is not content just with academic knowledge, but wants to try and have an actual mystical experience and goes about that as many people do at that age, and little by little he comes to the conclusion that the only validity of any religious dogma is if it changes how you behave in life and how you conduct your affairs. So he tries to be the best possible person he can become when he goes to work for Mother Theresa and joins the Quaker group. He's defeated in his attempt to become a saint, but I think he does gain a certain measure of self-understanding through that process. At the end of the book he's making another step toward being a better person when he's understanding that Madeleine is not going to be the woman he's going to be with, and that he has to give her her freedom as easily as possible and not cause any scenes. There's a line at the end when he's feeling a little better about himself, where I think he makes a step toward the kind of person he wants to become. And I think it's being with the Quakers, and having thought about all these things over the years, that allow him to do that.
The Marriage Plot is published by Fourth Estate.
Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, contributing editor to Untitled Books, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
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Tuesday, 6 December, 2011
Bedford Square Books is the new ebook and Print On Demand publishing venture set up by the Ed Victor Literary Agency earlier this autumn. They debuted with six titles, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction - The Secret History of Ancient Egypt, Herbie Brennan; Flint, Paul Eddy; Tales for the Telling, Edna O'Brian; The Queen and Us, Nigel Nicolson; Good Times, Bad Times, Harold Evans; and Two Sides of the Moon, David Scott and Alexei Leonov - and are planning to add an additional six to their list in the new year. I met up with Victor and his team in his offices in Bloomsbury to discuss this innovative new project.
Rather than treading on the toes of existing publishers, what they're doing, Sophie Hicks tells me, is "filling a gap in the market". They haven't employed any extra in-house staff, just enlisted the services of the digital production company Acorn, and a part-time publicist to help market the titles. As the current Bedford Square Books list is compiled of books by their existing authors that are currently out of print or unavailable, all the agency is doing, Hicks and her colleagues Charlie Campbell and Edina Imrik explain, is "providing a further service for our authors". Were a publisher then to approach them looking to take on one of the titles, there would be no conflict of interest; this remains the obvious goal. For example, they recently sold the Chinese rights to Good Times, Bad Times in Frankfurt. The New Year will also see the launch of the accompanying Bedford Square Stories - short stories or one-off articles individually priced and downloadable - all sourced, again, from their authors' back catalogues. A task which, bar potential stumbling blocks when it comes to the rights of previously published pieces, particularly journalistic ones, actually makes perfect sense when you've got as eclectic and illustrious a list as Victor.
Nevertheless, I'm intrigued as to whether the project has encouraged a host of fresh aspiring ebook-savy authors to approach the agency, or alternatively, whether the agency itself is actively seeking out new ebook and POD authors as separate from their other clients? Not at all, everyone explains. Though alongside the otherwise out-of-print titles the Spring will see the launch of the first Bedford Square Books Originals; Dead Rich by Louise Fennell. Victor is extremely excited about this debut novel - described by the author as "a Shameless [the Channel 4 TV show] with nobs on" - and so confident about it's appeal that, despite being turned down by publishers seventeen times, he's decided to go ahead and publish it himself: "I feel like the Viet Kong fighting a guerilla war," he tells me with a laugh. A grand launch party is scheduled for February with a guest list that includes the rich and famous (Victor warns that only my very best party dress will be suitable attire for the event), but the book is already making the press - last week the Evening Standard pondered whether it could indeed be the "e-jewel in Ed Victor's literary crown". I'm certainly keen to see the sales figures, as success with an original title has the potential to send Bedford Square Books, and the agency itself, in an entirely new direction.
Dead Rich and Bedford Square Stories launch updates to follow in the New Year...
Lucy Scholes, December 2011
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Tuesday, 6 December, 2011
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