Flying The Literary Skies

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

According to a recent report in AdAge, an international airline is planning to “curate” a series of books for passengers so that they will be able to finish reading them just as their planes touch down. Each one will last only for the duration of one of the airline's routes. "According to our literary friends at Hachette, the average reader consumes between 200 and 300 words per minute," the head of the airline’s agency is quoted as saying. "For the longer flights, we accommodated some napping time and meals."

G'day, mates! This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard. On your right, you can see the Harbour Bridge, and on your left, you’ll see a small pile of paperbacks. I know you’re used to reading books only on screens, but here, as a treat, is the real thing. Go on, pick up any one of them. Flash them for snob appeal the same way you do your chunky fountain pens and LPs.

Not to worry, the plane’s on autopilot, so I can ramble on for a bit. You don’t mind, do you? Good on yer. Well, even if you do mind, there’s little you can do about it, heh-heh. Just joking. No, I haven’t been sampling the Shiraz.

Checking out the books? You’ll find something for every taste. All you Wall Street tycoons can curl up with the financial thriller in which a young man armed with a management degree foils dastardly deeds planned by the Occupy Movement. Software tycoons: for you there’s the saga of a couple who rent out their garage to programmers working on the next big thing, only to find that they’re ripping off Apple devices instead. And for the women -- hello, ladies! -- there’s the heartwarming story of Sheryl Sandberg’s live-in maids and how they’re the power behind her throne.

The special thing about these books is that we've designed them to be just the right length. Start now and you’ll finish as you land. It’s six hours till we touch down, and according to our research the average reader consumes about 200 words per minute. Mates, I’m not suggesting that any of you are average, but still, that’s the only metric we have at present. So: 360 minutes would mean 72, 000 words. Whoa, I can hear you say, that sounds like a lot! But hold on a bit, you blokes.

On flights like these, we’ve noticed that you like to nap for an hour. So we told our talented writers to cut off 12,000 words; they're a fair dinkum lot. Then, of course, you’d need an hour at the very least to do justice to our fine wines and comestibles. That’s another 12,000 words gone.

Restroom breaks? No worries: take half-an-hour. Lop off another 6,000 words.

That’s not all. Stretching and strolling down the aisle to check on the status of co-passengers: 45 minutes. Take off another 9,000 words. Then again, should you be seated next to an attractive co-passenger, fumbling attempts at conversation would take, say, an hour. That’s another 12,000 words gone. Should you happen to be the attractive co-passenger in question, the same applies, as it’s difficult to read with someone burbling in your ear.

Further, you do need to listen to our in-flight announcements and safety procedures. That’s 45 minutes. We’ve also made allowances for those who conduct conversations in loud voices as well as children who are less than well behaved. These distractions shouldn’t occupy more than another 45 minutes.  Which means, as we’ve instructed our willing writers, another 18,000 words gone.

Let’s see, have we left anything out? Well, we’ll give you a little free time, because a part of flying is also, as we’ve observed, simply moving about in your seat trying to get comfortable. Let's take 3,000 – or make it 2,950 – off.

That leaves us with 50 well-chosen words. Read them right now, so you can sit back and enjoy the in-flight movie.

Reading In A Time Of Distraction

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

This column isn’t about what I thought it would be about.

Last week, I picked up a new anthology of Indian literature, intending to take a few days in going through it and then writing about my reactions. But reading ran aground, as it’s been doing for some time now. Every few pages, a drowsy numbness pained my sense, as the poet chappie would have said, and I put the book aside, reaching for a nearby screen.

Maybe I was just intimidated by the anthology’s phalanx of authors, professors and translators writing about – in their words – stalwarts and towering figures, with books that shaped contours, created a stir and, in one case, behaved like a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the establishment (which gave rise to the urge for a cocktail of a non-explosive variety).

It would be unfair to point fingers at this book alone, however. Even the new le Carré, which otherwise would have been consumed in a gulp or few, took several more swallows than necessary, and that’s not because of the quality of the novel.

I’d written about this earlier, referencing Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed 2011 work, The Shallows, which – to put it baldly – claims that the Internet is making us stupid. His subject is what happens to the brain when faced with digital distraction: "On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream."

This cognitive overload rewires the brain, Carr writes, and one of the costs of such switching is that "the linear, literary mind" becomes "yesterday's mind". Brains are scrambled by Twitter, Angry Birds, RSS readers, e-mail and all the other distractions that flesh is heir to. Neuronal grooves caused over time by the act of sustained reading are being overlaid by smaller nets, each one triggered by getting a quick fix.

The world we live in makes such pursuits increasingly easy and gratifying. As Damian Thompson writes in his The Fix, “our problem is that we’ve built an environment that bombards us with rewards that our bodies don’t need and that do nothing to ensure our survival as a species. Yet, because they are rewards – that is, because they provoke specific feelings of anticipation and pleasure in the brain – we grab them anyway.” Thompson’s thesis is that we’re all addicts in one way or another, entranced by objects from cupcakes to smartphones. It takes considerable willpower to break free -- although won’t-power may be a better word.

Present shock is what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls it. “Everything is real, real-time and always on”, he says in his new book, the title of which is a tip of the hat to and update of Alvin Toffler’s influential 1970 work. We live in a “distracted present”, Rushkoff writes, always reacting to “the ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands”.

He identifies several consequences of this new presentism, the first of which is narrative collapse: the abandonment of the traditional, linear stories that we all live by. With no charted journeys or goals, we’re more impulsive and impatient, and though he doesn't spell it out in so many words, this could also be why reading for a prolonged period is becoming more difficult. “How do we tell stories and convey values without the time required to tell a linear story?” he asks. Social impact apart, this has implications for the future of the novel itself – a new mode, fractured and jittery, may well come into being.

All of which can cause anxiety and exhilaration in equal measure. Swinging between the two, I managed to get this column done on time, in large part because the wi-fi stopped working and the technician resisted all attempts at contact. If he continues to prove recalcitrant, I may even be able to finish reading the anthology I intended to write about.

John Williams's Novel Of Everyday Heroism

This week's Sunday Guardian column

It made only a few waves when it was published almost 50 years ago, but now, a novel by an American author is climbing the charts in Europe. According to a recent report in Publisher’s Weekly, it’s the No. 1 bestseller in the Netherlands and also doing remarkably well in France, Spain and Italy. In the US, it was a reissue by New York Review Books Classics in 2006 that gave it a renewed lease of life.

Stoner, by John Williams, is at first glance a novel unlikely to merit such popularity. In brief, it tells of the life of William Stoner, born to an impoverished agricultural family on a small farm in Missouri in 1891, who goes on to study at the state university and discovers a love for literature. He becomes a professor, gets married, has an affair, is embroiled in petty academic politics and ages before his time.

That, on the surface, is what the novel contains. In Williams’s hands, however, this saga of the everyday reaches heroic proportions, which is, one supposes, one of the points he is trying to make. “From the earliest time he could remember, William Stoner had his duties,” we’re told at the start, and much of the novel deals with how this principled man goes about his duties in the best way he can.

Although his parents assume that after he completes his course in agricultural studies their son will return to their farm, it’s a course in English literature that derails expectations. This “troubled and disquieted [Stoner] in a way nothing had ever done before”, and he makes a full-time commitment to it -- a commitment that lasts for and defines the rest of his life. After reading the classics, “he became conscious of himself in a way that he had not done before”. In effect, he recreates himself and this is reinforced again later: “As his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself”.

It’s after Stoner starts teaching that he comes across a St Louis debutante who sweeps him off his feet. They marry and have a daughter but it’s a relationship that’s fraught from the start. Williams paints Stoner throughout as upright and kind, with the portrayal of his unpleasant wife decidedly one-sided and enigmatic. Approaching middle age, Stoner embarks upon an affair with a much younger instructor at the university, and this relationship, in contrast, is idealized: when together, “they seemed to themselves to move outside of time, in a timeless universe of their own discovery”.

Notably, Williams’s prose is crystal-clear and poised throughout, with a tone of gravitas that’s simple but never simplistic, and always grounded in details of the real world. At times, for example, he sums up characters in an incisive sentence. Stoner’s father-in-law, “like many men who consider their success incomplete…was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance”. As for his wife, “her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said”.

The novel is immensely moving, especially towards the end, when Stoner reckons with what he’s had to give up and what he’s gained by following his way of life. Passion may be a strong word for what drives the noble Stoner, yet we’re told that he had “given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving…. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.” This animating emotion ripples through every page of the book, encompassing university life, the values one lives by, close relationships and loss. The novel’s German publisher recently said that it is about the final things of life: “Love, commitment, compassion, work, backbone, truthfulness, death.” It deserves every bit of its new-found popularity.

Giving Novelists A Kick Start

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Zach Braff was in the news this week for raising over $2 million in less than five days to make the follow-up to his 1994 film, Garden State. What was unusual about this was the way the writer-actor-director went about it: he put up a request on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, explaining that he was reaching out for funds from the public rather than the Hollywood system in order to preserve control over the final product. He was inspired, he said, by the example of the makers of Veronica Mars, who had earlier acquired funds via the same source.

Upon reading this, I wondered whether any fledgling novelists had tapped the same channel  – after all, the one piece of advice they’re constantly given is not to give up the day job, as success in the profession is hard to come by and the pay is meagre. Had any of them used Kickstarter to give them, well, a kick start?

I checked, and it turns out that they have. Take Jack Cheng, for example, a designer and former advertising copywriter. “For the last three years, I've spent my nights and weekends working on a novel,” he writes. “Now I'm raising money to hire a professional editor and publish the book in a range of formats.” His novel, These Days, is described as the story of a guy who designs “fake computer interfaces for plastic prop displays in furniture showrooms” who meets a girl who doesn't own a cellphone. The last time I checked, Cheng had raised over $20,000, so there must be an audience for this sort of thing.

Not to be outdone, one G. D. Falksen has posted details of his magnum opus, called the Ouroboros Cycle, “an illustrated novel of vampires, werewolves, and paranormal adventure”. He needs money to pay for ads, social media management, promotional assistance, and other methods of “boosting the signal”, but so far has raised a little over $800. (Could the market for vampires be fading? One can only hope.) Doing slightly better at over $4,000 is a graphic novel entitled JFK Special Ops by Craig Frank, a thriller in which John F. Kennedy survives his assassination and decides to hunt down all those who were involved in the conspiracy. Hey, I’d read that.

From this limited sample it appears that so-called literary novelists – all those bespectacled wannabe Franzens in their garrets – have stayed away from crowdfunding. Which is understandable, and not because of aesthetic scruples. The best of such novels, after all, don’t rely on action and plot for their effects, but a distinctive take on the world, often expressed through close attention to characters and language. All of which is rather difficult to summarise and whip up excitement over, especially when one is in the middle of a first draft.

Imagine, for example, if you were a budding electronic patron of the arts and came across this on Kickstarter: “Hi, I’m Jimmy Joyce, formerly an English teacher at the Berlitz language school. I’m writing a sprawling work with a cyclical structure, using free association, puns and dreams, which ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same one. Here's what I've got so far: a way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Chances are, you’d hastily switch off the computer, mutter about these long-haired artist fellas and go back to leveraging buyouts or whatever else it is you do to rake in the shekels.

It looks like there’s no way out. Such novelists will just have to believe in themselves and their work, write, revise and re-revise, and then wait for agents and publishers to jump off their chairs in excitement. In case that doesn’t happen, they can always write about assassinations or befanged creatures of the night.

Kate Atkinson's Cascade of Echoes

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

You set off for a destination to find the way blocked so you return to your starting point and start out once more, following another route, to find that blocked too, leaving you no option but to begin again -- but hardly have you gone some distance than you’re forced to return and start over again until you get it right. This sounds like a recipe for frustration, yet it’s the bare-bones structure that Kate Atkinson uses with considerable success in her new novel, Life after Life. As a character says, “What if we had a chance to do it again and again until we finally did get it right?” Her earlier novels have unusual structures too; this one is the most daring of the lot.

How one chooses to start a story and the order in which events unfold has always been of importance. As Graham Greene writes in The End of the Affair, to signal that novel’s unconventional structure:  “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Many novels start in medias res: as close to the action as possible, shading in background as they go along. This creates the satisfying feeling of plunging into the heart of things and filling in the blanks as one reads.

It’s a tricky business: a structure that calls attention to itself should do so because it's a natural fit for the subject, and not as a gimmick. For the Modernists, playing with structure was a way of depicting what was for them a new and fractured reality.  Joyce, in an obvious example, tried to impart a mythic dimension to the events of a dreary Dublin day by mapping them on to the incidents of the Odyssey. More recently, in Time’s Arrow Martin Amis explored predestination and culpability in the life of his Nazi war criminal protagonist by telling the story of his life in reverse order.

In film, Christopher Nolan’s Memento famously also presented events backwards as a way of depicting the experience of short-term amnesia; another obvious example would be Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with its alternative versions exploring the nature of truth and subjectivity. It’s the fit between structure and subject that makes these examples spring to mind.

The film that Atkinson’s Life after Life has inevitably been compared to is Groundhog Day, in which the character played by Bill Murray repeats the events of a single day over and over until he learns his lessons and gets it right. Life after Life, however, treads its own path. It deals with the continuing saga of Ursula Todd, born in England in 1910, who lives several lives in order for her to fulfill her purpose. To begin with, an errant umbilical cord prevents her from being born. In other versions, she lives longer, but dies young nevertheless, of influenza and then by drowning. In yet other versions, she lives on but her life is cut short by events such as the London Blitz or a battering by a brutish husband. “Her memories seemed like a cascade of echoes,” we’re told at one point, an apt way of putting it. Finally, Ursula leads a life in which she – slightly implausibly -- moves to Germany and, after befriending Eva Braun, shoots none other than Adolf Hitler. History hinges on such vagaries, the author suggests.

If all this makes the novel sound depressing and relentless, I’m doing it a disservice. Atkinson’s prose is wry and delightful throughout, and her eye for period detail and manners during and between the two world wars is acute. She may be accused of over-egging the pudding with many references to what she's doing -- "Practice makes perfect" characters keep repeating -- but the result is undeniably gratifying. Like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino’s novel of first chapters, Life after Life is testimony to how a novel can be made memorable when structure and content fuse together.

His Son, The Fanatic

This week's Sunday Guardian column

When a heralded young writer claims that the first time he read a novel was at the age of 18, one has to wonder whether – as the British so elegantly put it – he’s taking the piss.  The 31-year-old Sunjeev Sahota, anointed this week as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, says that it was only after picking up a copy of Midnight’s Children at Heathrow that he awakened to the possibilities of fiction. His debut and so far only novel, Ours Are the Streets, shows that one of the lessons he learned was to create for a reader a “vivid and continuous dream”, as John Gardener put it.

Ours Are the Streets deals with the radicalisation of a second-generation Pakistani immigrant in Sheffield; Sahota has said that the idea of the novel came to him after watching a YouTube video of Mohamed Sidique Khan, one of those responsible for the 7/7 London bombings.  As such, it belongs to the burgeoning genre of Terrorism Lit – which contains plenty of well-intentioned but clunky novels, such as Updike’s Terrorist.

As an aside, Ayad Akhtar, another writer who has dealt with Muslim identity, was also in the spotlight this week, receiving a Pulitzer for his play, Disgraced. This, the New York Times said, accented “the incendiary topic of how radical Islam and the terrorism it inspires have affected the public discourse”. Akhtar's own debut novel, American Dervish, was a coming-of-age tale of an American Muslim in Milwaukee, very different from Sahota's work, but also shining a light on Islamic faith in a secular time.

Sahota’s Ours Are the Streets takes the form of a confession: Imtiaz Raina collectively writes to his estranged wife, daughter, and other members of his family about the events that have led him to consider donning a vest packed with explosives that he plans to set off soon.  The character’s voice, distinct and compelling, is one of the more appealing features of the novel. “Knowing you’re going to die makes you want to talk,” he says, and talk he does, in a manner that artfully fuses his past, present and immediate future: “I know you’re all probably at some point going to say that you didn’t say that or that never happened or how that bit’s the wrong way round, but this is how I remember things. This is how it feels to me.”

We learn of Imtiaz’s father, a taxi driver, and his mother, trying to make the best of the life she’s leading away from their homeland. (Come to think of it, Imtiaz could well be a version of the son in Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic.) Imtiaz courts and then marries fellow-student Rebekah, and there is much cross-cultural comedy in his initial meeting with her parents. Such light-heartedness is, of course, undercut by our knowledge of Imtiaz’s violent plans, chillingly expressed during moments such as when he looks out of his window at night: “So quiet the city is. Everyone sleeping contentedly. So indifferent to the crimes of their land.”

It’s during a visit to Pakistan, interspersed by journeys to Kashmir and Afghanistan, that Imtiaz starts to change. This is largely put down to a sense of belonging: “You’re not a valetiya any more, you understand? You’re an apna. You’re ours”. He’s indoctrinated by radicals, and a deadly plan involving him and his cousin is hatched.

As with so many other books, the set-up is more interesting than the resolution. The first half of Sahota’s book is the strongest, with the later section lacking the quality of lived experience. Imtiaz is increasingly beset by paranoia as the book progresses, and this, too, is disappointing if not haphazard in its effects.

It’s a measure of the author’s skill that despite this, Ours Are the Streets largely succeeds in its sympathetic portrayal of Imtiaz’s tortuous journey, one that seeks to understand and not condemn. Sahota may not have read a novel till he was 18, but he’s written one worth reading.

Down The Rabbit Hole Of Language

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

If the novel is indeed dying, someone forgot to inform today’s writers. The amount of new fiction published grows daily: take the recent reports of huge advances being paid to Indian writers for mythological sagas and stories of love in management institutes. For them, it’s always scribble, scribble, scribble, as the Duke of Cumberland once unkindly remarked to Edward Gibbon.

Just over a hundred years ago, however, a well-known writer composed a letter in which he confessed his inability to go on scribbling. The problem wasn’t lack of inspiration or time: it was an inability to connect with words. A chasm had opened between the word and what it referred to, and such was the writer’s eloquence that the letter is, till today, seen as a key text of literary modernism.

The Lord Chandos Letter was written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal who, from the time he was a teenager, was the toast of fin-de-siecle Vienna for his lyric poetry.  His letter, composed when he was 28, is fictional on the face of it, but with elements of lived experience -- Hofmannsthal was never again to return to poetry or prose, and worked instead as a librettist with Richard Strauss.

In the letter, one Lord Philipp Chandos apologises to Francis Bacon for his abandonment of literary activity. “I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all,” he writes. “Abstract words which the tongue must enlist as a matter of course in order to bring out an opinion disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms…Isolated words swam about me; they turned into eyes that stared at me and into which I had to stare back, dizzying whirlpools which spun around and around and led into the void.” He tries to heal himself by reading Seneca and Cicero, but to no avail. His trance-like, mystical state prevails, “a kind of continuous inebriation” when he sees “all of existence as one great unity”.

Finally, there’s some succour to be found in the aura of the object-as-itself: “A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel of my revelation.” (Which reminds one of William Carlos Williams pointing out how much depended on a red wheelbarrow.)

Wittgenstein was an admirer, as was Kafka who, in an earlier letter of his own to Max Brod wrote: “My whole body puts me on guard against each word; each word, even before letting itself be put down, has to look round on every side; the phrases positively fall apart in my hands.” Hofmannsthal’s missive resonated with many of the Modernists who were his contemporaries, and still does so with those who struggle to capture reality in the net of man-made words.

In Enrique Vila Matas’s Bartleby & Co, for example, the narrator, a former writer and clerk in a Barcelona office, attempts to compose a work of footnotes to an unwritten, invisible text. He calls this “the literature of the No”, with Hofmannsthal’s letter being an emblem of the enterprise. At one point, he dreams of meeting J.D. Salinger on a New York City bus and asking him his opinion of “the day Lord Chandos perceived that the endless cosmic whole of which we are part could not be described in words.”

Then again, in the last section of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, there’s a letter written by Lady Elizabeth Chandos, a sequel to the original, which asks Bacon to empathise with her husband’s plight as well as help him snap out of it.  “We are not made for revelation,” she cries. “Nor me nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun.”

Without revelation, such writers have fallen down a rabbit hole of language to discover – in the words of Beckett – “no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” They can’t go on, they’ll go on.

Jeeves And The Impending Novel

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster

Sebastian Faulks to write novel featuring Jeeves and Wooster  – News report.

The morning newspaper dropped from my nerveless fingers. I let out a sharp cry, the sort a pig would emit if it had suddenly been prodded in the hindquarters by the business end of a sharp stick. “Jeeves!” I yelled, which just shows the depth of my feelings, because we Woosters have not yelled out loud before our morning tea since the Battle of Thingummy, or do I mean Whatsit?

Jeeves shimmered in, bearing the restorative fluid on a tray. Taking a life-giving sip, I continued. “I say, Jeeves. Have you seen this?”

Jeeves scanned the paper and I saw his eyebrows lift a fraction of an inch, which is as close as he comes to expressing strong emotion. “What do we do, Jeeves?” I said. “This blighter Faulks plans to take over our lives. Faulks with a single F. Sounds rummy.”

“Sebastian Faulks, sir. An author of some note, I believe. I see he intends to carry on where our Master Wodehouse left off.”

“But Jeeves, dash it, he can’t do that, can he?”

“The necessary permissions seem to have been obtained, sir. In fact a few years ago the same Mr Faulks wrote a novel about James Bond.”

“Bond?” The name was unfamiliar, unless he was referring to Bingo Little’s nephew, Septimus Bond, who had done very little to be written about except eat eight bread rolls in two minutes when he was four.

“An agent on his Majesty’s Secret Service, sir. Known for his style of martinis.”

I started, almost spilling my tea. “Martinis be damned, Jeeves. Does one want to be written about in the same manner as one who travels hither and thither spying on blokes and blowing things up? What would the chaps at the Drones think?”

“I understand the problem, sir.”

“Well, Jeeves, do something! If anyone can get us out of this sticky situation, it’s you.”

“I shall give the matter my utmost attention, Sir,” said Jeeves, wafting out.

Hardly had I got into my trousers than Jeeves materialised again, bearing a silver salver on which there was an unopened envelope. “The postman just delivered this missive, sir,” he said. “Well, tell me what it says, Jeeves” I said, sliding into my dove-grey socks, the ones with the pink pinstripes.

“It is from your Aunt Agatha, sir,” said Jeeves. I leapt again, like the aforementioned pig. “What the deuce does she want, Jeeves?” I said, recovering my sang-froid.

“She would like you to spend the weekend at her residence, sir,” said Jeeves. “There is a young lady staying there and she is especially desirous that you become affianced to her.”

I drew a deep breath. Once again, this aunt who chews broken bottles and bays at the full moon had come across some efficient young woman with flashing spectacles and had reached the conclusion that my life would change for the better if I was to make her my bosom companion.

“Dash it, Jeeves, I’m not going,” I spluttered.

Jeeves coughed softly, like a sheep clearing his throat on a distant hillside.  “If I may, sir. You could tell her that you have an appointment with Mr Faulks, and therefore are not available. Further, you could mention that the author intends to spill the beans about the Wooster family.”

Light dawned. “So Jeeves, not only will I escape a weekend in ghastly company, Aunt Agatha will meet this Faulks chappie forthwith and warn him off this writing scheme of his?”

“Precisely, sir.”

I looked at him in awe. “I don’t know how you do it Jeeves. Two birds with one stone, as the expression has it.”

“I endeavour to provide satisfaction, sir.”

“Oh you do, Jeeves,” I said. “And speaking of birds, I rather fancy a spot of chicken sandwiches. Don’t hold the mayonnaise.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Talking About Online Stalking

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

The Internet doesn't just extend our capabilities, it also amplifies our tendencies, for better or for worse. Trolls spring up at a moment’s notice, and incidents of online stalking are reported daily, as legal enforcement agencies scramble to catch up. 

What does it feel like to be at the receiving end? In his new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, novelist and poet James Lasdun recounts the anguish he went through when he was targeted online, how it affected his work and how he dealt with “the great fugue of hatred and malice that thundered over my life for the next several years”.

His story begins in 2003, when he was conducting a fiction writing workshop in New York, and was impressed by the work of one of his students, whom he calls Nasreen. “She was in her thirties, quiet and reserved”, working on a novel set in Tehran during the last days of the Shah. Two years later, he receives an e-mail from Nasreen to say that she’s completed a draft of her manuscript. Lasdun enters into a correspondence with her, during which he gives her the contact details of an agent and an editor. The e-mails continue, on both sides: the happily-married Lasdun writes that while hers were occasionally flirtatious, he kept “the playful tone alive without actually rising to the bait”, wanting to be more a mentor than anything else.

They meet once again, for coffee, and continue to e-mail. Given that Nasreen mails him several times a day, demanding more and more intimacy, sometimes incoherently, Lasdun tries to break off the correspondence. But, “though I didn’t quite know it yet, I had entered the realm of stricken enchantment in which technology and psychology overlap”.

In short, over the next few years, Nasreen sends him vicious, threatening e-mails daily, posts vile comments on his novels and behavior on Amazon, GoodReads and Facebook, communicates with the head of Lasdun’s college with wild allegations, and threatens and accuses his agent and editor, among others. Anti-Semitism is a standard feature of these attacks, as are accusations of plagiarism, racism, sleeping with his students and encouraging rape. Lasdun’s life falls apart; as he writes: “out there in cyberspace a larger, more vivid version of myself had been engendered and was rapidly (so I felt) supplanting me in the minds of other people: Nasreen’s version, the thief, the racist, the sexual predator”.

At this point, the memoir takes a series of detours as Lasdun tries to create resonances between his situation and other aspects of his life, including his relationship with his father. There’s an account of a long train journey and later, a trip to Jerusalem, which has the unfortunate effect of making the book devolve into a solipsistic travelogue. More interestingly, he finds parallels in literature: Gawain and the Green Knight, novels by Patricia Highsmith and I.B. Singer, Emily Dickinson’s letters and the New Mexico sojourn of D.H. Lawrence. Circling back to Nasreen, he writes of seeking legal counsel and talking to NYPD detectives, none of which has much effect.

From Lasdun’s account, it seems clear that Nasreen’s mental health is precarious, but this is something he pushes away: “however afflicted Nasreen may have been, she was obviously, calculatingly, tauntingly aware of the possible consequences of her actions, and by her own admission dead set on bringing at least some of them about (‘I will ruin him’).” Moreover, he candidly admits, his vested interest in wanting to think of her as sane lies in holding her responsible for her behaviour and to avoid discomfort in writing about her.

At the end of his book, there’s no closure: five years after they began, the online attacks continue “like fevers of a recurrent illness”. Give Me Everything You Have may be flawed, and of necessity one-sided, but it’s also harrowing. Before you befriend someone new on Facebook, think about Lasdun quoting George Eliot: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people”.

Novels of Asia Redux

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Non-fiction shelves are filled with the work of those who try and interpret the rise of Asia. Now, it’s time for novelists to step in. Unusually, two recent books by writers from this part of the world both take their cues from self-help books.

The first, Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, announces its structure in the title itself, and with chapter headings such as ‘Learn from a Master’ and ‘Work for Yourself’. It’s written in the second person, and the combination of these elements puts one in mind of the stories in Lorrie Moore’s collection, Self Help, especially ’How to Become a Writer’.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is the life story of an individual born to an impoverished family, a “young jaundiced village boy”. However: “Moving to the city is the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. And you have now taken it.” Hamid charts his protagonist’s progress over the decades, from DVD delivery boy to “non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman” to bottled-water baron. (He starts out in this last endeavor by simply filling old plastic bottles with boiled tap water.) Bribes, bureaucracy and betrayals are, of course, part of this process, played out against the backdrop of urban decay.

It’s also a love story, and Hamid has said in a recent interview that he modeled the book on Sufi poetry: “Islamic mysticism where love is used as the prism for relating to the universe…in the form of love poems, which are second-person addresses”. Thus, the book also follows the fortunes of another individual referred to as “the pretty girl”, who makes her way from small-time model to television chef to upmarket furniture and bric-a-brac retailer. In a series of deft segues, we learn of the couple’s interactions and ultimate fates.

In contrast to Hamid’s coolly ironic tone, Tash Aw’s work is – on the surface, at least – more formally realist. His Five Star Billionaire, at nearly double the number of pages, shares similar themes, yet is a very different kind of work. If you look at the chapter headings alone, you’ll find them almost interchangeable with Hamid’s: ‘Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself’ and ‘Anticipate Danger in Times of Peace’, for example. In addition, one of the characters is addicted to self-help books while another claims to have written many of them.

The setting is a brash, modernising Shanghai, a magnet that Aw’s characters are drawn to from the Malaysian countryside. Many of the characters in Yiyun Li’s short stories are bewildered and left behind by the new China; here, we see the other side of the coin.

The five stars of Five Star Billionaire are the winner of a reality music show, an idealistic coffee-shop owner turned businesswoman, the scion of a wealthy family looking to expand its interests, a young woman who works in a spa and a mysterious tycoon seeking a legacy. Having thrown these balls up in the air, Aw makes them cross in their upward and downward trajectories, most of the time with a degree of skill. Beneath this is a subterranean plot to do with the catching up of a retributive past.

The fast-changing, polluted city with enclaves of affluence is a tangible presence in both books; in addition, fakes feature in both, as local rip-offs as well as the authenticity – or lack thereof -- of the characters. In his trademark tone, Hamid writes: “You know quality matters, especially for fakes”, and Aw observes of a counterfeit brand: “Like everything in life these days, I suppose you could say it’s a copycat – a fake”.

One of the chapters in Hamid’s novel starts with an exhortation to focus on the fundamentals. As novelists, both he and Aw do this by focusing on character and plot and creating alternative, competing visions of Asian rise and fall. Business headlines may trumpet a nation’s success story, but it takes a novel to unmask the darker, intimate stories behind it.