Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

What follows is a small selection of prose books I read this year that I haven’t already written about on this blog.

I seldom read novels these days, but I’ve enjoyed a few this year. Foremost among them was one I bought in a charity shop in Worksop: J.G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970). How I’d hitherto never read anything by him, I don’t know. It was like a cross between Henry Green’s equally magnificent Loving, Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland and, maybe, Brideshead Revisited – in how the house, or hotel in this case, out-stars any of the characters.

I also adored Jeremy Worman’s ‘autobiographical novel’ The Way to Hornsey Rise (Holland Park Press, 2023), a superb evocation of his upper-middle-class upbringing in Surrey in the Fifties and Sixties, in which his mother played such a dominating and unforgettable role. It’s available here.

Jeremy Cooper’s word-of-mouth success, Brian (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), a tale of a Camden Council housing officer who joins the BFI and consequently becomes an obsessive cinephile, had more than a few memorable moments; but not quite enough about his day-job for my liking. (The definitive novel about local government is yet to be written. Maybe I should have a go!) It’s available here.

I’ve got through a fair number of books by or about Larkin this year. The most enjoyable by far was Jean Hartley’s undeservedly out-of-print Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me (Carcanet, 1989), though, to my pleasant surprise, not because of its Larkin material, but Hartley’s superb account of her working-class childhood (in Hull) and evacuations, which, in passing, reminded me of my mother’s similar experiences at the same age.

The first, and so far only, biography of Peter Levi, subtitled ‘Oxford Romantic’, by Brigid Allen (Signal Books, 2014) was intended not to be a critical one, but Allen’s prose style and shrewd comments on Levi’s unjustly neglected poetry make for an engaging account of a writer whose reputation will surely be restored in time. It’s still in print, here.

The best prose book I read this year was Kid Gloves (Penguin, 2016), Adam Mars-Jones’s really quite beautiful memoir of his father and their sometimes fraught relationship. Mars-Jones is, of course, an outstanding novelist so it’s unsurprising that his writing in this book is so exquisite. It’s available here.