The Engine

Paul Muldoon: One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Faber & Faber: 2015 Clive James: Sentenced to Life: Picador: 2015  These are two very contrastive books both making a clear announcement through their titles. The first is brash claiming something unbelievable just as the German author Karl May, author of Winnetou, claimed to speak more than 1000 languages. Clearly Paul Muldoon’s meeting with America has also made him feel entitled to be just as bold and brash as the New World is. By contrast Clive James’s book is a valedictory epistle aimed at the guts but also demonstrates that James still has a good deal to say and the means to do so. Clive James is still able to be funny even if he now is terminally ill but like so many people who declare such things manage to yet persist. James aims his six shooter at plenty of high and low targets which include Laura Riding, who is depicted as endearingly barmy, intoning her high-brow stuff to the initiated only (yet somehow we reali...

Alice took a Detour and other meanderings by Karen Georghiou (Rag Publishing, London, 2014) Karen Georghiou’s book based on the Alice in Wonderland stories by Lewis Carol is a mixture of stories, poems and drawings derived from the original material yet also bringing something bright, interesting and refreshing to intrigue readers. Nonsense poems and nonsensical stories start out by declaring ‘why are we here reading this story?’. ‘Well we must be mad’ and that’s a good enough reason to read whimsical nonsense, isn’t it? The Cheshire Cat retorts similarly to Alice and then we are on our way down the rabbit hole and beyond the Mad Hatter’s tea party probably being clobbered by or clobbering the Bandersnatch, the Jubjub Bird or even the mighty Jabberwocky. The problem with this collection is possibly declared in its title which sets out too clearly authorial hesitations about the Lewis Carol original. The collection lacks a central cohesiveness that might have connected together s...