At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

I remember really, really enjoying The Debt to Pleasure back in the 1990s: I really should have another look and see if it's as cackhanded as his later fiction, or if he suffered some sort of head injury after writing that book.

And yet, I still enjoy his journalism, so what do I know?

same on the debt to pleasure, james. it’s partly why i picked up capital in the first place. keep meaning to go back. “slightly unsophisticated nabokov lite but quite funny and fun” is my memory. he had control of style, which is what he so clearly doesn’t have now.

argument in my head is that he can do unreliable first person (DtP) but becomes incredibly boring-patrician-voice and has evident lack of insight in third person (Capital).

also maybe a dose of fluid > crystallised mind, or to put it another way, he’s become more creatively stupid.

Is it possible that he's just lazier now? The story in question reads like a 'just get to the end and refine it later' first draft, without the refining bit. I mean the alternative is that he read, reread and laboriously pruned that paragraph I posted and still at the end thought it was a good idea.

I'm sure earlier Lanchester is better but can you seriously imagine him trying to do sexy reality TV contestants in the first person?

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall--an enormous concrete barrier around its entire border. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and attack constantly. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. And then the Others attack. . . .Acclaimed British novelist John Lanchester, "a writer of rare intelligence" (Los Angeles Times), delivers a taut dystopian novel that blends the most compelling issues of our time--rising waters, rising fear, rising political division--into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.

I feel like we could literally write this book in its entirety in the five months between now and its release and no one would be able to tell the difference between it and the real thing.

what if ilx pre-release but for novels.

and yes point taken on the first person love island contestant, i felt like my head had crashed just thinking about it.

lazier i don’t know. i don’t think he can know what good looks like. one possibility is that he’s not enormously well read in fiction and doesn’t have anything like an aesthetic sense. i mean he obviously doesn’t, but even in terms of reading. it doesn’t even feel like a case of “ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”. more like a toddler trying to form a fist.

lanchester does ballard! (re the wall). it’ll be great! why wouldn’t it be? he’s a writer of rare intelligence. a statement that makes me stare so hard at the entire fucking world.

It is extraordinary that after all this discussion of Lanchester, Matt DC has just posted an incredibly melodramatic blurb for actual new Lanchester.

I think I agree with James Morrison and Fizzles -- something strange has happened between the very early Lanchester fiction, and now. The other possibility is that the early work was much worse than we are remembering.

Like James M, I am still quite capable of enjoying his 'journalism', which is written in amiable bloke-ish, a voice not very good for fiction.

It is plain that he can publish what he likes in the LRB (think how often they publish fiction - Hilary Mantel the only other one?), and thus that there is a basic lack of quality control here.

One of this week’s Proms:

Haydn: Symphony No. 104 in D major, 'London'

Interval Proms Plus
Novelists John Lanchester and Diana Evans discuss depicting contemporary London in their fiction with presenter Rana Mitter.

Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Manze (conductor)

willing the half-man shape of pierre boulez to come hideously sucking and slithering onto the stage with the novelists, cry-hissing " rău rău rău"

Ian McEwan giving Lanchester a run for his money: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/dussel/

Yeah, that story is wretched. The worst kind of infodump SF-for-people-who-think-they're-too-literary-to-read-SF.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/03/perfidious-albion-sam-byers-review

Come back John Lanchester all is forgiven.

never mind that one, here's praise from Augustus Caesar himself

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/27/centrist-path-hardcore-brexiteers-corbynites

“Jess popped to the toilet to tweet” is almost the Platonic ideal of a Lanchestrian sentence in its mix of try-hard banality and chuntering prose rhythm. The only reason I can think of for its being approvingly cited in this review is that there's an entire genre of novels out there which garners publicity largely as a result of making broadsheet journalists feel like they're both very smart and with their finger right on the literary pulse.

I deliberately didn't post that Harris article because I didn't want to derail the thread with Corbyn chat but that's precisely the sort of clapping-seal approval I was getting at. The review he links to describes the novel as "an episode of Black Mirror as scripted by a “woke” Martin Amis" which is pretty much the least appealing thing I can possibly imagine.

I might actually read it.

by ilx law you have to liveblog it if you do

terrible sentences are ok because it's a madly funny rollicking farce with a cast mainly made up of scathingly ventriloquised grotesques

i appreciate yr point re: Harris Matt, hopefully this is a thread where we can leave that scathingly ventriloquised grotesque outside

A friend of mine has informed me in response to this that his wife is reading the following https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/02/the-power-naomi-alderman-review

Same bloody reviewer too

Jesus christ that Byers thing sounds like some hideous lovechild spawned from the combined loins of J.G. Ballard and Tom Sharpe.

'The Power' is hugely enjoyable fwiw.

Where's the line with these satires though? I guess it's all about execution

Well the Alderman isn't a satire, which is one thing. It didn't make me think particularly deeply but it was a lot of fun.

I’m better at dialogue. It took me a long time to figure out what it was for: it’s to give information to the reader in a different form so their eye doesn’t get wearied by the paragraphs. I used to think it was about imitating the way people speak.

Sebastian Faulks in an interview published today. Coming from somebody else I might think this was wilful provocation but he's being sincere. This is just such a weird binary to make

I've never read him but Jesus fuck that is not what dialogue is "for".

Yes, I read Wodehouse for the scintillating information

Is William Boyd anything like Lanchester?

I’ve only read one of his, Restless, iirc it read like a cackhanded SOTN type book with requisite banalities, albeit in thriller-ish form

i haven't really read any Faulks but he's fucking terrible so this checks out

Boyd used to be good, except for his short stories. He seems to have decided he wants to be a commercial thriller writer now, though, and it does not suit him. The rot really set in when he published a commissioned short story for some car company and then a James Bond novel.

Jonathan Coe has a new book called "Middle England". That is all.

Coe is rather more capable of carrying this sort of thing off, I think.

I've no great yen to go back to What a Carve Up!, tho I enjoyed it at the time. The blurb I've seen for this doesn't look promising and I'm not sure he should keep repeating the trick.

"In the next issue: John Lanchester on Agatha Christie"

:(

I have enjoyed SOME Lanchester writing. I have never enjoyed any Christie.

congratulations on

christie never for one second attempted a "state of england" novel obv* but i think but in passing you can often pick up a better sense of small currents active in the (non-marginal) society of her time than you ever really can from the try-hard boys

*except maybe the early tuppence and tommy one (forget title)** where they unmask the MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE BOLSHEVIKS
**this is a built-in problem with AC, an evident mark of a limit

I might have to read that.

One mention of Bolsheviks and xyzzzz is sold.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN BEHIND THE BOLSHEVIKS to thread

if you want to sell me anything don't give me this or that just tell me there are communists in it (mark s if you have it I will borrow thank you)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/john-lanchester/the-case-of-agatha-christie

:-)

"It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. Her prose is flat and functional, her characters on a spectrum between types, stereotypes and caricatures; so, you might well ask, what’s to like?"

looooool

lololol

Agatha Christie is, according to her website, ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’. That is a difficult claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt to do so, but when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion copies sold in English and another billion-odd in translation. Oh, and the longest-running play in the history of the world. Sceptics would be well advised to admit defeat on the issue of whether or not she sold more books than any other novelist ever has, and instead pivot to a more interesting question...

indeed..

EVENT: John Lanchester, LRB contributing editor and author of CAPITAL, will join us at St George's Bloomsbury for a special event to celebrate his latest book THE WALL, on 23 Jan. Book here: https://t.co/lyvJ9Kt5HA pic.twitter.com/hRCYlGV4UD

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) December 13, 2018

FAP?