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

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?

ps i need to reread the christie piece when not semi-dozing in bed past midnight but i thought it was in fact non-awful and perhaps even moving a little way towards interesting (compared e.g. to the quote edmund wilson piece which has always been bad not good)

It was interesting, just odd to read him write so much about style.

I don't find him at all convincing when he tries to critique style or close read, surprise surprise, but there is a kernel of thoughts worth reading in that piece.

This wasn't very good. Essentially the LRB are terrible at conveying what might be good, about something that isn't as well written as *whatever literary thing* they think the LRB readership likes (love toooo beeeee patronised to) so Lanchester gets into an argument that the conventions of genre are approaching some kind of modernist framework that simply doesn't land (can we flip this around? I mean Cervantes was playing on specific types of romantic novels at the time? What pulp did Joyce read? Molly's Requiem didn't come out of nowhere. What was Melville mining when writing about whales - which was a jumping of point for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with whales) leading to that awful moment where he is dutifully listing the half dozen or so of her best books like some accountant - like does that matter if its easy to read/re-read anyway. He dismisses any of her more political works, but if we are going to praise her like this why not start with those anyway?

In this piece you could map where literature has just gone wrong with a certain section of the public. There is a...basic misunderstanding on how fiction works, what it can do or more importantly what it gives, despite these people's attempts to kill it - and they might succeed.

I want to re-read Auden's essay on detective fiction because I don't know if that was any better. Might report back.

I think Beckett used to read Agatha Christie? Certainly he read detective fiction, "Molloy" shows an influence.

Yep, there's this famous reading list where Beckett mentions (unfavourably) a Christie:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-books-samuel-beckett-really-liked.html

Talking of Ward Fowler, I wonder if he ever watched Columbo.

i mean, i think the refinement of the formalist puzzle-making element, to the exclusion of most the other factors in the pleasure and/or value of writing&reading fiction, *does* fit somewhere alongside the modernist project, but in a way that recasts how we shd think about modernism... which is at least partly to do with a response to the industrial encroachment of genre fiction forms

(years ago jenny turner wrote a long piece on lord of the rings noting the various ways its innovations could be tidied up into the categories within modernism that joyce in particular also had assigned him, except joyce is doing THIS -- good? -- but tolkien is doing THAT -- not so good?)

i still haven't reread this un-tired but just noting before anyone else does: lol at him making the joke abt the only author he's read a book by under no less than three different titles, but only giving us the politically non-problematic one (= and then there were none) (= also the one that gives the plot away… ) and dodging the original unsayable title even by hint. you have to know this book's history to know what he's evadiing…

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

xp he does say he has read that particular book under three different titles IIRC, but that's still a reference for the true headz really

Obviously he's never seen the 80s TV movie version where the two heroes escape in a helicopter at the end.

It's interesting that Lanchester mentions Dorothy L Sayers - they have a lot in common, in that they're both successful bad writers who write overlong novels full of pedestrian detail passed off as canny observation. Obviously I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with Gaudy Night than Capital, but it's not much of a choice...

disagree, Sayers is the best of the golden era detective fiction writers (with the possible exception of Ngaio Marsh) IMO, but Gaudy Night isn't a great example of her work

it's years since i read much allingham to be fair but i think *all* the tec fic ppl he discusses are more able as writers and more observant detail-wise than lanchester is himself

(i am also v pro sayers)

The thing that confused me most was his choice to pull three extracts - one each from Allingham, Sayers and Christie - to show that Christie's lack of style makes her less "dated", while the other two's ambitions (stylistic and I suppose political) imprison them in their own time. But the stuff he quotes from Allingham and Sayers is evocative, summons up some character, gives you at least a faint interest in what's going on, while the Christie excerpt, divorced from its original context, is literally some "the butler came in and said SOMEONE'S BEEN MURDERED" self-parody, it couldn't possibly sound any creakier. Of course Lanchester's argument is that Christie's insistence on the mystery to the exclusion of everything else is what makes her great but in that case surely using an excerpt is doing the writer a disservice from the get-go.

I also didn't think much of his assertions on what genre fiction is "supposed" to do, the marking off of boundaries against anything too aesthetically or politically ambitious. Really don't think we need to mount a defense of genre fiction in 2018, those battles have been won ages ago, but it still feels like Lanchester's being somewhat patronizing about what he believes to be genre fiction's place.

(I also don't really think much of "dated" as a criticism in the first place, a book belonging to a time and a place is part of the appeal, and yeah that includes when I'm "reading for pleasure").

"There’s also a new novel from John Lanchester: The Wall (Faber, March) is set in a dystopian Britain under siege from the Others. Written in chilling, affectless prose, it’s like The Road meets Never Let Me Go – smart, speculative fiction from one of our most brilliantly wide-ranging minds."

affectless prose as a sort of commendation! lack of affect is typically seen as a psychological problem of course. and while affectless prose can have an aesthetic and emotional purpose certainly, lanchester’s “badly translated instruction manual” style doesn’t really seem equipped for that sort of nuance.

i don't care what anybody's personal opinion of McCarthy or Ishiguro is, that comparison is brutally insulting to both

To be fair. i suspect The Wall will feature exactly the same sort of shoddy, un-thought-through worldbuilding that Never Let Me Go did.

Shameless!

Author of the Month: John Lanchester

Our Author of the Month for January is novelist and journalist John Lanchester. A regular contributor to the LRB, Lanchester writes about the world of finance, new technology, food and everything else besides with sparkling insight, wry humour and remarkable clarity. His first novel The Debt to Pleasure, published in 1996, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, and his latest, The Wall, published by Faber, is a hypnotic portrayal of a fatally fractured world in which it is both sensible and necessary that the young should hate the old. You can explore his books in several genres here, and come and meet them in person at the shop throughout January.

btw strongly agree with Daniel Rf's criticism above -- Lanchester in the AC essay quotes those two passages from the other 'dated' writers and both seemed to me really GOOD and interesting -- having exactly the opposite effect of what he thought.

Anyone catch the John Malkovich Poirot over Christmas? Was interesting in its attempt to flesh out all the "modernist" minimalist stuff JL talks about Christie leaving out - adding (or attempting to add) plausibility, character history and motivation, references to contemporary politics, etc.

Kind of a sadface, gritty, DCEU take. Well-made but unlikeable. The one thing JL leaves out of his essay (easy to forget because it's so obvious) is that Agatha Christie is FUN. This wasn't.

I taped it but not sure I'll bother

i like it much more once i stopped thinking of it as a poirot story and just took it on its own merits

malkovich has been terrible in so much stuff that i'd kinda forgotten he can act - i thought he was great as a broken, walled-off, very still character who just happened to share a name with hercule poirot

Yeah, it was certainly very watchable. On the "gritty reboot" scale I'd put it above Zack Snyder but way below, say, Doom Patrol.

I watched it and quite liked it except a) it was quite gory and bloody for me, b) the denoument / villain's motivation stuff was preposterous - 'I wanted to revitalize you, Hercule Poirot! that's why I violently killed various people' etc - wasting all the previous effort to make a decent programme. Also c) the anti-/immigration theme was heavy-handed.

Agree with b and c, mostly. Really enjoy watching Malkovich and thought he was good in this. It was maybe shackled a bit by being BBC1 Christmas entertainment and could have gone further with its noir instincts.

I dunno, I find myself tiring of BBC drama that dials up the oppressively dour atmosphere at the expense of character development and this felt straight out of that playbook. It relied too much on the relevation of Poirot's past and I just didn't find any of it believable.

Still it was diverting enough and hardly in Taboo territory, but there was still something that felt lazy about it.

I don't watch tons of BBC drama tbf, Malkovich and the 30s were the hooks for me in this case.

(is that a diss on taboo, taboo was good not bad, this is canon and no backsies)

comments are closed

TBH I was so incandescent with rage at Malkovich playing him without the moustache that it was difficult to concentrate on much else for the first episode or so.

I think it's fair to say the whole production was likely to irritate a lot of Christie purists.

Oh I see the adaptation changed the motive for the murderer which is insane as the new one made no sense at all, as the Pinefox has pointed out.

I think the "sense" of the motive is that the murderer was a psychopath with a fixation on Poirot which doesn't seem notable more implausible than the book

It's definitely where the TV version's gestures towards politics and social relevance failed to cohere tho

More importantly how come Ron Weasley still looks 14?

Yes, I tried the first episode and found it too dour for my tastes, and not enough like the experience of reading a Poirot book - but then I got to thinking about bored how I am, too, with the Suchet 'heritage' treatment also. Perhaps something that acknowledged the surprising viciousness of a lot of Christie while at the same time sticking more closely to the 'traditional' whodunnit formula might hit the spot w/ me - or maybe if Mario Bava were still alive...

given that suchet redux set-design-wise is "it's the 20s! literally everything will be spiffy art deco!", i enjoyed the rebuttal here: ""it's the 30s! literally (almost)* everything will be edwardian, also decaying!"

*not the de la warr, an anachronism** they couldn't quite resist (the story was set in 1932 i think).
**another anachronism*** = a giles gilbert scott k2 telephone box (1st k2 = 1936: they needed a k1 but none survive in london)
***having a character sing 'night and day' isn't quite an anachronism: the show it's from, gay divorce (good title), is also 1932 -- but it probably didn't get widespread enough to be hummable for a couple of years (the film, the gay divorcee, is 1934)****
****(that i was busily googling all this while watching is possibly a sign my attention wasn't gripped)

I have to hand it to Mark S, those are good details.

In truth the 'night & day' semi-anachronism also results from being unimaginative about old time popular songs -- there are hundreds of less well known ones she could (more) realistically have sung but at this point 'night & day', 'I've got you under my skin', 'cheek to cheek' are virtually all that much of an audience will recognize.

(I thought this with very mild irritation at the time, while Mark was googling.)