News from Nowhere - Bad Sex edition

It looks like the tide of public opinion has turned against the Literary Review and their Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Articles in the Guardian, from shortlisted author William Nicholson, and from Laurie Penny in the NewStatesman, accuse the awards of bullying, and even ‘smut-shaming’. Our problem is that the humour of the awards seems to get lost in the telling; while the organisers say that only good books can be nominated, the shortlisted novels are held up to ridicule on the basis of one out-of-context passage. Worse, many, such as this years's nominee The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, with its lobster orgy are clearly humorous. As for their stated intention to discourage the 'perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description', well, we’re sure Woody Guthrie won’t be making that mistake again. Having said that, it's not a bad party. as Sam Mills found out last year.

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An impressive shortlist for this year's Costa Awards. We were pleased to see Sam Byers, who we picked as one of the Best Young British Writers back in March, getting some recognition for his excellent Idiopathy, which we reviewed here. Also up for the first novel award is Nathan Filer, for his intelligent and idiosyncratic The Shock of the Fall (review here), and Olivia Laing's erudite exploration of literature and alcohol The Trip to Echo Spring (review here). The judges have done a good job of reflecting the sort of books people actually read. After the excellent word of mouth on its release, I was surprised that Evie Wyld's All The Birds, Singing missed out on the Booker shortlist; I wouldn't be surprised to see her take the big prize this time.

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Reviewing Hermione Lee’s new biography of Penelope Fitzgerald for the Guardian, Philip Hensher mentions an anecdote about a young novelist who was anxious to spend some time with the great lady on their way back from a conference. Fitzgerald was ‘clearly determined, by travelling in second class, refusing a lift in a taxi, and heading down to the underground, to give him the slip’. The author in question (not named in Hensher’s piece) was Julian Barnes, who gives his version of this story in his recent collection of essays Through the Window. Amusingly, Barnes’s account  was somewhat different; he talks of feeling a 'certain impatience' as Fitzgerald desperately tries to find a way to get rid of him (going back through the tube turnstiles at one point because she had forgotten to buy any milk), and her own 'air of gentle concern' at the inconvenience she must be putting him to. The whole thing takes on a wonderfully comic air, with Barnes growing ever more frustrated at the implausible delays Fitzgerald comes up with, utterly oblivious to how unwelcome his companionship is. Barnes signs off the anecdote on a winsome note: 'I was still laughing by the time I got home', only to discover that the dedications she had apparently agonised over writing for him turned out to be the classic and utterly impersonal ‘best wishes, Penelope Fitzgerald’.

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Also in The Guardian, Terry Eagleton cast his eye approvingly over Morrissey's Autobiography, especially his depiction of 1970s Manchester and Salford as a 'barbaric place where only savages can survive'. This might seem like class treachery from the author of Why Marx Was Right and Why Prince Charles Will Be First Up Against The Wall, but Eagleton also enjoyed poking fun at Salford in his own childhood memoir, The Gatekeeper, in which he points out the philistinism of certain local councillors: 'The story is told of a meeting of the city council which was trying to agree a way of brightening up the town, a task which in my view would have required little short of divine intervention. Eventually, one councillor suggesting erecting a few pagodas in the local park. The suggestion met with general approval, until the mayor rose heavily from his seat. 'It's all very well having these 'ere pagodas in t'park,' he growled, 'but what I want to know is this. Who's going to feed the buggers?'