Anthony Burgess: Beyond Clockwork Orange

It's odd. I've been aware of the work of Anthony Burgess (the pseudonym for John Burgess Wilson) for decades, ever since I discovered him in connection with Clockwork Orange. Prompted by the Kubrick film I went down to the Fort Garry public library and borrowed a copy of Burgess's novel. ¶ After seeing the film I read it again, but I don't think I ever bothered with anything else by Burgess. Until now. ¶ I had a copy of Earthly Powers on my shelf for decades. Somebody gave me a copy of the first Penguin paperback edition shortly after it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Now and then over the years I'd take the fat, heavy book down, admire it's cover illustration (by Bill Sanderson), read the first couple of sentences, then put it back of the shelf. But not long ago I was out of action for a while, at home in bed with a cold, and I was looking for a big fat book to read. Finally Burgess's time had come... ¶ Earthly Powers is an episodic epic spanning the better part of the 20th century. Its protagonist Kenneth Toomey is a hugely successful, though personally tormented, writer loosely modeled on Somerset Maugham. ¶ Full of historical detail, the book is well written and intermittently compelling, although for me far and away the most effective sequence is a brilliant little tale of the supernatural set in Malaysia which is vivid, horrifying and unforgettable (although, having said that, I was talking to Graeme Curry, who'd also read the book, and he couldn't remember the episode at all). ¶ Earthly Powers isn't a masterpiece. I found it exhausting and its charms rather variable. Above all, I have to admit, I found the protagonist, in whose company we spend 649 pages, singularly unsympathetic (although I'm an admirer of the real life Somerset Maugham). ¶ The ending of the book, however, is stunning and left me full of admiration for Burgess. It certainly prompted me to look for something else to read by him. ¶ What I found was Any Old Iron. Despite being lumbered with a contrived and unconvincing narrative thread (a search for an ancient sword which even Burgess doesn't seem particularly interested in) this is a much better book than Earthly Powers. ¶ Again it's a wide canvas depicting the 20th century, and again it's beautifully written, with great authority. In particular, the war sequences, seen from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, are superb. The book doesn't reach a satisfying or interesting conclusion, however. ¶ To sum up, Earthly Powers is a serviceable novel with a splendid ending and Any Old Iron is a splendid novel with a serviceable ending. Burgess is clearly a giant, though, and I'm looking forward to spending more time in his company. ¶ I notice he's written novels about both Shakespeare and Napoleon, so those are next on my list... ¶ Incidentally, writing this blog entry has brought forcefully home both the joys and frustrations of the internet. I wanted to include an image of the cover of Earthly Powers, in the edition which I read, with the aforementioned splendid cover illustration by Bill Sanderson (design by Butcher & Gomez). ¶ But I don't have a flat bed scanner and my search on the web for a jpeg of the cover (a perfectly reasonable request, I thought), only threw up a couple of pitiful little scans of battered paperbacks. On the other hand, though, I found Sanderson's website which provided the magnificent illustrations you see here. ¶ This piece was supposed to be about Anthony Burgess but one of the bonuses of writing it was discovering Sanderson. He's a phenomenal artist and if you have the funds, you should contact his agent and commission him immediately.

My Attempt to Overthrow the Government

I had an odd little experience a few weeks ago, which ended up with me appearing on national television, fighting my corner against the forces of darkness. Or at least a whole bunch of silly newspapers. ¶ I asked the appropriate colleagues of my feisty book agent Julian Friedmann if I should try and write a piece about it for one of the less silly newspapers. The general consensus was that it was already yesterday's news. But an old schoolfriend, Ken Goodwin, urged me to give it a go anyway and I ended up doing a piece for the Guardian. ¶ That brief account was a much abbreviated version of what appears here. (You can also read the Guardian piece on their website.) ¶ It all began on a Wednesday with an email and a phone message from my screenwriting agent, the fragrant Janet Fillingham. Janet told me that a Sunday Times journalist had been in touch with her. He was doing a piece on Sylvester McCoy for that weekend's edition, the hook being Sylvester's new comedy for the BBC. ¶ Was I available for a quick chat, to provide some background colour? Always be nice to your agent, is my motto. Janet hadn't been able to find out anything about Sylvester's new comedy, from a quick search on the internet, but at the time that seemed neither here nor there. ¶ The following day I emailed the journalist with my home phone number.I was on the way out the door later when the phone rang. I came back to answer it. In the days that ensued, I was going to have plenty of time to reflect on what might have happened if I hadn't picked up the phone. ¶ It was the guy from the Sunday Times. I spoke unguardedly and at length, about Sylvester and other things, and hung up with the smug feeling of having done a favour for a friend. ¶ That Sunday I bought a copy of the Times to look for the article. I scoured the TV and entertainment sections and found nothing. I shrugged and decided this was about par for the course. But then emails started to arrive. The first one was from my old friend Simon Butler in Cambridge. "Great piece in the Sunday Times! I particularly admire the response to the interview question, must try that one next time." ¶ What? ¶ I went online and found the Sunday Times piece. Reading it was a bracing, icy shock. I had just about convinced myself that nobody was likely to read it when more friends began to email me. And even while I was answering those emails the story began to pop up all over the internet. Like evil toadstools sprouting, was my main thought. The Telegraph and The Mail now had it. What was going on? I went back to my copy of the Sunday Times and discovered why it wasn't in the TV section. It was on page 3 of the news section. In fact, it pretty much was page 3. ¶ The chief problem was that the story was being slanted as an attack on the BBC, an institution I revere. (I mean, Composer of the Week that week on Radio 3 was 'Bebop' - what could be better than that?) ¶ It seems that I had inadvertently handed a certain section of the press a magic bullet to fire at the Corporation. ¶ The most contentious bit being I suppose that, when asked in my job interview for script editor of Doctor Who, what I would most like to achieve, I'd replied "Overthrow the government." Of course the ensuing response I'd described, gently but firmly discouraging any such action and the ensuing discussion about the parameters of the job, weren't cited in any of the articles. ¶ I felt terrible. I composed an email to my agent and sat tight. On Monday she replied saying about the story, prophetically, "I suspect this won't disappear in a puff of extra terrestrial smoke." ¶ That was just before we learned that virtually all the Monday papers had picked up the story. And just before I got the phonecall from BBC Radio Wales, who wanted me to come on at drive time and talk about the, ahem, situation.¶ I agreed enthusiastically. I wanted to put my point across. I was quite nervous about the radio spot, until I got the phone call asking me to appear on TV that night, on Newsnight on BBC2. Right then, no disrespect to Radio Wales, my nerves about being on local radio vanished, to be replaced by apprehension about appearing on national television.¶ A few hours later I was being sat on the sofa in the Newsnight studio where they do the "soft" pieces. "Please sit with your right thigh on the seam of the sofa, Andrew. Look into camera 2, please. Thank you." ¶ I was seated, thigh on the seam, between Gavin Esler, our host for the night, and Tim Collins, who was sort of the Conservatives' man in science fiction. All three of us were slightly orange as a result of the make up. ¶ Tim and Gavin managed to have what seemed like a lengthy conversation about the British tradition of fantastic literature while I mostly fiddled with a glass of water. ¶ But I did manage to get a few key points across, and hopefully achieved some damage limitation. You can watch a clip of the show here. ¶ Then it was back into the deserted green room, where a pile of wet wipes awaited, piled on the arm of the sofa, for us to remove the make up. I rode back in a taxi through London at midnight, looking out at the streets, feeling strangely light headed and happy, making a note never to pick up the phone to a journalist again.

The Parker Novels by Richard Stark

Okay, the first thing I should say is that Richard Stark is actually Donald Westlake. Westlake wrote priceless comedy crime novels under his own name, perhaps most famously The Hot Rock but also dozens of others, many of them filmed, including Cops and Robbers, Bank Shot and The Busy Body, which had a Frank Frazetta poster I'll try and include here somewhere. ¶ While the Westlake books are often laugh out loud funny, the Stark pseudonym is reserved for hard edged noir neo-pulp crime stories. And they're great. More tightly plotted than Elmore Leonard, more coherent and engaging than Jim Thompson, the Richard Stark novels mostly concentrate on dark, suspenseful tales of the ruthlessly proficient mononymic professional thief, Parker. ¶ Two things first attracted me about these books: the wonderful Coronet paperback editions with the die-cut bullet hole covers, and the fact that John Boorman's Point Blank, one of my all time favourite films, had been based on the early Parker adventure The Hunter. ¶ It was a great pleasure to assemble the complete adventures of Parker in those beautiful Coronet paperbacks. They had the classic design simplicity of Raymond Hawkey at his best (compare those bullet holes with Hawkey's edition of the James Bond novel Thunderball), although I suspect they were the work of someone else; Hawkey generally gets credit for his work and these classic designs remains shamefully anonymous (if you know who the unsung genius was, do share). ¶ The series was a high point in British paperback design and it was a sad day when Coronet abandoned it for a more conventional (not to mention dull) approach with Butcher's Moon in 1977. This cover was so lame I'm loathe to reproduce it here, but I will just to prove a point. Its utter lack of appeal may help explain why this is one of the scarcest Parker novels. Who would want to buy such a dull travesty of a cover, especially after a run of such magnificent editions? ¶ Anyway, copies of Butcher's Moon now change hands for silly amounts of money and the book spelled the end of the series in more ways than one. It would prove to be the last adventure of Parker for over 20 years. But Westlake is a clever fellow and he revived Parker in time to greet the new millenium. This was great news for connoiseurs of crime fiction — and news which only recently caught up with me. ¶ Last week I had the pleasure of acquainting myself with the renewed Parker saga by reading three of his latest adventures. (Yes, I really did power through three novels in a week, while busy writing my own stuff; they are that addictive.) These three novels were Firebreak, Breakout and Ask the Parrot. Parker novels, at least these days, are not so much stories about heists as about heists going badly wrong. Richard Stark — I'll refer to the writer by his pseudonym to avoid confusion — is a master of suspenseful plot complications and even though Parker is a remorseless, hard nosed bastard you will soon find your heart going out to him as he faces the seemingly endless series of obstacles his creator throws at him. ¶ Incidentally Westlake wrote a short story which depicted the last word in criminals thwarted by unexpected complications. It was called The Curious Facts Preceeding My Execution and it is deeply, darkly funny. ¶ In Firebreak Parker is embroiled in a fine art heist while contending with a loose cannon accomplice and a sequence of hit men who have been assigned by an old enemy to kill him . In Breakout Parker's heist goes wrong on the first page and he spends the rest of the book trying to deal with the consequences, including, as the title suggests, by breaking out of prison. ¶ Ask the Parrot begins with Parker already on the run as a result of a job that went sour. As he flees from the police and dogs up a wooded slope he encounters his dubous saviour, an embittered hermit who wants revenge against the race track where he used to work. He wants to rob the place — and Parker is just your man. ¶ The films based on the Parker novels deserve an essay all their own, so I'll content myself with a few highlights. Point Blank is by far the best of them, and a modern classic. The Mel Gibson remake Payback, written and directed by Brian Helgeland, has its moments, but isn't in the same league. ¶ The Outfit, written and directed by the British film maker John Flynn has many virtues, including Robert Duvall as Parker and a score by Jerry Fielding. It is also probably the film most true to the original novels. In particular it faithfully reproduces Parker's technique of asking his victims their names. So, for instance, when he orders them to lie down while he robs their bank, he can address them properly and they're more likely to cooperate. I've never tried this but it always struck me as a convincing detail. ¶ Lastly, The Split, directed by Gordon Flemying, another Brit (yes, he directed the Dalek movies) is worth a look, if only because of a cast which includes Donald Sutherland, Warren Oates and Ernest Borgnine, and a score by Quincy Jones. This score is available on a CD which includes liner notes with a detailed appreciation of Stark, and Parker. ¶ As a last, quirky detail concerning the Parker novels, there's one non-existent book, called Child Heist. What the hell do I mean by a non-existent book? Well it only appears in another book. ¶ In fact, and I love this, there's a Donald Westlake novel called Jimmy the Kid, which is about the incompetent John Dortmunder, who also starred in The Hot Rock and Bank Shot. The copy of Jimmy the Kid illustrated here has a terrific airbrush cover by the great Robert Grossman who worked for everyone from Time Magazine to National Lampoon. In Jimmy the Kid, Dortmunder and his gang have a copy of this 'imaginary' novel featuring Parker and they try to replicate the kidnapping described in it, and naturally bungle everything. ¶ Donald Westlake meets Richard Stark. It's like the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the short film attack the main feature. As with the revival of Parker, I've only just learned about this book and I'm off to buy a copy now. ¶ Another fact I discovered while researching this piece was, sadly, that Westlake died just over a year ago. There's an appreciation of him and his Parker novels here. What a shame. Westlake, Stark, Parker and Dortmunder all gone... Luckily there are over a hundred novels in print which feature one, or all, of them.

Troy Kennedy Martin Part 2: Reilly Ace of Spies

A few weeks ago (17 September) I wrote about the tragic loss of screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin. The loss would have been more tragic still if it wasn't for the substantial legacy of great drama he left us, much of it now easily available on DVD. ¶ These wonderfully useful silver discs enabled me to pay my respects to Kennedy Martin by launching my own personal retrospective film festival. I started by watching the six episodes of Edge of Darkness. A gloomy masterpiece. ¶ I then planned to dip into Kelly's Heroes — sheer joy, a World War 2 high octane black comedy with a Lalo Schifrin soundtrack. But I changed my mind and decided to watch Reilly Ace of Spies instead.¶ If, after reading this, you decide you want to follow suit, then you're in luck. The unwieldy six disc DVD set I paid through the nose for a few years ago (utterly devoid of extras, too, he said bitterly) has recently been replaced with a sleek, streamlined three disc edition which nonetheless still contains nearly 640 minutes of undiluted Reilly — and Troy Kennedy Martin's genius. ¶ Reilly Ace of Spies was the most ambitious production ever by Euston Films, perhaps the most presitigious producer of British television drama, famed also for The Sweeney, The Minder and the fact that they failed to hire me as a script editor. ¶ Actually, by the time I went for my job interview at Euston the firm was well in decline. The presiding geniuses' current big idea was to replace Minder (a humorous crime series about a likeable, plucky working class underdog) with Capital City (a glossy soap drama about unsympathetic rich young city bankers). I never got my chance to tell them what I thought of that particular strategy, unfortunately.¶ The big script brains of Euston, in the shape of Verity Lambert and Linda Agran were long gone by this time. (I later had a job interview with Linda Agran. She didn't like my rucksack.) But in the days of Reilly, Lambert and Agran were very much in evidence and it's unlikely that without women of their taste and perception at the helm that a writer of Troy Kennedy Martin's distinction and talent — and eccentricity — would have been allowed loose on such wonderful material, and with such profound and memorable effect. ¶ In short, Sydney Reilly was a sort of a precursor of James Bond, operating from the early part of the 20th century until the early days of the Soviet regime. He was a real person, although the story of his adventures had probably been considerably sensationalised before Troy Kennedy Martin got hold of it and made it more sensational still. ¶ Some commentators are sniffy about this departure from the facts. Personally I think it's great. Nobody tells a more enjoyable story than Troy Kennedy Martin and I wouldn't want to see a writer of his ability strait jacketed by mere facts. ¶ In the 12 episodes of the serial we follow the adventure of Reilly (Sam Neill is satanically sauve in the title role) from manoeuvrings over oil supplies, an alliance with arms dealer Basil Zaharov (Leo McKern), the Russo Japanese war and spying in Germany through to the Russian revolution, an attempt to bump off Lenin (Kenneth Cranham), tommy gun battles in New York and Reilly's execution in a snow covered forest outside Moscow. ¶ The last mentioned incident was particularly harrowing and as I watched this final episode (Shutdown) last night, I kept hoping against hope that Reilly would somehow escape the Cheka (the Russian secret police). ¶ This is a fascinating period in history and Troy Kennedy Martin's account of it left me wanting to learn more. Some of the details are just amazing. For example, Reilly's nemesis is the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky (pronounced Dijinksy) played by Tom Bell. ¶ This is a man so fiendishly clever that he protects the Bolsheviks by creating the Trust, a supposedly anti-Bolshevik organisation which he can use to monitor and manipulate his enemies. This scam is so successful that the enemies of Communism are soon contributing millions of dollars, supposedly to overthrow the Bolsheviks but actually providing all the money needed by the Reds to fund their counterintelligence! Incredible stuff, and Troy Kennedy Martin does full justice to it. ¶ The cast of the show are also top drawer, including all the aforementioned luminaries plus Alfred Molina as a Social Revolutionary assassin; David Burke as Stalin, whom Troy Kennedy Martin brilliantly introduces us to eating sardines out of a tin at his desk, and who in his murderous Georgian paranoia will dismantle the Trust, leading to the downfall of Dzerzhinsky and the death of Reilly; Laura Davenport as Pepita, the last of Reilly's many wives; and Clive Merrison, with whom I worked briefly on Doctor Who as Savinkov, Reilly's friend and the head of the anti Bolshevik movement. ¶ Approaching 12 episodes of story and over ten hours of viewing may seem a bit daunting and you might be tempted to just dip into a few episodes intitially (this was certainly my approach). So, let me reccomend a couple of episodes in particular. ¶ Visiting Firemen is a gem, with Reilly stealing plans from a German weapons plant. It features memorable black humour, a nail biting confrontation atop a high crane, breathtaking ruthlessness on the part of Reilly, and the gorgeous Joanne Whalley, who would later make such an impression in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective (illustrated here because, criminally, I couldn't find any images of her in the Reilly episode). ¶ The other standout episode is After Moscow, which features Lindsay Duncan (later in Simon Moore's Traffik) as the Plugger, a guntoting meretrix who eats cornflakes with champagne and shares Reilly's dangerous life in London after fleeing from the USSR with a death sentence on his head. ¶ The same story features Joanne Pearce as Carryl Houselander, the psychic whose love for Reilly will result in her exhibiting stigmata during his brutal beatings at the hands of the Cheka in the final episode. Unforgettable viewing.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks to its naked greed and breathtaking business acumen, my local yoga centre decided to respond to the credit crunch last year by doubling its prices. This proved to be the absolute definition of a blessing in disguise when, monumentally ticked off with these jokers, I quit the centre for good and began practising yoga at home — every day. ¶ The net results of this new regime was not only that I made more progress in six months than I had in the previous six years (look Ma, I'm doing the full wheel!) but I also I found myself listening to a solid, and enlightening, seven hours of internet radio a week, while practising said postures. ¶ The latest fruits of this routine have included an outstanding dramatisation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five on BBC Radio 3. I only just caught up with it and it will only remain available for another two days (click here) but if you miss it, don't despair. A work of this quality is bound to be repeated and I will keep you posted. ¶ Admirably adapted by Dave Sheasby, the novel works surprisingly well on radio. But what struck me most of all was how beautifully written, casually profound and bitterly funny the book is ("Anti-war novel? You might as well write an anti-glacier novel"). ¶ There's a full cast of Vonnegut's regular characters in attendance, including Eliot Rosewater from God Bless You Mr Rosewater, which I think was the first Vonnegut novel I read; Howard J Campbell Jr from Mother Night, which I re-read recently, and which was another compact masterpiece (also an excellent film starring Nick Nolte); and of course the pervading presence of hack science fiction writer and fellow peddler of casual profundity, Kilgore Trout (a name which is an obvious play on Theodore Sturgeon, though unlike Trout, Sturgeon writes very well). ¶ Listening to the radio play also brought back startlingly vivid memories of seeing the movie with my mum. At the cinema in Grant Park Plaza, I believe. Mum enjoyed the movie, but she was a little upset by the cruelly pointless death of Billy Pilgrim's sweet, loving wife, Valencia. So it goes.

Troy Kennedy Martin 1932-2009

In my, admittedly idiosyncratic, view the three greatest British screenwriters to work significantly in television (Dennis Potter is a near miss) are Nigel Kneale, Simon Moore and Troy Kennedy Martin. This week I was saddened to hear that Kennedy Martin had died. The only up-side of his loss is that we might get a BBC4 retrospective devoted to his work. ¶ I first became aware of Kennedy Martin's writing, although I was already an admirer without knowing it, through Edge of Darkness. When I started working at the BBC as a script editor in television drama that influential six part serial had only recently been made. There were still posters on the wall and scripts lying around the offices in Shepherds Bush. ¶ I never met Troy in person (we'll use his first name to avoid confusion with Ian Kennedy Martin, his brother, creator of The Sweeney and another considerable British screenwriting talent) but after Edge of Darkness I watched everything I could find by him. I mentioned above, somewhat cryptically, that I'd been an admirer of his without knowing it. That's because I'd seen and appreciated Kelly's Heroes, the Clint Eastwood feature which Troy had written. ¶ His other famous movie, from much the same period, is the cult favourite The Italian Job. Both Kelly's Heroes and The Italian Job are marred, in my view, by undistinguished direction which encouraged some broad slapstick and hammy performances. But both films rise above their deficiencies and the essential brilliance of Troy's writing shines through. Add to these The Sweeney 2, a crackling, sardonic and salty big screen version of the police TV series his brother created, and you have the best of Troy's big screen work. ¶ His other feature credits consist of co-writing the Walter Hill mismatched buddy-cop movie Red Heat (a proficient and engaging thriller fatally compromised, I think, by some questionable casting, while the great character actor Peter Boyle languishes in a minor role), adapting the South African suspense writer Gillian Slovo's novel Red Dust (an intelligent and mature but strangely under-powered script) and The Jerusalem File (an obscure thriller which I have never seen; roll on its DVD release). ¶ The highlights of his later television work are Edge of Darkness and Reilly Ace of Spies. I can't tell you about his early TV dramas, because with exception of one episode of Z-Cars (which he created) I haven't seen them. Fingers crossed that the BBC4 retrospective materialises soon. A big screen adaptation of Edge of Darkness is in the works, starring Mel Gibson, but Troy did not have a hand in the script and I suspect it will have as little resonance with his original as the recent Italian Job remake. If you want to catch the original, classic version of The Italian Job it's worth noting that the latest DVD has a new commentary featuring Troy Kennedy Martin himself. There are some interesting website postings about him here and here.

What I'm Reading on Buses (and Trains)

Paperbacks used to be called pocket books. (Stick with me kid and you'll learn something.) This was for the very good and simple reason that they were of a size to fit comfortably into the pocket of a jacket. ¶ You could carry the book around with you and read it whenever you wanted, cancelling out those mind numbing waits for (or on) public transport. Such books had been specifically designed with this in mind. ¶ So, the lucky reader had the choice between these frangible pocket books, or paperbacks if you will, and hardcover books. The latter were more permanent and durable than our easily destroyed little paperback friends, but also a lot bigger and heavier, and wouldn't fit into the pocket of even Andre the Giant's jacket. But that was cool, because you always had the paperback option. Then some marketing genius got the idea that there was money to be made in making paperbacks bigger and classier (and more expensive, natch) and altogether more like hardcover books. ¶ These mutant aberrations were called trade paperbacks. This scam, I regret to report, worked only too well and today most paperbacks are these bloated hybrids. The point I'm getting at — they won't fit in my fershlugginer pocket any more! So when I head out on public transport I always go through my vintage paperback library (and baby, it's quite a library, believe me) and select a proper pocket book. Sometimes it might even be a Pocket Book. ¶ Recently, as regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know, my pocket-stashed reading has been William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I'm very familiar with this book, having read it more than once over the years and seen the film what seems like dozens of times when I was a kid. That film, written and directed by Peter Brooks, made quite an impression. ¶ But it is a perhaps feeble shadow of what might have been if Nigel Kneale's adaptation had got made. The creator of Quatermass, Kneale was a stone cold genius, a formidable screenwriter and a dangerous mind. In his version of the film there would have been both girls and boys stranded on the island, a more valid microcosm of society. It's a tragedy that film never got made. Anyway — I thought I was familiar with the story. But I was in for quite a surprise. ¶ My first impression of the book was that Golding is a very good, vivid writer. He has a strong visual sense and a good turn of phrase. His tropical island is also very convincingly evoked. So much so that, knowing he'd served in the navy during World War Two, I assumed he had been posted to the Pacific and encountered such places at first hand. ¶ In fact, a bit of painless research (very painless, since Peter Carey's biography of Golding was serendipitously serialised on the radio recently) revealed that the author had in fact spent his war service in cold Atlantic waters. Which makes his achievement all the more laudable. So far so good. ¶ My problems with Lord of the Flies, and they are substantial, begin with the Beast. Allow me to back track. As I opened my battered Penguin Modern Classics copy (nice cover by Andre Francois) and began reading it, sitting on a train bound for Waterloo, I had a clear idea of how the story went — or at least, I thought I did. ¶ It begins with an admirably terse and eliptical reference to a nuclear war that has swept the globe. A passenger jet full of schoolboys, refugees, has crash-landed on an isolated tropical island. Soon they begin to descend into savagery, ending up finally pursuing one of their own number in a hunt to the death. Well, in all of those particulars I was correct. ¶ But I'd completely forgotten about the whole stupid "Beast" subplot. Which goes like this. Some of the smallest kids ("littluns") have bad dreams at night, and believe a menacing beast stalks the island. ¶ The older kids poo-poo this. But then one night, unseen by any of them, a dogfight takes place in the sky over the island. Two jet fighters duelling to the death. (This is all quite nicely and economically described. Golding, I'm sure he'd be pleased to hear, can write.) Then one of the pilots comes floating down from the sky on a parachute. The trouble is, he's dead. ¶ He lands on the highest hill top of the island, where the boys try (and often fail) to keep a signal fire going. Some of the kids spot the strange, billowing, vaguely supernatural shape of the parachute, which has snagged on an outcrop. In the darkness they think they've seen a monster, and flee. Powerful and convincing? Nope. Sorry William. It's bunk. ¶ And it gets worse with a couple of other encounters between Gullible Kids and Parachute Corpse. Soon word on the island is that the Beast really exists. All this nonsense about the Beast is contrived and thoroughly unconvincing and seriously damages the book. ¶ It's like all that crap about Vietnam and Daffy Duck in Alex Garland's The Beach (I notice it was the first thing that screenwriter John Hodge filleted out when he adapted the book for the screen). I wish some editor had had the brains to say to Garland, "This is a great book, just lose all that tripe about Vietnam and Daffy Duck. Oh, and do try and think of an ending. There's a good chap, Alex." Because that's the way editors talk. ¶ And I wish even more emphatically that someone had said to Golding to lose all the Beast bollocks. The worst part is, he kind of uses it as a device to explain, or at least hasten, the degeneration and growing violence of the kids. I'm all for a powerful account of the descent of civilised children into murderous savagery. Bill, you're playing my song! This is the most powerful and enduring aspect of the book. But you don't need the boring bloody Beast to justify it. This subplot weakens and diminishes the whole book (it sold a mere ten million copies. Imagine how many copies it would have sold if he got it right!). Good book, though. ¶ Anyway, having just finished the book and reflecting on this, I sat down for coffee (hot chocolate, actually) with Phil O'Shea, a writer buddy of mine from Dark Knight days and all round nice chap. Phil knows that I'm a vinyl nut and always ordering LPs (mostly jazz) from all over the world. These LPs arrive in specially designed LP boxes and, because I have what some would call an unwholesome penchant for music, there are a lot of these lying around the place at any given time. ¶ And any given time is usually when Phil O'Shea turns up, with a bag of pastries to bribe me, and takes away my precious boxes. He uses them to ship the records (mostly classic rock) he sells all over the world. This is a sideline of Phil's and at the moment there is probably more money in it than there is in writing for television. End of digression. ¶ As I sat there with Phil, sipping the superb hot chocolate I'd made for us, kvetching about writing, he happened to mention this new biography of Golding. And he told me that the original draft of Lord of the Flies had apparently been full of quasi-supernatural doings and accoutrements. Oh, and that beautifully terse and elliptical reference to the nuclear apocalypse? Apparently in the original there was reams of stuff about this war and its aftermath. But, thanks to the cleverness and taste of Charles Monteith, a tyro editor at Faber, most of this stuff was cut. How fascinating. If only Monteith and Golding had gone that extra mile, and got rid of the Beast, too. Still, it provides a nice excuse for that Andre Francois cover. If you look carefully you can see the face of the Beast looming in the background over the boys, cleverly composed of the signal-fire smoke which is such an important element in the story.