Isaac and I

This book is the autobiography of Chris Searle, who more or less dedicated his life to the promotion* of poetry - the eponymous Isaac being his greatest artistic influence, Isaac Rosenberg, an East London Jewish poet & painter who was killed at 27 in World War One, and according to Searle deserves to be much more widely known & read. Searle grew up with a hunger for the poetic, and carried this passion with him throughout quite a travelled life - he taught in Canada & the Caribbean for a stint before returning to the familiar East End, where he almost immediately got fired from his role as a secondary school English teacher because he published a collection of his students' work. It all worked out sooner or later thanks to a combination of union pressure & his outraged students going on strike, making headlines as they did so. Political consciousness & activist struggle are wrapped closely up with his understanding of the functional social power of spoken word, as we see throughout - as he brilliantly puts it, "the further dimension of true poetry is also the power to become others in the constant provocation and 'penetration' of revolutionary human empathy". Poetry is intrinsically democratic, egalitarian, progressive, and Searle's own ethics on socialism & anti-racism demonstrate that he fully comprehends this & follows the path of speakable truth; I was mildly alarmed on a few occasions at the sheer backwardness of the surrounding culture he found himself in, especially regarding race, but I suppose that goes to show how far we've come since the mid/late 20th century. Overall this is a very readable book & a solid testament to the liberatory power of creative expression, be that through individual influence & inspiration as with Chris & Isaac** or with grander collective acts of embodied imagination shown in the activist tendencies running throughout. A final thing I will say is that for an autobiography Chris is remarkably uninterested in talking about himself - it's always "this kid or colleague or acquaintance inspired me in such & such a way" and the text is littered with quotes or the entireties of poems by people who he's had in his life, which adds an erratic but edifying diversity to the reading experience. I doubt you've heard of Chris Searle*** so this is not a book to read out of celebrity curiosity - but if you're looking for a grounded, relatable, inspiring story about the active power of art, community, and hope, this is a good book.

* He is clearly very passionate about poetry, but from how he talks about it in the course of this book it seems he cares less for the aesthetic form of how it is written or performed & more with ways in which it can empower people to express & celebrate themselves together. Quite inspiring stuff to me given my ongoing role as host of a monthly spoken word evening (which yes is still going really well thanks for asking)

** Yes, I did buy this book because it has my name in the title. My copy's signed by Chris even - albeit to Paul... whoever you are Paul, I hope Chris doesn't find out you dumped his signed autobiography off to Oxfam.

*** Or case in point Isaac Rosenberg, sadly.

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes

This book, composed by Rob Wilkins based on autobiographical notes made by the subject, Terry Pratchett, is a brilliant biography. I won't say too much about his life or character as portrayed herein as in an early (post-wise) recommendation I think everyone should read this book - it's a heartfelt and complicated and beautiful image of the man who probably has done the most anyone has done for fantasy fiction since Tolkien, and I do not say that lightly.

    Wilkins's prose is passable enough but it's the pictures carried therein that really move this book to something brilliant - one really gets to know Pratchett in an intimate sense, from his childhood as an under-achiever to his unwanted death to dementia.* Some of the earlier chapters are genuinely idyllic - his lifestyle throughout the 1970's read to me like some kind of fantasy it was so much so. One also gets a thorough picture of the blue-collar attitude he took to the business of writing novels - perhaps most perfectly displayed in the discussion of when Pratchett took six months of sabbatical to rest his mind, and then following this when Wilkins (as was at the time his personal assistant) asked him what he did with his time off, Terry grumpily replied "I wrote two books." Further from this though is an image of a man with an insatiable aptitude for practical learning - even though he'd never done particularly well at school, Terry would take an interest in something and learn the skills to master it. From his room full of old hardware that he never dared throw away in case it might still prove useful to the brilliant story of how when he recieved a knighthood he bought a small knob of metal from a meteor, found a local blacksmith and learned himself how to smith metal, personally mined a bunch of iron, forged a sword using this iron and the meteor-metal he'd obtained, and got knighted using exactly that sword.** Basically the man was a living legend, full of so much humour and wisdom that I sincerely believe the Discworld series will survive for centuries to come.

    As already said, I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a lovely read. But if you are already a fan of Pratchett's work, or at all interested in the kind of character who could produce such diverse and prolific literature - this is a must-do.

* I will say that this book, especially in the latter chapters dealing with Pratchett's struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's, is a hardcore manifesto for the right to self-dying. The tragedy of everything that you are, that you know yourself to be, degrading as your body decays, is an abhorrence, and though before reading this I had qualms about it, since, I am fully on Terry's side and think that one should be able to of sound mind & heart choose the time & method of their exit from this world should they, their family, and their medical authorities foresee nothing left for them but loss and pain. After all, if there's one thing Terry taught us overall, it's that Death is a friendly dude just doing his job.

** Tangential I know, but as a D&D dungeon master I've always had it in my head that were I to plan a campaign set in a magical post-apocalyptic England, then 'Terry Pratchett's Meteor Sword' would have to be a legendary item. I haven't worked out its stats yet.

Accidental Saints

This book by Denver's most famous Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, is a collection of searingly honest autobiographical vignettes of the complexities and difficulties of the real rough Christian life as experienced through her pastoral career. People are broken and messy - they will disappoint you, confuse you, sin against you, requiring love and forgiveness in amounts that do not come naturally to humans outside the activity of the Holy Spirit. In this book Nadia skips through a series of problematic encounters that she's had, wrestling with God over how best to encourage or rebuke others as much as wrestling with God over how much we might need an encouragement or a rebuke that we're unwilling to currently hear. She writes with shockingly frank vulnerability, and a down-to-earth lucidity that is extremely readable, and her way of discussing both practical and spiritual matters is so deft that one easily gets a sense of the shapes of situations discussed. It is a book that makes you deeply grateful for God's grace, as it reminds us just how much all of us need it. Reminding me somewhat of Dave Tomlinson's How to be a Bad Christian, though with more emphasis on pastoral care than on individual behaviours and attitudes. I'd recommend this a solid resource for any Christians feeling somewhat stultified in their faith and relationships, as it makes a powerful wake-up call to the boundary-pushing certainty-defying modus operandi of our God's grace.

the Damnation Document

This book is - well, it's actually a report from the organisation called thirty-one eight - who are specialized in investigating abuses within churches. I'm including it on this blog as it was at least as long as many books I've read and has far more content. As regular readers will know, I am a committed Christian - and as more attentive readers may know, my relationship with the church I grew up in deteriorated quite viciously toward my exit from that congregation.

   I'm not going to make a huge song-and-dance about everything in this post. I left The Crowded House for my own reasons, though I'm sure they were folded into manifold other factors going on within that church that made it spiritually unsustainable for me to stay. Anyway, the title of this post is simply what I've been thinking of this report as - I read the first quarter of it way back when it came out and broke down in tears, but I've finally psyched myself up to read the whole thing so I could have a coherent backwards opinion. And I am sure I made the right choice in leaving. This is a book review blog, not a church-dissection blog, so I'm going to eschew any personal commentary here; if you are interested in what was awry in my home church the link is right there above.

the Art of Disruption

This book, part autobiographical reflection and part political manifesto, is the first book by Magid Magid, who frequently made global headlines* when he was Sheffield's Lord Mayor a couple of years ago.**

   In it, Magid develops the "ten commandments of Sheffield", a sequence of generally agreeable but radical in intentionality diktats rooted in his ethical thinking (originally put together as a poster for Tramlines, then kind of just started circulating around activist and youth circles of their own volition). These are as follows:

1. Be kind
2. Don't be a prick
3. Do epic shit
4. See the good
5. Don't lose hope
6. Do it differently
7. Always buy your round
8. Don't kiss a Tory
9. Tell your ma you love her
10. You've got this!

   Obviously there is a lot of wiggle-room in the actual applicability of these principles, but as guidelines for personal conduct and attitude I think they're a solid contribution to the discourse on how we should behave in relation to politics and society in the 21st century. Magid's book is not so much an argumentative justification for these commandments, nor speculations as to how they may be enacted - it's more a process of thinking through the values underlying them and looking at how everyone can grasp and engage with such principles in their own life contexts. It's not so much a true manifesto then as it is an inspirational primer to show people how and why they should care about positive liberty and the common good; an affirmation that we can change things. All of this is rooted in Magid's discussion of where/when these values have prompted developments in his own life, which has been a vibrant one to say the least - Sheffield's first Muslim/black Lord Mayor, his experiences growing up as a refugee, his dalliances with international media furores, and his election as a Yorkshire & Humber MEP during the whole Brexit debacle - man's had some interesting grit in his life.

   The prose is not particularly dazzling, but I kind of liked that - it almost hardly feels like reading a book, it's so casual and conversational, and therefore extremely easy to read. I finished it in two or three sittings. You really get a feel of Magid's personality and passion through the course of the ten chapters (one for each commandment obvs) and for this reason alone I would recommend this book - for if everyone in the world had someone like Magid in their life, democratic societies would be immeasurably healthier and happier. I wouldn't call this a must-read, but it's a provocative and heartwarming take on and against the cynical culture of our day, and there are anecdotes and wisdom-bits in there that could genuinely propel the apathetic into active sociopolitical concern. Not that he specifically needs it for that reason but I've decided to give this book to my eldest brother as I think he'll resonate strongly with the ethos at the core of the book, which is no singular monolithic ideology, but rather an open-minded personal quest for truth and justice - and that is what we should hope to expect from all our legislating representatives.***

* Perhaps most notoriously for calling Donald Trump a "wasteman" & subsequently (and hilariously) banning the then-President from Sheffield.

** Not to name-drop or owt but I met the guy a few times. Truly lovely chap.

*** I'm really hoping he gets the Green Party nomination for Sheffield Central in the 2024 general election, as Magid has enormous name-recognition value among the youth - here's me crossing my fingers that despite his last elected role (as MEP) falling apart in the ruins of Brexit he gets a chance to shine in Parliament proper.

the Prehistory of the Far Side

This book by Gary Larson is a highly interesting account of how he came to be one of the most highly-respectly and widely-syndicated comic artists of the late 20th-century (see for proof, the books of respective galleries one, two, three and four - as example).

   The first third of the book is a fairly sketchy but endearing autobiography of how Gary grew up with a fascination for nature, all its oddness and darkness; while also having a fairly odd and dark sense of humour - and naturally these things came together. He includes a few scans of drawings he did as a kid, several of which are fairly horrifyingly graphic - but you can see where the roots of the comic he become famous for came from. It's illuminating to say the least.

   The second third of the book is a dryer and more methodical walkthrough of his efforts to get published, then syndicated, then bigger - and so on. This sheds a great deal of insight into what exactly late-20th-century comic publishers were expecting from their artistic contributors and what they weren't, and it does largely seem that whatever Gary Larson was, they weren't expecting and didn't really want.* It took him a while to find his feet in the industry, and even when he did, the people managing his strips for the syndicates often didn't even understand the comics he was sending them - to the point that, if he sent in a batch of comics for a weeks' worth of newspapers, sometimes they would even mix-match captions between one or the other strip without even noticing, and often with no reader complaints that they "didn't get it" either. Gary Larson's style was simply that weird that people just took it as a given if it made close to zero sense. Though the dryest part of the book, I enjoyed this bit the most. It gives a great light into the inner and outer struggles of a cartoonist trying to get recognised and then successful; and with an honesty and humour throughout, never a bitterness.

   The final third is a compilation of Gary's favourite strips from his tenure, though most of these have already been featured in the galleries linked in the first paragraph. Anyway, if you not only have decided that you like The Far Side as a comic but are interested in the artistic, personal, and economic processes by which one becomes as weird a cartoonist as he, then this is definitely worth a read.

* I'll tell you what they wanted. They wanted Marmaduke: a dog who never made a noise or a mess or a fuss, only a vaguely sardonic thought-bubble in response to a borderline completely normal situation. They wanted Garfield: a cat with a big personality comprising of a whole four jokes under his belt that could be recycled ad nauseum at the expense of his obviously manic-depressive owner Jon Arbuckle... what they DID NOT want was a completely off-the-wall unhinged rumination on anthropology or natural history or fuck-knows-what every week with a completely different joke every time that most days even the editors wouldn't understand. But still, The Far Side remains a classic. How many people do you know that own a collection of Marmaduke strips? Exactly.

Tramp for the Lord

This book by Corrie ten Boom is an unexpected delight. I grew up on occasional stories about Corrie ten Boom; how she and her Christian Dutch family sheltered Jewish families throughout the Holocaust for years, right up until the end where they were captured and she and her sister Betsy were taken to a concentration camp, where Betsy died, but Corrie survived just long enough to see the camp's liberation at the end of the war. They were inspiring stories, and form the backbone of her more famous work The Hiding Place - but I'd never read that myself. But somehow I found myself drawn to what she found herself doing with her life after so much trauma. And man, is it remarkable.

   The autobiographical chapters in this book span decades, recounting historical events as she grows up through and past them, all with an unshakeable faith in Christ that carries her through everything as she persists in a singular quest to share the joy and hope she has in Jesus with as many people in as many place as she can. It's truly inspiring. And not just the task of it - the bulk of these chapters is comprised of a variety of hindrances, from lost airline tickets to localised epidemics to terrorist attacks to you-name-it - but Corrie's immediate instinct is always to retreat and to pray, and to continue doing so, while blessing those around her however she can, until something rights itself. And in these chapters, it always seems to. A cynic may easily say these are the miraculous wishings of a senile woman with nothing in her head but the dregs of a meaningless faith. But I do not think a woman of her calibre could have been what she had without developing a hard shell of robustness and fortitude in telling what is mere coincidence or genuine miracle or both; and more often than not, both IS both - that's the point. Her faith and her prayer and her patience sees her through so many strange and stressful situations in this book that she not only makes her global tour appointments as a speaker to congregations more or less on time, but she touches and brightens the lives of many random folks around the world as she does so. I found this a genuinely inspiring book - if not necessarily for how I think my life could ever go, then insofar as I may have faith, patience and prayerfulness. Lord give me the strength to be the kind of tramp Corrie was.

All My Cats

This book is a partially autobiographical shortish novel, or longish novella, by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, who, once upon a time, moved into a house in the Bohemian area of Kersko just outside Prague, hoping that he would have peace there in which to write. However he finds the town's wild cat population seeps into his life and thus commences the book's central theme and relationship - that of Hrabal with all the cats that start visiting, then staying in, then breeding in, his Kersko home, despite the regular complaints of his wife "what are we going to do with all these cats!?"

   Of course, what he actually does do with the cats is the meat of the story so I won't spoil it here. But be warned - cat lovers expecting a ride as soft and complacently-cattish as this novel will be sorely disappointed, as Hrabal's cat cabal relatively quickly begins a descent into grim, almost Dostoevskian horror and brutality - look out for the mailbag...

   I'd happily recommend this book to people who enjoy reading about the nature and character of cats, as this book I think feeds into that kind of metanarrative really interestingly. But if you just want a nice story about a man with lots of cats, don't read past the first chapter of this one - this is not that kind of story. It is, however, once you get past the sheer darkness of its core conflict, a deeply funny and thought-provoking story about life, care, responsibility, and "whatever are we going to do with all these cats!?"

The Bucket

This book by Allan Ahlberg is a mixed bag. It's an autobiographical look through rose-tinted age-fogged glasses at the author's own childhood, in 1940's/50's Oldbury in the Black Country - and for a Millennial reader like myself, the sheer distance between his childhood and the contemporary average is mind-boggling, but I pride myself on being feral enough that despite being born in the 1990's my own youth bears many hallmarks of similarity to what is presented in this book. We meet a young Allan who hates baths, loves hiding under the table, dart, playing football, alternately squashing and empathizing with snails, playing with things that aren't even technically toys but can become such through active imagination, etc.

   I'm not really sure who this book's meant to be for. Ahlberg is a masterful and prolific kids' author and this claims to be his first book intended for adults, but other than nostalgic curiousity for the inner life and memories of a similarly-aged person, I'm struggling to think why exactly an adult reader would read this off their own bat. It would be a fantastic book to read to younger readers to give them a sense of how much lifestyles, attitudes and such can change in a short fifty year generation or so - but in my opinion it just wasn't entertaining enough on its own merit to warrant picking up and reading as a grown-up. Unless you really like terse poetry, rambling anecdotes about half-forgotten things, and of course buckets and buckets of Brummie good cheer.

Ten Days in a Mad-House

This book, a reprint of an 1887 work compiled by Ian Munro from the reports and news-clippings from intrepid journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a.k.a. Nellie Bly - or for the sake of her narration in here, N. Brown. I won't say much about it because Wikipedia can give you a better-sourced summation than I can be bothered to - but basically she feigned dementia/insanity for a while to see how hard it would be to get committed to an asylum, in which pursuit she could then report first-hand on the conditions of such places. She spent ten days in Blackwell's Island Asylum, having been processed through the bulk of an inept bureaucratic system up to that point. It is gross and shocking reading that makes me so grateful to God for the NHS; and to the sheer ballsiness of people like Liz Cochran / Nellie Bly for diving headlong into the messes of our world to tell the truth, and their stories amidships. Grimly fascinating, and I will be digging out more books by Nellie to see how she managed to circumnavigate the world in eight days less than Jules Verne thought probable. Following her exposé of the terrible conditions, the state of New York committed an extra $1,000,000 to the cause of properly caring for the "insane". What a woman. 

Persepolis: the Story of a Return

This book, the second part* of a graphic autobiography by Marjane Satrapi (see first part) was even more gripping, radical and brimming with righteous indignation than its prequel. In part two, we follow her through teenage years struggling to find her identity as an Iranian in Europe, as she explores new experiences and subversive ideas - only then to return home to Tehran in desperation for belonging; but here, she meets obstacles of the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic repressing freedoms (especially for women) that only deepen her sense of struggle. As with part one, it's as educational as it is entertaining, and cannot be read without rowing out across a sea of empathic storytelling in a dinghy made of simplistic and striking illustrations; the dialogue matter-of-fact, sharply succinct, so that developments and relationships that spanned years are neatly condensed to their essence in the wider life story in a few pages, and the visual style and deftness of person and setting characterisation really pulls the reader into Satrapi's world.

* Okay fine I know that link is actually just for a book containing both parts - childhood and return - as I received it for Christmas and didn't see the point in reading the whole first half again just so I'd be able to do a post about the whole book. My blog, I make up the rules as I go. Maybe follow the link to the post about the first part anyway as this post is particularly short because I don't want to have to re-type out all my broad reactions to the general style and thrust of what Persepolis is, and the post about part one deals with those adequately.

Homage to Catalonia

This book, an eyewitness account of a small sliver of the Spanish civil war told by George Orwell, is probably my favourite of his books that I've read yet. I read it because of the admittedly-not-as-extensive-as-I'd-hoped parallels between the circumstances of Catalonia's workers' revolution (driven as much by anarchists as communists) in the midst of a complex civil war and the current situation in Rojava - and, somewhat appropriately, read the bulk of it during four days spent at a grassroots environmentalist training camp last week.
   It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made  and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
   I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.



* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.

** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.

*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?

Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood

This book, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is one that I will not discuss at length but I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm currently halfway through a several-day essay splurge and am reading pretty much everything about historical processes of democratisation in Turkey and Iran that I could easily find - this book, being as it is a more or less autobiographical account of the author's life from ages six to fourteen in Tehran during the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, the subsequent establishment of the repressive Islamic Republic, and the ruinous war with Iraq, was on the same shelves as many of my required sources and so I borrowed it from the library as a sort of pudding* and have just blasted it in one sitting and I'm hoping to comb through several more academic chapters after this blog post so sorry if you don't like mad run-on sentences. (I love them.)

   Persepolis is gripping, heartwarming, full of as much vivacious humour and character as it is incisive political consciousness - the relatively simple black-and-white illustrations convey a huge amount of emotional context and carry the story really well. Ultimately it's an education in historical empathy: western audiences are rarely exposed to narratives told in the Middle East unless it's a story about war, oil, politics, or all three, in which the main character is a western soldier, businessman, politician, or something, probably fighting cartoonish terrorists. Marjane Satrapi's work in Persepolis (including the sequel which I have not yet read) is the kind of story we need to see, hear, read, whatever, more of - as it helps better show the personal and social realities of what it was like to live in Iran through one of the most turbulent times in its modern history, and bridges the sense of our simply not knowing - though conveyed in the format of a comic, there is a deep and profound humanity in this book, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the Middle East, whether or not you like graphic novels - it is a powerful and well-told story that will make you laugh and be sad and know more about Iranian history and what it's like to be a teenage girl with ambitions of punkdom living under an autocratic religious regime.**

   Anyway, that's the post. I'm going to drop this book in the returns bin in the library.

   Fin

* When you've been reading heavy academic non-fiction all week and you need something lighter, or at the very least more aesthetically pleasing.

** I mean, if that last bit doesn't hook you I don't know what will.

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

This book, the warts-and-all 'autobiography' of Alan Partridge, undoubtedly one of Great Britain's national treasures of TV/radio/general broadcasting, was an absolutely cracking read. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular man, he is a fictional character devised by Steve Coogan (and portrayed by him too), Armando Iannucci and a team of comedy writers (most of the same as those who did this) over the last two decades or so, who has become such an iconic monument of British culture that he more or less exists as a real person in his own right. With all the repressed rage and frustrated class-entitlement of Basil Fawlty yet all the desperate compulsion to be loved and admired as a worthy entertainer of David Brent (if you're not getting these references you've got some serious learning to do about British comedy), Partridge's status as a true titan of Little England is far broader and has an incredibly deep background. For a man who isn't real, the details of his life are wrought with a richness of detail and nuance that humanise him, though such a ridiculous character, effectively being as he is just an irredeemable dick, yet through the wealth of radio and TV projects he's been slotted into and the sheer coherence of this autobiographical backstory* as a way of tying it all together, I am left marvelling at the skill of the writing team. When watching or listening to any of the shows that made Alan Partridge famous, be it his ill-fated chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You or the cringe-sitcom following his floundering career I'm Alan Partridge or the radio shows he was sports presenter for way back before he really took off or even the current mid-morning radio slots he hosts on North Norfolk Digital, I was always left as a viewer/listener thinking "this is hilarious because of how closely it treads the line to what someone like Alan Partridge could actually be like if they existed" - but having read this book, I now feel like that hypothetical wondering might be vindicated. Coogan, Ianucci et al have truly created a living breathing insufferably-boorish bigoted boring bellend from Norwich. Obviously he's still fictional but his life (of course, narrated in his voice** which given his massive insecurity is far from a reliable narration***) is drawn out so well that it's given my a much deeper enjoyment**** of all things Partridge. Alongside the perfectly-written narrative accounts (anecdotes aplenty), the book features two inserted sections of pictures from Alan's life, the explanatory subtitles to which are a pure treasure, as are the utterly inane footnotes spattered throughout the book (some of which direct the reader to 'press play' on a given musical track - yes, this book has a tracklist, as the autobiography of any respectable Disk-Jockey would, and though I did not listen to these songs as and when commanded by Alan, I feel that doing so would certainly improve the reading experience somewhat, so there you go).

   I should probably start a new paragraph.

   Another for good measure. Anyway, if you're not a Partridge fan, you probably won't get this book, but please please please acquaint yourself with him, and if you find he tickles you in any way, devour everything there is to watch or listen to of him, and then read this. You'll love it. Alan Partridge is one of the greatest artistic creations in the history of human civilisation. (You can quote me on that.) Likewise, if you a Partridge fan, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It yielded more laughs-per-chapter than anything I've ever read, while also being an outstanding work of writership on part of the team behind it, and also provoking occasional moments of actual thoughtful sadness on the reality that people like Alan may exist. This is the less-gushing part of the post so I've saved it for a final paragraph.

   Alan Partridge's existence at all is a masterwork of sociocultural satire. In the same way that The Thick of It (by most of the same writers, remember) explores the dark twisted nexus between democratic politics and the liberal media, I think Alan's 'life and work', taken as a whole, can be seen as a grand and complex insight into a variety of unfortunate factors floating about in Britain today (or at least, in the 1989-2007ish period). Geographically and historically he can definitely be said to be a product of his environment. Alan Partridge grew up in the decades where traditional British modernism and community structures were giving way to individualism, and while he as a character is not in any substantive sense 'postmodern' he's definitely been able to shape his life according to the opening-up that this current had in enabling people to more aggressively determine the shape and trajectory of their own life - ultimately a decline in top-down social purpose bestowed upon persons, which for people like Alan merely empowers an unnoticed but pervasive lifelong wrestle with purposelessness. These decades also saw the diffusion of higher education on a bigger scale, empowering the lower-middle-classes with new outlooks on life - in Alan's case, a classless unfounded snobbery that he's quite good with general knowledge. Also, the economic development of these decades meant that traditional career paths were no longer a given, and as mass-entertainment became something to which society oriented itself with passive resignation, the excess of material and intellectual wealth accrued in Britain started to find itself being wasted on things produced for the sole purpose of bottom-of-the-barrel lowest-common-denominator drivel - like chat shows. These are, I think, symbolic of the roaring emptiness of late-20th-century western culture, and it is telling that it is Alan Partridge's lifelong ambition to be a broadcaster of the type who hosts one such avenue of background noise, convinced, as so many who chase these careers probably are, that presenting a pinnacle of vacuousness is a legitimate alternative to attaining true usefulness, fame, or love. From the 1970s onwards, the British public started sitting in sofas staring at TVs and vaguely forgot about everything else that they weren't directly obligated to partake in. Culture, religion, art, any form of wisdom? Meh, whatever floats your boat, but if it doesn't float my boat, then who cares. Politics and social issues? Meh, I'll side with whatever floats my boat, who cares about yours. The trajectory of Alan's career and the views he voices reveal a complicated indictment of our media, which seems to spout utterly empty tripe so as to maintain an utterly empty audience, and the only people who would strongly desire to be the face of such a media are utterly empty people like Alan Partridge, people without a clue, petty materialistic reactionary bigots who desperately crave attention, and they do get it, but only in its most primitive, pointless and soulless form.

   These are my own personal reflections on the cultural titan that is Alan Partridge, his life and work; the writing team may have had completely different ideas. But hey ho. Alan is, alongside everything already said about him; sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist, actually a fairly rubbish broadcaster, and an all-round horrible git. Yet this book, in a handful of well-placed passages, does, with unexpected clarity of human insight, make us wonder how a person like him could exist with the 'life that he lived' and the 'shows that he made' and still be able to tolerate living in his own skin, and in those passages where Alan's self-reflection is activated in a genuine sense we see a giant wall of ignorance and denial, blocking this somewhat-clever man's view of the fact that absolutely nobody wants him to be doing what he's doing, and this wall enables him to proudly, cheerily even, keep doing it. Ahaaa to that!

* Unlike his first autobiography, Bouncing Back, which experienced shockingly poor sales (for an autobiographical work of such high calibre by a respected public figure in the Norfolk area) and sadly had to be pulped.

** It's available in audiobook form, read by Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge's voice. Get in!

*** I strongly recommend watching Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge and perhaps even listening to some of his radio stuff before you read this book. They're all on Netflix (or DVD boxsets are pretty cheap if you want some awesome Christmas ideas). You'll find it thoroughly amusing, and the horrific awkwardness of some of the scenarios he finds himself galloping into through his sheer social ineptitude will be at stark contrast to the ways he recounts these events in the book. It ties all the loose nuggets of his life that we've seen in shows etc. together brilliantly, fleshing out the realer (and actually deeply sad) life underpinning them all in intervening chapters. I only wish that this book had come out two years later so that the events depicted in the film Alpha Papa (a comedy-thriller marking his debut on the big screen, whereby the broadcaster we all love to hate so much somehow ends up being solely responsible for defusing a hostage situation), as that time revealed Alan not only to be a top entertainer of the people but also a man of action, much like Roger Moore or someone, and reading his telling of how it all happened would've been amazing. Ah well.

**** And I already did have a pretty deep enjoyment of all things Partridge. I'd grown up with a dim cultural awareness of him, but in my third year of university, my close friend and next-door neighbour Charlotte (same who gave me this - yeh, we share a broadly bizarre sense of humour) broke her leg. This meant that a lot of her time had to be spent basically not moving and being kept company to avoid depressive boredom, and during the two-or-so month period it took for her to regain the skill of walking, we must've watched every episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge at least three times each. I'm not joking. We binged and re-binged and we have no regrets because it provided some of the funniest evenings of studentdom.

Surprised by Joy

This book, the autobiographical coming-of-spiritual-age story of that darling of 20th century Christianity, Clive Staples Lewis, is so deeply thought-provoking and insightful and wise that I actually have very little to say about it. I acquired it second-hand almost immediately after a stunned encounter with the fact that he was an atheist for much of his life. Surely, I thought, any mind as piercing as his sojourning from godlessness to joy in Christ would be worth reading. It was.

   What can I say? C.S. Lewis has a unique ability to describe combinations of feeling, thought, circumstance and motive to penetrate with alarming clarity the truth of what is going on in a person or an idea - and he is well able to apply this skill to the evolution of his own mindset. His overall journey can broadly be described as tasting "joy" early in life and commencing searches in art, philosophy, science and history to find clues as to where it might come from and how he might reliably attain its source (SPOILER ALERT: God). He explores how his conception of a worldview grows and changes, based on aesthetic taste, satisfactory narratives, his character's reaction to places in which he finds himself and people who challenge him, and (though these are surprisingly not as central as I expected) intellectual truths to which he assented.

   Exploratory reading of a huge assortment of books (especially myth and legend, the grandeur of which grounded his inkling of a more meaningful universal story than atheism provides) and formal education (from the violent aristocracies of Wyvern boarding school to the relentless logic of a tutor referred to as "the Knock") are the two main currents of growth and development in his coming-to-faith. A host of other places and people and circumstances are significant in the tale too, but I would rather not list them nor summarise them. From World War One to an aging father to frequent lengthy trips to and from Northern Ireland to tutoring at Oxford; Lewis's life, even the abridged aspects presented in this book, are far too wondrously individualistically interesting to do justice* even in his own words, let alone mine, which here are far fewer, less well-chosen, and read by almost nobody.

   It's very easy reading, which is just as well, because I was breezing through it during the days surrounding my last exam (I am, as of Thursday, free, thank goodness, at least until tomorrow when lectures start again, but hurrah nonetheless). It's insightful and challenging and I would recommend anyone read it; christians will find it an excellent source of pearls regarding wisdom, truth and goodness and one's acquisition of those things in coming to know God; non-christians will be entertained by his lucid cheery writing style and perhaps provoked to reflection by some of the ideas Lewis encounters in books or observes floating about his own worldview.

* Biographies always irk me slightly in that regard. They have value in that aspects of a life can be accentuated to shed light on a particular purpose or meaning, but the sheer inadequacy of reducing something as marvellous as human experience to words on pages is such that most endeavours to do so come across as superficial and sad. Autobiographies are slightly better, as at least it's the mind describing its own history. Truly though, if you want to make a point about something extrinsic, write non-fiction, and if you want to expose something of the untellable beauty of humankind, figure out fiction or poetry that manages. Sometimes I don't mind though, as with this book. The arc is so well-articulated and the points made so important and embedded in the biographical details themselves, that this is the first proper "autobiography" I've been able to engage with happily.**

** Except the political diaries of Chris Mullin and Tony Benn, but those are more of a direct continuous insight into the working life of leftist politicians, which is cool. Come to think of it, a huge amount of fiction I love is semi-autobiographical, and many essays, journalism pieces, and memoirs that I've enjoyed definitely are, not to mention well-worded anecdotes, or even much of the Bible... there appear to be blurred lines here. I'll have a think and come up with a better definition of what kind of biographical works I dislike next time I read one.