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I reviewed this about two months ago for the Literary Review and have been “getting round” to posting it up ever since. Productivity reaches a new high.

Robert Rowland Smith is a consultant,writer and teacher with a great middle name. His book seems to be being received well, although it did get an enjoyably vicious review in the Observer, from Theodore Dalrymple:

No thought is too banal for Rowland Smith; unfortunately, his banality is perfectly compatible with error. He rarely loses an opportunity to suppress what is true and suggest what is false.

Funny, but harsh. I thought this was a case of “wrong reviewer, wrong book.” Dalrymple - a bit of a gun - seemed almost offended to be asked to review a work of popular philosophy. He attacked the form and genre, rather than the content, and gave little impression that he had actually read beyond the table of contents.

Reviewing is an immanent art. It works best when it adapts to the goals and conventions of its subject (while bearing in mind the genre, of course). Smith’s book is far from perfect. But Dalrymple’s review was the equivalent of criticising Woolf for failing to develop minor characters or Powell for lacking gripping plots.

You can read my effort (the original, not the cruelly cut Literary Review version) after the jump.

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The last episode of Alone in the Wild is tonight. The incredible Ed Wardle continues his journey into the Yukon wilderness, while we watch his beard grow and his stomach shrink and ask ourselves why he ever agreed to do this. I’ll never read an adventure book the same way again.

One thing that’s amazed me throughout is Ed’s psychological resilience. In the last episode he convincingly told us (I paraphrase):

My chest hurts, my legs hurt, I’m hungry and sore. My pack is rubbing against my back. But I’m happy. I’m happy.

In his award-winning book Stumbling on Happiness, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains one reason for this:

We might think of people as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness. This metaphor is unusually appropriate. The physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognise and destroy foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognise and respect the body’s own cells.

If the physical immune system is hypoactive, it fails to defend the body against itself and we are stricken with autoimmune disease. A healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well – but not too well.

ps. More prosaically, for those wondering why Ed’s so obsessed with salmon, the answer is here.

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I’m reading The Sun Also Rises at the moment. It’s very Hemingwayish, more so somehow than the other novels. When there’s less happening, style and preoccupations come through much more clearly.

One line made me laugh. It comes about halfway through the book, when the main character - Jake Barnes - visits a man he knows in Pamplona to buy tickets for the bullfighting. Jake says:

He was an archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story.

It’s a strange thing to say. The whole book is full of observations like that - why tell us that this one is irrelevant? I guess it serves to remind the reader how every detail is being marshalled towards the final effect. Anyway, it struck me as amusing.

It’s a fine book, as Jake would say. Reading it, I’m reminded of one of the liqueurs the characters are endlessly drinking - a pernod, or an aguardiente. Like them, this is cool, dry and slightly sour - and, of course, unexpectedly strong.

If you’re looking for something to go on holiday with you could do worse than this. It’s easy to read, has short chapters and is only 210 pages long. It also makes you think about drinking - something we can only really do properly on holiday. All his novels have that effect, or at least they do on me.

All Hemingway’s novels could also be summed up by the drinks in them - For Whom The Bell Tolls would be a spicy Spanish wine, Green Hills of Africa a whisky. A Farewell to Arms has vast amounts of all sorts of booze, including a the delightful-sounding eggnog spiked with sherry. Perhaps it would be a beer, or maybe a vermouth. The Old Man and the Sea is all about the absence of drink.

Speaking of which…

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At the Royal Court last night, to see Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth. An astonishingly rich play, with a truly incredible central performance by Mark Rylance (as Johnny “Rooster” Byron, pictured). They’ve extended the run. This is a must see.

I’ll be thinking about Jerusalem for a long time. There’s so much to it, although it manages to cram it all in without ever turning boring or pretentious. It reminded me of Angela Carter - the short story “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, in particular - and the best bits of Neil Gaiman. He’s also recreated A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this is what Butterworth does here, with Rylance as a Puckish Lord of Misrule.

Gaiman has often lamented Fairie’s departure from the real world. Butterworth makes the same point here, but instead of connecting it to the loss of childhood in the normal way he connects it to adolescence - that strange, unnerving time when sex undermines reality. The constriction of adolescence is a major theme here - Rylance’s character deals drugs to the local teenagers. Like Carter, who pictures the Puck with an enormous, irrepressible erection, Butterworth sees the sexuality of all those folk tales.

I was also strongly reminded of Darkmansby Nicola Barker. Like Jerusalem, Darkmans is a brilliant portrait of contemporary Britain - there’s a superb portrait of a feckless builder - but it’s also a strange, mystical book, deeply concerned with myth and history. At ten million pages, it’s too long for its slightly disappointing ending, but it’s still an excellent read. If you enjoyed Jerusalem, I suggest you start here.

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