Craig's 2021 crackers
Who makes Pam Ayres seem like Milton? What happened when a drunken doctor tried to stitch Macca’s cut lip? Find out in our peerless critic’s round-up of a bumper year (plus a couple of right royal duds!)
Ihoover up diaries, though this was not a vintage year for them. The chirpy, too-big-for-his-boots Tory MP Alan Duncan released his political diaries, In The Thick Of It (William Collins, £25). They were awash with clumsy, ill-fitting insults, most of them directed against his former colleagues. Away from the hustle and bustle of Westminster, his life seems deadly dull. Hard to pick the single most boring entry, but ‘Mike and Anne Eley from next door come for dinner. Slow-cooked shin of beef. Rather tasty’ must surely be in with a chance.
Much more enjoyable were Hugo Vickers’s diaries of the years he spent as a young man writing the biography of the high-camp designer and photographer Sir Cecil Beaton (Malice In Wonderland, Hodder, £25). Of course his raw material was infinitely superior to Alan Duncan’s – along the way he encountered Princess Margaret, Princesses Diana and Grace, Jeremy Thorpe, the Duchess of Argyll, Truman Capote, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn, to name but a few – but Vickers is also a much more gifted diarist, quick-witted and observant.
Chips Channon’s diaries, heavily redacted when first published in 1967, are at last being published in full, now that their victims are safely dead and buried (Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, Volume 2,
Hutchinson, £35). The first two volumes top 2,000 pages, and there is another to follow in the spring. Waspish high campery among the upper classes is best consumed in small doses: if you read more than 50 pages in a single session, it feels a bit like stuffing yourself with marshmallows.
There were two brilliant books about villains published this year. Fall: The Mystery Of Robert Maxwell (Viking, £18.99) by John Preston took a fresh look at the overweight and overbearing newspaper magnate, whose body was found floating in the sea off the Canary Islands 30 years ago. The great and the good praised him to the skies at the time of his death, but had to eat their words once it emerged that Maxwell had left debts of £1 billion, and had pilfered well over £400million from his employees’ pension funds.
Though he is sympathetic to Maxwell’s roots as a Jewish refugee, Preston in many ways agrees with Rupert Murdoch, who describes him as ‘a total buffoon’. When his newspaper, the Daily Mirror, launched
a £1million Spot The Ball competition, Maxwell told the editor to ‘Make sure this doesn’t cost me a million’, and ordered the judges to find the squares no one had chosen and then pick them as the correct ones.
The Sackler family were, until very recently, viewed as saintly philanthropists, particularly by the arts world, as they kept endowing museums and galleries the world over with lavish bequests. But, as Patrick Radden Keefe shows in the magnificent Empire Of Pain: The Secret History Of The Sackler Dynasty (Picador, £20), their vast fortune was founded on death.
Their company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured the painkiller OxyContin. They knew it to be dangerously addictive but they hushed it up. In the end, half a million people died from opioids manufactured by the Sacklers and others. Empire Of Pain is a milestone in investigative journalism and a masterpiece of storytelling, a family saga of greed and grandeur that stands comparison with Zola and Balzac.
We’re living in a golden age of fiction by North American women: Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout, Meg Wolitzer, Curtis Sittenfeld, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, the late Carol Shields. This year I chanced upon someone else who can be added to the list – Mary Lawson, who comes from the wilds of Canada but has lived for decades in sedate Kingston upon Thames. All her novels are set in Canada and centre on the strains of family life. They are good stories, sharply observed, beautifully told. Her latest, A Town Called Solace (Chatto & Windus, £14.99), was long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, so has achieved a certain amount of acclaim, but still she deserves to be better known. Hats off, too, to Meg Mason, a New Zealander whose Sorrow And Bliss (W&N, £14.99) is full of snappy one-liners but, at the same time, also remarkably poignant.
A Swim In A Pond In The Rain (Bloomsbury, £16.99) contains seven short stories by four great Russian writers – Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev – which are then examined in detail by the American short-story writer George Saunders. This may sound dreary and academic but it’s quite the opposite. In clear, fresh, often humorous language, Saunders reveals the various sleights of hand involved in their construction, while never trying to flatten their essential genius. A gem.
The most original literary biography I read this year was Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent Of D.H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury, £25), which covers ten particularly hectic years in the life of the nightmarish author. For some reason, Lawrence has always made my heart sink, and this book certainly never
made me wish I’d met him, any more than I’d want to be pally with a tornado. But Wilson writes with such energy and humour that you fast become absorbed in Lawrence’s mad, bohemian circus of drunks, conmen, freethinkers, spongers and adulterers.
I didn’t expect much from the long and ludicrously expensive (£75!), two-volume The Lyrics by Paul McCartney (Allen Lane). I imagined that he had already said anything worth saying. But it’s full of revelations about the domestic events that gave birth to songs which, decades later, still revolve in our heads.
For instance, the line from Rocky Raccoon ‘the doctor came in, stinking of gin’ was inspired by a doctor who gave Paul three stitches on his lip after he fell off a moped while visiting his family in Liverpool for Christmas 1965. The doctor was so drunk that Paul had to thread the needle himself. To cover the scar, he then grew a moustache. The other Beatles liked the look of it and copied him, and, within a few weeks, half the young men in the world followed suit.
If, like me, you’ve been missing New York during lockdown, Craig Taylor’s New Yorkers (John Murray, £25) will make you miss it even more. Across seven years he interviewed a variety of New Yorkers – a window cleaner, a personal injury lawyer, a subway conductor, a dog walker, a security guard at the Statue of Liberty, and so on – to produce a book that perfectly captures their relentless drive. ‘We’re all characters, we’re fast talkers, we’re hustlers,’ says an attorney. But it comes at a price. A dentist points out: ‘In New York, you get a lot of grinding.’ After the 2007-08 financial crash, ‘that was huge, huge. People grinding their teeth, just clenching and grinding their teeth. You were seeing cracked teeth. You were seeing grounddown teeth.’
I much enjoyed two very different books by comedians. For the first twothirds, Bob Mortimer’s And Away… (Gallery, £20) finds our hero almost as forlorn as a character in a Patrick Hamilton novel. But everything changes when he goes to see Vic Reeves performing above a pub. ‘I felt like I had seen the past, present and the future of comedy.’ Over the next weeks they strike up a friendship and – hey presto! – Mortimer transforms from downbeat solicitor to happy comedian.
Frank Skinner’s A Comedian’s Prayer Book (Hodder, £9.99) must confuse booksellers as they puzzle over whether to file it under Humour or Religion. It’s actually a bit of both, as Skinner is far from solemn. But I liked his disapproval of what he calls ‘belief-lite’. He is an unequivocal Roman Catholic, reading the Bible every day, attending Mass, praying with a rosary. ‘Weird-in-a-good-way is one of my favourite religious categories. I like my religion to feel like poetry rather than prose… I don’t like it cosy.’ It was a disappointing year for Royal books, or at least books by Royals. The Duchess of York published a romantic novel, Her Heart For A Compass (Mills & Boon, £14.99), which, it emerged, was ‘cowritten’ with a Mills & Boon veteran, Marguerite Kaye, who churns them out at the dizzying rate of 8,000 words a day.
Set in Victorian times, with lots of cod olden-days language – a typical sentence begins ‘The day was considerably advanced’ – it proved a long, dreary read. I found the romantic scenes, which never went beyond hugs and kisses, almost comically offputting. ‘They kissed. Deep, starving kisses, adult kisses, their tongues tangling, hands clutching and clinging.’
The wife of another second Windsor son, the Duchess of Sussex, published a cashingin-on-baby, virtue-signalling children’s book called The Bench (Puffin, £12.99), which even the dimmest reader could read in a maximum of five minutes. ‘This is your bench/ Where you’ll witness great joy/ From here you will rest/ See the growth of our boy.’ It makes Pam Ayres seem like Milton. Happily, it turns out that most of us can still sniff a celebrity turkey a mile off. The last time I looked, Fergie was 16,794 in the Amazon book charts, which, to be fair, is still a lot better than Meghan at 47,861.