Bevis Hillier
My first choice is A Mingled Measure (John Murray, £19.99), the latest volume of James Lees-Milne's diaries. I notice that he is forever declaring that he is not clever. It is rather like Prince Hal's avowing that he is just a plain blunt fellow and then going on to deliver a speech of matchless elo- quence. Why does Lees-Milne insist on his dumbness, when he is clearly as clever as a monkey farm? I think it is to give him a dead-pan Buster Keaton manner which makes his observations 20 times funnier than if delivered by a smartie-pants.
We sat on the top deck [of the bus], for she is a chain-smoker, all the daily workers silently reading their papers and gazing into space — until we arrived . — . I politely asked sotto voce what book she was working on. 'The courtesans of Italy', she bellowed. 'There is nothing, simply nothing I don't know about Italian brothels', she added. People looked over their newspapers at this elderly British spinster.
Least welcome new book: Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star (Chatto, £15.99). The trouble with criticising any Hollinghurst novel is that it looks like queer-bashing. For that very reason, I thought The Folding Star was sure to carry off the Booker this year. As it was, the judges went for f*** f*** f*** rather than b***** b**.** b*****; though in the usual recriminatory Booker post-mortem it became clear how close Hollinghurst had come to winning. His first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, with its soppy old Lord Nantwieh, struck me as substandard P.G. Wodehouse (or rotten Plum), with piston-mechanical sex added in. Hollinghurst's idea of sex might be best expressed by an oxymoron, `frigid lust'. The new offering is about a Belgian pupil molested by his English tutor not exactly what the Common Market was set up for. It is written in Hollinghurst's usual prissy, pursed-mouth style, hardly leavened by what might be called clever-dick word-play (the pupil Luc i is cu/ spelt backwards; the action, such as it is, takes place in Bruges, that is to say Brugge — an anagram, geddit?) Of course it is good that a homosexual hero no longer has to masquerade as het- ero, as in Proust; but Hollinghurst is a dis- mal standard-bearer for the gay novel. What can be achieved in the genre Is shown by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine in No Night is Too Long (Viking, £15), my second book of the year. It is worlds subtler and more humane than Hollinghurst. She should have won the Booker. It is shameful that snobbish atti- tudes to the crime novel have kept her out of the nominations.
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