Afternoon:
9°c
Like everybody who's ever been involved in a literary prize - I was once a judge in the Biography category of the Whitbreads (now the Costas) - I've ceased to pay them much mind. Nevertheless, I was really delighted to hear this week that, at 91, Diana Athill had won the Biography prize in the Costas this year for her memoir of old age, Somewhere Towards the End.
Like all Athill's books, it's a work of wonderful, apparently throw-away candour. She's always written about the events of her own life in this way - as though, since none of them have much currency any more, she might as well just tell the truth about them now as simply and directly as she can. It's by no means as artless a style as it at first appears and masks considerable steeliness, not just about herself but about others too.
And it makes her the only person who could have done this book so well. She may say it just happens to be a good subject she's alighted upon. "Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster around procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away."
But it's her own styptic clarity, her droll detachment, that makes the book so good, whether she's clobbering Henry James - "What Henry James was thinking of when he called death 'distinguished', when it is the commonest thing in life, I can't imagine - though the poor old man was at his last gasp when he said it, so one ought not to carp" - or talking so coolly about sex - "An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex."
Yet perhaps Athill is also right to insist that old age has been "strangely liberating" for her as a writer, because once "none of it mattered at the deepest level", then "all of it could be taken lightly". In that way, perhaps age has actually freed her to be ever more herself? For although she had published in her forties, it wasn't until 80 that she started again with the marvellous Stet. She really does make old age seem to be not so much a drawback as a unique vantage point on important truths about life.
To be sure, there have been other writers who began writing and found fame late - and, in their different ways, also benefited from liberating detachment from youth. Mary Wesley published the first of her many novels at the age of 71, going on to enjoy great success with her raunchy cynicism for 20 years. Penelope Fitzgerald launched her literary career at the age of 58 and wrote her finest novel, The Blue Flower, in her late seventies.
But here and now, Diana Athill is telling us how life seems to her from the final part of it, so rarely heard from in our culture - and that's a victory to celebrate.
Sugar-coating the subcontinent
Slumdog Millionaire is an interesting take on Bollywood romanticism. The film's style remains pretty realistic until the end, when there's a daft dance. Yet the story it tells - love conquering all - couldn't be soupier. Audiences, I suspect, don't quite see what a pup they are being sold because of the gritty setting in Mumbai. In this the film resembles the Man Booker winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. That's another entertaining tale that ends up revealing little more than that in India there still exists poverty, violence and corruption. You don't say?
Back to a monstrous future
Seeing which businesses are doing better in the slump is interesting because they are giving us our first glimpses of the future we all face. Recessionary Man is emerging, not just tight-fisted but resolutely antiquated. Many lifestyle choices have already fallen back more than a decade.
Trips to restaurants used to be passingly rare expeditions. Now we're going back to the future: Fishworks is struggling; Domino's pizza is busier than ever. And the monstrous ballooning of cars over the past decade has gone into reverse. Ford's new bestseller is the modest Fiesta while sales of Land Rovers are down 45 per cent.
All to the good, then? No, no, no. I was crushed to hear that bookings of caravan holidays have shot up by 40 per cent. A future full of caravans: if any news can cast a further pall, this surely is it.
