Morning:
8°c
As 2010 draws nearer, the literary world is starting to ask: what were the defining novels of the Noughties?
For while the decade kicked off with Zadie Smith's promising debut, White Teeth, it is ending with a collective gnashing of teeth about the number of tripe celebrity novelists.
If Martin Amis's Money embodied the Eightis with its portrait of greedy, Thatcherite Britain, then Ian McEwan's Saturday was emblematic of the new millennium.
The novel, which appeared in 2005, unfolded over the course of one Saturday, 15 February 2003, during the biggest anti-Iraq war demonstration in London.
On its publication it immediately struck a chord with readers, capturing the heightened sense of menace which had permeated Western cities since 9/11.
On waking up, the hero's initial euphoria disappears when he sees a plane through his window, trailing fire.
McEwan showed how terrorism had infused our consciousness — and his book grimly foreshadowed the events of 7/7 in London.
But there are other candidates for the zeitgeist novel of the Noughties that are not so overtly political. Zadie Smith was published to great acclaim, followed by Monica Ali's Brick Lane.
Blake Morrison dubbed this new breed of young female writer with the composite moniker “Zadie Monica Ali Smith”.
Morrison argued that the 1997 Labour victory was a “magical realist” moment, and that literature had become more social realist as the magic wore off.
It is a neat idea but far too schematic. What about Philip Pullman and JK Rowling? And Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code?
Not to mention the public's increasing thirst for vampire literature and the Twilight novels of Stephenie Meyer in particular. Meyer has sold more than 85 million books worldwide.
And it seems to ignore a huge swathe of post-modern fiction best exemplified by David Mitchell (Ghostwritten, number9dream).
In the end it may be another book altogether that comes to be seen as more representative of the decade.
Sarah Waters brought lesbian writing into the mainstream with Fingersmith and The Night Watch, as did Alan Hollinghurst for gay writing with his Booker prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty.
Meanwhile, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a tale of clones kept alive for their organs, had its finger on the scientific pulse. Ours was the era of Dolly the Sheep and the Human Genome Project.
Dolly the Sheep may have been cloned from a mammary gland yet it was another mammary gland that came to dominate English literature. Step forward Jordan, aka Katie Price, whose novel Crystal outsold the entire Booker shortlist.
Are we reaching the end of literary culture? For this is our literary decade in a nutshell — from bags of talent to two bags of silicone.
Two become ... humdrum
Two of my favourite divas, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, have teamed up for a new single, Video Phone. On paper this sounds like a match made in heaven.
However, as so often with celebrity duets, the song is rather less than the sum of its parts.
Remember Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's Ebony and Ivory? Nauseating. Or Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's The Girl is Mine?
Mmm. This latest collaboration is not that bad but the naked commercialism of the enterprise takes one's breath away — and both ladies detract from each other.
I like my divas undiluted, thank you. All you single men, please do not put a ring(tone) on it.
New words are for fopdoodles
I have enjoyed some of the new coinages of 2009 such as “deleb” (dead celebrity), “unfriend” (to remove someone as a friend from a social networking site), and “tramp stamp” (tattoo on a woman's lower back).
However, few if any of them compare to the new words I have discovered in Dr Johnson's dictionary of 1755 — such as “fopdoodle” (a fool), “nappiness” (the quality of having a nap), “curtain-lecture” (a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed) and “vaticide” (a murderer of prophets). New old words are so much better than new new words.
• Nobody is enjoying Labour's swansong more than Alistair Darling.
On receiving a Survivor of the Year gong at last week's Spectator Parliamentary Awards, the Chancellor joked: “As you know, I don't win many prizes.”
This week he wrote the Spectator diary, describing how he is having to pile on woolly jumpers to stave off the cold in his Downing Street flat.
Whoever thought Darling would emerge as an Eeyorish national treasure? Not Gordon Brown, for sure.
