Arriving precisely when he means to: Peter Jackson's triumphant return to Middle Earth

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

‘I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.’ This is how Bilbo Baggins ends his journey in Lord of the Rings, having yielded to the ravages of age and thus being accorded a place on the last ship to the Undying Lands. But the question abounding in critics’ reviews is: are we ready for another adventure? And do we really need one?

The film Jackson has made is a rollicking, hilarious and tender frolic through Middle Earth. Admittedly, by its very nature, it is not as epic as its predecessor. Its evil characters (comically cockney trolls, a hostile but amusingly jowl-wobbling Goblin King, even the scarred albino menace Azog the Defiler) fail to inspire the terror of Sauron and his Nazgul. And there are some odd moments that could perhaps have been culled, such as the episode with the mushroom-eating, bird-poo covered wizard Radagast, which feels disconcertingly like a bizarre flight into a hallucinogenic video game.

But Ian McKellen’s wizard Gandalf, by turns twinkle-eyed and splendidly wrathful, gives the film a powerful sense of both warmth and gravitas. And the story is carried expertly by Martin Freeman’s ingenuous, endearing embodiment of Bilbo Baggins. As an actor he elevates himself from Elijah Wood’s somewhat cloying, wooden Frodo – you cannot help but relate to Bilbo as someone uprooted from his home and muddling through the unknown. He disarmingly tackles challenges big and small, from protecting his mother’s antique glory box against the boot-scrapings of impolite dwarves to protecting the exiled dwarf-king from a beheading by a vengeful, merciless Azog.  

It is the film-stealing riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum that makes another trip to Middle Earth feel truly worth it – brilliantly-timed, wretched, ominous and hilarious all at once. Andy Serkis’s superlative facial expressions are transmuted to create a CGI character that perfectly sustains the schizophrenic Smeagol-Gollum dialectic conceived with such inspiration in Lord of the Rings. Serkis fully makes you feel the spectrum of Gollum’s emotions: his gambolling joy at playing games with Bilbo; his primative urge to kill this intruder into his world; his innocent, excruciating pain at losing the ring. And the teetering repartee between Bilbo and Gollum, which veers from playful to menacing in an instant, gives you a real sense of their terrors, prejudices and weaknesses, to the point where you wish you could go down to the goblin cave in which they spar and save them both.

So for me at least, the answer to whether we need The Hobbit is a resounding yes. Not simply because I am an ardent fan (who, I admit, is to Lord of the Rings what the devoted Samwise Gamgee is to his Mister Frodo.) But also because I think Peter Jackson has given us a film which not only pays homage to the meticulously realised world Tolkein created but which emphatically enhances our appreciation of that world. He has indeed vastly augmented a small book in order to realise it on the same colossal scale of his first film trilogy, for which he has faced not insignificant derision. But it doesn’t feel that this is arbitrary or excessive, because Jackson has faithfully incorporated elements of The Silmarilion and Tolkein’s own appendices, and made with them a film that still speaks to our own times of the uncertainty of life, the unlikely friendships that can be forged and the courage that can be found in every day actions.

If you have given up 30 hours of your life watching the ‘Making of Lord of the Rings’ DVD appendices (yes, I have. Twice.) you will know how much love and painstaking devotion went into every detail, down to the last curlicue of elvish written on the thousandth extra’s sword and sheath. And I believe the same, justifiable commitment has been made to The Hobbit – so do not take Peter Jackson for a conjurer of cheap tricks. Oh no. He is a maestro of his craft, and I would wholly recommend you go on his unexpected journey. For when you step onto the road, there's no telling where you might be swept off to…

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Mirth in mime from former Cirque du Soleil clown

Julien Cottereau – Imagine Toi

13 – 24 December, Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre

On a sparse stage, lit with beautifully suggestive lighting, a man gambols alone. Alone, but in an instant his stage feels almost tangibly populated with a host of props, animals, beasts and ghouls. Julien Cottereau exists in a realm conjured by nothing but a twisting body and extraordinary vocal gymnastics.

Here is a man who has channelled the French discipline of mime into a show that is at once a loyal homage to the old greats and a contemporary, accessible and hilarious interpretation of their genius. With a Chaplin-esque rapport with the audience and facial contortions worthy of the virtuoso Marcel Marceau, Cottereau charms and dissembles his way through plots that are both playfully funny and poignantly emotive. He gets entangled in skipping ropes of imaginary chewing gum, plays spiralling ball games with metamorphosing dogs, and fights with snarling monsters conjured only by his ventriloquist roars and cunning sound amplification. But he also falls desolately in love (with a damsel chosen from the audience), has to sacrifice his injured pet and ends with a liberating, ecstatic dance into freedom that sent shivers down my spine.

And this is a show that works for children and adults alike – I have never heard both infectious, cackling laughter from children and genuine belly-laughs from their parents in such earnest. I found that at times the pace drags a little, and that some sketches could be more coherent and succinct, but the overall effect is to enchant, to tickle the funny bone and to dumbfound. I can only feel thankful that the dumbfounding is confined to the audience and that Julien Cottereau continues to create whole worlds with that limber, hypnotic, wonderfully uncanny voice of his.

A disclaimer: I work at Southbank Centre, but the views above are all my own.

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Humming silk worms, living statues & human fat - the Art of Change explores what it means to be alive.

Art of Change – New Directions from China

Hayward Gallery, until 9 December

A pillar of human fat. A life-sized triceratops. An Alice in Wonderland-esque rabbit hole through which you enter an eerie domain and receive a hoarsely whispered wish. The variety and impossible strangeness of this exhibition gives it an uncanny vitality, the like of which I have never before experienced in an art gallery.

I visited this exhibition expecting to have my slight scepticism about modern art confirmed by a collection that had moved so far from traditional mediums in its rebellion against the authoritarian censorship of the Chinese government that I would struggle to recognise it as art. But instead of the art being subsumed by politics, I found that most pieces had an aesthetic or artistic vision with which I could identify (or at least recognise as such). And often they provoked an unusually visceral engagement – the sound of live silk worms moving, the woman standing with their head protruding through a hole in a wall-mounted shelf, an impossibly suspended figure frozen in an impossible fallen motion who, with a jolt, you realise is a living person – all of these force you to connect with life, with humanity, with what it means to be human.

The introduction to the exhibition says that the works ‘not only reflect the energy and dynamism of present-day China, but also its extraordinary contrasts and contradictions’. Which I think is remarkably true; there is a sense of the apolitical, the inquisitive, even the entertaining, in conflict with a deep-rooted need to comment on the state of contemporary China. You are faced at one moment with MadeIn Company’s harrowing The Starving of Sudan, which forces the viewer to contemplate their own voyeuristic tendencies and also has implicit connotations for China’s own, potentially self-interested, involvement in Sudan and Africa as a whole. And yet this work is mounted in a room at whose centre lies a white cube from which apparently random objects are flung high into the air, distracting, amusing and perplexing the viewer simultaneously.

But because of the nature of these works of art, the effect is not necessarily jarring. Rather it forces you to contemplate the juxtaposition of diverse artworks and the disparate moods they create, and to wonder to what extent this is reflective of the need of the artists to express themselves in fluctuating, ephemeral and impersonal ways.  You do indeed recognise an Art of Change in these pieces, and that change, for me at least, is emphatically a positive one.

So I would fully recommend you catch the last weekend of this exhibition before it closes on Sunday. And don’t miss out on the wonky ping-pong table… I challenge anyone to achieve a rally of more than four hits!

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Piss-pots and polemic in Alan Bennett's People

People by Alan Bennett

Lyttleton Theatre, running until April 2013

From dilapidated fur coats to prized chamber pots full of celebrity urine, this play is not afraid to send up the higher echelons of our society. Nor is it afraid to denounce every other aspect of England through the prism of the decaying wealthy, from the voyeurism of National Trust visitors to the banalities of the porn industry.

People’s premise lies in its lamentation of the future of a decrepit stately home, whose fate must be handed over either to the pompous, impervious National Trust, to the money-grabbing, elitist private collector or to be funded by a proliferation of dirty porn films. The inhabitants of the house, Dorothy Stacpoole and her beleaguered companion Iris, are brilliantly portrayed by Frances de la Tour and Linda Bassett. They are relics of a bygone age who wish to let the past decay as they believe it should, rather than have it dredged up and prettified for the commercialised whims of the National Trust. And although this doesn’t always feel like an entirely satisfying alternative to commercial conquest (there is a sense that Bennett can’t quite think of the alternative he would substitute), you root for them throughout.

My main issue with the play was the abundance of clichés. Bennett evidently exploits these consciously in order to dissect and censure the stereotypes of the world he is portraying. But as an audience member they can feel slightly tired and predictable. The play seems caught between a camp musical (typified by the cringingly cheesy sequence of the manor house being swept clean by a bizarre troupe of miming, dancing workmen) and biting satire (in which even the archdeacon’s aspirations include ‘exclusive celebrity eucharists’).

It feels that something is lost in the space between, a sense of subtlety that would give Bennett’s acerbic polemic true resonance. Dorothy fights to assert that Stacpoole Manor ‘is not Allegory House’, but Bennett ironically falls into the trap of metaphorising too strongly. In doing so he loses the nuance of his argument, which is actually a complex blend of pro-conservative preservation as personified by Dorothy and anti-Thatcherite condemnation of the 1980s as a time in which the country became fixated on the monetary value of everything. 

However, I did frequently laugh out loud and also felt a heart-wrenching sadness for the impossible predicament in which Dorothy and Iris find themselves. The play does force you to think about the dismaying decline of our country into a place that now seems to be ‘just a captive market to be exploited’, as Bennett puts it in his enlightening article in the London Review of Books. All the actors play their parts brilliantly, seizing roles that risk obvious caricature and moulding them into believable characters – Miles Jupp as the cloyingly plummy auctioneer and Nicholas le Provost as the bumbling National Trust enthusiast excel at this particularly. Bennett’s scintillating wit and the touching poignancy of Dorothy’s plight ultimately win out to make this play highly enjoyable and disquietingly thought-provoking.

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The final tour? The beauty of Bon Iver

Bon Iver, 5th November, Berlin Arena

We stand in a cavernous hangar, lit only in the gaping rafters. The blank acoustic space slowly amasses sound-absorbent bodies, its atmosphere increasingly electric with the anticipation of seeing one of the best bands of our generation.

I kept looking longingly at the beams above our heads, presenting the impossible temptation to perch monkey-like above the hordes and receive the full impact of the sound. But even without this height, subsumed instead within the pulsing crowd, the liquid beauty of Bon Iver’s music seeps into your (very sweaty) skin.

Opening with the soft electric guitar riffs of Perth, the virtuosity of the whole band was showcased from start to finish. Every member of this behemoth group is humblingly multi-talented. Special mention for drummer/singer/one-man-band Sean Carey, whose soaring falsetto is one of the most exultant vocals I have ever heard (and that while he is drumming in perfect unison with Bon Iver’s other percussionist Matthew McCaughan). The set grew through other tracks from the band’s second album, Bon Iver, swelling into the ecstatic nostalgia of Towers and the emotive 80s homage Beth/Rest.

As always with the ‘famous’ single, there is a risk of disappointment, but For Emma, Forever Ago’s Skinny Love evolved seamlessly from initial understated delicacy to climactic, heart-thumping power. The pared-back acoustic recording is replaced in the live set with a throbbing leviathan of a song, from the first unadorned chords to the punctuating bass drums in the chorus which compel you to stamp your feet in time. And this is how I would characterise the whole gig – a perfect balance of fragile beauty and stomping euphoria.

From their heartfelt folky roots to their experimental impressionism, Bon Iver get it all right. Justin Vernon’s elemental, resonant bass and sinewy upper register perfectly complement a band whose tonal subtleties arise out of skilful layering, a respectful fusion of synths and acoustic sounds, and a genuine emotion that pervades every note – the instruments and their players metamorphose into one ecstatic sphere of sound.

All of which brings me to lament the fact that Bon Iver are having some down-time after this tour. Justin Vernon has said ‘I need to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it – if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that’. So, if you haven’t yet, listen to Bon Iver and revel in their exquisite musical beauty. And hope that their renewal comes quickly to grace the stage again. In the meantime, this is a good place to start.

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Skyfall – when did James Bond become the ‘damaged superhero’ du jour?

Bond, the wounded superhero, the zeitgeist protagonist of our times. This is what critics have been going wild for, claiming that the new film combines emotional depth, resonant topicality and scintillating wit.

Bond is indeed ‘damaged’. We see him as a shaking, stubbled, alcoholic wreck. Later we are supposed to be shaken, perhaps even stirred, by his silent, brooding contemplation of his parents’ deaths, reflected in the bleak mists of the Scottish moors that host the climax of the action. But this seems instead to damage the film and the very essence of who Bond should be. Yes, the franchise is an amorphous series that metamorphoses through the decades, but that is no excuse for the over-emotive scenes with M in which we are supposed to perceive the ‘real Bond’, but instead find ourselves faced with a cliché of the flawed hero type much harder to swallow than the clichés of Bond’s classic one-liners.

The film does have undeniable strengths. The cinematography is stunning; the plot (until the last half hour when all degenerates into an unimaginative shoot-out) is compelling and does indeed attend to our very real concerns about cyber terrorism; and the bad guy, Silva, is chillingly played by Javier Bardem as a floppy-haired, pout-lipped dandy with a malicious policy of vengeance, unnervingly veiled by the fineries of his deliciously camp demeanour.

But with the exception of Bardem, the acting is dubious, particularly from Bond-girl-come-secret-agent Eve (Naomie Harris). She is also proof of the film’s enduring sexism; by the end of the opening chase scene through the bazaars of Istanbul, we have already witnessed the banal mocking of her driving skills and ability to aim a gun. Critics such as Jane Martinson in The Guardian acknowledge this but believe it to be counterbalanced by the figure of M. The head of MI6 is heralded as ‘a proper female hero’, but it seems to me that, although her spirit and resilience are strong, she is actually undermined by the fact that she is losing her grip on the agency, by her reliance on men (Bond, Ralph Fiennes’ brilliant Mallory) to protect her bodily when she fails to do so, and by her callous disregard for the lives of her agents. For this Martinson praises her, but despite the surprising humour it brings to the film, it often seems unnecessarily spiteful rather than a necessary sacrifice for the greater good (Bond arrives back from the dead: ‘We sold your apartment. You’re not staying here.’ and so on).

It seems to me that critics have been blinded by the contemporaneity of the plot and so have overlooked the fact that, beneath the virtual whizzbangs of the hacking world in which Bond now dodges computer trackers as much as bullets, the film is a hackneyed yoking of modern and classic. It thus fails both to have the pure entertainment factor of the old Bond films or the compelling emotional resonance of a modern drama. Bond has indeed (sky)fallen from grace, and fallen hard.

From Tintern Abbey to Hobbiton - Celebrating Literary Britain

Retrospective on Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

British Library, May - September 2012

Reading The Casual Vacancy got me thinking about British types and stereotypes, and about visiting Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library last month. The very experience of wandering through the exhibition made me feel inescapably British... Averting my eyes when the mobile ringtone splintered the almost unnatural hush of the sacred exhibition space. Stoically shivering against the cold of the air temperature control systems, set low enough to preserve both the precious manuscripts and the icicled visitors. But most of all, I felt British because the displays brought alive something essential in our nation: its idealised celebration of the countryside, its quiet outrage at and adaptive acceptance of industrial revolution, its unexpected subversion in the secretive vitality of the suburbs.

The themes of Writing Britain (Rural Dreams, Cityscapes, Wild Places, London, Edges and Waterlands) led you on a purposeful meander through the contours of Britain’s literary identity, and showed how that identity has been sculpted and eroded by the spaces and places in which our poets and writers have moulded their words.

The most appealing elements of the exhibition for me were the manuscripts and artworks on display, and the often symbiotic relationship between the two. Visitors do not suffer from the blindness Wordsworth fears in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as the curators have provided two evocative paintings to enhance our appreciation of his pantheistic masterpiece. Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is wonderfully illuminated by his illustration of a grotesque, full-lipped, squat-limbed Queen of Hearts.

It was a shame that these sometimes weren’t exploited to their full potential. JRR Tolkein’s picturesque watercolour evocation of Hobbiton (see image at top of page) would have benefitted hugely from the presence of the text next to it, even in published form in the absence of a manuscript from the library’s archives. The modern take on Heart of Darkness as a graphic novel would have been enriched had Conrad’s text been laid next to it for direct comparison.

The absence of transcriptions next to some manuscripts also detracted slightly from the exhibition, often from a purely semantic point of view. Possibly the rationale was to present the historical artefact as it existed at the time of creation, but the effect of this was to frustrate when you couldn’t actually read the beauty of Keats’s words in ‘To Ailsa Rock’ as clearly as you could perceive it in the accompanying artist’s rendering.

But what struck me most potently was the surprisingly ephemeral quality of the contents of the exhibition, a sense of their fragility and their existence very much as entities of the past. And perhaps this is indeed because of the absence of those anchoring transcriptions, providing liberation from our constant need for modernisation, clarification and easy-to-digest information.

Because I visited the exhibition with the expectation of being faced with resoundingly physical objects which would impress upon me the fundamental endurance of literature, embodying its original inscription on the page. And of course the endurance of literature was palpable, but I emerged with an irresistible sense of wonder at the relative insubstantiality of these works of art; it is the simple jotting of a few lines on a piece of paper that have transmuted into the monumental printed texts we read today. It overwhelmed me to see Blake’s ‘London’ and ‘Tyger Tyger’ crammed into opposite corners of one battered notebook leaf, poems that were to become some of the most famous of the Romantic age.

So, to come back to the stereotypes of the British: comical, bathetic and, in the case of the social condemnation embodied in Rowling’s new novel, sometimes unpleasant. This exhibition reminded me that there is counterbalance to the stereotype, a multi-faceted culture of literary celebration and experimentation that the British Library honoured in this, quintessentially nostalgic, understated and considered exhibition. 

For what was included in the exhibition, see here.

Casual cruelty in The Casual Vacancy

On JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

Launched at Southbank Centre, September 2012

A disclaimer: I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I have read the books more times than I care to admit, and may or may not have dressed up as a snitch: golden sandwich-board-ball, wings and all.

That said, I went to see JK Rowling launch her new novel The Casual Vacancy with slight scepticism, partly because I had seen past interviews in which she appeared somewhat lacking in charisma, or at least forced to forgo charisma for the sake of discretion. But for the launch of her novel at Southbank Centre last month she came across as extremely genuine, engaging and honest. Her desire for the book to be well-received was palpable, as was her acceptance that there could be no discussion of it without reference to the behemoth that is her fantasy series.

Rowling opened up about her preoccupation with death, which presented itself with increasing ruthlessness throughout Harry Potter. She admitted to a crippling sense that, as she says inThe Casual Vacancy, ‘tiny ghosts of your living children haunt your heart’; that life is a constant process of mourning the past. This is something Rowling acknowledged no child would want to know of their parent, and which she followed with an immediate apology to her daughter in the audience. Such frankness is indicative of just how personal she is being in this book – The Casual Vacancy is not simply a ‘500 page socialist manifesto’ as Jan Moir has unforgivingly labelled it, but is a novel that addresses Rowling’s own emotional as well as political concerns. She affirmed that she had been experimenting with adult novels before Harry Potter materialised, fully formed and bespectacled, on that famous napkin, and that this is not a cynical, provocative career move to wrong-foot the critics but is something she ‘couldn’t help but write’.

I was pleasantly surprised, after mediocre reviews, to find that the novel feels on the whole well-written; her slight clunkiness-of-phrase (to employ a somewhat clunky phrase) is offset by the engaging structure and plot. But I have to say that I am now 200 pages in and struggling, not because I don’t think the novel is of a high enough quality but because it is relentlessly depressing.

There is no lovable character to root for. The reader is subject to a constant barrage of insidious suggestions that no one in our country, across the spectrum of the class system and for myriad miserable reasons, is happy. There are some characters with subtle redeeming qualities: the well-meaning but ineffectual school councillor, the ‘f***ed up’ but sympathetically-drawn daughter of a heroin addict. But most are almost entirely, fundamentally unpleasant; from the sinisterly abusive middle-class father to the subtly psychotic teenage boy, all the characters lead you lose faith in humanity.

So, as much as I admire the book, enjoy the writing and respect the writer, I hereby think I will have to abandon it. Perhaps I'll turn to Cider with Rosie instead, another West Country story of a different time and of a very different kind.

Engaging new writing from unseasoned playwrights

Unseasoned, Back Here! Theatre Company

Shooting Star at Liverpool Street, Monday 15th October

Monday's trip to see Back Here! Theatre Company’s collection of new work Unseasoned was an unexpected delight. This was a showcase from actors at the beginning of their careers, performing new writing that consisted of four short plays and four monologues plus a sizzling UK premiere of Tennessee Williams’s short play In Our Profession. Slightly unseasoned though they sometimes seemed, it was in general high quality, thought-provoking (especially to the mid-twenties crowd who made up most of the audience) and hugely entertaining.

My general sense was that because the actors and playwrights were young, they were addressing all the concerns that I feel most vividly at the age of 25. From the slow decay of relationships to the terror of parental death, our generation's fundamental fears were examined in ways that were, if a little rough around the edges, simultaneously poignant, genuine and laugh-out-loud funny. 

Choosing art with a boyfriend devolves into a histrionic analysis of the relationship’s flaws. What at first seems to be the 'awkward turtle' of two people's first encounter through a sex dating website is actually a desperate attempt to revive a couple’s failing sex life. A tramp provides the cathartic ear a young man needs for his woes, accompanied by a repulsive, but enlightening, swig from a cigarette-saliva-rimmed can of White Lightening.

Although some of the acting wasn't perfect, and some of the scenes not entirely coherent, overall I found the evening absorbing and very enjoyable. The fusion of comedy and pathos, of light-hearted banter and grave admissions of mortality and heartache, worked well to bring alive a host of characters and situations that were at once unique and universal. Which is ultimately what all good theatre should do.

And they're doing it all again next Tuesday 23rd October - for details see their facebook page here.

Will Self's self-indulgent modernism

On Will Self at Southbank Centre, September 2012.

Will Self’s concept of 'modernism' in the novel (can we even call it modernism anymore? Should that term not have been confined to the early 20^th century along with the modernists who first expounded it?) is flawed.

Perhaps within the parameters Self sets out, it is legitimate. But those parameters are far too rigidly delineated. When I went to see him talk about his new novel Umbrella, his propounding of, let’s call it experimentalism, in the novel was erudite and well-informed, and is well-executed in the novel. But I can’t help feeling he is a little too blinkered in the unforgiving nature of his philosophy. Yes, it is essential that creative writing in both form and content continues to push the boundaries of what has yet to be attempted in literature. And it is important that the multifarious nature of our world and of humanity can be linguistically encapsulated in the multifarious nature of the novelistic internal voice. But does that mean that the ‘realist’ tradition, honed by George Eliot and Jane Austen and now typified by the likes of Amis, McEwan et al, should be eschewed in favour of an attempt to conduct the darting meanderings of consciousness into language? And isn’t this language by its very nature carefully structured by the novelist and thus, ironically, ‘unreal’?

For what is language but a constrictive conduit through which we must necessarily articulate our abstract thoughts and emotions, and by which we are thus restricted within the very boundaries of that language and the limited manipulations upon it that we attempt to enact? Self’s argument that the novel should aspire to communicate the ‘reality’ of our thoughts and their infinite tributaries and deviations is valid, and has to an extent been executed by the 20^th century greats: Joyce, Woolf and so on. Self experiments in Umbrella with shifting time-periods mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and with the expression of what he calls ‘condensed thought’ via italics. And I do believe that such experimentation should be valued and acknowledged as a progression of the artform. But I cannot help but feel that his dogmatic insistence that this is the only way, or at least the closest way, of authentically conveying our inner thoughts is flawed.

Because for me novels express the most fundamental truths, emotions and expressions of being. And they can do this despite, or even due to, being composed of chapters, cohesive sentences and linear narratives. Not all novels achieve this veracity of course, but some do it to at least an equally potent effect as the stream of consciousness and some, I would argue, more so. Marshall Brown is speaking of poetry when he invokes ‘the vital round dance that lets form give life and meaning to content and lets content give substance and expression to form’ but I think this can apply equally to the novel and its form, be it experimental or traditional.

Think of Dickens in Great Expectations when he entreats the reader to ‘Think of the long chain of iron or gold, thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day’. Dickens is a proven master of the chapter, of the slow materialisation of the links that join together and form unbreakable nexuses around which an entire world can be created. Or think of Will Self’s contemporary David Mitchell, a fine example of experimentalism through the very distinct chapter partitions of his masterpiece Cloud Atlas, whose first character says: ‘Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent’.

These truer truths may be latent within the simulacrum of the realist novel just as much as within the simulacrum of the continuous stream of thought; they can be found not just in the attempted realism of the mind’s nebulous internal iterations but in the marshalling of these thoughts into something less ‘real’, perhaps, but equally true.