1. The purpose of politics is to inspire art. The only useful thing it has ever achieved

When Marshall Brennan argued “The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power… It is the first great modernist work of art”, he referred specifically to The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. While the Diggers and Levellers before them had already captured for the people the format of dramatic declamation previously used only by noblemen and clergy, it was Karl and Friedrich who were to craft it into something resembling literature, with its “opiates of the people” and “icy waters of egotistical calculation”. These were cadences which spoke on as aesthetic as well as an instructional level, more scripture than stricture. But if Germans were the forefathers of bringing an artistic sensibility to the manifesto, it was an Italian who was to take it to the next level, to make the manifesto a work of art in itself. Fillipo Marinetti was a man whose life’s work was dedicated to hammer at the block of his own bombast in the hope it was battered into something resembling genius. His diabolically dynamic screed ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ was published on the front page of leading national newspaper La Figaro in 1909, and was to set the tone for many of the hundred manifestos Alex Danchev has compiled in this fascinating collection: it takes pride of place as the chronological first. Taking in his own Futurists, through their British counterparts and bitter rivals the Vorticists, to their bastard offspring and political foes the Surrealists and Dadaists, it was his supercharged oppositionalism which set the template.

2. Substance is for abusers. Style is king, subjects are mere subjects

Futurism’s bad reputation proceeds it, but should not supersede it. With its adolescent worship of speed and war, cars and explosions, and with the knowledge of its noxious later association with fascism, one returns to Marinetti’s original manifesto expecting a risible gaucheness at best, (a kind of Top Gear for intellectuals), or a repellent mania at worst. And yet its evil beauty can and does still thrill today. From the orgasmic opening scene of his car crashing off the side of the road (“Oh mother of a ditch! … How I relished your strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse…”) the narrative itself roars off into the distance, crashing repeatedly through its audience’s senses and sensibilities. Later comes the firecracker destruction of all established art and history:

“We want our country free from the endless number of museums which cover here like countless graveyards… admiring an old painting is just like pouring our purest feelings into a funerary urn, instead of projecting them far and wide, in violent outbursts of creation and action”.

Then the zealously phrased, totemic proclamations: “There is no longer any beauty but the struggle. Any work of art that lacks aggression will never be a masterpiece”.

This is the word as weapon, where the pen is power (or penis power given Futurism’s obsessive virility: penis mightier than the sword). It is absurd, illogical and immoral, but it is as much a manically brilliant, endlessly fascinating creation in itself, as it is a tyrannical statement of intent for the magnificent paintings which were to follow.

Other manifestos from Futurist followers follow in the collection, including Boccioni and Carlo Carra (perhaps the greatest Futurist painter, railing against “the cube, the pyramid and all other static shapes” and hailing “Red, rrrrrrreds, the rrreddest rrrrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuuut”), but it was Marinetti who remained poet provocateur in chief. Yet while this was a movement founded by a priapic misogynist, it took two women followers – Valentine de Saint Pointe and Mina Loy – to make manifestos which contained enough jagged aphoristic gems to match those of those of the Futurist founder (“Misery is the disintegration of joy. Intellect, of intuition. Acceptance, of inspiration”). They bring a lightness of wit lacking in Marinetti, which reminds us that another forbear of the manifesto tradition is perhaps the un-credited Wilde, whose paradoxical ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ (“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art”) can also be traced here. A greater wit than Marinetti could also be found in his great rival Wyndham Lewis over in Britain, whose Blast manifesto contained all the acidic bombast of Futurism with a greater realisation of its own contradiction and absurdity.

While this is a form rooted in politics it can graduate into a purer aesthetics of the soul and mind, and it is perfectly possible to wander its waywardly beautiful walkways without being corralled down the shady political alleys many of its practitioners ended up skulking. With the deliberately self contradictory rhetoric of Blast, this is positively invited, political rhetoric is a mere tool for internal implosions of the mind and senses (despite Wyndham Lewis’ own later rightist dalliance). The Russian Constructivists, and later the multinational Dadaists and Surrealists, were undoubtedly inspired by Marinetti’s manifesto, but were to take sides at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, some Communist, some Trotskyite, (not many anarchists despite what you might expect) though their own thought experiments clearly inspired many way beyond this ideological milieu. All were to understand the importance of rhythm and cadence in channelling the grand chaos of their ideas. They also understood the importance of having an enemy to kick out at, a hate figure at which to throw their artful darts. Whether their politics ended up on the far-left or the far-right, the tone of absolute rebellion, the stance of heroic David in creative revolt against a moribund art establishment Goliath is often markedly similar in spirit, though not necessarily in execution. The Dadaists after all were to cast the Futurists themselves as just such a rigid, fusty old relic, despite Marinetti’s crew arriving not five years before them. And despite, or perhaps rather because of, the clear inspiration they gleaned from them.

3. We never saw an opposite that didn’t attract. All hail MC Skat Katt!

As early as 1923 we see reactive statements against political ‘control’ of art in Theo Van Doesburg’s ‘Manifesto Prole Art’, which explicitly renounces the existence of a “proletarian” art in an of itself – “Every proletarian work of art is nothing more than a poster for the bourgeoisie”. While the contemporaneous ‘Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors’ of the Mexican David Alfaro Siquieros shows the stale, nullifying uniformity which came to dominate the degenerate art in the “actually existing socialism” which became known as “Communism” to the world. “Exploiters of the people in concubinage with traitors who sell the blood of soldiers who fought for the revolution” etc etc. By contrast, Breton, Riviera and Trotsky’s later ‘Towards a Revolutionary Free Art’ from 1938, (one of the few manifestos here with input from a “real” politician), displays a beautifully stated commitment to absolute freedom of expression “No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!” It’s perhaps surprising to read the one time brutal overseer of the Red Army and butcher of Kronstadt sounding positively anarchistic. And yet earlier manifestos here from artist supporters such as Mayakovsky and Rodchenko show in its earliest days the Soviet Union was both a wellspring and a haven for artistic rhetoric of the most rapturously absolute intellectual freedom, though this very quickly curdled into the gruel of “socialist realism”, little of which is worth reproducing today.

If Futurists were in revolt against tradition, Dadaists were in fuller revolt against established thought: anti-sense. This made their output more knockabout, pranksters as much as revolutionaries. Pranks are always hit and miss, and this approach can often grate to modern eyes as often as it delights. (“Honour is bought and sold like ass. Ass, ass represents life like fried potatoes” says Francis Picabia’s 1920 ‘Dada Canibalistic Manifesto’, and on it goes). Of course the Dadaists would argue this was the very intent, storming the bourgeois boundaries of our sensibilities, twanging the elastic until it snaps. The later Surrealist manifestos here are comparatively stately in their assaults on political, spiritual and mental establishment, take the sublime statements of the movement leader, Andre Breton: “This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes a little impression on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere”. Far more, and greater works of art emerged from this more elegant swipe at the accepted.

4. Those who can, paint, those who can’t, write manifestos

Though they may have dabbled, neither Marinetti nor Breton, the movement maestros, were painters nor sculptors, their manifestos were their art. This leads us to the half truth above. At least in many cases there does seem to be a kind of inverse relationship between the artistic success of the author and the brilliance of the manifesto. There are no manifestos from Picasso, Miro, Magritte, nor later from Pollock or Francis Bacon. Carlo Carra and Wyndham Lewis were relative exceptions in excelling at both the written and pictorial form. Certainly Dali’s ‘Yellow Manifesto’ from 1928 is rather flimsy and derivative thing in comparison with its Dadaist forbears, with little of the flair at work in his painted phantasmagoria , while the sculptures of Picabia are wonderful grotesques which do not begin to translate into the language of his writing. Art is absolutely subjective – fly forward to the book’s more recent manifestos, and Gilbert and George’s words are dry recitations of the banal (in contrast with what – to me – are the dizzy delights of their images), while the Stuckist Manifesto written by Billy Childish in 1999 – a declaration of war on conceptual art of the Young British Artists, Hirst, Emin et al is a fabulously angry and witty slice of excoriation, expertly honed (and far more interesting – to me – than anything he has ever drawn). Kandinsky meanwhile, perhaps the greatest painter writing here, has a manifesto written with Franz Marc which is not a striking piece of art in itself, and does not aim to be, but is instead an expertly clear and ordered explanation of what the new non figurative art aims to be. Sometimes the manifesto is simply a piece of meticulously crafted description or statement rather than an exhibit in itself.

There are other quieter, thoughtful manifestos here, such as Takamura Kotaro’s ‘Green Sun’ from 1910, grasping the joins between traditional Japanese art and the new Western abstract style. There are wry pieces like Michael Bettancourt’s ‘The —————– Manifesto’ from 1969 (i.e., fill in the —————- yourself), and there are inroads to far more all encompassing and revolutionary philosophies such as Guy Debord’s ‘Situationist Manifesto’ from 1960. Danchev’s selections in this to-and-fro across the century are eclectic yet exhaustive, and his introductions to each piece are highly informative, managing a fine balance between an impassioned interest in the subject and the aim not to overwhelm with his own point of view. As always in art, true objectivity is impossible, and he cannot – for instance – disguise his contempt for Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, but then a little of the combative spirit redolent in so much of the material here is quite welcome.

5. There is no one true path to the sublime. The road may be painted in ink as well as oils.

100 Artists’ Manifestos is both an intriguing history of art in the 20th century, and an art exhibition itself, artists using words not canvas. And this is art, not literature. It seems to me it is possible to signify a separation between the two, the teleology and order of the former, and the amorphous, weightlessness of the latter. In one of the quieter pieces here, Apollinaire claims the new (in 1912) non-figurative art is “purer” as, like music, it reaches parts of the soul beyond description. In the best these manifestos, the melange of aphorism and idea, of barbed incongruity and graceful lyricism, can entice and sooth the nameless contours of the soul just as much as Miro’s ‘Ciphers and Constellations’ or Kandinsky’s ‘Composition VIII’. There is a genius at work in these words-as-art which cannot easily be imitated, as my own piss-weak pastiches here no doubt amply display. The manifesto is an insistent form, one that makes demands. Read the selection here, and see where the orders take you.

Pop music and literature are two separate miracles, the silent shout and the screamed secret, two wonders working to their own, different and divided rules. Each has seductive thrills of its own. Pop music has no need to attain the form of literature to achieve greatness. A great many of its practitioners have thought otherwise however, and there have been countless pretenders of one form to the other. Whether its Iron Maiden raiding Coleridge or The Eurythmics mugging 1984, the straightforward homage, sad to say, usually rings false. Frank Zappa’s denunciation of rock music writing was “like dancing about architecture” and the ‘category error’ is just as stark the other way. The essence of one does not easily translate into the other. That doesn’t mean it is not possible however, that the breadth, sway, richness and ambiguity of literature cannot be captured in song. A true – successful – literary sensibility in pop music is a rare thing indeed, but it can happen. It doesn’t come from showboating references but a much deeper understanding of the texture of literature. Colin Meloy is firmly and defiantly in this tradition.

Meloy’s Oregon band The Decemberists have shone out in the past decade like a lighthouse through the murk of mediocrity, conveyor pop shite and landfill indie alike. Unfashionable dedication to virtuoso musicianship has played its part in this, and it’s certainly a special band which is capable of single-handedly rehabilitating the accordion as a musical instrument. But it’s the lyrics which make The Decemberists unique. Meloy uses words very rarely found in pop songs. Words like ‘frigidaire’, ‘ravine’, ‘parapet’, “odalisque” and “cardamom”. He rhymes ‘flue’ with ‘1842’ and ‘mirage’ with ‘shiraz’ and then ‘applause’. He sings “I was wedded and it whetted my thirst”. No other songwriter would write the couplet

And I say your uncle was crooked French Canadian
And he was gut-shot running gin,
and how his guts were all suspended in his fingers
And how he held them, How he held them, held them in.

Sometimes they are self-consciously archaic, especially when the scene being captured is explicitly rooted in the past (i.e. “and what irascible blackguard is the father?” from the Hazards of Love epic). More often than not though they are not so much archaic as parochial and particular, evoking an immediate time, place and essence. They are certainly unafraid to seem florid. Pop music, even in ‘sophisticated’ pose, usually sticks to a convention that verbosity strangles vitality and immediacy. Orwell wrote that Yeats was the exception to the rule that poets tend to avoid self-consciously ‘poetic’ language. Meloy is the exception to the rule that self-consciously literary language has no place in pop. When he sings that “Pretty hands do pretty things when pretty times arise / Seraphim in seaweed swim where stick-limbed Myla lies”, you could wince at a grandiosity that is ‘out of place’ in pop. Or you could delight at what is, quite simply, a gorgeous lyric.

Beyond phraseology, further proof that Meloy’s is a truly literary style is his single-handed one man revival of the Narrative – capitalise that N! – in pop songs. Storytelling is more common in both the folk and country musical genres that The Decemberists also straddle, but Meloy is rare in bringing this back to the indie-rock sound which remains their base.

And such Narratives. Laudanum-drugged French Legionnaires dreaming of home, the un-resting ghosts of poverty-stricken barrow-boys and stillborn babies, runaway 10th-century female harem slaves and 20th-century male prostitutes, vengeful sea-crew and psychopathic Ulster Protestant terrorist splinter groups, lovelorn honeytrap victims of rogue security service agents. From first album, Castaways and Cutouts, until the fourth, The Crane Wife, The Decemberists proved themselves the masters of capturing the skewed short story in song. Most pop lyrics are a bastardised cousin of verse poetry, but this was a truer poetry finding its form in novel or short story prose – to emphasise the fact, the lyrics in the liner notes to Castaways are written out in prose paragraphs rather than verse style. Stories in the true sense (though usually not true stories), these were vignettes which didn’t just carve out their scenes with precision, but also gave an inner life to the characters within.

The narratives do not always follow the traditional linear form, and to employ literary labels Meloy is open to the modernist as well as the realist style.

‘Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect’ employs a drugged, dreamlike drift in the narrator’s identity across different nations and ages. ‘Red Right Ankle’ takes the blood vessels and sinews of its eponymous appendage as the narrator of its first verse. Disjointed, displaced in time and space, they are narratives nonetheless. A broadly realist short story style predominates however, and this aspect reached the perfect peak in this form in 2005’s Picaresque, which, as its title suggested, captured the perfect form of tarnished anti-heroes battling through a colourfully grimy, chaotically uncaring world.

Picaresque showed also however that the Meloy’s sense of the literary goes beyond the Narrative. Its poppiest moment – ‘Sixteen Military Wives’ – is a sardonic satire on the Iraq invasion, sneakily taking the back-door route of mocking its media coverage: skewering the TV commentators, from distinguished academy chairs, to pontificating celebrities with “Wretched chequered lives” and “pristeen moderate liberal minds”. The unreal, disjointed disconnection between the fatuous media circus and the bereaved tragedy of the military wives is presented without a hint of either mawkishness or heavy didacticism, making its point all the more poignant, and wrapping it in a euphoric chorus. This isn’t a narrative as such, there is no beginning or end, nothing “happens”. But it has still evoked characters, and illuminated themes in a startlingly original way, shedding light into corners previously dimmed by dull cliché and repetition. Another song without a narrative is ‘Angels and Angles’, a brief, slight gorgeous meditation on the “angles” of a loved ones features as she fills in a crossword. A finely carved sculpture of a song, fragile in its material but immortal in its robust finish, a miniature marvel to behold. This is why Meloy is a literary songwriter, and not just a yarn-spinner.

Meloy perhaps reached his zenith on the same album with ‘The Engine Driver’. Against an impossibly gorgeous, languid, sonorous backing, he takes on a variety of brief two-line personas with their own brief, terse narrative – an engine driver “on a long run, so will be my grandson”, a money lender who has “fortunes” but is “ever tortured” – but whose chorus whittles these away to reveal that each one of these personas, these forays into fiction, are just the sad standbys, the necessary imaginary retreats of an author “writing pages upon pages trying to rid you from my bones”. A strange, post-modernist self-commentary (is the writer of fiction himself still a character? Or is it, finally, Meloy himself?) is injected with the vitality of raw, pulsing emotion to create a song which nourishes the mind as surely as it grabs at the heart. It also allows it the true status of the literary song.

And yet literate pop is not literature, it still needs a voice, not the authorial tone but a flesh and blood trachea that makes a noise. Meloy has self-deprecatingly dubbed his singing voice “my famous donkey bray”. “Mannered” would be a polite criticism, “whiny” a less polite one, and when one considers this voice is at times singing interpretations of folk tales from medieval Irish mythology, it is easy to see how some may think at first, second and even third listens that here is the nadir of clever-clever self regarding “college rock”, to coin a hideous phrase. And yet, ultimately, it is the raw, naked tremulousness of this voice which gives the final spark of life to these songs. What at first sounds mannered quickly shows itself as an instrument whose every stray inflection counts, not a syllable goes astray. When the word ‘tramp’ in ‘We Both Go Down Together’ extends one syllable into four, the effect is startling, and an anguished truth carries along its contours.

Some of the tales Meloy tells are so far out and fanciful they would be easy to dismiss as arch or pastiche. Sometimes, undoubtedly, the melodrama is played for laughs, as with ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’, a bloody, syphilis-ridden tale told from within the belly of a whale. Often there is an air of whimsy. But even in his most playfully outlandish narrative realms, Meloy’s red-raw voice, backed by the pitch-perfect instrumentation, manages to give the characters a hauntingly real emotional resonance – yes, even from inside a sperm whale’s stomach. With fifth album The Hazards of Love, the band moved from the short story to the novel, from the song in a single to a full-blown album length rock opera. In theory this should be the very height of overblown prog-rock pretension, especially when you consider that the plot concerns the star-crossed love between a young maiden and a fawn which shape-shifts into a man under the jealous tutelage of the Queen of the Forest… And yet, what could so easily seem risible, instead becomes magical, an emotional odyssey which sweeps you along with the characters, and showing that the narrative is a runic metaphor for the travails of the heart as well as a baffling medieval oddity. It is that too though, and the idiosyncrasy only in increases its lunatic appeal. Its centrepiece, ‘The Rake’s Song’, is an amazing piece of work which shows in the starkest relief the tension between the emotional honesty of Meloy’s delivery and the outlandish nature of the subject matter. We are once again into Meloy’s most melodramatic territory, a ‘rake’ who after his wife’s death following “her womb spilling out babies” seeks to “divest his burden” so he can live the bachelor life once more – by murdering each one of his children. This character is so monstrous as to be Tex Avery cartoonish and, on one level, it is certainly black humour. And yet once more that voice gives it a terrifying edge of sincerity. As the cod-Dickensian argot of the rake’s chorus “Alright! Alright! Alright!” ritually repeats itself the effect is certainly funny on one level, but genuinely sinister and shocking on another. This is the success of duality, the marriage of tragedy and comedy which the greatest works of literature attain.

Written while in pastoral retreat in the remote Oregon countryside for a year, with 2011’s The King is Dead, Meloy has swung the pendulum altogether away from the narrative epic of Hazards of Love – some would say one extreme to another. These are short, straightforward songs with neither extended nor individual story-telling narratives between them. At first listen The Decemberists aficionado may feel short-changed. With these relatively amorphous, impressionistic outings, where is the intellectual grandiosity which makes them the weird wonders they are? This however, is to forget the other more subliminal elements in The Decemberists’ make up being brought to the fore here, the sense of place (the rural West) more subtly hewn, itself bringing out a deeper edge to the contours of nerve-scratchingly raw emotion in its examinations of lost childhood and lost children, of joyous working solidarity and defiant class struggle, and most of all of the infinite sublimities of nature to be found in the year’s seasonal turnings. This is clearly Meloy at his most personal, not cloaked amid his ever-myriad personae. The paintings created are from a more subdued but no less beautiful pallet. Perhaps this is the album where the music and that beautiful voice are left to do the heavy lifting, but still there is time for a comedic dream about Armageddon, where apocalyptic Andalusian tribes lay waste to the world as our hero is exiled to a new civilisation below ground “and I’ll be crowned the Community Kick-It-Around”. Understated-ness, it seems, can only go so far in Meloy’s world. Long may that remain so.

Literature is sometimes held to be an elitist form. In strict literal terms it is, if by elitist we mean staying true to individual vision and not allowing itself to pander to crowd pleasing, quasi-democratic mediocrity. The Decemberists are the very definition of the ‘cult’ band, one whose followers have a fevered adoration to their idols and a snobbish view of the outsiders who will never “get it”. And yet this proud secret of their bookish acolytes are now finally breaking into the mainstream, with The King Is Dead topping the US charts, something beyond anyone’s most fevered imaginings even a year back. Already you can hear the whispers of “sell-out”. Yet this would be as unfair as it is untrue. There is no need for Meloy to water down his literary sensibility as wider popularity beckons, and nor has he. And nor, I strongly suspect, will he. One last literary parallel: what is at first denounced as a perverse irrelevance, of interest to only a cliquish minority, often comes to be accepted as genius by a much wider audience a few years down the line. We shall see. In “I was meant for the stage” Meloy claims his destiny is for applause and derision alike. There will never be any shortage of the latter from those who think that the literate has no place in pop. But a growing number are applauding, and this applause is sweet music itself.

Published a few years before the works that made him a posthumous literary superstar, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is an evasive, hybrid beast. Ben Granger gets to grips with it

This arcane curiosity of a book – first published in Roberto Bolaño’s native Chile a few years before more his more famous and fêted works The Savage Detectives and 2666 – raises many questions about what literature is for. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a mock encyclopaedia, portraying a selection of imaginary 20th-century authors, South and Central American in origin with the odd Yank thrown in, most of them insane and quixotic, and all of whom are connected to extreme right-wing ideologies. Why? What effect is it seeking to create?

One answer might be absurdism. In real life no true collection of fascist Latin American writers really exists, at least not to the extent of the pantheon, or oeuvre on display here. When we see the immense consideration accorded to Italino and “Fatso” Schiaffino, two Argentine brothers who wrote lauded poetry, novels and social commentary while simultaneously leading both a football hooligan gang and a Galtieri-era death squad we are clearly entering into a brutal whimsy, a Carrolesque fantasy with no real parallel in reality.

Not all examples are as strange as the Schiaffinos and, as the meticulous details of these bizarre reactionary salon scenes emerge, surely the answer is really satire? But satire on what? That there was no real right-wing literary movement in Latin America could be seen as a sledgehammer battering of the right, pointing out the incongruity of buffoonish bigotry in the artistic soul. Of “soccer player futurist” Silvio Salvatico, we hear a list of his beliefs: “the re-establishment of the Inquisition, a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation, polygamy, the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin colour, and the abolition of tax on artists’ incomes”. We also hear “he worked as a gossip columnist and copy editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him”. The often lingering implication in many entries is that the talent of these individuals is largely a figment of their own diseased imaginations. The ‘artistic temperament’ is the last refuge of the scumbag, a passport to endless selfishness and limitless cruelty, as displayed by many of the subjects here. The likes of Salvatico play at being the artist to sate their own sociopathy, talent is an afterthought, a hoped-for extra.

Yet, in reality, the most burning insight and talent can co-exist with unsavoury ideology. In early 20th-century Western Europe we really did have our right-wing literary heroes – T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis on this side of the Channel, Marrinetti on the other. Is Bolaño extrapolating on the perverse allure such artists have, and giving a farcical twist to see what they would look like in South American drag? (A recurring theme is how odd it is for the “mestizos” to follow Nazi cults of racial superiority while they themselves would not pass the Aryan test.) Certainly the demonic buccaneering Chilean Pedro Gonzalez Carrera, a trigger-happy adventurer offering his gun hand for the forces of Franco and the Fallange seems to echo the demonic buccaneering avant-swagger of Marinetti.

Bolaño himself said of the book “when I am talking about the right, of course I am really talking about the left” – a left to which he definitely belonged and yet was far from unafraid to criticise. In this sense the outrageous crassness and excesses of the characters on display could be seen as looking-glass distortions of their equivalent counterparts on Bolaño’s own political side. Ernesto Perez Mason for instance, a swaggering Cuban drunk who continually challenges foes to duels who are too scared to appear, and who secretes the acrostics “LONG LIVE HITLER” and “KISS MY CUBAN ASS” in his journalism seems like a fascist doppelgänger of Hemingway. Are these the real targets?

So perhaps Bolaño’s satire aims in two directions at once? And perhaps sheer absurdity? And maybe the competing streams are there to add to one straightforward torrent – to make the reader laugh. Humour is perhaps the most subjective value of all, and it certainly seems true to say that if you don’t find the book funny, you will not see its ‘point’. Plenty of reviewers have sat po-faced through the work and given it the negative notices they believe it deserves, Alberto Manguel in The Observer being just one of many nay-sayers, the good burghers of the Amazon review corps seem similarly non-plussed.

Myself, I found it hilarious. The necessarily flat pomposity inherent to the encyclopaedic style contrasts brilliantly with the demented and demonic behaviour in display. Hazlitt wrote that we laugh because we see the gap between things as they are and as they should be, and the conceit of the encyclopaedia is highly suited to bringing out this contrast, with the gaps of what is unsaid just as vital as the facts on the page. Of the troubled monarchist Mexican poet Irma Carrasco and her ‘tempestuous’ relationship with Communist husband Barreda, the bare biographical facts belie the violence beneath.

In 1953, after another reconciliation with Barreda, who had become a renowned architect, the couple travelled to the Orient: Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and India inspired Irma to write the new poems of The Virgin of Asia, steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to 16th-century Spain. In 1955, she was hospitalised with various broken bones and extensive bruising.

The reactionary Brazilian Catholic philosopher Luiz Fontaine De Souza and his crusade against the figures of the Enlightenment yields a similarly muted gap of anguish, as he follows his Refutation of Voltaire, Refutation of Diderot, and Refutation of D’Alembert with further works on this well-thumbed theme. In 1930, A Refutation of Montesquieu (620 pages) appeared and, in 1932, A Refutation of Rousseau (605 pages). In 1935, he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in Petropolis. De Souza later bites off more than he can chew with his refutation of Hegel and Marx.

Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his command of the language was excellent) but not, by any means, in the work of the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant on several occasions, and worse still, with Jean Paul, Holderlin and Ludwig Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.

Again, it is the dry staid bibliographic tone surrounding it which makes this passage so funny. Well, for me, at least.

And yet the themes go a fathom deeper than that. With his expertly crafted idiosyncrasies Bolaño has created another universe here, a breathing, thriving world. Bolaño has been accused of the solipsistic sin of self-reference – writing about writing – and perhaps nowhere could that accusation be more accurately levelled than here. Yet by featuring windows on other authors’ narratives Bolaño fashions a dream bridge between different minds, creating a eerie universe of shared perception, in a way truer to life than linear narrative. And in the more bizarre and outré landscapes forged by such damaged misanthropes as Zach Sodenstern (a science fiction writer whose immensely popular Fourth Reich series imagines a noble tribe of Caucasian barbarians reconquering a post-apocalyptic US), Bolaño conjures up the tormented demons of the mind which can give life to real-life nightmares. “The sleep of reason produces monsters” said Goya. In showing the beasts stalking the reason-starved imaginations here, Bolaño shows these monsters can be as seductive as they are bestial.

The far-right is only the secondary subject here. The real focus is the literary world and its feuding literary journals, and cliquish literary societies are distorted but recognisable replicas of those Bolaño himself must have known. The strange self-destructive paths the authors travel down also seem to have an anchor in the realities of Bolaño and those around him. Bolaño was a heroin addict, which may have contributed to his early death aged 50. Different methods and different pathways to be sure, but Bolaño and the buffoonish monstrosities on display here are gripped by the same urge to self-destruct, and to write. They are blood-brothers under the scarred skin.

In real life, as a subversive Chilean leftist, Bolaño was at real risk of torture or even murder at the hands of the country’s right-wing putschist tyrant Pinochet. For him to identify with these monsters, the spiritual brothers of his oppressor – is a strange game, playfulness at its most unnervingly masochistic. The final chapter, on Carlos Ramirez Hoffman, takes a different turn. Longer than the other entries, the writing takes a more straightforward novelistic style, and the narrator is Bolaño himself. He spends the chapter tracking Hoffman, a lauded poet now gone to wrack and ruin and a retired killer in league with Pinochet’s death squads. As Bolaño seeks him out, and the more passages open into more conventionally striking prose unconstrained by the bibliographical format in previous chapters, we see a strange, eerie fruition of synthesis, the encyclopaedia breaking out into the world. The epilogue of characters, books and journals only serves to complete the creation of this dark universe.

This work is not a satire, not a comedic whimsy, not a dark jaded quasi-autobiography. And yet it is all this and much more, a schizoid laugh as much as a peer into the abyss. Bolaño has been the posthumous literary sensation of these past few years and I’ve yet to read his more lauded works, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, put off probably by both their length and fashionability. After the weird brilliance I found in this work, I await their delights with wonder.

First off — the title. Shepherd-Baron was clearly aiming for the hard-bitten no nonsense “Dettol-does-what-it-says-on—the-tin” approach when naming this comprehensive world survival guide, but has ended up producing the clumsiest and most ungainly titled book of the decade. On the other hand, it does make it stand out doesn’t it? And so, I suppose, it works.

And ‘what works’ is very much the priority for James Shepherd-Baron, formerly a UN peacekeeper, and latterly a humanitarian aid worker, whose valiant travels have led him to some of the most dangerous places on earth, including Bosnia, Rwanda, Lebanon and Afghanistan at the height of their respective conflicts. The book is separated into broader sections such as health and hygiene, personal security, and disaster, which in turn lead to an efficiently thorough look at any tricky or hazardous situation you could care, or not care, to imagine. These range from the relatively mundane such as using a CB radio (complete with all the code words and call signs), or deducing which way is north using only the stars for a guide, to withstanding earthquakes and tsunamis (counter-intuitively — you should usually stay inside), firing an AK47, finding yourself in charge of a plane, dealing with a having a grenade thrown at you, and surviving being held hostage.

Some tips are more expected, in line with what common sense would assume although it is still good to see them if in cold authoritative print (ie. Don’t pull shrapnel out of wounds as it increases the loss of blood) while for those of us not raised in the cubs and brownies, a complete guide to tying knots is of interest too. Others are more unexpected – such as learning that the effects of alcohol can be greatly reduced by consuming rather foul sounded “kos” or curds beforehand, or that if your house comes under fire in an African zone of conflict you should retreat to the bathroom — it has usually been lined with lead as the “safe-room” of the house.

Others are downright startling – if attacked by a tiger or lion your best bet is to run at it arms outstretched and shouting, but if attacked by a wild dog you should back off, slowly and silently, maintaining eye contact. Still others are rather mournful – if you accidentally run someone over in a conflict zone you mustn’t stop, local people will be disinclined to believe it is an accident, and you are liable to be lynched.

Shepherd-Brown writes a dry and factual style, as is appropriate for the subject matter, but the poignancy, drama and horror of the situations he has seen can’t help but seep through. Much of the advice is accompanied by a “reality check” giving a real life example of where the advice was either used or not, and the consequences for those involved. Many involve Shepherd- Barron himself, others are anecdotes he has learnt in his intrepid trade. When reading of the car-jackings, the hotels on fire, the diseases withstood and the limbs lost, it’s hard not to be humbled by the bravery of those involved, or to wonder at those who willingly give their lives for the good of others.

Only once does the author digress from his clinical professionalism. After admitting it is hopeless to even attempt flying a helicopter in an emergency situation, (unlike the easier aeroplane, which also has its own section) he then goes on to detail the myriad specifications of various helicopters over three pages, serial numbers and all, with next to no use for the reader. Clearly Shepperd-Barron is a helicopter enthusiast who couldn’t help showing off his anal interest in this area. Such as the quality of advice elsewhere however, I think he can be forgiven this endearing eccentricity.

In all this book is a useful tool for anyone entering into even a small fraction of the situations on display, the consummate guidebook for anyone entering into full time humanitarian aid work or other full-on survivalist situations, a vicarious thrill ride for those who want to read about firing guns, and a testimony to humanitarian bravery. As guide-books go, that’s good going.

Capitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in a myriad of ways. From the meaningless market-bureaucracy which infests public services, to the nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap, from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all business and government functions, now not just a tool but an end itself. All neo-liberal life is here.

Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and launchpad for his analysis. He begins with the suggestion that the film Children of Men is the apocalyptic fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile populace representing a sterile culture, not openly totalitarian yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised, all public space abandoned, and connecting with the suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Most importantly, that there really does seem to be no alternative. As Fisher notes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

The nature of this murky triumphalism is such that this “post-Fordist” capitalism is a far more amorphous creature than that which appeared in the old “capitalist/worker” duality that characterised the conflicts of old. The new capitalism asserts ‘we’re all in this together’ (to quote our present regime), the system is everyone and everyone is the system – to question its logic is to question the logic of life itself, of your own sanity. As the class war is rejected the savage disparity inherent in the system has increasingly turned into internal conflicts, with mental illness spreading at an exponential rate – schizophrenia at society’s margins, bi-polar disorder at is core.

Capital is an eternally shape-shifting “un-nameable thing”, tainting everything with the logic of its own transactions. The brutal logic of the market creates its own kind of cultural ‘realism’, which Fisher shows as expressing itself in the fetishisation of the rugged individual in the vogue for gangsta rap and gangster films, reaching their asocial apotheosis in the Hobbesian fictional worlds of James Elroy and Frank Miller, where no-one and nothing is to be trusted. Fisher uses gangster films to show the direction of travel capitalist organisation has taken. In the Godfather era of the 40s-60s, the Corleones were bound together with a ruthless and absolute loyalty, mirroring the big, hierarchical, often family-based corporations of old (where you may be exploited but you still have a job for life, ‘at least they looked after their own.’).

By the time of Heat, De Niro’s character Neil McAuley shows himself a very modern gangster by his lack of any ties or loyalties whatsoever: “Don’t let yourself get too attached to anything that you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” This in turn mirrors the atomisation of the brave new world of “de-centred” capitalism, whose lack of straightforward hierarchy only makes its exploitation more nebulous, casual labour in all areas of the economy shed in an instant as billionaires lightly toss their casual carefree faces to the world, “shirtsleeves informality and quiet authoritarianism”.

In a system where everyone is co-opted, no-one can be to blame. Witness, as Fisher notes, that “no-one was to blame” at Hillsborough and the Menezes shooting (you could add the Union Carbide explosion in India and BP oil spill in the US to that) – and literally speaking this is quite true. Capitalism claims its legitimacy in the name of the free, autonomous individual, yet this individual has long been lost in a Kafka-esque maze, his face used as a totem as his autonomy is secreted away, forgotten.

Socialist Realism was the official name for the ersatz art churned out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hackneyed, servile and trite, the art of ‘actually existing socialism’ had as much in common with the liberationist project of Marxism as the plastic Mary’s flogged near Lourdes have to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The reality of ‘actually existing capitalism’ is similarly dislocated from its projected self-image as that of the heroic, ruggedly free isolated individual.

Using his own background in the education system as just one of many examples, Fisher shows that while modern capitalism presents itself as the enemy of bureaucracy, in fact it has proliferated meaningless layers of white collar wastage more than any system in history. As the system only functions in so far as how it’s appearance can keep its hold over the populace , “all that is solid melts into PR”, and targets proliferate. A frantic scramble ensues for formless trinkets with no link to reality . Everyone knows this is meaningless, yet at an official level this cannot be admitted. When Gerald Ratner called his product ‘crap’ he sinned against this unwritten rule – we all know it but it must not be admitted. This is an omnipresent facade, from which everyone seeks escape by any means necessary. The daydreams appropriate to this Janus-faced world are the paranoid fantasies of Paralax View or the Bourne films, or at a higher level in the nightmare schizoid dreamscapes of Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David Cronenberg, “where agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.”

Writing with a mercurial set of cultural references, Fisher can shift gear from the ground level of reality TV shows like Supernanny to the heights of Baudrillard and Lacan without any sense of jarring incongruity. Unlike Slavoj Zizek, another social critic given to blending high and low cultural reference points, you never get the sense that they are being thrown in just to shock, or to highlight the author’s brilliance.

Fisher shows the modern society as a sinister hall of mirrors, and illuminates each pained pane perfectly. So many themes throb within this tiny book (just 81 pages!) as to take your breath away, and this review has only scraped the surface. Other panes – that revolution itself has been absorbed and commodified within the neoliberal paradigm with ‘liberal communists’ such as the philanthropic elite of Gates and Soros giving out with one hand what they take away with another, that Kafka prefigured the current order better than Orwell or Huxley, (and uncannily predicted the call centre while he was at it), and that the ostensible ‘choice’ of the market has worked its way in ever diminishing returns into a zero common dominator, 999 channels of nothing.

Deft at sociology, political theory and cultural analysis alike, Fisher is probably at his weakest with his own empirical examples of students at the college where he has worked. He claims that the listless sense of time, and inability to absorb abstract concepts, that he observes in his students, mirrors the blip-vert consumer mentality of modern market reality. Maybe true, but this also sounds suspiciously like the moaning of the teachers at their inattentive pupils over the ages. The piercing vividity of his other insights however more than make up for this.

While by no means a “light” read, and the odd excursion into Deleuze and other theorists did shoot slightly over my scalp, this is not a tome you need a degree in philosophy or cultural theory to comprehend – its ingenuity is an open book. And while Fisher’s style is more often academic in style than not, the forensic imagination and magnificently multifarious breadth of scope on display means this is anything but a dry read.

Indeed, he brings to vivid life a somewhat deadening and depressing vision. “The most gothic description of capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, and insatiable vampire and zombie-maker, but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”

This is a horror show in which we are all trapped. In Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher shows with terrifying insight just how completely it has enveloped us, but offers little glimpse of how we can break out. He does however disabuse us of any false hopes, and in demonstrating the enormity of the hold it has on us, shows the rank monster for what it is. Maybe that’s a start.

First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries, when the Great British reading public scanned the covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their thoughts on encountering this shock pink punch, this blinding black statement of intent, forcing the eye to flinch in its wake. Most would find it abhorrent, as people do with genuinely new ideas. But these ideas tend to find a way. This cover was an electric flash, heralding a storm threatening to engulf the formal pastoral of before. The aftershock of this storm still reverberates.

What was Blast? Ostensibly, the first “journal of the Vorticist movement”, published in 1914, which only ever made it to issue two. In effect, the warped premature brain-child of one Percy Wyndham Lewis, a spiky spiteful self-styled Enemy of the Art establishment, and Vorticism (“of the Vortex”) was his vehicle for unleashing a crusade against them. Each word and image is heavy with the scent of his venom, slashing at those who wouldn’t accept his self-proclaimed genius. The one truly original British art movement of the first half of the twentieth century was animated almost single-handedly by one man’s bile. But what was in it? Blast includes examples of Vorticist art by Lewis and his contemporaries, his own art and literary criticism, his unstage-ably extreme two man play “Enemy of the Stars”, poetry by Ezra Pound, and short stories by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Brown. Most notable however was its first section, and most unique construct, the Blast Manifesto.

This manifesto is printed in the typography of contemporary posters, those advertising gaudy entertainments such as the circus or boxing match, and cascades forth in aphorism heavy bombast :-”We start from opposite statements of a chosen world/ Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes……We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb….”

Deliberately overwrought, powered by excess as if by rocket fuel, ready to declare war on art and the world, “BLASTing” and “BLESSing” the world as if from stance of some rogue Norse deity. English humour is first BLASTED “quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness/ Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalising like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious chemistry of laughter” and then BLESSED “the great barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the ancient fair of LIFE”. France is seen from both sides too, damned for “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH”, praised for “Masterly pornography (great enemy of progress), depths of elegance, Great Flood of LIFE pouring out of wound of 1797.” Entrancing poetic pronouncements, mad with possible wisdom, spark with the force and rapidity of machine gun fire. “BLESS ALL SEAFARERS. They exchange not one LAND for another, but one ELEMENT for another. The more against the less ABSTRACT. BLESS the vast planetary abstraction of the OCEAN.”

Here was an artform not seen before :- writing, but writing which seeks to attain the form of visual art rather than literature, more precisely aiming to emulate the ever-shifting contours of the vortex from which the movement takes its name. (Lewis’ friend James Joyce was also beginning to cultivate this ‘writing as visual art’, but Ulysses was only started after Blast was first published, and would not be finished for a decade.) This is a writing which seeks to shake and unsettle the mind rather than cultivate or “improve” it.The thoughts of the manifesto making up this vortex are therefore wildly and wilfully contradictory, at once revolutionary and reactionary. The contradiction is essential. Lewis states in the manifesto “We need the unconsciousness of humanity –their stupidity, animalism and dreams” also “Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not in the object or content.” The message is essentially the form itself, and so taken as a piece of writing, it lays itself open to charges of shallowness, meaninglessness. What is the use of a manifesto that spends equal time lauding and assailing the same targets?

But there is no “use”, because this is art, all of which as Wilde said is “quite useless”. The thrill of the angular sentences, the unexpected words jutting forth like rogue corkscrews, produce a kinetic rush which is its own reward. Grammar, morality, congruity, indeed sense are all swept away by the vortex, an acidic word play which finds its apotheosis in an art of destruction, destruction of form and format, of meaning itself. And yet at the same time, one can find more truth and wisdom in its scattershot pronouncements than in a hundred more measured and erudite tomes, in the same way that Nietzsche is read far more than Kant. His conclusions may be wrong most of the time, but he has a far more interesting time getting there. Then again, this is not philosophy, but entertainment. Entertainment indeed, this is writing as art, but taken at its most base level, it is essentially humorous.

The manifesto is a hilariously transgressive statement of intent, it’s sadistic screed sham utopian, in the style of Swift (one of its “BLESSED” writers.) This is a satirical cabaret as much as an exercise avant aesthetics. Taking apart England, France, “the years 1837 to 1900 –abysmal inexcusable middle-class”, this stance of the grand nemesis, while its hatred may be genuine, is also a knockabout routine, and Lewis knows it. This stance of The Enemy is an anti-humanistic counter-pose to prevailing morality which presents the artist as an evil deity. Indeed, it presents the artist as a simultaneous Anti-Christ and anarchist – to quote a certain later descendant – and was every bit as much a cabaret act when his forbear performed it.

Moving on into the pages of Blast – after the art of Wyndham Lewis’ words, the art of his images. Living in the aftershock, we may take it for granted, but this jagged, fissured assault on the figurative sensibility must have seemed terrifyingly alien at the time, inorganic, a re-scalpelling of the soul made possible by the machine age. They would be right, but this optical poetry creates the same psychic rush his writing achieves. Take the fractured curves of “Timon of Athens”, or “Slow Attack”. The angular menace, the sheer visceral abandon of these can still thrill today.

The other contributors to Blast compliment the attack. Pound’s poetry is still in its infancy, but is still so unlike anything which has come before to add new currents to the storm. Rebecca West’s short story “Indissoluble Matrimony” is the most “conventional” narrative here (Lewis, ever contrary, said it was the only thing in the journal he enjoyed not written by himself) but its tale of a husband and wife bludgeoning each other in a lake combines an elegantly icy authorial surface voice with a savage energy beneath which add further prismatic whirls to the vortex. The art prints of Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, Cuthbert Hamilton and Jacob Epstein take Lewis’ style into still more redolent contours. But they don’t match the inhuman originality of the master. It is the painting and the prose of Wyndham Lewis that makes this vortex spin. Both the prints and the writing are a poetry of the sharp surface, a harsh, perverse carapace, unalloyed and unique. Lewis is the consummate elitist, untainted by the muck of mediocrity.

The achievement of Blast is to create an aesthetic all of its own, a complete mental landscape every bit as unique as Impressionism or Cubism, feeding into the Dada and Surrealism that followed it. The merest fragment can find an image of the whole movement, perhaps the truest definition of “original” art. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto had a clear debt to the manifesto of Blast. Search on down the decades and the debt continues. From the whirling non-linear narratives of Burroughs and “Atrocity Exhibition” era JG Ballard, to the savage surreal satire of Chris Morris’ Brass Eye, each owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika-Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years before. McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed a “Which side of the bed” t-shirt which homaged the “Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with new heroes (Eddie Cochrane, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Charlotte Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, Max Bygraves, WH Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old (the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast‘s descendants are magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised oppositionalism, it is absolutely vital this is accompanied with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring. Its more degraded descendants could arguably include every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the Daily Mail.

With “Enemy of the Stars”, a two handed play which sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existentially battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot descendants of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical opposition. Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre. Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred. The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere. The charge-sheet against this personally dislikeable individual is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood. Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad combination, as certain followers of that other great pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage.

W H Auden dubbed Lewis “that lonely old Volcano of the Right.” A lonely volcano maybe, but one whose diabolic lava solidified into the shapes which formed the cultural landscape we still live in. Out of print for decades, Blast is now finally available in a new print from Thames and Hudson. It’s worth a read, not least as this is a Blast from which we still live in the echo.

Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” will be added by the more confident comedians, and much, much merriment will be had all round. Oh, the laughter!

Let’s leave aside the fact the economic shit-storm the world currently finds itself in stems entirely from the Mephistophelian neo-liberal pact which this “suicide note” rejected, a pact wholeheartedly signed up to by the current “realist” Labour administration, along with the rest of the world. Let’s ignore the fact that the 1983 result was that of a party caught between the SDP schism, an economic upsurge and Falklands wargasm euphoria. Let’s gloss over the fact that Soviet Communism and unregulated international capitalism have both been utterly, comprehensively discredited, while simple logic dictates the democratic socialist alternative Foot put forward has been vindicated. The fact the man was basically right all along – we can delicately place that trifle to one-side for now. We can all still agree however that when it comes to the everyday devious machinations of leading a political party, and of creating an effective electoral machine and vibrant media image for the slick media age, Foot did not find his forte. What was? Writing. Journalism, ideas and writing.

Foot began writing in the 30s for a variety of magazines and papers, broadly championing the underdog, and more specifically drumming up solidarity against the menace of Fascism. His 1940 book Who are the Guilty Men?, denouncing as it did the Tory Chamberlain government’s appeasement of Hitler, did much to consolidate progressive support for the war effort, with the promise of a better society at home beyond. In the 40s he joined the Tribune newspaper along with, amongst others, his friend George Orwell, helping establish it as a voice for the Labour Left which stood solid against the hegemony of both US and USSR. On into the 60s, concurrent with acting as the conscience of the same Labour Left from the backbenches, he found time to write the definitive biography of his mentor Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H G Wells was to follow later.

It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a politician needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape. The selection of essays here are a testament to the man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual scope. Taken from over a half century, only a small number touch on purely political “issues” – nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas of an individual man or woman, and a small majority here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from reviews of biographies or collections from their own work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish and Indian independence are well represented with Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the same time there are a great many portraits of writers and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft.

That the politicians segue so well into the writers is a testament to the well- rounded totality of Foot’s mind and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as important in the literary sphere as in the party political, maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biography of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead common, and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the least “political” here, are probably the most beautifully written, with an evocation of time, space and place which is truly involving, even moving.

Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the essays on those he knows and knew, while the same easy, almost conversational style flows similarly into those from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always has been).

A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a political party. The decency consistently evident in his prose also lays bare the absolute absence of the killer instinct needed for leadership. The venom of the zealot isn’t there either. Rare asides against Thatcher are dismissive rather than enraged, bereft of the rabidity she so easily inspired in so many. Figures such as Ernest Bevin and others on the Labour Right are appraised admiringly. Even a review of the autobiography of nemesis Healey is genuinely warm and salutary. Tom Driberg, the louche old eccentric (ie. fantasist) and rogue (ie. sociopath) is recalled with the affection of the friend that he was (though the bad points are laid bare too.) Anti-Thatcherite Tory and historian Ian Gilmour is praised, and there is even a short yet powerful defence of Churchill, paying robust tribute to the old reactionary against the modern fallacy held by revisionists on Left and Right alike that a deal could or should have been struck with Hitler.

This lack of killer instinct means he lacks the final “bite” of the truly great writer too. Eloquent praise pours freely, but not once is there an effective literary slaying of a hated foe, not a shortfall that could be levelled at his friend Orwell.

This politeness, this sheathed sword and profoundly English politeness can irritate. The kind words found for that other “loveable rogue”, the Tory Kray-groupie Bob Boothby seem to be stretching the limits of tolerance past snapping point. And seeking and finding the good points even in that other arch Conservative icon Edmund Burke; for instance, is hard to take from the more partisan. Even here though, he does well to convince. How many of the golf club bores, bigots and blimps who denounced the man as a “dangerous extremist” when he led Labour could demonstrate the barest fraction of his broad minded respect for and interest in competing points of view?

Foot is a socialist in the truest sense, yet forever free of the dogma that dogs too many of his tribe. And free of the great sins too. Absolutely no apologia for the crimes of Communism from him – Stalin is condemned here in a brief article taken from the week of his death, written when the rest of the world were paying tribute. An unequivocal defence of Salman Rushdie taken from the time of the Satanic Verses furore, shows that he would have no part of the alliance with militant political Islamism which some on the Left have cynically seen fit to serve. His support for NATO’s bombing of Serbia is more contentious, though, whatever one may think of it, still presents him as someone true to a liberationist vision on his own terms, unaffected by the fact that such a position would not be popular amongst his own beloved wing of his own beloved party.

Foot sees socialism as the rightful heir of earlier struggles for liberty and autonomy that distinguished the great rebels of the past. This is the socialism of liberation, not restriction, the vision of liberty which inspired the creed in the first place, expanding the vision of the free-born Englishman to include those without property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pamphleteer William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is more than entitled to.

An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his blending of the poetic and political. The personal too, as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with whom he was once in love, before coming to know him through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the cartoonist Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too, like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and would summon his hero to his side whenever the political battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal asides are –springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connection with this writer becomes that bit clearer.

I have found myself slipping into the past tense in writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does pass away however, an age of passion, principle and philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s party political machines, – slick, shallow, technocratic, faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the transgressive ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You can just about see they “work in the same industry”, but nonetheless, a “category error” has occurred. Does not compute.

True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a different man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but this is a very limited exception to the greater picture. Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of wider political possibility, and of greater political imagination. It is also simply an immensely strong body of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among pygmies.

Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like “Funes the Memorious”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges explores the concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge, a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging paths of reality which make possibility itself endless. In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps unique in literature – the master poet-in-prose of the infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike and factual, making the fantastical real, and the prosaic extraordinary. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, he describes a man re-writing Cervantes’ work, word for word, without reading the original, and makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable, and beautiful. In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” another world – one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure thought – floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us accept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality and perception are rendered malleable and human, the arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.

In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings – dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably be seen as treading water at best in most other authors, – and in the case of most other authors the accusation would probably be accurate. You can’t readily imagine James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of “he could write about anything and make it wonderful” – the old “I’d listen to him sing the phone book” cliche – for Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the format of a scholarly researched compendium allows him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowledge and learning which pepper his writing, while the subject of the fantastic complements completely the strange insights which inform his vision.

The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander. What Borges brings to his description of these creatures, which many readers may think themselves already familiar with, is the learning which marks much of his best work (“research” is somehow an inadequate word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly. European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually surface and recede as the moment demands.

Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of medicinal qualities:- “Buddhists affirm that Dragons are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number.”

The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they fixed the intervals of the fiery bird’s visits as once every 1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn’t just lie down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches. These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim augurs of the future the memory of which survives in the weird sisters of Macbeth.

References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius, and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men of the day considered all these “imaginary beings” as “real”, believed in every bit as much we today accept the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television screens. These beings informed the landscape of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches, their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house, the Harpies, who we learn “wielded weapons of gold – lightning – and milked the clouds” , all these dwelt in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked among them.

While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and show us far more of the subjects than we could have imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4000 eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on the back of the great fish Bahamut, “All the seas in the world placed in one of the fish’s nostrils would be like a mustard seed placed in the desert”. Under Bahamut is water, and under the water darkness, “and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach”. The uncanniness of cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it is with the “Fauna of Mirrors” where we learn that the people of Canton believed another hostile world was behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be heralded by…. a rogue yellow fish you may see in the mirror that shouldn’t be there. That such a potentially risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is further testimony to Borges’ mastery.

Occasionally the book has guest spots from other authors – mainly Kafka and C S Lewis – which, good as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular visions of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, “each one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as to be uncanny.” Borges is adept at describing things, which, in terms of physical human description, cannot be described. When H P Lovecraft does this, he horrifies. When Borges does it, he simply entrances.

With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime, and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with incredible vividness of the celestial beings he claimed to know – “as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and Devils.” When the allegorical nature of some of the creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the combination of a griffin and a horse which denotes the impossible – Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius somewhat milked this by inventing the “fact” that griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the Squonk, ( of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant dryness. The entire “Fauna of the United States” are of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehandle hound – shaped like an axe, and which eats only axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt on the fantastical – he knows its importance too well.

Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcendent mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions of Swedenbourg. They don’t exist, never have, and countless crimes have been committed in the names of the theologies which conjured them up. But these are beings without which the world of the mind, the world we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges’ very real genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of wild possibility.

Not bad for a book about about dragons, witches and gnomes eh? No, he’s not bad this Borges.

The “coming-of-age” teenage novel is now a well-weathered archetype, every bit as established in the literary pantheon as the state of the nation diorama, or the star-crossed romantic tragedy. A teenage narrator has the potential to reflect the world in a purer and starker state. At the same time, the self-righteous certainty and ignorance endemic to adolescence can clash against this purity with a jarring clang .Those writers in this genre emphasising the former fact aim for the profound and lyrical, the majority home in on the latter and aim for comedy. Catcher in the Rye can be regarded as the apotheosis of the first outlook, the Adrian Mole series the standard-bearer of the second. Submarine, the first novel of Swansea born poet Joe Dunthorne, first released in 2008 and now making its way into paperback aims to capture both these aspects. Does it succeed?

15 year old Swansea boy Oliver Tate is clever, obsessive, solipsistically single-minded and doggedly literal in his grappling with the world. Oliver sees life as a series of black-and-white logic puzzles which can be solved as soon as the correct equations come to hand. New words are memorised on a daily basis (forming the book’s chapter headings, including autarky, decollation, fastigium and quidnunc ), people are slotted into different categories like so many enzymes in a petri-dish. Minute details of his neighbours and school mates appearance and lives are mulled over with clinical detail. Fixated on minor detail (observing during kisses that his girlfriend Jordana has been drinking semi-skimmed milk) Tate is also given to rather outre’ similes of the mind (bottles in a bottle-bank for instance are likened to the piled corpses of Holocaust victims. )

At times, the cold analysis hot-wires with the fever of his rampant imagination and the classification goes awry. A local physiotherapist is classed as a “pansexual” (attracted to everything), a local Muslim family re-categorised as far more exotic Zoroastrians, both on equally flimsy evidence. With the pansexual physio, Tate books an appointment and puts the accusation to him. Here is a lad who likes to see things through.

High among Oliver’s lists of to-do are achieving penetrative sex with Jordana, and attempting to heal the perceived rift in the marriage of his progressive parents, those of the type given to “improving” holidays. Dad is a teacher, puffed up with over-emphatic jollity and prone to clinical depression, his mum seemingly tiring of this forced contrast and seeking attention elsewhere. The re-emergence of her past boyfriend Graham, a new-age capoeira teacher spurs Oliver to take increasingly drastic action, exploding into a spiral of chaos.

Last year’s hardback release of Submarine plunged through an ocean of plaudits, “excellent”, “brilliant”, “the sharpest funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager’s coming of age since Catcher in the Rye”, “Adrian Mole for adults, with a more complicated protagonist, truer to life and infinitely funnier.” Well, let’s begin therefore with a churlish pissing on the parade, and start with the negatives. There are very few great novels, and Submarine is not one of them . Whilst engaging with both the teenage novel-models I banged on about at the beginning, its default mode is the latter. The occasional note of grating whimsy, the perennial flaw with the teen comedy genre, is not therefore altogether absent. Furthermore, Oliver’s mental voice is set to an odd pitch, clipped, detached and pedantic. While certainly funny, it can sometimes be hard to see whether this emotional distance hinges on a slight affectation on his part – a deliberate ploy of making himself slightly stranger for the reader – or a genuine dislocation bordering on, if not straying into, outright autism (which is why at times I thought the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was a closer model than the Holden Caulfield or Adrian Mole.) Finally, while bustling with amusing and arresting set pieces, none grabs you so hard you either laugh out loud or achieve a moment of the truly sublime.

Pissing over with. Submarine may not be great, but is very good. It is consistently funny, with a flair for evocative description which puts Dunthorne’s background as a poet to fine use.

And while his voice may seem just a little too strange to be true, the obsessions of a teenage mind are captured expertly, the (un)healthy obsessing and pondering, the snagging of the mind on seemingly irrelevant words and images. It often rang very true with this here former teenager at least. It’s also bold and interesting and characterisation to not cast Tate as the pure lovable outsider in the Mole mode either. Tate’s forensic instinct for survival means he has managed to offset his social inadequacies enough to worm his way into the entourage of “Chips”, a popular bully in his school’s hierarchy, and is quite happy to join in the sadistic taunting of overweight outsider Zoe. ( In typically over-hyper-efficient style he writes a “how-to” guide for her in how to avoid bullying, re-created in full, the shifts of style in the book are another strength).

The consequences of Tate’s clinical outlook on life are not just slapstick funny, but at times quite darkly humorous too. The unthinkingly uncaring treatment of Jordana when she discovers her mother has cancer is the clearest example – “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” he reflects at this point with quite breathtaking callousness. The fact he sees himself as the wronged party following her angry reaction tests the very limits to how we can sympathise with the self-obsessed little scrote.

But sympathise we do, because the figure drawn from these lines of absurdity, brilliance, malignancy, is one captured very well. Every other player is finely crafted too. The earthy charm borne through rough self-confidence of thug Chips; the bumptious but essentially loveable dad all the more poignant in his naffness, the bad girl Jordana who melts into more pathetic humanity amid her own heartbreak…there are plenty of opportunities to teeter over the brink into broad comedy caricature, and Dunthorne always manages to avoid them, in the same way that, while set in the early 90s, inane observations about ooh-aren’t-the-mobile-phones-big-yo-ho-ho are avoided too. He reveals himself as a minor master observer in the subtle comedy of manners. And he proves that, yes, he has succeeded in combining the poetically profound and lamentably laughable sides of the teenage condition.

In the creation of Oliver Tate, Dunthorne has managed to marry the sublime and absurd sides of the teenage tale, and shown better than most that there isn’t necessarily too much difference between the two. He has also revealed a real flair for mood and language which should evolve further in another novel, without the inherent limitations of this genre. So, nice one Joe, let’s have another one.

Many people first read A Clockwork Orange when they’re very young, and fall in love with it. When did you first read it, and what was your reaction?

Actually I came to it fairly late, I read it just a few years ago, I was in my twenties. I didn’t want to read it before, I thought it was a boy’s book – a book about boys who were violent for no reason, which had nothing to say to me. Talk about judging a book by its cover! When I did finally read it, from the first page, the language just amazed me.

The book seems to take a fairly even inspiration from both Orange and Manchester itself. Which inspired you more?

Moss Side is the stronger influence. Moss Side, Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, these areas around Oxford Road, not far from where we’re sitting. Poor areas right next to a massive student population. Populations which may as well come from different worlds.

The lively contempt Alex shows for the "Blytons" [her slang word for the respectably and middle-class] was presumably inspired by this.

Yes, that and the novels of Enid Blyton herself. Growing up reading books like Mallory Towers, about all these girls playing hockey in boarding school…in a way it just served to remind me this is the kind of education I would never have, it made you feel worse in a way. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but the contrast was so massive.

Your Alex is violent, but not nearly as violent as the Alex of Burgess, which makes for a very different dynamic to the book which inspired it.

Yes, her violence is much more just about expressing anger, justified anger. The Alex of Clockwork Orange is much more sadistic. That suited Burgess who was posing questions about the nature of choice, about choosing between two evils. My Alex comes more from my own experience. The choices she makes I see as positive.

How much of you is there in Apple’s Alex?

Well, I was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but at the same time I was the oldest girl in a family of seven trying to keep it together. Like her, I was angry rather than rebellious, rebelling implies you’ve got something constructive to rebel against. I didn’t go around beating people up, and I wore Dr Martens rather than ballet shoes! But like her, I was an autodidact, always looking for something new.

Whereas Clockwork Orange has the fictional behaviour-control of the ludovico technique, the Bill and Bob technique of your book is a direct attack on the very real techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous and the self help industry in general.

My book isn’t a prediction, but looking at how things could go if we follow America in this way, as we do in so many other ways. The addiction “industry” is massive in America, whole communities are leaving this sober, denying life. It preaches that nothing is about social conditions, it just says you’re morally defective in some way.

Your Alex is a symbol of autonomy against this deterministic outlook?

It’s about more than autonomy. It’s been said the characters of the Scottish writers Kelman and Welsh are informed a great deal by existentialism, determining your own way no matter what the consequences, and no matter what structures are in place. That’s true of Alex certainly, she’s in tune with her inner existentialist!

The invention at work in the language is probably the books biggest achievement. Have you always been into playing with language in this way?

On one level it’s a really juvenile thing, playing with words like toys. Its like a puzzle thing, playing with puzzles. But on another, language is so vital, so important. Noam Chomsky talks about how language informs power structures, how the words you use both signify and inform your politics, where you’re coming from. It all comes together in the book.

Your language is inspired by Burgess’ “nadsat”, but at the same time is very different to it. Once again, its nothing like a pastiche.

Burgess was a very intelligent man, and a linguist, he was drawing from other languages, Russian, Spanish, Italian. I know English and that’s all I know – I think that’s enough to be getting on with! I looked at English words which we no longer use for whatever reason. Latin too, which has long been the preserve of the elite. Once again, as with her intellectual passion, I wanted Alex to reclaim these things for normal people.

The Mancunian dystopia you explore is female dominated, with males largely obsolete. Is female domination a bad thing, or is this one positive aspect of an otherwise grim future?

Not it’s not positive. The perspective of the book is I’d say humanist rather than feminist, and the fact men are on the way out is drawing on the marginalisation of men today in working class communities like Moss Side. Male lives are wasted and that’s not a good thing.

Some readers might be surprised to see a book set in Moss Side with little mention made of race, and the characters would seem to be white.

Moss Side has become synonymous with black people but there is a large white working-class population as well, which gets overlooked I think. There are other immigrant descendants, like the Irish, my ancestors, too. I was writing drawing from my own background, race wasn’t really an issue I was dealing with. Class on the other hand is.

Is there a straightforward political message in the book?

Yes, again, class. Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that we’re all middle-class now, he clearly never visited Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over clear. Alex here is a voice that is otherwise not heard.

You’ve been involved in creative writing projects with teenagers in both Moss Side and Brixton. What’s the main advice you would give to young writers?

I think the fact the way I write is not in a mainstream voice is the main thing, and I hope this encourages young people. People should write in their own voice and not be deflated. My sister went on a creative writing course and it was –you must write in this way and that way. If you’re going to write in that way you may as well be in a factory, dryly sticking different bits of formulae together. It may sound like a platitude or a cliche, but staying true to your own voice really is the most important thing in writing.

Belinda Webb’s blog is at belindawebb.blogspot.com