It was unsurprising that Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, in which the Channel 4 News economics editor predicts seismic change was less than favourably reviewed in the more conservative niches of the press. “I confess to an initial despondency on being asked to review this book,” wrote Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times. “Mason is someone I wouldn’t trust in his analysis of the present, let alone the future.” “Unnervingly dense” and “irritatingly shrill” found Gillian Tett in the Financial Times; “deeply misguided ... utopian folly,” thundered the Telegraph’s Liam Halligan. In the Times, Tim Montgomerie’s imagination ran riot, with “a future police service led by a chief commissioner Mason – kitted out in berets and Che Guevara T-shirts – swarming all over Switzerland.”
Less predictable, however, was the critical kicking Mason got in more progressive publications: the former Labour MP Chris Mullin wrote in the Observer that “although undoubtedly bright, erudite even, he still appears to be shackled to the remnants of a hopelessly impractical ideology”. Even the Socialist Worker was resolutely unimpressed, with Dave Sewell noting that “Paul Mason’s enthusiasm about high-tech work sounds like he has just seen an advert for a job at Google”. Not that all these buckets of cold water seem to bother Mason’s fans: at last glance the book was number seven in the Sunday Times’ bestseller list.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, a graphic exploration of the far-reaching consequences of child abuse, was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. The novel received rave notices in the US, but on these shores critics have been more circumspect. For the Observer’s Alex Preston, it is a book that has missed its moment, recalling a previous era in which an obsession with misery and self-harm was very much the order of the day. “It is a serious book, taking itself seriously in a very American, very 90s manner,” he wrote. For Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times the novel was a victim of its own excess: “Plot, character, detail – everything is in thrall to Yanagihara’s programme of exaggeration, which is deeply kitsch in its relentless insistence on tragedy,” she wrote. The author “turns up the volume until amplification becomes distortion.” In the Independent, Lucy Scholes agreed that the premise was over the top, but found that “in practice, A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that demands intense emotional investment”. “It’s an achievement, for sure,” wrote Anthony Cummins in the Telegraph, “though I’m not sure I’ll want to return to it any time soon.”
Finally – or, with any luck, not so finally – critics enjoyed Latest Readings, another valedictory publication from Clive James, who has carried on producing poetry and criticism despite his incurable leukaemia. “He has written more in the shadow of death than many writers manage in a procrastinating lifetime,” wrote Tim Adams in the Observer. “As a critic, James has been capable of sustained rigour here it is mostly his old brilliance for epithet and concision that is to the fore.” In the Financial Times, Jason Cowley found that both essays and poems “are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive, even when mortally sick, especially when mortally sick.”
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