Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World by John Walsh; Constable, 432pp, £25. The Lives of the Saints: The Laureate Lectures by Sebastian Barry; Faber & Faber, 128pp, £14.99
Forty years ago, at the age of 29, John Walsh was working at a business magazine called the Director when he set himself a challenge: he would become literary editor of the London Times before he turned 35. He didn’t make it, but only on a technicality: a matter of days before his 35th birthday, he became literary editor of its sister newspaper, the Sunday Times.
Circus of Dreams charts the adventures of Walsh, born in London to Irish parents, in the British book world of the 1980s. This was the time when literary fiction went from minor pastime to prominent spectator sport, which Walsh attributes to a number of factors: young writers who launched careers in the 1970s (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie) were coming good on their promise; there were new magazines such as Granta and the London Review of Books; and fat multi-section newspapers wrote more about books to fill their pages.
And then there was Tim Waterstone, who opened the first of his eponymous chain of bookstores in September 1982, staffed by “knowledgeable, passionate, unashamedly egg-headed” booksellers.
Walsh, as a news hack of old, knows how to provide enough juice to keep the pages turning
It helped, too, that Granta’s 1983 Best of Young British Novelists promotion put these writers in the public eye and in branches of WHSmith across the nation. And Walsh reminds us of its forgotten predecessor, the 1982 Best British Writers list, which might have alternatively been called Best of Old British Novelists, where the youngest (Malcolm Bradbury and Beryl Bainbridge) were 49 and the oldest (VS Pritchett) 82.
Walsh’s enthusiasm for the writing of the 1980s is infectious, and for every well-known title he pushes there’s another lesser-spotted one readers will feel they now must try pronto, such as David Hughes’ The Pork Butcher or Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Birds of the Air. (Indeed, in browsing online bookshops for the backlist titles I didn’t know, I found one thing: the 1980s were a golden age of literary novels that had the confidence to come in at under 200 pages.)
There are plenty of big personalities also, such as the clash of titans when Howard Jacobson’s publisher hired Carmen Callil as his new editor (“We hated each other from the start,” says Jacobson frankly). And Walsh, as a news hack of old, knows how to provide enough juice to keep the pages turning, with information on his disastrous interviews (trying to impress Martin Amis, giving Seamus Heaney advice on how better to end his play The Cure at Troy) and his run-ins with Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil. These are both successful, as when Neil wanted Walsh to run a review of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s memoir ahead of Peter Ackroyd’s life of Dickens, but backed down; and unsuccessful, as when Walsh offered Norman Mailer £10,000 to review Salman Rushdie’s children’s book – until Neil closed the purse strings.
Your appetite for all this probably depends on your interest in the world it describes. For me, who came of literary age in the 1990s and to whom the ’80s were tantalisingly unreachable, it is pure catnip.
These are not academic lectures, but conversational, friendly ones, written to be spoken as though Barry has buttonholed the reader in the corner of the snug
There’s no room in Walsh’s book for Sebastian Barry, whose mature fiction didn’t appear until the 1990s. He did write two novels in the 1980s, which he disdains now. “The last page was… quite possibly the best page,” Barry writes of his 1987 novel The Engine of Owl-Light. “At least your ordeal was over.”
This self-effacing sentence comes from one of Barry's three lectures as our outgoing fiction laureate, now published as The Lives of the Saints. These are not academic lectures but conversational, friendly ones, written to be spoken as though Barry has buttonholed the reader in the corner of the snug.
The first describes the development of his career as a writer, from that “pants” first novel to a point where he received a fan letter from Harold Pinter; and Val Mulkerns, on reading his enthusiastic review in this paper of her novel The Summerhouse, “wrote me a note and said she was glad my parents had gone to the trouble of conceiving me”.
The second is a loving portrait of the late Donal McCann, who starred as Thomas Dunne in the first productions of Barry’s enduring play The Steward of Christendom. It was a demanding role, McCann told Barry: “even Lear gets to take a piss.” But even when writing the unvarnished truth about McCann’s role as a “great drinker… I was not a fan of drinkers, in the main,” Barry’s portrait is one filled with love and respect.
On finishing the third lecture – about Barry’s family including his “negatively charged” father and his mother, “a cut wire thrashing about after a storm” – I reflected that the only downside of reading the lectures is that it made me want to hear this consummate performer deliver them live: the theatricality of Barry’s language, the benefit of his playwright’s experience, and his silver-tongued devilry overall.
