Prospect reads

I was naturally keen to read the first issue of Standpoint, the new rival monthly to Prospect with a firm right-wing perspective. I came away feeling a mixture of jealousy and relief. The magazine has established an elegant template—it looks very handsome and it feels already as if it has been around for a long time. Daniel Johnson's first editorial is certainly less gauche than mine was nearly 13 years ago in the first edition of Prospect. He makes much of Standpoint's intellectual affinity with the now defunct monthly Encounter—with 9/11 and the threat of radical Islam apparently standing in for the Soviet communism that Encounter was created to counter (a comparison that surely flatters the Islamists). But the point about Encounter, at least in its early days, is that it was a meeting place for the anti-communist left and right. And Prospect represents that tradition of political eclecticism far more than Standpoint does, from our launch edition—Amartya Sen, Geoff Mulgan (among many others) for the left, Sarah Hogg, Freddie Raphael (among many others) for the right—to the current issue—Alex de Waal, David Goldblatt on the left, David Willetts, David Trimble on the right. (Andrew Marr manages to sneak, elegantly, into both launch issues.)

And the trouble with feeling well established from the start is that it doesn't feel, well, new. And that is because it is not new. There are far too many of the usual, centre-right suspects saying what they usually say at greater length. Yet another piece from Ed Lucas on Putin and the new totalitarianism, Douglas Murray on too much self-censorship over Islam, Jonathan Bate on bureaucracy and decline in higher eduction (similar to a piece in Prospect by Noel Malcolm written 12 years ago), several people saying they do things so much better in America, and so on. Standpoint does not feel very energetic, not even very angry. Prospect's first issue, by contrast, was far less accomplished but—and of course I am biased—it feels as if it is trying to grapple with a big, complicated world out there; and at least we had some new voices, Standpoint has precisely none.

The only piece that I learnt anything from was Alasdair Palmer's excellent article about Britain's family courts (in fact, the Palmer piece and a charming review of Ferdie Mount's autobiography by Charles Moore are the only two Standpoint pieces I would have happily snapped up for Prospect).

Of course, Standpoint's timing is good with the probable return of the Conservatives to power (a mirror image of the arrival of Prospect 18 months before Labour's 1997 victory). But why is there nothing on the new Toryism, apart from a dull column by George Osborne that might have appeared in the Times or the Telegraph? There should have been an interview with Oliver Letwin sceptically probing the new Tory progressivism from the right. I did not feel intellectually challenged anywhere in Standpoint, and almost every longer piece should have been more tightly edited (especially the piece by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali). And the humour we were promised in the editorial did not really happen. Julie Burchill was underwhelming by her own high standards and the normally hilarious Craig Brown felt as if he was going through the motions.

Daniel Johnson promises that Standpoint will be a beacon of hope. But if the magazine has any purpose, it is to tell us that Britain (and it was a very British first issue) is going to the dogs, which is going to make for depressing reading. Having said all that, it does look and feel an attractive magazine, something a bit uplifting to carry around—and that is quite an achievement for a first go.

Along with most of Britain, I've been reading Sebastian Faulks this week, who "writing as Ian Fleming" has given us the latest James Bond novel, Devil May Care. Although the first to assume Fleming's name, Faulks is no less than the fourth person to have written an original, adult James Bond book since Fleming's death, the first being Kingsley Amis, who wrote Colonel Sun in 1968 under the pen name Robert Markham, the second John Gardner, who wrote 14 official Bond novels under his own name between 1981 and 1996, and the third Raymond Benson, who took over from Gardner until 2003. To my mind, Faulks's is one of the best of a lot, discarding the (sometimes tiresome) literary flourishes of his own oeuvre for a fast-paced yarn that is—just—kept on the right side of the ridiculous by dry wit and touches of pathos. The baddie has a monkey's hand and an underwater lair; Bond's efforts to keep himself in prime physical condition are as manfully noted as his preferred brands of booze, clothes and cars; while his getting of the girl satisfyingly follows an initial, uncharacteristic libido lapse. The book is, I note, Penguin's fastest selling hardback fiction title ever, with 44,093 copies sold in the four days since it hit the shops. Bond is evidently not the only one to set store by vintage brands.

Following Kurt Vonnegut’s death last year, I took it upon myself to read as much as I could whilst the plethora of reissues lasted. I’ve never been very good at binging on authors—overfamiliarity with a style makes my attention wander—but there is a quality to Vonnegut’s work which makes reading three of his novels in a row anything but tiresome. This may be because he is such a modest writer, using little narrative trickery and making no excuses for the flimsy nature of both his characters and plots. The narrator of Cat’s Cradle, for example, lacks any depth and conforms to the whimsy of those around him, happily adopting the overtly nonsensical religion Bokononism, then farcically becoming president of the fictional island San Lorenzo. Nothing in the book is believable or opaque, meaning that we are left to search for entertainment beyond the realms of narrative. Indeed, Vonnegut’s characters offer some of the purest satire available, in that they seem to have no purpose aside from parody.

However, like all good satire there lies a rich vein of wisdom in Vonnegut's writing. The quasi-religious sentiment in Cat’s Cradle and the disparate episodes in Slaughterhouse-Five both make insightful statements about Vonnegut’s main thematic concern: the vulnerability of the human condition. The only thing which is sacred to the Bokononists is man, and although Vonnegut sometimes saw the very worst in the people round him, I think the same can be said of his writing.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. Bellow's novella charts the one-day inner journey of Tommy Wilhelm, a one-time salesman who has fallen on hard times. Jobless, broke and on the wrong end of a messy divorce, Wilhelm is trapped living in a cheap hotel in upper Manhattan, populated by retirees - including his disapproving father - heavily reliant on prescription medicines and alcohol, and captive audience to one of the residents, Dr Tamkin, a sort of perverse morality play figure, who delivers absurd pseudo-Freudian lectures while swindling Wilhelm (or "Wilky") out of the only money he has left in the world.

The action of the day in question largely plays second fiddle to Wilhelm's internal monologue, through which we learn, among other things, that as a young man he changed his name (a la Gatsby), broke with his family and tried to reinvent himself, only to return to the east coast defeated and humiliated. Embittered by the rough hand life has dealt him, and resentful of his father's seeming lack of sympathy, Wilhelm's excessive self-pity and introspection is, one suspect, deliberately overblown; and while the book initially threatens to go the way of a one-act Arthur Miller, it's resolution (or lack of it) is refreshing. In the end it's quite a satisfying, taut little read.

I'm reading The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, published last year by Verso. It's a very elegant polemic about how the Enlightenment ideas, as represented by Locke, Hume, Kant et al, have been hijacked by the "folk Enlightenment," as represented by neoliberals, neocons and neanderthal New Labour.

What I'm not reading is "What we're reading" on the Granta website, because it's cheeky and disappointing to plagiarise—and I don't class JB Priestley and VS Naipaul as new writing.

"Suppose you're a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles and you're watching a football game," starts one chapter of the book I've just finished. "The Eagles have possession and are down by five points with no timeouts left. It's the fourth quarter, and six seconds are left on the clock. The ball is on the 12-yard line." All of which means next to nothing to me. Fortunately, not knowing the rules of American football is no barrier to understanding Predictably Irrational, a recent book on behavioural economics by MIT professor Dan Ariely. Like many academics who are popularising their work (and economists may be particularly prone), Ariely sprinkles his book with anecdotes and references to popular culture and sport, seemingly afraid that readers won't be able to relate to it otherwise. But his research is fascinating enough on its own.

Ariely is hardly the first person to point out that we are not the rational decision makers that classical economics assumes us to be. But, through simple experiments, often conducted on his students, he systematically demolishes the assumption. His message is that instead of being merely irrational, we are predictably so—and this very predictability can provide solutions to the problems irrationality creates. However, not all of his conclusions are so comforting. And despite 20 years of research in the field, Ariely admits that he can be as predictably irrational as the next person.

For light bedtime reading I've been turning to Richard Price's 1992 novel Clockers, an uplifting tale of violent crack dealers, corrupt cops and miscarriages of justice, set amid the bleak housing projects of New Jersey town Dempsey (Spike Lee turned it into a movie in 1995.) It's a fast-paced and gripping tale, satisfying in its greedy ambition of plotting and character and almost Dickensian in its scope. (Similar comparisons have been made about the TV series The Wire, which I gave up on after one episode because I couldn't understand anything the Baltimore dealers were saying to each other.)

I've also been intrigued to read a celebration (subscription required), in the impeccably liberal New York Review of Books, of the British approach to civil liberties in the post-9/11 age. David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, spent a semester at UCL in late 2006, and was surprised to discover that despite Britain's lack of a written constitution and of a formal separation of powers, along with our history of Irish Republican terrorism, "the UK has been considerably more restrained and sensitive to rights in its response to terrorism… than the United States." Cole at one point tells us that Tony Blair attempted to extend the maximum period of pre-charge detention of terrorist suspects to 19 (rather than 90) days—one hopes this is a mere typo rather than the foundation for his entire argument.