I had to interview him about this book, so I was fascinated to see what he had done with this volume of autobiography, intriguingly, and surely unnecessarily, sub-titled The Making of a Python. The first surprise is that he only gets as far as Python, and then not very far into it, so that while we get Cambridge Circus, the Frost Report and At Last the 1948 Show there is very little of Fawlty and only the odd reference to Wanda so this is clearly only the beginning of what might become a trilogy if he can ever face it. The irritation that sneaks in about having to do it and publicize it, makes me doubt he’ll want to try. Irritation is a key word for John. The result is that the book is very long on the young days, with a lot of the unpleasant mother, and Prep school and Clifton College, and short on the fascinating self-questioning person who became the funniest man in Britain. The surprise for me is that when he gets accepted into Cambridge University he goes back and teaches for two years at his old Prep School which he describes as halcyon days. Here he was at his most happy, which I find extraordinary. There has always been a teacher inside John, and a yearning to teach, and at one point his parents set him up for a job at Marks and Spencer’s, and he even hankers for a moment about becoming a banker. Shades of Mr. Puty.  At Cambridge he drifts accidentally into the Footlights before revealing that amazing performing talent that was so evident in 1963, when I first met him. He talks generously of Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, but John stood out head and shoulders above that crowd, and not just physically. He was always the funniest man on the stage. The book is well written and there are tender and affectionate portraits of his father, a favourite teacher, called Mr Bartlett, Graham Chapman of whom he writes lovingly and with great tolerance; greater tolerance than he expressed at the time; and he adores Connie Booth, revealing the kind heart that beats under the somewhat crusty exterior. He is a self-confessed wuss, and shy of women, until finally taken in hand by a forthright New Zealand lass on tour.

Reading Eleanor Catton’s precocious first novel revealing her extraordinary talent as a writer still did not quite prepare one for the amazing achievement of deservedly winning the Booker next time out with The Luminaries. Set in a high school, where a teacher has been interfering with a pupil, it concerns the first year classman of an acting school, raising questions about reality, acting, and concealment of truth, through the central figure of a saxophone teacher and the pupil’s sister. Complicated and not altogether satisfactory in conclusion, it raises more than it settles, but is a terrific read anyway. Her talent is immediately evident.

Excellent voyage through somewhat familiar landscape. He is very good on Henry V111, less so on Elizabeth, but he views the Tudor world through the ever changing veil of religion, one man’s saint is another man’s cinder. Highly readable. Always interesting.

On the road. London, Pompeii, Henley, San Francisco, Seattle. This was a great month for new novels. I hit Hatchards in London delightedly finding a new Martin Amis, a new Ian McEwan, a new David Mitchell and the real Howard Jacobson signing his new book. He kindly invited me to his launch party where he introduced me to Philip Kerr, but I didn’t catch his full name until later, grr. However, I liked him without even knowing I loved him. Two of these new novels are about the Holocaust but they couldn’t be more different.

I really enjoyed this book. He sidles you into the sudden startling realisation that the people talking, narrating, the talking heads who take us through the novel, are all in Auschwitz and to them it is a life, a job, and a career. Their various narratives show us the different ways humans deal with hell,  from denial to alcoholism. Almost all of them have an eventual realisation that something is terribly wrong here and they might have to pay for it. This is an extraordinary work that imagines the day to day banality of the reality of casually disposing of the carcasses  of human beings and the problems which that presents, smell, mess, leakage…. without ever recognising their humanity. A total denial of the real horror of what is going on. Amis creates a love story between a junior officer and the wife of the Commandant, a very dangerous liaison, that never quite takes place, but which provides the central theme of the book. He is the most honest of writers, and credits Primo Levi, and many others in his bibliography, but I find he has the most amazing ability to understand the truth about the human monster, and a pitiless glare exposing that moral monster. In this he is subtler than Dickens, who makes monsters comic for us to laugh at and dismiss when they get their come uppance, but you feel Martin Amis goes all the way to try and understand what makes a man into a monster, see for example his amazing book on Stalin, Korba the dread. His constant exposing of hypocrisy must be why he arouses such resentment in the British press, which is the home of hypocrisy. But he is an unrelenting satirist and the finest novelist.

A dystopian novel set in the future about the recent past. A big departure for him, and this is not one of my favourite genres, because I find the world complicated enough to understand without having to invent another fictional world with its own set of rules. Given that apologia this kept me going because, simply, I love the way he writes. In this one he eschews his masterful comic talents for something more serious. This is set in a post Holocaust world where everyone is encouraged by the state to be in denial about what might or might not have taken place. The J word of course is the subject. Certain humans do speak up and out, while others observe and report, so there is both paranoia and suspicion. In the midst of this he produces a love story between two misfits, struggling to survive in the violent, angry, and hostile world that has replaced the supposed “event” with silence. I had the great pleasure of meeting him briefly and I shipped a signed copy home but picked up a nice travel paperback version at the airport because I couldn’t wait to read it. Also I just realised he looks like Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had been born in Manchester. Nominated for the Booker.

And quite by chance I was reading this play which does to me now, seem anti-Semitic. I guess the question is are the characters anti-Semitic, obviously yes, but is the play itself anti-Semitic. I’ll get back to you. I’m a bit tired of the silly casket business. Which reads even more like a tired idea for a game show. Why would you leave your daughter so at the mercy of a guessing game.

A short but powerful book. I love the immediate reality of his characters and the way he writes about them. He brings a freshness to the kind of people he writes about, in this case a female married English judge whose husband announces he is leaving her. She must meet and decide on whether the court should forcibly give blood to a young 17 year old Jehovah’s Witness who will otherwise die. Complex moral problems and her own feelings intermingle as the young man begins to stalk her. I really enjoyed it.

This is a far better title than book. In fact it’s just an eye catching title of a not particularly brilliant short story, which tries but fails to deliver on a promising concept. This is a publishers pot boiler. There are two schools of thought about Hilary Mantel and I’m afraid I fall into the other camp of what is the fuss all about? I couldn’t finish the Cromwell book, and was reasonably disappointed by the stage adaptation I saw recently. I felt that Peter Akroyd’s book on The Tudors knocked her fictionalisation into the proverbial cocked hat.