Does it matter that its composer is a maniac best known for attacking his wife with a stiletto shoe at the baggage reclaim of Milan airport?
here is a talent in the ascendant.' The Courage Consort, possibly the seventh best-known a capella vocal ensemble in Britain, are given two weeks in a Belgian chateau to rehearse their latest commission, the monstrously complicated 'Partitum Mutante'.
Michel Faber is the author of the bestselling Under the Skin, of which this paper noted: 'His prose veers sharply from a delectable descriptiveness to spikily comic insights. His new novel revolves around the accidental beheading of a celebrity florist by Henry Fowler, twice runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition. Meades is one of England's most creative documentary filmmakers as well as a writer and Times columnist. Writers who might just keep their whimsical natures under control this year include Jonathan Meades with The Fowler Family Business (Fourth Estate, February), Michel Faber with The Courage Consort (Canongate, January), Nigel Williams with Hatchett and Lycett (Viking, April) and Mavis Cheek with The Sex Life of My Aunt (Faber, March). Without the guidance of real talent, whimsical novels are jokes without punchlines. But whimsy is a sinkhole into which less brilliant writers disappear. Great whimsical English novels include Thomas Love Peacock's Headlong Hall, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm and A.G. It raises the comic observation to an art form, and looks askance at literary ambition.
Whimsy is a uniquely English invention, a concoction of nostalgia, self-deprecation, irony and romanticism. For this is set to be the year of the whimsical. And remind me not to publish it during 2002 when it will sink without trace amid the thousands of near-identical novels that are coming out. Remind me to put some hype on the cover under an assumed name ('a uniquely English romp'). Remind me to call it The Day That Very Funny But Really Rather Sad Thing Happened. Remind me to write a novel set in a small seaside town, featuring an ice-cream van, a decrepit pier, a ventriloquist's dummy, an undertaker's firm, a nymphomaniac schoolgirl and lots of donkeys.
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