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Also available in Japan

Richard Beard — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:22:11 +0000

On 10 December I’m flying East to give some lectures at The University of Tokyo. After the general anaesthetic, the long-haul flight – two treats in two months. The anaesthetic and the plane fall into the same category of relaxation. While I’m unconscious or flying, I’m not supposed to be doing anything else. Or probably I am, but there’s not much anyone can do about it right now. Especially not me. So relax, lie back, you won’t feel a thing.

Imagine being an astronaut. Everyone would understand when you didn’t pick up the phone.

I don’t know whether it says this on the poster, but if in Tokyo feel free to come along.

The Demolished Man

Richard Beard — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:49:10 +0000

From The Independent Book of a Lifetime

In 1985 I bought a 30p second-hand paperback because I liked the title: The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester. This fits into a rare category of novel – short science-fiction – and I read it during my first two days as a student. University promised friends, drinks, adventures, but I preferred life on Mars. On the third day, I read it again.

Since then, for me, The Demolished Man has become a comfort book. All writers should have them. Instead of reading for research, or reading to steal, there are books that recalibrate the original, childish joy of reading to escape. This in turn reignites the urge to write and, for me, The Demolished Man is one of those books. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939) is another.

Both these short novels are full of vigorous action. The Demolished Man (winner of the inaugural Hugo award on publication in 1953) is an American cop novel set in the future, a genre combination later exploited by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. For Bester, familiar police procedures are given an original edge because the investigating cop, Lincoln Powell PH.D 1, is a first grade ESPER.

‘Esper for Extra Sensory Perception … for Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers.’ He knows and the reader knows right from the start whodunit. It was Ben Reich, evil industrialist (an ever contemporary touch) who lives by the flawed motto – `Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail.’

Powell’s challenge in the book is to trick the murderer into revealing his method and motives, because not everybody in the future can read minds. Reich himself, for example, attempts to outwit Powell by filling his head with a popular song and acting before he thinks. In this way the ripping pace of the book becomes part of what it’s about.

Each time I re-read the novel I’m impressed by the formal daring. Bester experiments with fonts and layouts to convey different types of unspoken thought, and his prescient characters include Sam @tkins, Jo ¼maine and the very sexy Miss Duffy Wyg&.

Not all his future projections have worn so well. Reich’s motives are stiffly dependent on Freudian theory, but most glaringly Bester fails to predict any type of feminism. The words girl and pretty always come as a pair.

My edition is the 1966 Penguin with the ugly Halloween cover and a glut of hard-boiled typos, and I doubt it will survive many more readings. If anything, the story itself gets younger – I’m now older than the characters, who in their late thirties once seemed impossibly experienced in the ways of the future world.

And however many times I re-read The Demolished Man, I never tire of the ending: ‘There has been joy. There will be joy again.’ Yes, I think. That must be so. It is 1985 and time to go out.

Wales! Wales! Oh my heart aches

Richard Beard — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:42:45 +0000

In boxing, the first and simplest of the combat sports to get itself organised, the referee from the earliest days brought the fighters’ gloves together and said: ‘May the best man win.’ There is an acknowledgement in this saying, a sporting dread, that the best man will not always win. The best man sometimes loses. This creates a visceral sense of injustice – sport needs to be fairer than this.

The injustice of cheating can be stopped. That’s why rules are invented and evolve. Then there’s the referee himself. In Wales 8 France 9, the semi-final of the Rugby World Cup, in one of the least simple of combat sports, the referee created a situation in which the best team was most unlikely to win. And they didn’t. But only just, which goes to show by quite how much they were the better team on the pitch.

I love French rugby, everyone knows that, but France shouldn’t be in the World Cup Final. What’s disappointing about Alain Rolland’s decision is that it extracted the heart from the game. He ignored what he knew about the human beings in front of him.

There are vicious idiots in the game of rugby, who aim to injure with malicious intent. They tend not to thrive, and such a brutal sport could never prosper without good faith. Roland would have talked to the captains before the match. He knew who he was dealing with, and there’s no evidence that Warburton (or Dusattoir, for that matter) aren’t the self-effacing heros they appear to be from the outside looking in.

Stop, Alain, think. Warburton is not a vicious idiot (he’s not Jamie Joseph). Clerc is very small. He tips easily. But there was no stopping and no thinking. The best team lost, and this decision didn’t only ruin the semi-final, it ruins the final as well. Everyone wants to see the two best teams in the tournament contest the prize match at the very end. That’s not going to happen – and even if neutral fans can muster some excitement, there’s always the fear that the officials may well ruin the day again.

My heart aches for Wales, and for Warburton. The injustice, his life-changing opportunity cut short, the hollowing of Wales. These are not the feelings that sport at its best is supposed to provoke, when justice is done and the best man wins. This was the opposite, the best man losing, the worst-case eventuality feared from the beginning of organised sport and that we still haven’t managed to eradicate. Human beings are useless.

Except the valiant Wales 14, who were magnificent. Unfortunately, this makes the unfairness even greater. This is a why-oh-why moment, with god absent from his heaven. It’s a day when it feels like there were better things to do, in a universe that ought to reward its champions.

Allez les Bleus! Rugby is the winner. No, really.

Richard Beard — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:51:11 +0000

France 19 England 12 – the French save the sport of rugby from extinction. Too much? I don’t think so. Martin Johnson’s team has been trying to prove that rugby games can be won in the gym. More muscle, more directness, eliminating mistakes. If he’d been right, and until this defeat nobody could be quite sure he wasn’t, then rugby as a game would have been thought out, thought through.

This may not be overstating the case. Billiards, as an example, was an engaging and competitive sport until training and application discovered its limits. When the Australian Walter Lindrum made a break of 4137 points in the World Billiards Championship in 1932, the game was up. Billiards had been an entertaining contest between happy-go-lucky amateurs. As a professional sport, when the players wanted to win at all costs, it was exposed as a pastime of limited skills and permutations.

The Johnson team wanted to demonstrate that winning was possible without basic catching and passing skills, without either intelligence or wit. They were attempting to defy the joy and spectacle of rugby, the hope for sporting astonishment. They failed. The ploy of standing props at first receiver, of leaving the hooker out on the wing comes from the same thought process that led to three second rows on the pitch at the same time. And perhaps four, counting Banahan in the centre. Johnson wanted to win the game with models of himself, in the way he knows best. Not enough. The game itself has bested him.

Unpredictability will still win big rugby games, spontaneity and evasion. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a game worth watching, and the sport has proved itself bigger than England’s limited ambition. All true believers must have hoped it would be so. I had such faith in rugby that Paddy Power had my money as a down-payment on the past and future belief that rugby union is a varied and intricate code of football.

Now I’m off to spend the winnings. On English beer, of course.

Lazarus is Dead Events

Richard Beard — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:15:58 +0000

Lazarus is Dead is officially out from 18 August, so I’ll add reviews as they come in, if they’re good. The literary blogs can be ahead of the papers (in more ways than one) and so far the astuteness of these comments has made me happy for hours at a time:

‘Beard tells about the decline and rise and decline of Lazarus with wit and charm. I was blown away by Beard’s delivery and creativity. I haven’t read a book quite like it in a long time. So good it’s almost off the scale for me. Brave, brilliant and utterly readable. Highly recommended.’ Louise Laurie, The Bookbag

‘Reading this novel is exhilarating for many reasons. As Beard himself says, ‘A point of stagnation has been reached in scholarly and theological studies. A new approach is needed’ and this book with its melding of fiction and non-fiction, critical analysis and detective work, consolidation and controversy, is a potent combination that breathes life not only into the ‘imaginative representations’ of historical events but also into the possibilities of what we think a novel might be able to achieve.’ William Rycroft, Just William’s Luck

There are also some events planned around the publication:

Sunday 21 August Edinburgh International Book Festival, 7pm, RBS Corner Theatre £7 with John Niven

Friday 26 August Greenbelt Festival 11, 8.30 pm The Hub

Sunday 25 September Wigtown Book Festival 6pm, County Buildings £7 with Owen Sheers

Thursday 20 October Bristol Festival of Literature (venue and price tba)

With the National Academy of Writing I shall be giving mini NAW Masterclasses and workshops at:

Saturday 1st October Henley Literary festival (free)

Tuesday 11th October Cheltenham Literary Festival

Thursday 20 October Bristol Festival of Literature (free)