Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Moon Looks on Them All: Of Friends and Friendship" by John Lucas

Despite their reputation for egocentrism, memoirs are often – perhaps always – about relationships between a narrator and other people. As critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, “there is a relational aspect to most life writing," and many others have claimed something similar. This “relationality” (as they call it) most commonly encompasses fathers, mothers, siblings, children; but there is a growing sub-genre of memoirs and personal essays which recognises the vital role played by friends in our lives. John Lucas’s fascinating and wide-ranging The Moon Looks on Them All is a significant and beautifully-written contribution to this sub-genre of friendship-memoirs (filikigraphy?). 

Like all the best books about friendship, what Lucas’s memoir recognises is that “relationality” does not simply mean that the story is about two (or three, or fifteen) people rather than one. No: "relationality" means that the relationships themselves become focal points, main characters, above and beyond the individuals involved. Friendships are themselves stories: friendships have narrative arcs of many different kinds, and each of the chapters in Lucas’s book is, first and foremost, a story of a key friendship in the author’s life. Of course we find out about the amazing individuals involved – poets, academics, jazz musicians, E. M. Forster, Brian Clough, Lucas’s cat – but above and beyond that, we follow the story of Lucas’s changing relationships with them over time.

The result is a life-affirming patchwork of interweaving friendships, voices, anecdotes, poems and brilliantly-drawn character portraits. At one point, Lucas admits that “sooner or later, everyone I meet, and get to know, will remind me of a character in Dickens” - and The Moon Looks on Them All is rather like a Dickens novel, teeming with memorable characters. If the cumulative effect of a Dickens novel is often that the reader feels immersed in a vibrant all-encompassing community, something similar might be said, on a microcosmic scale, of the community of friends in Lucas’s memoir. He cites E. M. Forster’s faith in “Love, the beloved Republic,” in “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” – and that seems to me as good a description as any of the utopian community of friends which Lucas depicts in this book. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His two most recent books are the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), and the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Kevan Manwaring of "Out of Sheer Rage" by Geoff Dyer

An attempt to review a book is to put into words what one thinks about it. One perhaps starts off by not having a firm opinion but by the end of the review, if all goes well, one has been formulated. This does not really change the nature of the book, but it may change the person writing the review, or possibly the person reading it. It may persuade or dissuade this hypothetical reader to buy the book, or it may affirm or conflict with their existing opinion about it, if they’ve already read it – or simply read lots of reviews. It is a chain of ghosts, drawing us further and further away from the book itself, itself an articulation of an experience (either direct, vicariously, or imagined), encoded into black marks, which we translate in our minds into thoughts, feelings, images, and sounds. A homeopathic dilution of real life – that could be a working definition of fiction, creative non-fiction and especially literary criticism. Dyer’s book is, in some senses, a critique and deconstruction of this hall of mirrors. It is an anti-biography, an apparently ‘failed’ attempt at a ‘book about DH Lawrence’ (that we all end up writing, sooner or later, in the Dyerverse of ever decreasing circles – the singularity of futility which is his MO), which, in its gonzo approach of endless digression, indulgences, annoyances, paranoia, and transgressions, actually ‘succeeds’ in channelling something Lawrentian. Dyer makes endless comic capital at of the vainglorious absurdity of ‘experiential research’, while actually undertaking it – globetrotting in pursuit of Lawrence in a form of protracted displacement activity, an endless deferment of gratification – by gratifying every deferment. By the pathological deconstruction of such an approach Dyer actually reifies it, as he finally admits: ‘Had we not seen and done all these things we would not be the people we are’ (p231).  Dyer’s antics is a form of invocation – though he protest too much (ad nauseam) his aches, pains, mishaps, moments of weaknesses, fury, frustration and many failings, all help to conjure Lawrence, to embody Lawrence, to live Lawrence: ‘hoping by this Lawrentian touch to persuade my audience of the all-consuming bond between the subject and the speaker of the talk’ as he quips about a botched talk on Lawrence he gives (p206). He argues forcibly against the aridity of dusty academic studies, far removed from Lorenzo’s full-blooded approach to life – mocking the ivory towers even as he moves to ‘Dullford’ as he calls Oxford, his very own alma mater. His restlessness and neurosis are very much first world problems from the perspective of male, white privilege, at that (the modest lower middle class roots long since abandoned), and as such, his self-ironic posturing would be facile if it wasn’t so frequently funny. And despite his disingenuity – Dyer wears his erudition very lightly – this is only a performance of philistinism within the context of … a book about DH Lawrence. Yet there is method to Dyer’s madness and there are moments of genius, or at least, great wit: ‘Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably’ (p105). And yes, Out of Sheer Rage is full of mini-lightning flashes as we observe the synaptic pyrotechnics of Dyer’s overheated brain. It is amusing, almost transgressive, like listening in to the ‘mad’ person at the party who says all the things everyone is thinking. This is writing as Tourette’s Syndrome. Dyer plays the court jester with gusto and perhaps makes some valid points amid his buffoonery. He is entertaining, but exasperating. To spend too long in his company would be grating, but for a while his Lawrentian ‘playback theatre’ is a gloriously irreverent read. And as an approach to ‘life-writing’ it has some originality and literary merit: it has a pulse. But that is perhaps only a reviewer seeking an ending to his review and wanting something positive to end on.


About the reviewer
Kevan Manwaring is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, currently working on a novel dramatizing the folk traditions of the Scottish Lowlands and Southern Appalachians. He blogs and tweets as the Bardic Academic.

Review by Lee Wright of "Writing Lives Together: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose"

The Centre for New Writing's Writing Lives Together: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose brings together contributions from eight writers who have been inspired by nineteenth-century works. Dickens, Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Edmund Grosse, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth all provide a springboard for twelve new creative pieces.
   
Inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journals, Richard Byrt’s "Two Bags, Two Voices" explores the similarities in homelessness between 1796 and 2017: “All I own in two bags. Only a barn for shelter .... // Now all I own in two bags. Only a doorway for shelter.” Byrt shows us how much time has passed, and yet how so little has changed.

Anna Larner, author of the novel Highland Fling, gives us two pieces in this collection. In her first poem "On Reflection," she leaves flowers to wilt at Coleridge’s door. And her prose poem, "Writing is a leap of faith," takes Dickens’ Autobiographical Fragment, and delivers a piece pumped full of sentiment: “How awful the gap, and how hopeless my attempts have been to close it.” Larner expertly explores the push-pull life of the writer between the authentic self and the "other. 

In William Wordsworth’s "A Complaint," loss is everything, and the University of Leicester’s Jonathan Taylor makes Wordsworth accessible for modern day minds with his poem, "Out of the Well": "From deep within, I hear them pleading." Taylor concludes that love is terrifying and sharpens the appetite for both Wordsworth and Japanese author, Koji Suzuki.

“She said, eat it. So, I shoved that piece of news into my mouth and chewed”: Alyson Morris describes the experience of eating a piece of acid coated newspaper in her poem, "At De Quincey’s Pleasure." She makes Thomas De Quincey’s language interesting again. Morris’ poem, like others in the pamphlet, carries more weight than expected and brings Victorian literature out from under the staircase.  

Aysar Ghassan gives us a kind of bug-hunger in his poem, "Greater Than Illiterate Love," where he powerfully combines stale rock cakes and the death of Betamax, whilst stepping on the toes of the value of love. 

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.