No 3612 Set by Margaret Rogers
We asked for haikus encapsulating the ten essential novels named by Jason Cowley for the millennium.
Report by Ms de Meaner
Ah, I did ask you for all ten books listed (you had potted versions to mug up on, after all) and you had to come up to a reasonable standard in all ten. So people who sent in five or managed excellence in just one were not chosen. £15 to the winners; the bottle goes to John O'Byrne.
Crash
Chrome pornography:
Brake-fluid orgasms in
Amputee's lesions.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The clock strikes 13.
Truwise in room 101
Two plus two make five.
A Perfect Spy
Temperate thriller
Cold war skirmishing between
Luke-warm warriors.
The Enigma of Arrival
Novel postmortem:
Melancholy memoir of
Empireless England.
Tono-Bungay
Drink Tono-Bungay!
George Ponderevo's cure for
England's condition.
To the Lighthouse
Stream of consciousness
Flows first between, then towards,
Phallic objective.
Women in Love
Coalfield to Innsbruck:
Two sisters, two lovers, and
Glenda's famous flash.
The Good Soldier
Spa town betrayals
Obliquely occasioning
Double suicides.
Under Western Eyes
Hapless bystander:
Defeated Razumov can't hear
The predestined tram.
Nick MacKinnon
Crash
Moorcock and Ballard.
A futuristic cocktail
Of high-speed madness.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell, dying, writes
Hopeless Nineteen-Eighty-Four,
Taking all with him.
A Perfect Spy
A perfect spy's dad
Lets Pym down badly for a
Le Carre retread.
The Enigma of Arrival
A Stonehenge sunset
Renders Trinidad Brahmin
Of and yet apart.
Tono-Bungay
Panorama of
London disintegrating
Balzac and tonic.
To the Lighthouse
Rich and suggestive
Upper-class meandering.
Unreadably great.
A Handful of Dust
A hand full of dust.
Evelyn Waugh in waste-land.
Dickens of an end.
Women in Love
O modernity!
Sexual depravity,
In Nineteen Twenty.
The Good Soldier
Suicide, madness.
Edward, Florence and Nancy.
Dowell learns at last.
Under Western Eyes
What can be one expect
With a name like Razumov?
Anarchy and death.
T Griffiths
Crash
Bad driving and sex.
Oh! What dreadful fetishes
Some rich people have.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Shut up! Say nothing!
Big Brother is watching you.
So no haikus, please!
A Handful of Dust
Wife is unfaithful,
Spouse ends days in rainforest
Reading and reading . . .
A Perfect Spy
Keep thinking of dad;
The job sucks, full of deceit.
How I hate cold wars.
The Enigma of Arrival
Post-colonial angst
In a pastoral landscape:
Stonehenge sunset, too.
Tono-Bungay
Boy visits London,
But has low attention span,
So does other things.
To the Lighthouse
Streams of consciousness
On a Hebridean isle.
The Ramsays are nice.
Women in Love
Mechanical things
Are so dehumanising,
Let's go organic.
The Good Soldier
There are a lot of
Time shifts and personal angst;
Things are left unsaid.
Under Western Eyes
Oh, all that intrigue!
And no one appears happy.
I ask, "Where is love?"
John O'Byrne
No 3615 Set by Ms de Meaner
We'd like to set again that wonderful favourite: the suspenseful thriller (or steamy romance) in which there are at least five pieces of boring information. Here's an example from two decades ago: "'Freeze bud - or I turn you into a lead sandwich,' came a voice from the darkness. Blake reflected that with a mean body temperature of 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit - though somewhat higher than this in the anus- this might prove difficult." Surely there's some even better information out there now. Max 200 words and in by 10 February.
Apologies for the wrong entry date last week. It should have read 3 February not 3 March.
comp@newstatesman.co.uk
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