I’m sitting in the internet cafe, music blaring, as it does everywhere here – it’s some really bad Europop this evening but anything is a pleasant change from Engelbert Humperdink’s Greatest Hit And Twenty Other Songs that I’ve been listening to all day on the boat. What is it with the muzak thing in Europe? I have never heard so many Gloria Estafan songs in my life.
Today was the final research day, the bit I’ve been looking forward to – the circumnavigation of the islands. Did without the guide after yesterday (“What do you want to go down there for? Seen one catacomb you’ve seen them all”) but we did have a sublime rabbit stew in Mgarr.
So I just booked one of those normal cruise boat things, filled with sunburned English people who all sound like extras from Bad Girls (“Wot’s that then?” “Cliff, innit.”) all unsuspecting that they are involved in a great pirate enterprise. They thought they were going snorkelling in the Blue Lagoon (with buffet). Actually, it wasn’t blue today, just a crazy kind of aqua. Because today was the first cold day. Nobody told the Lobsters who were all in their swimming gear, all the better to get
sunburnt.
After lunch came the coastline I really need to see, because I’ve decided on all these pirate landing places and my guide had put the fear of God into me by saying they are all hopeless – and of course he showed me the cliffs that were about as death-defying as a council drain.
The cliffs! From the sea, they soar. For miles. And the pirate haven I had chosen on the basis of book-learning only looked absolutely perfect to me, and there are grottos (in French, it’s “La Grot”) deep into the limestone and on every headland a Knights of Malta watchtower still stands, beautiful squat stone things they are too. The wind rose, the sea was heaving and a wonderful dark blue. I was grinning from ear to ear again, and then heard a rather disconcerting noise.
On the top deck, holding on for dear life in the wind was me, some Maltese-born Canadian women with their whole families so excited they pointed out every rock (“Look Derek, LOOK!” “Yes, dear, I see it, it’s a cliff. It’s the same cliff you pointed out two minutes ago.”) and a few hardy Germans. We were all having a blast. Down below things turned out to be not quite so pretty, as the heaving seas had the Lobsters heaving up their buffets.
Worst thing that happened to me was that when I got back to the hotel I realised my hair had gone all Marj Simpson. Actually, it was more like the woman on the Bentley bonnet badge, streaming out behind me, very Art Nouveau. Well, it would have streamed, but since I don’t have much hair it was streaming in principle. And I seem to be swaying in my chair from the after-effects of the swell.
I’m coming to the end of my time here, and it’s been a bit mad, rushing around, and yet quite often I’ve found myself all alone in some of the best museums. In the Fine Arts Museum, for example, I was the only person there, which made me a sitting duck for Leonard The Bored Guard and Art Expert who physically dragged me from painting to painting and explained the Renaissance as the bit that came before real art (ie Baroque, in which Malta specialises). Bless him. He got so excited about one of
Preti’s St John’s that he gave me a hug. It’s a bit like that here.
There are lots of boats, excitable people, cool buses (and hats), perfect cities and wonderful fortresses. And pirates. Even if I have to invent them myself.

There’s much excitement here in New Zealand over the imminent opening of the Chronicles of Narnia , a film made here, and directed by a Kiwi-born lad – for once genuinely a Kiwi, as opposed to people who stopped in once on a cruise or went to school in Grey Lynn for a term, and are therefore labelled by the local press forever as New Zealanders.
They are really the kinds of books that are best enjoyed as children – I never got the Christ allusions until I was 20 and read Lewis’s essays. Like Enid Blyton, his writing and characterisation has dated in ways that the books of Rosemary Sutcliff, for example, or Stevenson, rarely do. The magic wears off.
Educators and critics may debate the virtues or shortcomings of CS Lewis all they like. He made one critical statement which has never dated and its wisdom resounds through the years:

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

Got totally stuck this week. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t even concentrate on research. Sleepless. Tired. Had a couple of good solid writing bursts, but not like my usual marathons.
Walks on the beach didn’t help. Extra coffee was no use. Watching Food TV made me hungry (there wasn’t anything on the History Channel apart from endless hours of mummies or stupid US documentaries like “The Wonders of Engineering” – is the BBC on strike or is it just Mediocrity Month?).
Reading something completely off-topic or web grazing made no difference – although it did fill in the time and I know much more about Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations and Pushkin than I did last week. And you never know when that’ll come in handy.
It’s a new book, nothing to do with pirates, and so I tried to analyse my way around the blockage: behave like a fiction plumber. Connected to the fact that pirate book three was delivered last week? Need to let go before working on something else? Fourth book syndrome? Performance anxiety? Can’t write about anything but pirates? Total loser?
Tried printing out the patchy draft and reading it on paper. Made lots of corrections. Bored even myself. Had another coffee.
Then yesterday I had to leave the rock (to go to the mainland cinema for Harry Potter). Sat on the ferry in the sun. There was a manta ray in the shallows.
Before we’d even left the pier, the notebook was out, novel subversion was underway, pipes unblocked and all was well with the fictional world.
Diagnosis: Simple case of cabin fever.
Next week I have to return to the land of the living for a couple of weeks to earn a crust. I’ll spend the whole time cursing my wasted stuffed-up week.

More excited than any kid there, I lined up for the new Harry Potter film yesterday (Goblet of Fire). It must be nerve-wracking to one of those pedants, of any age, with every line of dialogue and potion recipe crammed into your brain, sitting and watching and waiting for a directorial slip-up. That way, surely, lies madness and disappointment. There’s been much Myrtle-moaning about various characters and sub-plots omitted from the screenplay, but the only essential ingredient missing for me was JK Rowling’s wonderfully dry humour, which lights up the books and is often lost in translation to the screen. Key to her success, if you ask me, but funnily enough the pedants often ignore it in plot-obsessed film and book reviews. Chill out, giggle, and be scared. Much more fun.
Goblet of Fire is the best of the series in its special effects, narrative drive, the kids’ performances, and the ratty school-like reality that was also a feature of the last. It creates a sense of wonder. Magic.
I’m easily scared, and jumped clear out of my seat a couple of times, having completely forgotten everything that happens in the book. My nine year-old friend Maddie gripped my hand really hard a few times, and admitted afterwards she’d thought it was so “freaky” her legs were shaking. She’s going back tomorrow to see it again.
By the way, if you’ve never seen JK Rowling’s website, take a look. It’s fascinating, because it’s designed specifically for the way kids scan the screen and use their mouse. For people like me who worked on the web for years and get grumpy about usability, it’s a lesson in designing for a specific use. Kids run the cursor over everything to find links – their eyes simply don’t do what adult eyes do faced with a computer screen – and Rowling’s web design team has developed what is arguably the smartest kid-focused index page on the web. Of course.

The year’s most excruciating literary award is announced tonight (give or take the international dateline) in London: the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award.
This year promises to be fabulous, with some of the most grandiose names in the literary world among the dozen nominees: John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Even Marlon “I coulda been a contender” Brando is a contender, for the “incomprehensible sex scene from his posthumously-released novel Fan Tan“, according to the Guardian.
The prize was founded by Auberon Waugh and aims “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
Most winners have managed to retain a sense of humour, although Tom Wolfe refused to accept his prize last year – I can’t wait to see what happens if Theroux wins this year.
I can’t quote any of the nominated extracts because I don’t have the stomach for it, but you can read them in all their context-free glory here.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
– Edith Sitwell

All these “Best Books of the Year” lists make for nice weekend reading, great Christmas shopping lists, and the occasional snort of incredulity, but they have one insidious message: YOU MUST READ THESE BOOKS.
It’s not like reading reviews, which I could do (and do) all day. It feels more like getting your high school text book list for the coming term.
I hate that. If anyone tells me there’s a novel I simply must read, I don’t. Won’t. Haven’t read Tim Winton for years because I’m sick of the sound of his name. The poor man hasn’t done a thing to deserve it, but I hate it when people drool. If everybody raves about a movie and insists I simply must see it, I refuse (silently, but implacably). It’s especially true of people who wouldn’t know me if I stood up in their porridge, who have met me six minutes previously at a party, and say, “Oh you must read this – I just know you’ll adore it”.
Word of mouth is very good for everyone else, and for book sales, but on me it has the opposite effect.
This doesn’t seem to happen with non-fiction, partly because nobody I know ever says things like, “Oh you simply must read Stalingrad, it’s divine”. Instead, wise friends slip me a copy and understand that they won’t hear from me for a few hours. But for some reason, novels and independent films make people blurt out these desperate pleas to share their passion (I’m sure I’ve done it myself, but that was in another country and besides the wench probably stole my copy).
There may come a day when I’m stuck on a plane for thirty hours and there’ll be nothing to read but Tim Winton and no movies showing but Jesus of Montreal and I’ll hang on every word of Dirt Music and watch Jesus of Montreal twice and wonder what I’ve been missing all these years.
On the other hand (sorry Tim) I had to read The Da Vinci Code between Dubai and Singapore a few months ago and if I could’ve opened the plane window either one of us would have been out of there. And four million people rave about that.

It must be late November. Newspapers everywhere have started publishing their annual lists of Best Books.
The New York Times hedges its bets with its list of 100 Notable Books of 2005. You understand these are notable, rather than necessarily brilliant, books, and the list seems to be a miscellany gleaned from previous reviews. That means Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appears in the same category as the latest by Elmore Leonard, E. L. Doctorow, and Zadie Smith. And why not? (I haven’t read, for the sake of my health, Camille Paglia’s new essays, but the NY Times describes them as “written without ego”, which is the best evidence I’ve ever heard for alien abduction theories.)
In London, the Sunday Times doesn’t go in for any such mealy-mouthed nonsense. Its Best Fiction of 2005 has a go at the Man Booker judges (“John Banville’s numbingly pretentious The Sea has brought the prize’s reputation to a low ebb”) and selects Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George to top a sensibly argued list of favourites.
The good old Observer sought advice from “leading figures” including Jan Morris, who selected Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo as best biography and Tom Holland’s Persian Fire as “most exciting historical narrative”. Sarah Waters chose Rory Stewart’s Afghanistan odyssey, The Places in Between, while Deborah Moggach raves about Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
The book reviewers over at the New Statesman are a terrifying lot – the list includes names like Byatt, Toibin and Dalrymple, usually on these lists as contenders. Hilary Mantel, an expert on public executions (note to self: add A Place of Greater Safety to favourites list), liked The Tyrannicide Brief by lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, while J G Ballard can’t decide between Tony Judt’s Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 and the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin.
You’ll know it’s December when they start on the Books to Watch in 2006 lists.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
– Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer’s Notebook

This morning I woke up bleary after a sleepless night and thought: I’m in italics.
Don’t ask me. It’s a half-asleep editor thing.
I remained in italics for half an hour, until my girlfriend woke up. She decided that since I was in italics I couldn’t be trusted to make a pot of tea. She’s an editor, too. She understood.
By the time my cup of tea arrived I was back to Times Roman Normal.