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Week three: David Peace explains how he came to write The Damned Utd

In the summer of 1974, my dad took me to see my first football match; Huddersfield Town v Leeds United. It was a pre-season testimonial game for Town’s Steve Smith. It was also, according to my dad, a chance for me to see Trevor Cherry play. Cherry had once played for Town, but now played for Leeds. This fixture had actually been arranged by the previous managers of Town and Leeds, Ian Greaves and Don Revie. Now both Town and Leeds had new managers, Bobby Collins and Brian Clough.

I remember Brian Clough as I stood with my father in the Leeds Road car park and watched the Leeds players and staff get off their coach. Brian Clough looked different. Brian Clough looked friendly. He shook hands with people. He signed autograph books. He ruffled my hair. He winked at me.

He said: “You’ll never forget this day.”

Or at least I think he did.

Sometime in the summer of 2003, I came to England from Japan to see my mum and dad and also to deliver the final draft of my novel GB84 to Jon Riley, who was then my editor at Faber, and his assistant Lee Brackstone.

Jon had been responsible for bringing me to Faber from Serpent’s Tail, following the completion of the Red Riding Quartet. The original plan had been for two novels; The Yorkshire Rippers and GB84. However, following a long, long discussion about the miners’ strike, Jon had persuaded me to leave “the Yorkshire Rippers novel” for later and to write GB84 first.

Two years later, GB84 was finished and now, in a pub on Lambs Conduit Street, Jon asked me: “How are the Yorkshire Rippers?”

“Do you fucking care?” I replied, “Or DUFC - an Occult History of Leeds United; a secret grimoire of the Dirty Whites - told through a chorus of voices; Don Revie on his deathbed; Albert Johanneson in his tower-block flat; Brian Clough during his 44 days at Elland Road in 1974; David Harvey in his Sanday caravan on the Orkney Islands, his malt dreams as United Spectres of Leeds past, present and future; a choir of the Damned, conducted by Luchino Visconti. Or something like that …”

“That’s fantastic,” said Jon, and that was that. I went back to Tokyo and I began to read; the history of Leeds United and the life of Brian Clough, all the football books and all the local newspapers. And also all the novels that I wanted to pay homage to: Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry and Alma Cogan.

And then there came a point, when and where I stopped reading and I started writing; different lives, different voices -

There was a very lengthy and very noir prologue entitled “I, Brian Clough, Having Slaughtered Alf Ramsey”; there was also a shifty little character called the Irish Shit-house, a man trapped in a glass box, endlessly giving his commentary and his opinion; and then there was that ghostly voice of troubled-Don.

But gradually, very gradually, day by 44-day, one voice, one life, triumphed over all the other voices, all the other lives; the voice and the life of Brian Howard Clough; a voice I remembered as a caricature; a life I remembered face down in a ditch; but the more I listened to this voice, the more I read about this life, and now the more and more I wrote, the more and more I both admired and feared this Brian Clough; a man of two-halves (at least), as we are all men of two-halves (at least). But always a character. A genuine character -

In the first person present; present in those 44 days in 1974. And in the second person present; present in the memories that brought him to those 44 days in 1974. Present and incorrect. A character in a novel; a novel about a man and a job and a place and a time; Brian Clough as the manager of Leeds United in 1974. And how he came to be there. A novel that was no longer DUFC - Do You Fucking Care? A novel that was now The Damned Utd -

A novel about fact and about fiction, about dreams and about nightmares, about defeat and about revenge, about tragedy and about farce, about wings made of wax and rays made of sun.

In the six years since Jon, Lee and I sat in that pub on Lambs Conduit Street, The Damned Utd has been the subject of a legal action by John Giles, incurred the displeasure of the Clough family, and is now a film starring Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall. Next year, the Damned United musical opens in the West End. Maybe. The Yorkshire Rippers, on the other hand, remains a book-to-come. Still.

• Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers’ responses.

Recent years have spawned mummylit, dadlit and a brood of online offspring. Two new anthologies bring together earlier examples of parentlit in poetry and prose. Jenny Turner on why a sprinkling of ‘not-niceness’ is essential in books about bringing up children

Somebody, somewhere always seems to be having a baby - friends and families and neighbours, people you used to work with, parents of one’s own children’s friends. So obviously, you have to get them a present, and usually, that’s easy - the cunning will even now be stocking up on end-of-line babygros from the summer sales. It can be difficult, though, if you want to send a card. You want something sharp, modern, unsentimental, though you have to be careful, what with those messy, mushy post-partum feelings. You want something that works with the particulars - lesbian, single-parent, mixed-heritage, depressive, smug-married-and-having-babies-because-isn’t-that-what-you’re-supposed-to-do. And most likely, you’ll find your taste, faute de mieux, collapsing, towards the pastel, the boringly minimal, the weedy picture of the single flower - as though celebrating a new baby is in some ways a bit like marking a death.

I didn’t know Penelope Shuttle’s poem “Delicious Babies” until I came across it as the first selection in New Life, “a selection of poetry and prose for that most important event of all”. “Yum, yum! Delicious babies! … The pads of their hands! The rounds / of their knees! Their good smells of bathtime / and new clothes and gobbled rusks!” At last, I thought, a poem that is modern and realistic and enthusiastic about babies - perhaps I can copy it out and drop it round to my neighbour, who’s just had a little girl. “Even their discarded nappies are worthy of them, reveal their powers,” the poem continues. “Bring me more babies! / Let me have them for breakfast, / lunch and tea!”

Only then, just as quickly, I went right off it. It’s generic, it’s sentimental, it makes a fetish of baby-bums, like Pampers ads on the television, like those photos you get of rows of naked babies with cabbages on their heads. “You all know the kind of person who goes about saying ‘I simply adore babies’,” as DW Winnicott, the child psychologist, wrote in the 1950s; “But you wonder, do they love them?” And that’s exactly it. Sometimes, the sight of a person holding their new baby can provoke unkind, uncomfortable feelings - sadness, envy, boredom, emptiness, desperate nostalgia that your own child-rearing days are over; disappointment, even, that a person you thought of as special has turned out to be just another boring breeder. None of this makes a person wicked, or means they are not also sincerely in favour of little babies. It just means that in public and private discourses around the topic, there is always going to be a disconnect.

Every English-speaking schoolchild sooner or later gets taught one or both of the loveliest baby-poems in the language, Sylvia Plath’s “You’re” (”Clownlike, happiest on your hands …”) and “Morning Song” (”Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”) They’re great for teaching prosody, metaphor and simile; they’re also marvellously poised and exact. And yet, doesn’t presenting poems such as these, in charming, context-free isolation, limit and blunt them? Plath’s Collected Poems are arranged chronologically, in order of composition; “You’re” appears between “Mushrooms” (”Nudgers and shovers / In spite of ourselves”) and “The Hanging Man”. “Morning Song” is trapped between “Face-Lift” (”Old sock-face, sagged on a darning-egg. / They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar. / Let her die there”) and “Barren Woman” (”The dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen”). The really singular thing about Plath’s poetry, as Janet Malcolm has said, is its “not-niceness”: the poet’s refusal to hide her own aggression lends to her poetry new sources of truth and force. Plath’s baby-poems, those delightful little bottles of love and wonder, were shaped by the same “not-niceness” as came up with “Lady Lazarus”, showing off about suicide and bragging about how she can eat men like air.

It’s “not-niceness” too, though of a completely different sort, that lends distinction to Rachel Cusk’s wonderful A Life’s Work (2001), a mummy memoir that is both beautiful and historically precise about the weirdnesses of its time - the sceptical, terrified new mother, the absent, ignored older generation, the “friends” who drop in and out and seem far too distant to be of any help. And yet, for every reader who admires it, another hates it, violently and personally - the author has herself summarised the main charges against her as being “of child-hating, of post-natal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual”. That a writer might make an artistic decision not to share cosy, reader-pleasing moments, that a book’s apparent selfishness might be sculptural and strategic, seems not to compute to these angry readers. Why can’t Cusk just say that she simply adores babies, like everyone else? Is it maybe that simply adoring them is a bit different from producing them out of your body and the job of looking after them, day after day after day?

The birth of my son, nearly six years ago, caused in my house a crisis of representation. I’d not been one of those women who’d always longed to have children; I hadn’t paid much attention to the state of being pregnant - I had other things on my mind. Then the child comes out and everything changes: your body splits, the world contains a whole new person, and suddenly, for the first time, you see the life and truth in familiar images that never used to signify anything much at all. In her book, Cusk writes about how, although she had always loved the Coleridge poem “Frost at Midnight”, she had, somehow, never noticed the baby in it, placed slap bang in the very centre - “Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, / Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, / Fill up the interspersed vacancies / And momentary pauses in the thought!” And it’s not just poems that suddenly turn out to be full of babies, but streets and parks and shops as well - in 2003 in fact, the UK birthrate did start edging up a little, from what had been an all-time low two years previously, but mostly, what looked to me like a sudden boom was a figment of my own solipsism. “Mothers had seemed to be odd, out-of-focus creatures, standing waiting outside schools, endlessly waiting,” Sally Emerson writes in her introduction to the New Life anthology. “Yet once I had children I was propelled into a clear new world.”

And it’s not just the real world that’s full of babies - the inner life, acknowledged and unacknowledged, is absolutely crawling with them as well. In Making Babies (2004) Anne Enright writes about aliens of both the Roswell and the Sigourney Weaver sort - “The foetus has no capacity for wonder … It lurks. It is all potential. We do not know if it means us well.” Roswell aliens, I remember, were popular on balloons and T-shirts when I was pregnant; I felt elated and also embarrassed when I saw them, it was suddenly so obvious what the image was all about. Nativities, too, and madonnas, and songs about stars and mangers and Baby Jesus; all different ways of broaching the mysteries of reproduction, concealed and revealed in folds of drapery and flesh. And I grew even fonder than I had been already of the old David Lynch film, Eraserhead, with that terrible, monstrous, snuffly baby. One of the many things no one seems to tell you is that babies really do snuffle as though about to give up breathing, and go on doing so, all night, every night, for months.

But mainly, in those long dark nights I remember sitting, almost outside myself, thinking about how terrifying it must be to be a tiny baby, the storming aches and popping pipework, the floppiness, like being locked inside a coma, without even a memory of language to help you structure what you see. That was why I spent a lot of time, to begin with, reading psychoanalytic accounts of infancy, especially Winnicott’s in The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964) - “You know how your infant uses his fist or finger, how he pushes it into his mouth … Well, screaming is like a fist that comes up from inside.” Emerson writes: “In poem after poem we see both the grandeur of babies as they arrive on this planet, and their vulnerability” - but her anthology doesn’t include Winnicott, or any of the other post-Freudian baby theorists, although it is they, in my view, who have written about such grandeur and vulnerability with more depth and tenderness than any poet or fiction-writer. A forthcoming book from the cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik is called, a bit archly, The Philosophical Baby: “Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined …” Well here, for example, is one of Emerson’s most striking selections, the astonishing opening passage - as it were - from Edward St Aubyn’s 2006 novel, Mother’s Milk

“Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead …”

It’s still unusual, though, to read writing that attempts to think about how matters might appear from the point of view of the baby, perhaps because the new mothers are too anxious, too much in the middle of the experience to be able to observe. Tired and housebound, unable to focus on anything for any length of time, new mothers instead form a captive audience for a massive, ever-expanding number of parenting sites on the internet - Mumsnet, the market leader, boasts “more than 20,000 postings every day on anything and everything from the advisability of using pull-up nappies to the acceptability of wearing socks with Crocs” and carries blogs and forums written in its own special Mumsnet language - dh hates me bf’ing and ds won’t hug MIL - HTH and LOL … !!!

Adrienne Rich was never more prophetic than when she wrote, in 1977, that for her, pregnancy was like being “a traveller in an airport where her plane is several hours delayed, who leafs through magazines she would never normally read, surveys shops whose contents do not interest her” - Pregnancy for Dummies, for people who’d rather be reading a software manual; the Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, for people who’d be happier researching a gap year; and the near-uniform rows of manically cheerful comic memoirs, each with their exhausted weak-pun title and diminishingly tiny USPs - You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman (the author is over 40); From Here to Maternity: One Mother of a Journey (the author is Mel Giedroyc from Mel & Sue); From Here to Paternity (which claims to be “the diary of a pregnant man”). The strange thing about these books is that the more of them you read - I binge on them sometimes, in the local library, chomping through them in piles - the sadder their authors seem, isolated and incompetent and suspicious of the other adults around them. The sense of inadequacy, the junkification of emotion, the all-pervasiveness of what is basically envy, reach an apogee in the many works detailing the alarming appearance, excessive possessions and multiple character flaws of the “SUV-driving, skinny latte-drinking, hair-tossing … figure of both wonderment and loathing” they call the yummy mummy, as defined in a recent newspaper article as “an abomination not just to motherhood, but to ordinary people everywhere”: “not-niceness”, it seems, has a way of poking its head out, even in supposedly cheerful, light-comic easy reading. “Not-niceness” in fact is just part of the package with babies and children, whether a writer acknowledges it or not.

In her most recent book, Penelope Leach, the great childcare writer and campaigner, points out that there is “more written but less understood” about her subject than about “almost any other single topic that is relevant to almost everyone”; and that the area has become “dangerously hot to handle”, explosive with anxiety and panic and guilt. Some of the reasons for this sense of panic are well known. In the rich world, today’s adults were probably as children brought up in small families, meaning that they may never have changed a nappy or seen a leaky breast until suddenly, they find themselves the first people in the history of the world to be faced with such an abomination; they’re probably older than first-time parents used to be, with their own parents perhaps too old, too far away, and/or too disrespected to be a lot of help. But Leach also thinks the problem has a cultural dimension. “The topic of childcare is becoming more sensitive because, after two generations of startlingly rapid social change … we are still looking at it backward, treating the sole mother care that was typical of white middle-class families for a generation after the second world war as a gold standard … It is difficult to imagine a less useful mindset.”

Leach is right to remind readers that images and styles of parenthood have a historical context. This becomes shockingly clear, in one way, in Louisa Lane Fox’s Love to the Little Ones, subtitled The Trials and Triumphs of Parents Through the Ages, in Letters, Diaries, Memoirs and Essays. “With only a few exceptions,” writes the editor, “this anthology is about the ’survival of the richest’ parents and children”; only the richest had the wherewithal to record the comings and goings of family life. And yet, writers accidentally include savage cameos of the wider society around them. The Duchess of Devonshire writes in 1783 that her daughter’s nurse “made the bed stink of wine and strong drink whenever she came near it”; Georgiana pays her 10 guineas to be off. Mr Haydon writes in 1831 about the wet-nurse he has employed to breast-feed “my dear little child Fanny”; so the nurse has to wean her own “fine baby” in order to keep the milk for her job. And so, the “fine baby” dies of starvation, and Fanny follows shortly after.

And yet in some ways, the more traditionally literary New Life is more historically shocking still. There is Dickens, sharing dad-time with Paul Dombey; there is Tolstoy, sitting in on Kitty’s childbed. Why, though, are there no Brontë sisters or Jane Austen? Why is George Eliot barely represented, why is Virginia Woolf’s fiction only there with Flush, her novelty biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog? The answer is obvious when you think about it - these writers never wrote much about childbirth because they didn’t know a lot about it, not having ever had children themselves. And neither of the present anthologies contains anything from the pioneers of late 20th-century feminism, disqualified, perhaps, by their failure to reproduce biologically: so no Simone de Beauvoir (”It is … deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself”), and no Female Eunuch-era Germaine Greer: “The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother’s accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him.”

A little later, though, and there were lots of mothers among the writers who shaped the women’s movement of the 1970s and 80s. Rich (born in 1929) was, like Plath, a young wife and mother in what she calls “the family-centred, consumer-oriented, Freudian-American world of the 1950s”; unlike Plath, she is still alive and writing. She published the magnificent Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976, and it’s still the most lucid account ever written of how ambivalence tears at the insides of the modern mother: “I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself.”

At about the same time, Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992) was writing The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), which was published in Britain in 1987 as The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World. This astonishing book argues that both men and women are basically monstrous creatures that rely - like the Wizard of Oz - on phony mysteries to keep them in their different sorts of power. And we’ll go on being monstrous - by which Dinnerstein means unfinished, inadequate, living twisted, crazy lives, until we learn to disentangle the ghastly mess that gender relations - she called them “sexual arrangements” - have become, by getting men and women to take equal responsibility for raising children. Childcare, Dinnerstein argues, may appear to be a boring, low-status activity, but really, it’s about teaching children the power and burdens of being human - far too important a task to be skimped. Both the Dinnerstein and the Rich book have been out of print for years.

Dinnerstein might be interested, though, to hear of dadlit, a brave new spirit beginning to come up behind the mummy memoirs. “Desperate husbands” was the headline on a story the other week in a Sunday newspaper, about a new generation of stay-at-home “recession dads”. Michael Lewis, a journalist better known for writing about Salomon Brothers and baseball, has recently published a book called Home Game, sold grandly on its cover as “a story of raging egos, brutal power struggles and fraught decision-making”. His kids eat their yoghurt only if it comes in tubes, frozen; his wife is on medication to silence her “brain screams”; “the American male”, Lewis considers, has “at some point in the last few decades” been “fleeced”. According to Leach, “While every child is uniquely the responsibility … of his or her own family, all children are also everybody’s responsibility: not-yet-parents, has-been-parents, the childless and the child-free.” And yet, “the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother,” contributes Lewis - suggesting that in his house if in no other, what Dinnerstein called “the male-female collaboration to keep history mad” has a bit more life in it yet.

• To order a copy of New Life, edited by Sally Emerson (Little, Brown) for £9.99, The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik (Bodley Head) for £13.99, Child Care Today: What We Know and What We Need to Know, by Penelope Leach (Polity) for £13.99, Love to the Little Ones, edited by Louisa Lane Fox (Frances Lincoln) for £13.99, or Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis (Penguin) for £8.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

The summer holidays have arrived and the kids are kicking their heels – what better way to keep them entertained than to supply them with a stock of good books? But which titles do you choose from the hundreds piled up in your nearest bookshop?

The Guardian’s children’s literary editor, Julia Eccleshare, guides Claire Armitstead through the shelves, from picture books, through the tricky territory of early independent readers and pre-teens to the more complex terrain of literature for the over-12s, and gives her key rules for choosing the best books for children.

Gandalf and Dumbledore may have legions of fans behind them, but the time has come to decide who wields the most power under their pointy hat

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin. Once upon a time, there was a kindly old wizard whose only concerns were pipe weed, hobbits and a gold ring that caused all kinds of trouble. Gandalf (for so the wizard was named) lived happy in the knowledge that he was the greatest wizard of them all. Until, one day, an obscure conjurer who ekes out a living as headteacher of a remote public school found international stardom when a former pupil made it big in Hollywood. And so it came to pass that Albus Dumbledore was hailed by a new generation as the greatest wizard of them all. But which was truly the greatest? Time to put them to the test.

Round one:
Magic is a slippery fish at the best of times, so when it comes to wizardry duels, it’s vital to agree the ground rules before you cross wands. For the purposes of this match we will turn to the 20th century’s most widely acclaimed codex of magical knowledge - The Complete Wizard’s Handbook, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. Unfortunately for Gandalf fans, the grey one comes off rather badly by these criteria, barely managing to scrape Level Five magic user with his pitiful deployment of flare spells and the minor illusion employed at the Ford of Bruinen. By contrast, Dumbledore fields an array of impressive spellcraft that sees his AD&D level reach the high double figures. Well done, old chap!
Gandalf 0 – Dumbledore 1

Round two:
But in showdowns between fictional wizards, actual magical skill is among the least important criteria. Much more significant in the minds of most readers is the power of the myths from which each character draws their power. In this myth-off, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings fields a clear advantage. Middle Earth is a fully realised secondary universe complete with multiple languages and rooted in the Norse mythic tradition, as well as being a deeply meaningful metaphor for the eternal conflict between good and evil. By contrast, the Potter verse is a ragtag collection of magical tropes and cliches, reheated with nonsensical names (Quidditch? I ask you) that manages, at best, good versus evil tile.
Gandalf 1 - Dumbledore 1

Round three:
Of course, the true test of any great wizard is the stature of the actor employed to depict them on the big screen. Anything less than a grandee of the British theatre and you’re not even in the running. Had the late Sir Richard Harris lived to act another day in the Potter movies, Dumbledore might have made it a close fight, but unfortunately, for all his strengths, Sir Michael Gabon is still one or two rings below the highest echelons of acting pedigree. No, when Hollywood needs a touch of genuine class for a fantasy action flick, no one is better suited to the task than the mighty Sir Ian McKellen. There isn’t another actor, living or dead, who could fill Gandalf’s pointy hat with the conviction McKellen brings to the role.
Gandalf 2 - Dumbledore 1

So, hats off to the grey rider – a convincing victory about which there can be no further argument. Or can there? Cast your votes below for Gandalf or for Dumbledore and let us know your arguments either way. Or vote on Twitter using hashtags #GUgandalf or #GUdumbledore. May the best wizard win!

As the Met Office’s predictions of a barbecue summer drown on a Birmingham outfield, shelter from the inevitable showers in the land of fiction, with our holiday reading quiz

• Spoof memoir of debut writer on 13-strong longlist
• Every book got fair crack of the whip, say judges

Literary heavyweights AS Byatt and JM Coetzee were today named on this year’s longlist for the Booker prize – which also features a first-time writer purporting to be Tarzan’s chimpanzee.

The broadcaster James Naughtie, who chaired this year’s panel of five judges, called the line-up of the 13 writers on the longlist, chosen from 132 books, “one of the strongest in recent memory” with “a span of styles and themes that make this an outstandingly rich fictional mix”.

There were notable omissions: Anita Brookner, for her much praised Strangers, Sebastian Faulks, his novel A Week in December, and not one Asian writer listed. But Naughtie said it would have been “death” to judge by box-ticking and they had had to decide on the individual merit of the books, not reputations.

Of nine former winners considered this year two were longlisted. Byatt, who won in 1990 for Possession, is nominated for The Children’s Book, her detailed exploration of the Edwardian cult of childhood, and Coetzee, who won for Disgrace, is named for Summertime.

Three first-time novelists are named on the list, including James Lever who wrote the hilarious Me Cheeta, his “biography” of the chimp movie star; Samantha Harvey, who also featured on this year’s Orange prize shortlist for her Alzheimer’s novel The Wilderness; and Ed O’Loughlin for Not Untrue & Not Unkind.

One novel that has featured heavily in summertime read recommendations is Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s gripping account of Henry VIII’s Tudor court told through his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The Guardian’s Christopher Tayler called the book “a display of Mantel’s extraordinary talent”, adding: “Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it’s not like much else in contemporary British fiction.” Historical fiction has, self-evidently, done well this year and another on the longlist is Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze, set in a private asylum used by the Victorian poet John Clare. Foulds is a young writer whose star is rising rapidly and he also won the best poetry category this year in the Costa book awards.

Many would be pleased if 2009 was the year for one of Ireland’s most acclaimed writers, Colm Tóibín. He has been a Booker bridesmaid twice, having been shortlisted in 1999 for The Blackwater Lightship and in 2004 for The Master, which, by all accounts, came extremely close. This year he is longlisted for his funny and moving study of belonging, Brooklyn.

Other longlisted novels for the Booker are Sarah Hall’s How To Paint A Dead Man; Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room; James Scudamore’s Heliopolis; William Trevor’s Love And Summer; and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

Naughtie said today : “I think we’re all really happy with the list and it gives you a spring in your step for the next stage.”

The judges, who include the professor and Guardian writer John Mullan, writer Lucasta Miller, comedian and broadcaster Sue Perkins and literary journalist Michael Prodger, spent five hours debating the longlist, and Naughtie said they had deliberately not been trying to tick categories.

“The reason we spent a long time discussing it, was that we wanted to give every book a fair crack of the whip,” he said.

While Indian writers have done well in the prize recently, winning in 2006 and 2008, this year’s list is notable for its absence of Asian writers.

The award, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, is one of the world’s leading literary prizes, although some regularly express exasperation that it is only for Commonwealth and Irish writers. Last year Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gained the accolade of best Booker winner over the prize’s entire history, and Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Booker for his debut novel, The White Tiger.

The judges are to meet in a month’s time to cut the list to six novels, and then a month later, when the £50,000 winner will be named at London’s Guildhall.

Chair of judges hails ‘one of the strongest lists in recent memory’

Literary heavyweights in the form of AS Byatt, JM Coetzee and Colm Tóibín were today named on the 13-strong longlist for the Booker prize.

The broadcaster James Naughtie, who is chairing this year’s judges, called it one of the “strongest lists in recent memory” with a good span of styles and themes.

Two former winners are nominated. Byatt, who won in 1990 for Possession, is longlisted for The Children’s Book, an almost staggeringly detailed book set between 1895 and 1919 which explores the Edwardian cult of childhood. And Coetzee, who won in 1999 for Disgrace, is named for his yet-to-be-published novel Summertime.

One of the most popular books to make the list is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which recreates the Tudor court of Henry VIII seen through the eyes of the king’s most trusted adviser, Thomas Cromwell. The novel – expect it to be popular beach reading this summer – has been one of the best-reviewed books of the year so far. The Guardian’s Christopher Tayler called it “a display of Mantel’s extraordinary talent” adding: “Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it’s not like much else in contemporary British fiction.”

Many would be pleased if this was the year for one of Ireland’s most acclaimed writers, Colm Tóibín. He has been a Booker bridesmaid twice – shortlisted in 1999 for The Blackwater Lightship and in 2004 for The Master, which by all accounts came extremely close – and is this year longlisted for his funny and moving study of belonging, Brooklyn.

Other established names on the list include Sarah Waters for The Little Stranger, William Trevor for Love and Summer and Sarah Hall for How to Paint a Dead Man.

Judges will now meet in a month’s time and whittle the list down to six. The other longlisted novels are Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze, Samantha Harvey for The Wilderness, James Lever for Me Cheeta, Simon Mawer for The Glass Room, Ed O’Loughlin for Not Untrue & Not Unkind and James Scudamore for Heliopolis.

The author of some of the most startling graphic stories of recent years is not what you’d expect of an artist, but then his are not your typical picture books

“Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental detail,” says Shaun Tan. Fortunately, the Australian artist’s award-winning picture books are anything but short on detail. Each spread drops the reader into a surreal world of bizarre animals, skew-whiff buildings, dreamlike landscapes and invented languages, the magical realism and conceptual playfulness of Tan’s paintings underscoring the simple language of the tales – “illustrated modern fables” as he calls them.

In the stunning, wordless graphic novel The Arrival, sober-looking characters dressed in 1930s-style suits and bowler hats are accompanied on their journeys through a mysterious city by strange creatures reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s daemons (only much, much weirder). The Lost Thing is a huge metal contraption from some other world, “hidden” by the boy who finds it in his parents’ otherwise relatively conventional house; next to the words “nobody understands”, the central character in The Red Tree is seen wearing a weighty diving mask, huddled in a glass bottle on a stormy shoreline, in one of the most unnerving insights into depression ever drawn.

“The detail adds an element of unexpected something,” Tan explains. “All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details. I’m constantly testing with the details. I go on a hunch and try it out. I might have a character and have a feeling that he needs to have a hat and so I put it in and it feels right and then I realise that he needs to have a hat because he’s trying to hide something.”

The result of this careful attention to detail is that Tan’s worlds, however fantastical they may appear on first glance, have their own internal logic. It is what he describes as “groundedness”, and he regards it as crucial to the success of the stories.

“By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality or it becomes of its own interest only, insular. In The Lost Thing, to have creatures flying around is unsatisfactory without the context. It works because it exists in opposition to the world in the rest of the story.”

To meet the man behind the wildly surreal pictures brings home that sense of opposites. Compact, neatly dressed and precise in speech, the initial impression is less the artist bubbling over with crazy creativity, than an accountant, albeit a very bright and charming one. Tan speaks thoughtfully, carefully about his work and there’s a clue to the origins of this precision when he talks about his upbringing in Perth, western Australia. His father was an architect and Tan recalls spending hours as a child drawing pictures on the back of discarded architectural sketches.

“I learnt some of my style from him,” says Tan, “including the extreme attention to detail. There’s that sense that if you do something it has to be well-crafted and it’s more fun that way and you get a better thing at the end.”

Yet despite parents with an interest in art and a childhood spent carefully observing and documenting in pictures the world around him – “I was always head down, looking at objects on the beach, almost fixated on collecting seashells and bumping into something that’s unexpected” – it was not a given that Tan would pursue illustration as a career. He flirted with the idea of becoming a scientist – a fascination carried over into The Lost Thing, where the images are framed with collages from physics and maths textbooks.

But, at 16, he had his first illustration published in an SF magazine and discovered the thrill of seeing his work in print. “One of the attractions of working on the books is the idea of people you don’t know seeing your work and forming an opinion about it. Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you’re young. It’s that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood,” says Tan.

A joint degree in English and fine art followed, while he continued to sell illustrations to magazines. But even then he wasn’t convinced that he could make a living as an artist. “I didn’t want to starve in a garret. For me, the main thing was to secure a livelihood and then explore artistic interests. I was fairly conservative like that,” says Tan, laughing now at the memory.

He decided to give art a year after finishing university and see how it went. He soon found that, by saying yes to everything that he was offered, from commercial illustration and fantasy novel book covers to occasional cartoons, and drawings of microscopes, he could make his way and then start creating his own books.

Given his secure, happy childhood and what seems to have been a relatively straightforward path into a successful career, it is perhaps surprising that Tan’s work is quite as dark as it is. Although often categorised as a creator of children’s “picture books”, the deeper, bleaker issues he tackles belies any such pigeonholing. The Red Tree is a blistering portrait of depression, while The Arrival is a masterful examination of the immigrant experience, and The Rabbits (illustrated by Tan but written by John Marsden) is a powerful allegory of environmental destruction. While The Arrival, thanks to its sheer length and sepia tones if nothing else, falls most easily into “graphic novel” territory, Tan’s other books occupy a kind of hinterland which can make them difficult to market.

“None of my books are for anybody – I don’t have any image of a child reading my book when I produce them,” says Tan. “It’s unfortunate sometimes that they are marketed to children. It’s good that kids get them, but that can exclude adults.

“One bookseller in Australia took the children’s book award sticker off The Red Tree as he felt he could sell more that way, and sold an extra 30-40 copies a month. It’s about simple things like font size – people think they can judge the age a book is for by the font size and assume that it’s for little kids if it has a big font, but that’s silly. I don’t worry too much about those things as the creator because I figure that the books will find their own audience and sometimes I like the idea that they can give adults a surprise pleasure.”

There is indeed always a “surprise pleasure” despite the seriousness of the topics Tan takes on. The books are leavened not only in the flashes of humour in Tan’s richly imaginative drawings, which he describes as “conscious dreaming”, but the thread of hope and compassion woven through every tale, however initially bleak.

“I think stories that represent the world as hopeless or dark are valid and some of them I really enjoy but the truth is that there is hopefulness in every situation,” says Tan. Of The Red Tree, he says that “the expression of depression is somehow refreshing. You can deal with things if you acknowledge them – it makes you feel good to acknowledge stuff.” Even in The Rabbits, although the “text is grim”, the images are redemptive, especially as it ends with “two misunderstood beings trying to communicate with each other across pool of stars, to overcome their cultural blindness and ask questions about what they are doing.”

These kinds of attempts to communicate across divides are a key theme in Tan’s books. His characters are often outsiders who have trouble articulating their feelings, something Tan says he recognises from when he was growing up and used drawing to help to express himself. The characters find themselves in strange situations but, ultimately, cope by “using empathy to get through, overcoming apathy.”

Tan is reluctant to delve too deeply into the “meanings” of his fables. Towards the end of The Lost Thing he writes, “Well, that’s it. That’s the story. Not especially profound, I know, but I never said it was. And don’t ask me what the moral is.” When pressed on the The Red Tree and the sudden chink of light at the end of the story with the appearance of a magical tree, he suggests that
“The Red Tree is there because this girl has somehow persisted and if there is any moral to the story – if you had to force a moral at it would be something to do with persistence.”

Morals or not, what shines through Tan’s work is an essential humanity, whether it is arrivals in a new city silently describing their journeys from war zones to a fragile new life, a metal mammoth happy to be found a place where he doesn’t quite fit, or a girl who finds a speck of hope, “bright and vivid, quietly waiting”, where previously there was only darkness.

• Shaun Tan’s latest work, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar) is an anthology of 15 very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world.

Bernardine Evaristo welcomes Patrick Neate’s most inventive book yet

Patrick Neate’s books often surprise. As a white British writer (forgive the labelling) he seems as comfortable writing black and Asian narratives as he is creating fiction closer to his own background. It began with the first novel of this trilogy, Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko, set in a fictional African country called Zambawi (loosely based on Zimbabwe). His second novel, Twelve Bar Blues, was a scintillating jazz riff played out on the streets of New Orleans, and finally we have Jerusalem, a novel that straddles Zambawi and England, oscillates between 1901 and 2008, and resurrects characters from the first two books.

Jerusalem opens with “The diary of a local gentleman”, written in 1901 by a nameless officer in the Boer war. Next, we are propelled to a prison in Zambawi where a new guard encounters the mysterious Prisoner 118. We later learn he is a spirit medium called Musa Musa who has been imprisoned by President Enoch Adini, his erstwhile friend. By page 15 we have been transported to London, 2008, where we meet the uber-cool, multimillionaire Preston Pinner, aka 2p™, aka Tuppence™. Preston owns a media and marketing company called Authenticity, which provides “laterally thought-out associative marketing relationships for any company wishing to ‘cool-up’ its brand”. Preston’s father, David Pinner, is the Foreign Office minister with portfolio for Africa, currently dealing with the arrest of a prominent British businessman, Gordon Tranter, in Zambawi - to where the action returns. Next is a section written by anthropologist Edison Burrows III, “the world’s leading expert in the mythology of the Zambawi”. And so it continues. A deliberate device of narrative disjuncture disrupts the reading experience from the outset, so that one is forced to puzzle over how the pieces of this jigsaw fit together.

The three predominant fictive strands are the Pinner story, the Musa Musa story and the English gentleman’s diary story, and as the book develops the connective tissue between them does become apparent, although it is at times quite fragile. But this multi-layered, jam-packed and often satirical novel is rich in ideas and argument, and while it exposes colonial idiocies it is also a lament for an imploding postcolonial southern African country.

Zambawi is debt-ridden, Aids-raddled and run by a president teetering on the precipice of “African Leadership Syndrome”, aka dictatorship. The British government, it transpires, is involved in subterfuge to topple this corrupt government. David Pinner, the most successful target of Neate’s lampooning wit, is sent out to Zambawi on an unofficial visit to negotiate on behalf of Gordon Tranter. He can’t wait to experience what he calls “the real Africa”, one that must be “so colourful, so noisy, so smelly, so damn alive, that, if you went there, you would most likely suffer from sensory overload, or arguably scarier still, go native”. In a playful twist, back in London, his son Preston, grandmaster of all things cool, is marketing a rapper called Nobody, whose hit debut single is a mutant version of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”.

The Pinners, father and son, are the most fully realised and entertaining characters here. Preston is a cynical observer of people, yet although he is both public school and Oxbridge, he wears the belt-below-the-bum jeans and thick gold bling of an American gangsta rapper. Authenticity - “keeping it real” - is, of course, about image and inauthenticity. The excruciating relationship between father and son is nuanced and brilliantly depicted. Preston doesn’t seem to care about anything much, and ends up swirling into emotional oblivion in the vortex of his own fakery. His father can’t honestly connect to anything either, least of all his son. Bland, self-serving, idiotic, he ends up drowning in drink and mediocrity.

Jerusalem is Neate’s most inventive book to date and also the hardest to define - is it three novellas thrown together? Is it one novel fragmented into several very disparate parts? It certainly invites comparisons with David Mitchell’s genre-busting Cloud Atlas. And, as with Mitchell, the ambition and imaginative reach of Neate’s writing are admirable.

• Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Blonde Roots is published by Penguin.

With the conflict in Afghanistan escalating and the Iraq inquiry pending, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy commissions war poetry for today

Poets, from ancient times, have written about war. It is the poet’s obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. In modern times, the young soldiers of the first world war turned the horrors they endured and witnessed in trench combat - which slaughtered them in their millions - into a vividly new kind of poetry, and most of us, when we think of “war poetry” will find the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon coming first to our lips, with Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke … What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? … There’s some corner of a foreign field … Such lines are part of the English poetry reader’s DNA, injected during schooldays like a vaccine.

But other poems - not all by soldiers - also come to mind: Walt Whitman’s civil war poems; the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, written (or memorised) during the Stalinist terrors; Lorca’s poems from the Spanish civil war; the poems of the brilliant young Keith Douglas who was killed in the second world war; the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert from eastern Europe and Mahmoud Darwish from the Middle East, and of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley from Northern Ireland.

British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war, as Keith Douglas did and Edward Thomas before him. They might be poet-journalists like James Fenton, the last foreign correspondent to leave Saigon after it fell to the Viet Cong in 1975, or electrifying anti-war performance poets, like the late Adrian Mitchell, or brilliant retellers of Homer’s Trojan wars, like Christopher Logue. War, it seems, makes poets of soldiers and not the other way round. Today, as most of us do, poets largely experience war - wherever it rages - through emails or texts from friends or colleagues in war zones, through radio or newsprint or television, through blogs or tweets or interviews. With the official inquiry into Iraq imminent and the war in Afghanistan returning dead teenagers to the streets of Wootton Bassett, I invited a range of my fellow poets to bear witness, each in their own way, to these matters of war.

In Times of Peace

by John Agard

That finger - index to be exact -
so used to a trigger’s warmth
how will it begin to deal with skin
that threatens only to embrace?

Those feet, so at home in heavy boots
and stepping over bodies -
how will they cope with a bubble bath
when foam is all there is for ambush?

And what of hearts in times of peace?
Will war-worn hearts grow sluggish
like Valentine roses wilting
without the adrenalin of a bullet’s blood-rush?

When the dust of peace has settled on a nation,
how will human arms handle the death of weapons?
And what of ears, are ears so tuned to sirens
that the closing of wings causes a tremor?

As for eyes, are eyes ready for the soft dance
of a butterfly’s bootless invasion?

Listen

by Gillian Clarke

to the chant that tranced me thirty years ago
in Samarkand: the call to prayer at dawn;

to that voice again, years and miles from then,
in the blood-red mountains of Afghanistan;

to the secret placing of a double-bomb
at a dark hour in a Helmand street;

to the first foot to tread the viper’s head,
the scream that ripped the morning’s rising heat;

to the widow’s wail as she crouches in the rubble
over a son, a brother torn apart;

to a mother dumb with shock who locks her door
and sits alone, taking the news to heart;

to the soldier’s words, “It’s World War One out here”;
to the rattled air, the growl of the grenade;

to a chanting crowd fisting the foetid air;
to a silent Wiltshire town at a last parade;

to ruin ripening in poppy fields;
to barley burnished in the summer air;

to the sound at dusk, cantata of despair,
the holy call become a howl of prayer.

War on Terror

by Fred D’Aguiar

Lasts for as long as nightmares
paint behind the eyelids

as long as a piece of string
cut from a navel remains buried under a tamarind tree

as long as radar from a whale
sounds like my child crying in her sleep

not long after the eyes wash away
last nights paint

no longer than a piece of string
tied at a navel

shorter than this war in this time under
this government that drowns our children in their sleep

Untidiness

by Amanda Dalton
The National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

Some time after the looting, the locked gates,
the US tank stood idle in a gallery,

Mushin Hasan, his head bowed
in a room of shattered stone,

after some had come back in blankets,
dustbin bags, the boots of cars,

in pieces - the Bassetki Statue, pulled
from a cesspool, smeared with grease -

and others recovered from Jordan, Italy,
France, US, UK, Peru, eBay,

they re-opened the museum,

missing maybe 3 or 11,000
(depending what you read), missing

the Hatra Heads, the Nimrud Lioness,
and doubting they’ll ever get them back,

those bits of the world,
bits of the civilised world, scattered.

• “Untidiness” is how the then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, described the looting from the Iraq National Museum.

Big Ask

by Carol Ann Duffy
(In memory of Adrian Mitchell)

What was it Sisyphus pushed up the hill?
I wouldn’t call it a rock.
Will you solemnly swear on the Bible?
I couldn’t swear on a book.
With which piece did you capture the castle?
I shouldn’t hazard a rook.

When did the President give you the date?
Nothing to do with Barack!
Were 1200 targets marked on a chart?
Nothing was circled in black.
On what was the prisoner stripped and stretched?
Nothing resembling a rack.

Guantanamo Bay - how many detained?
How many grains in a sack?
Extraordinary Rendition - give me some names.
How many cards in a pack?
Sexing the Dossier - name of the game?
Poker. Gin Rummy. Blackjack.

What’s your understanding of ’shock’ and ‘awe’?
I didn’t plan the attack.
Once inside the Mosque, describe what you saw.
I couldn’t see through the smoke.
Your estimate of the cost of the War?
I had no brief to keep track.

Where was Saddam when they found him at last?
Maybe holed under a shack.
What happened to him once they’d kicked his ass?
Maybe he swung from the neck.
The WMD … you found the stash?
Well, maybe not in Iraq.

The Grassington Mandala

by Ian Duhig

The photograph, a monk explains,
shows statues once in Bamiyan;
near here the Pilgrimage of Grace
fought Bluff King Henry’s Taliban,

where now enlightened refugees
rebuild their Buddha’s house in sand,
a sand once ground from precious stones;
they laugh, now statue-dust’s as sound.

The sun and moon attend his throne
surrounded by five jewelled walls;
a foursquare palace circles both
(with, on its roof, white parasols),

then rosaries of thunderbolts,
and rainbow-serpent aureoles;
each high brocaded gate supports
two kneeling deer with dharma wheels.

This Mitrukpa Mandala’s power,
to these who travel with belief,
absolves the karma of who kill
or are involved in taking life.

The RAF train overhead -
Jihadists also, up the Dale;
a homeless monk with steady hands:
another serpent bites its tail.

Landlock

by Matthew Hollis

Rain came rarely to the white wood valley.
In between times, he did what he could,
cut rhubarb and gooseberries, brought flowers
from the hill: camel-thorn in winter, rest-harrow
in summer, rock-rose, barberry, mimosa.
He ground wormwood to settle her fever.
When the trouble was done he would take back the farm,
plant olive and cedar, build her a home.
But she thought mostly of the sea -
the uncommissioned sea -
wild at her, salt strong -
not the starving river, brackish and torn -
a river is never enough.
One of her wishes was to find her own path,
but the lowlands were locked down, the plains undone;
so they climbed, and climbed as one.
And when she could not walk he carried her
and when he could not carry her she walked.
Such as this the days went by, till his strength too was sapped.
He laid his back against the longer rock
and set her head that gently in his lap.
Sleep overtook them on the slope.
He woke to take the sunlight in his eyes
and could not see at first the greater distance,
the strange blue, stain blue light in the distance,
that seemed every bit to move, impossible, surely,
a thin drawn band of sea, somewhere meeting sky.
He raised her head that she might see it done.
But where she was she had already gone.

Descent

by Alan Jenkins

… when suddenly out of that lake of blood
And plasma and the seepings of old sores
And indistinct stuff, rotted flesh and mud
And floatings of chemical froth, the spores
From carrion-flowers, the bandages that dressed
Deep-tissue wounds acquired in recent wars,
Moment-of-death evacuations (deliquesced),
The slippery insides of bodies cut in two,
Brain-matter, bits of muscle and the rest -
Three bubble-streams rose up; then from this stew
Appeared, slime-covered, plop plop plop, three heads,
All familiar. Each seemed about to spew
But more muck filled their open mouths, and threads
Of mucus clung and dripped from them as all
Were forced to swallow back those strange sweetbreads.
And so their words came thickly though a wall
Of vile breath and the noises that each made
In struggling to be heard: “I [burp] now call
On our great nation, and the mighty shade
Of Winston … [awk!] Churchill [blurp] … I mean, look …”
“Perhaps you dickheads think” - a fierce tirade
Came now from his confrere - “that this [blurf. Flook!]
War will be some kind - of fucking - picnic -
Though we could just make out a Don! or Dick!
Among his snarls of petulant disdain
And “DON’T MISUNDERESTIMATE ME” (sic)
He shrieked, futilely fending off a rain
Of liquid shit expelled in passing by
A bony old man with a baggy stain
For underpants, long matted beard, wild eye.
“To satisfy their vanity”, my guide said,
A million, two million forsaken had to die.
Now they must squabble in this place instead,
But no lies they repeat will justify
Their crimes, or earn forgiveness from the dead … “

Inquiry

by Carola Luther

how close how far how deep
what shade what shape what height
these quiet skulls like eggs how old
how wide one hundred thousand
which angle which side
the walls fall slowly as if half asleep
stepping out of clothes what’s heard
what’s said her stained abaya
from where from when
miles for water what’s dug up
who’s missing who’s quiet
their bed in the crater by the park
what number what cost on the step a baby
his sucking mouth what’s named what’s lost
on the rubbish mound two girls in black
looking for nylon and Pepsi cans
what’s counted what’s hidden
what’s not documented the boy still searching
for the head of his dog what’s shredded
what’s kept which contractor who’s job
in the city darkness electric switch click
click who’s friend who’s father which cellar
which jail underground the oil what email
one perfect apricot in the flattened orchard
who’s dental record who’s record beneath
a new sim-card painkillers ninety nine
prayer beads which faction which cabal
sometimes she tries to get to school
that firm which consortium at the widow’s stall
petrol by the cup tissues chewing gum
who’s ring who’s tongue left by the road
in his mascara khol private clothes
what’s stolen what’s found
a Sumerian statue from the flipflop man
what’s ignored inside there were ants
what’s replayed the Sony camcorder
whirring like a watch under her bhurka
that’s intact what’s standing what story
what rumour sepsis making its yellow flower
which fact which faith just tea and dates
tea and dates and three small onions
my son has gone the teacher’s leaving
which airport which building
quiet men meeting

After the Stealth Bomber

by Robert Minhinnick
(Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker)

It is years later now
but time can also run backwards.
Still she squats in candlelight,
Umm Ghada in the caravan,
or in 125 degrees Fahrenheit,
a cockroach ticking on her divan.

At night
they come out of the bunker,
the children, the old people,
but all a fog of flesh.
one body with four hundred souls
is exposed in a photographic flash.
They pick the wedding rings and wisdom teeth
from crematorium ash.

Who was it dreamed a stealth bomber?
Stealth steals.
Think of a smart bomb.
Not so smart.
Where the missiles entered Amiriya
daylight was star-shaped in the sarcophagus,
the concrete blasted back,
all the bodies foaming like phosphorus
in a bunker in Iraq.

The old women
took off their shoes
to welcome the fire that jumped into their mouths.
How quickly the children
found themselves unborn.

Yes, stealth steals.
But still Umm Ghada
guards. Umm Ghada
who goads God
with her grief
and the ghosts she carries,
Umm Ghada my guide
in the charnel house corridors.

What is she but a woman
in desert black.
Yet no desert was ever so black
as the sackcloth that Umm Ghada owns.
Not the Syrian desert’s
Bedouin black, its cairns
of cold stones.

• The Amiriya bunker in Baghdad was destroyed by the USAF on 13 February 1991. More than 400 civilians wer killed. Umm Ghada, lost manymembers of her family in the destruction, became a guide at Amiriya, living on the site. I met her there in September 1998. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

Afghanistan

by Paul Muldoon

It’s getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.

Have I Got Old News For You

by Daljit Nagra

You’ve been mapping the best mortgage
for our first house in these skint times,
recalling the latest tracker rate
you hint we play it safe
with a five-year fixed.

You’re by the telly when Dubya flashes up
twitching a smirk in his cowboy gear,
now safely in the past, yet verged
on a mind-blowing
thought.

I’m sorry Love, in the head to head,
my head had gone astray so you were
second best, it’s just that I banked
on a dead cert gaffe to raise
us a laugh.

You don’t hand me another Bud, but quiz
my smiles at this sniggery ad-lib game
of gags (that won your broken
laughter back then).
I’m thrown

to our courtship years glued to the smoke of Guan-
tanamoww, Eyraaq, and of course Affghanestaan
freed by John Simpson for the Crusades,
way before our daughter
trod the earth.

Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way

by Sean O’Brien

May we begin? Please tell us what you said
Or did, or saw the others do or say
Or see, or write, or somehow intimate.
We’re anxious to be clear on all the facts.
… But no. You think it’s wiser if instead
You don’t do that. You haven’t got all day.
How could we grasp the interests of the state,
The angel-subtleties its work exacts?
Are we suggesting you might swerve
From righteousness? Why should we need to know?
Who do we think we’re talking to like this
When - okay, look - God’s asked you to preserve
His plans from scrutiny? You smile. You go.
Outside your creatures queue to take the piss.

Battle Lines

by Carole Satyamurti

They wear the same boots, the same touching hair-cuts,
they’re smiles on the News, digits on print-out,
our brave boys;
names, ranks and numbers, action men
splitting the night with mind-trash noise.

Below them, the lights are the Fourth of July,
the screen shows cursors falling, converging
on other brave men -
abstract enemies with blanks for faces.
The mission’s to smash them and smash them again.

Each leader works at poses, inflections:
strong on screen, bluff on the air-waves,
caring friend.
Each of them bathes in his own propaganda;
his currency’s lives, and he’s plenty to spend.

It’s no use praying for some clean ending,
the God of the cross, of the star, of the crescent
is deaf and blind.
The fall-back, an echo of voices from childhood:
Don’t cry big boys. Never mind.

St Brides

by Jo Shapcott

There is a tower of the winds as tall
as this one in another city, a steeple
filled with fire by the incendiary raids
of a coalition of the unwilling. Nocturnal
shocks pound the citizens who survive,
blast them out of their beds into the streets,
children bundled under their arms. The gutters flame.
Dust is alight. I was born in a city

to come and go safely through the boroughs,
carrying inside me every morning’s news: pictures
of soldiers in places they didn’t want
to understand, made to fight for loose change,
for the hell of it, for a can of oil. I live here,
but the smell of print and ashes is in my nose.

It could have been

by Clare Shaw

Ali, son of Abdul. 16 months.
Rocket on house, Sadr City 16.5.2009.

Ali, but for some detail of history,
this day could have been yours.
It could have been you this morning,
stood at the end of your bed,
eyes still shut, arms held up for your mother,
who makes sun and all things possible,
who could, little Ali, be me.

Tony Edward Shiol, 5 years.
Kidnapped, found strangled, Shikan 12.05.2009.

If God had sneezed or been somehow distracted.
If that ray of light had shifted
and you had landed
with that small, metallic thrill of conception
as I walked down Euston Road,

then this could have been your morning.
It could have been me inhaling
your breath straight from sleep,
the smell of hot lake and woodsmoke, could
have
been
my tired arm under your neck.

Unnamed baby son of Haider Tariq Sain.
Car bomb, Nawab Street, Baghdad 7.04.2009.

It could have been you
shouting “carry”
at the far top stair of my stairs -

hello stairs
hello breakfast

- your feet in these shoes
which do not contain ants;

Unnamed daughter of Captain Saada Mohammed Ali.
Roadside bomb, Fallujah 20.4.2009.

biting soap
which smells good
but does not taste; watching
the unsteady wonder of bubbles;
throwing water up into the light.

Unnamed child of Haidar, male, aged 4.
Suicide bomber, Baghdad 4.1.2009.

then swimming:
your body held out in my hands;
the pear-shaped
weight of your head
safe away from the pool’s sharp side

Sa’adiya Saddam, aged 8, female.
Shot dead by USA forces. Afak, 7/8 Feb, 2009.

It could have been me on that street
with you in my hands
and my hands red and wet
and my face is a shriek
and my voice is a house all on fire

But for geography,
but for biology,
but for the way
things happen,
it could have been

Unnamed female baby of the Abdul-Monim family.
Shot dead, Balal Ruz 22.1.2009.

you falling,
you holding your hand up for kissing.

Poppies

by Jane Weir

Three days before Armistice Sunday
and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves. Before you left,
I pinned one onto your lapel, crimped petals,
spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade
of yellow bias binding around your blazer.

Sellotape bandaged around my hand,
I rounded up as many white cat hairs
as I could, smoothed down your shirt’s
upturned collar, steeled the softening
of my face. I wanted to graze my nose
across the tip of your nose, play at
being Eskimos like we did when
you were little. I resisted the impulse
to run my fingers through the gelled
blackthorns of your hair. All my words
flattened, rolled, turned into felt,

slowly melting. I was brave, as I walked
with you, to the front door, threw
it open, the world overflowing
like a treasure chest. A split second
and you were away, intoxicated.
After you’d gone I went into your bedroom,
released a song bird from its cage.
Later a single dove flew from the pear tree,
and this is where it has led me,
skirting the church yard walls, my stomach busy
making tucks, darts, pleats, hat-less, without
a winter coat or reinforcements of scarf, gloves.

On reaching the top of the hill I traced
the inscriptions on the war memorial,
leaned against it like a wishbone.
The dove pulled freely against the sky,
an ornamental stitch. I listened, hoping to hear
your playground voice catching on the wind.