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All you need to know about the 2009 Booker prize, with video, audio, reviews, interviews and more

Despite a few structural flaws, Eleanor Thom’s new novel sympathetically fleshes out the pain discrimination against Traveller communities has caused through the generations

The idea that it’s somehow all right to treat Gypsies and other Traveller communities with prejudice and contempt is an unpleasant curiosity of modern Britain. According to the Daily Mail, fermenting hatred towards them is categorically “not racist”. Jokes about “pikies” and “thieving gypos” pass easily from the lips of civilised people, too – people who would otherwise be horrified to be thought of as illiberal. Worse still, hardly anyone ever complains. Travellers themselves remain marginalised and unheard, and precious few are prepared to speak up for them. So it’s both a relief and an eye-opener to encounter a book such as Eleanor Thom’s The Tin-Kin – you can read a brief extract here.

Thom describes herself not as a Traveller but “off-of-Travellers” (that’s to say descended from and linked to Travellers), and she provides a naturally sympathetic insight into the pain that the discrimination against that community can cause – and has been causing for generations.

In the 1950s, a “Tinker” called Jock is murdered in police custody in a small town in north-eastern Scotland, and the law does nothing. In the 1990s, his descendants still don’t know his story, or even that they are his descendants, since the non-Traveller side of the family has done so much to hide their history.

The political message is clear and strong – but never overstated. Thom concentrates instead on the human element of her story, and it’s this, rather than any barracking, that makes the point. The injustice Jock suffers bites hard, thanks to the life – and love – she has breathed into him and his extended family.

This family, in the 1950s section, are just beginning to settle in houses. There are romantic evocations of the old life lived in seaside caves and on the road, of horses and telling stories around bright fires drinking tea out of jars. But mostly it’s the descriptions of cramped domesticity that make an impression: arguments overheard by everyone, nights punctuated by the crack of mousetraps, birth and death happening under the same small roof. There’s also something of the magic of intimacy, like this description from Jock’s niece about listening to a radio programme together: “This is the best feeling in the world. It’s just us, our breathing, the smell of soot that’s in our hair and clothes and bed sheets. Our Mission Control. And them. The voices in the box that come from the future in the clean, cold sky.”

This niece – Wee Betsy, one of several narrators – has plenty of fine lines. She elsewhere observes, for instance, that her 22-year-old uncle Jock can “wipe away” the wrinkles that form when he concentrates, “not like Granny with her mashed tattie face”. But aside from also being a lovable scamp, she presents one of the book’s many little problems: she’s often too eloquent and too poetic to be believable as a child. This is particularly acute when she breaks into some complex musings on perspective and the horizons on a beach – all a bit strange coming from someone who spends most of the book bunking school.

I had other issues relating to the suspension of disbelief. Wee Betsy’s grandmother (Auld Betsy) narrates in a dialect full of oan’s and oot’s: “There’s rules! Oh me! Bad news is fer reading oot the paper after it’s ower, nae off fawk’s palms. Ye keep it secret. Every wan ae us kens that. Oh me!” I stumbled over it – and worse, it struck me as caricatured. You might want to take that criticism with a pinch of salt, given that most of the Scottish press reviews I’ve read have commended the authenticity of such utterings, but not all my complaints are dependent on my ignorance of north-eastern Scottish speech.

The present-day narrative often seemed to get in the way of the more interesting events in the past. The main subject (Dawn) has a side story of domestic abuse that is never fully realised and feels tacked on. There’s also some dubious hocus-pocus relating to an old fortune-teller and Dawn’s daughter that detracts from the impressive realism in the bulk of the book. The structure creaks, too. This isn’t just because of all the competing voices and viewpoints, it’s also because Thom has decided to open with a description of Jock’s death. Harrowing though it is, it makes the account of the events that led towards it almost a relaxing stroll.

Still, these rough edges don’t detract too much from the bigger picture. Certainly, they don’t prevent reading The Tin-Kin from being a moving and thought-provoking experience. Which comes as a considerable relief after last week. It’s still a book that does credit to the Not the Booker shortlist.

But is it the best? You’ll have to decide when you vote next week. Until then, thoughts and comments are gratefully received, as ever.

The Liverpudlian comic and author talks to Sarah Crown about his latest novel, Mister Roberts, why he now prefers writing to comedy, and why he’ll never win the Booker prize

Google might be celebrating Confucius’s birthday, but there are so many more reasons to remember China’s most influential philosopher

2,560 years ago today, a boy was born on the North China Plain who would go on to become Asia’s most influential thinker. Confucius’s birthday, which Google has celebrated with a doodle, has brought him back to our attention, but his popularity has long been growing in his homeland and beyond as China and the Chinese way of life rise once more.

Confucius was born in 551 BC, to a family already far down the path from riches to rags, and worked as a cattle and sheep herder before becoming a reforming minister of crime. Disillusioned with the leaders of his day, he set off on a 15-year journey around the crumbling alliance of states now absorbed into China, a huddle of 30-year-old students in tow, selling his ideas on politics and the family for grain and cash.

At first sight those ideas were deeply conservative. Confucius preached respect for elders and for the social structure and an understanding of one’s own responsibility to others within the system. In his teachings he conjured a dim and distant golden age which he believed men could recreate, if only they followed the right social and ritual practices.

Yet he was no reactionary. Confucius was a self-made man and he taught that governors should be chosen for their virtue and ability, not their birth. He argued that the end of government was the welfare of the people. And he insisted that a ruler who was not righteous and humane would forfeit the Mandate of Heaven, and so lose his crown. For Confucius, morality and political unity were natural bedfellows.

Confucius launched his revolution as an author and orator, not a general. Historians and philosophers in China had always written under state patronage, yet Confucius offered answers to the troubles of the day independently; he was a traveller without a master. This was an enormous gamble but he hedged the risk by describing himself as no more than a transmitter of older ideas.

He failed to convert any rulers during his own lifetime, with his belief in the innate goodness of humanity looking increasingly naïve as China descended into violence and chaos towards the end of the fourth century BC. But under the Han dynasty, Confucius’s ideas became the official doctrine of state, eventually giving birth to the meritocratic civil service which tussled with Chinese emperors while kings and sheikhs elsewhere ruled according to their own whim.

The 20th century saw Confucianism come under attack, a gang of students digging up his grave in 1966 to prove that he was dead, but it could be argued that Confucianism shaped China for communism. Both hold to a belief in the innate goodness of man – mankind’s problem is not himself but his social and political structures. Moreover, both emphasise rule of man over rule of law; in other words, the emperor or the Party chairman is in charge. Why? Because an ideal society is being created and man must sit at the top of everything. Impersonal laws cannot rule over him. The rule of law has more religious underpinnings than Confucianism or communism ever offered.

Now the Chinese Communist Party is claiming Confucius as one of their own, opening a string of Confucius Institutes around the world, including 11 in the UK. Their mission is to further Chinese language and culture abroad, although some complain they are mere proxies for the Chinese Communist Party.

For me, much of his charm lies in how playfully contrarian he could be in debate with his student followers, forging lines of arguments they could never have predicted and so enlarging their vision too. As then, so today Confucius is too large a figure for anyone to control – indeed, his relations with China’s rulers were far less cosy than Google’s. He wrote without state patronage and this is why he poses such a conundrum to his country today. Two-and-a-half millennia after he first wandered through China, Confucius still has the power to subvert and surprise.

Raymond Carver was one of America’s greatest writers. But was his razor-sharp style created by his editor?

At 8am on 8 July 1980, Raymond Carver sat down to write a letter to his editor, Gordon Lish. He’d been up all night worrying about the book they were working on together, and by the time Carver had finished writing there were more words in the letter than there were in many of the short stories for which he was known.

“Dearest Gordon,” it began, “I’ve got to pull out of this one. Please hear me… I’ve looked at it from every side, I’ve compared both versions of the manuscripts… until my eyes are nearly to fall out of my head.” The trouble was, Lish’s version was so far from what Carver had sent him that Carver felt it was unrecognisable.

The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential literary figure once known as Captain Fiction, had published Carver’s first stories in Esquire magazine. (They had met in Palo Alto, when Carver was, as his wife later put it, a “practising alcoholic” working at a textbook publisher’s.) Lish later became an editor at Knopf and championed many other writers whose styles were unlike Carver’s – Don DeLillo, for instance, and Richard Ford. He went on to give writing workshops at which he managed, by all accounts, to be gnomic, crushing and inspiring in relatively equal measure. Lish’s own fiction – he wrote stories and novels – is compact, antic and self-reflexive, with titles such as Wouldn’t A Title Just Make It Worse?.

Carver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. His characters worked in diners and motels; they had amputated limbs and their families had left them, with or without furniture; their working lives, their cropped, half-understood thoughts had not been seen in fiction. Lish had edited Carver’s first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and together they had composed a taut new voice full of left-field desire and hopeless dread. As Carver put it in the letter of 8 July: “You’ve given me some degree of immortality already.”

But now Carver was desperate. This new collection, which he titled Beginners, was the first he had written since he thought he’d never write again – the first since he’d been sober, the first since he’d left his wife, the first since he’d met Tess Gallagher, already a well-known poet at the time and the woman with whom he was to spend the rest of his days. The collection meant a great deal to him. He pleaded incipient insanity as a way of asserting authorial control: “Now much of this has to do with my sobriety and with my new-found (and fragile, I see) mental health and wellbeing,” he wrote to Lish. “I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here.” There were three stories in particular that were so cut back that he felt he could not live with them, whether or not they were objectively better: “Even though they may be closer to works of art than the original,” he wrote, “they’re still apt to cause my demise.”

The letter is an incredible document, a missive from a man both indebted and imperilled, unsteady, spewing. It’s at once a plea and a manifesto – it reveals the extent to which writing was connected to Carver’s sense of self, and it reads much more like the characters he originally wrote, who, far from leaving things unspoken, say too much and still manage to scutter around the main point, which is perhaps only anxiety itself.

And there was a crucial difference between these stories and the ones they had worked on before – Tess. As he said in the letter: “Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I had sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it. But Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely.”

The book’s publication went ahead, in Lish’s form and under Lish’s title – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was received, in April 1981, to spectacular acclaim. It made Carver’s name and remains his most famous book.

More than 20 years after Carver’s death, Tess Gallagher has spent twice as long as his executor as she did as his lover. Carver, she says, dedicated that book to her with the promise that the original she had read and loved in 1980 would one day be published. Now, with the help of the Carver scholars William L Stull and Maureen P Carroll, Gallagher is bringing out the manuscript of Beginners. She describes the process as a “restoration”, and says it has taken 12 years for Carver’s words to be exhumed from under Lish’s hand, so extensive were his marks. It makes the stories sound like the literary equivalent of the Sistine Chapel.

Tess Gallagher opens the door to her house in Port Angeles, Washington to the sound of wind chimes. She has the mischievous eyes and twinkling laughter of a good witch, and she leads us, the photographer and me, to a kitchen smothered in family photographs where she has baked us lemon and poppy-seed muffins. She imagines we must be hungry after our long trip to this watery, northernmost tip of the country. Gallagher was born in Port Angeles; Carver was born a few hours’ drive away. She has said that the exposed, unornamented landscape inspired him, that it had something in common with the “forsaken quality” to be found in the lives of his characters.

She and Carver lived in this house for the last 10 months of his life (he died of lung cancer at the age of 50, in 1988). It is, as she says at one point, a “museum”, and she doesn’t tend to write in it herself, preferring to work in what she calls her “sky house”, a secluded, teetering place on a hill up the road. But she has kept Ray’s study more or less intact – the invitations on the mantelpiece, the casts of Tess’s teeth, the childhood photographs, the keepsake from Chekhov’s house in Russia. Even the aluminium mailbox at the end of the drive is as it was, with TESS GALLAGHER RAY CARVER stuck on it in capital letters. Everywhere in the house are portraits of the couple – Carver rugged and somber-seeming, Gallagher with a long mane of black hair, a neat painted mouth and eyelids like creamy, pale bells. Now her hair is silver and short, but before she had breast cancer six years ago she was a laid-back, bookish icon, who looked like a 1930s movie star who had studied to be a geisha and ended up in Haight-Ashbury.

They first met at a writers’ conference in Dallas in 1977. Carver had been sober for five months. “He seemed very awkward and fragile,” Gallagher recalls as we sit down in her book-scattered living room with cups of strong coffee, small dogs at our feet. “I was actually kind of apprehensive to meet him after hearing stories about him! You know, they called him Running Dog – he’d get himself into certain troubles and then he would have to run to get out of there. I remember he wanted to make a phone call and he asked if he could use the phone in my room, and I thought: Oh my God, I hope he doesn’t make a pass at me!” She laughs loudly. “I’d be so sad to have to turn him down, he’s so sweet! Thankfully, he just really did want to use the phone.”

When they saw each other again a few months later, he had separated from his wife of 20 years, with whom he had a daughter and a son. (He’d met Maryann Burk when she was a 14-year-old waitress in the coffee shop where his mother worked. In an essay called “Fires” he describes, with shocking bitterness, the “oppressive and often malevolent” influence of his children, who “were eating me alive”.)

Gallagher had been married twice before, to a pilot and to a poet. To hear her tell it, she had the feeling, twice over, that she couldn’t, in some sense, save these men. The first had been to Vietnam and was changed by the war; the second was an alcoholic whose poetry found fewer readers than hers did. When she met Carver she was understandably wary, but things began on a different footing. “Ray was coming back from a death, really,” she says. “He was a Lazarus. He was so bright, and so looking forward to the day every day. And I fell in love with that, too, I think – that here is somebody who loved life, and didn’t want to live back in the rubble of past lives that had failed.” But she says she fell in love with the writing first – “and then: ‘Oh! Look at this man attached: my goodness, he’s lovely, too!’” she laughs.

Gallagher worried that living with Carver might be like stepping into one of his stories, and sure enough, at first there were bill collectors at the door. But she took charge of that, and then she took charge of giving him space to write (in one house they lived in she gave him the study and wrote her own poems in the bathroom; in another she gave him the study and wrote at a picnic table in the park). Finally, she took charge of his fate itself.

“Listen,” she told him, “I love you. But I did not come 4,000 miles across this country to get bad luck. My luck is good and I want it to stay that way. You’d better change your luck.”

And so it went. But there was at least one sense in which being with Carver was like being in one of his stories: much was submerged, and some things were visible only to her. Gallagher remembers with great pleasure a day when her father, who didn’t understand the quiet Carver at all, finally sighed and said to her: “Tess, there must be something about that man that just don’t show.”

At least since Carver’s death, and long before lay readers were able to judge for themselves, as they will now be able to with the publication of Beginners, there have been whispers about Lish’s impact on Carver. In time, it has risen in volume to a full-scale debate, along the following lines: if Lish edited Carver so heavily, then is what we think of as “Carver-esque” really Lish? And if Lish’s gifts were such, why is his own writing not as well known as Carver’s? When Carver’s work became more expansive later in life, was that in fact a change of style or merely a change of editor? Did Carver worry that he would be unmasked? Did Lish worry – or hope – that Carver would be unmasked? Does it matter whose work it is at all, as long as the work exists?

One of the contentions is that the relationship between writer and editor changed over time so that Lish forced Carver to be more Carver-esque than he wanted to be. In one letter to Lish, Carver suggests as much, writing: “I know there are going to be stories… that aren’t going to fit anyone’s notion of what a Carver short story ought to be… But Gordon, God’s truth… I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close. There may have to be limbs and heads of hair sticking out.”

On the other hand Carver was willing, even if a certain side of history casts him as a victim, and he did allow these stories to be published – indeed, in a letter written less than a week after the great missive of despair, Carver appears to give Lish carte blanche, saying only: “Please look at the suggestions I’ve pencilled in… even if you finally decide otherwise.” Not only that, but Carver made a career out of these books, and he went on to write a third published by Lish. In that last instance, Lish edited lightly and offered up the edit with an ominous note: “To do less than this would be, in my judgment, to expose you too greatly.”

When Lish spoke about the matter to the New York Times journalist DT Max in 1998, he told him of his “sustained sense of [Carver's] betrayal”, and described Carver as a “mediocrity” he had discovered and made famous. When I contacted Lish for this piece, he sent a gracious reply, saying that he regretted what he had said about Carver already, and did not wish to say more.

What can we now see from the stories themselves? Often Lish’s edits improve minimally, give shape to what’s there, or alter a phrase so that it’s actually more in keeping with the voice Carver has invented. But at other times the feeling is very different – the characters can be more brutal, for instance, and less is made of the women. Many stories are cut by 50% to 70%. Certain stories – “Beginners”, one called “A Small Good Thing” retitled “The Bath” by Lish, and another called “Tell the Women We’re Going” in both versions are different pieces of work altogether, with different plots and tone. A man murders two women instead of one; a couple never finds out if an injured son lives or dies.

More generally, Lish’s edits become slices that depend on silence and suggestion, on the reverberations of the barely glimpsed. Carver’s original characters did a lot more talking – they told drunken anecdotes, they wept, they felt, they contemplated, confronted, confessed. These differences are not stylistic – unless you consider earnestness and emotion to be a matter of style rather than heart or disposition. In the most changed of these stories, the edited characters simply would not behave the way Carver’s original characters do; if they could, if they had the words or the taste to, there would, in a sense, be no story, since so much of Carver as we have known him until now is about what’s unspoken. The edited characters well up; the original characters spill over.

Carver hated to be called a “minimalist”, and he was called one often. One wonders if he disliked the term because he knew that minimalism was the aspect of his writing that was least his own. If you are a Carver reader who mainly associates his work with a certain style, then you may be surprised to find that the style itself – his sentences and paragraphs, the blunt, mid-air endings of his stories – was in many cases engineered by Gordon Lish. If, however, you take Carver’s world as a whole – the brutality of intimacy, the unplaceability of anxiety, the mess any and all of us can make of love – you may think that Lish saw something in Carver, rather than imposing something else on him, and helped find a form to fit the content.

Then there is the strange, small, yet perhaps emblematic change: a ritual alteration of characters’ names, so that Herb becomes Mel, Bea becomes Rae, Kate becomes Melody, Cynthia becomes Myrna, and so on. This habit in particular feels like an imposition, a suggestion that the editor knew the writer’s inventions and his world better than he did himself. Here, you wonder how the relationship changed.

Was the relationship between Lish and Carver parasitic or symbiotic, and if the former, which way round? These are vexed questions of ownership and identity, and one might, of course, ask them of any artist’s relationship with anyone else, spouses and friends as much as editors.

Gallagher, who says that she doesn’t “necessarily feel that [Lish] is a villain”, tells me that her interest is not in comparing the two versions. She just wants to show, as she puts it, “the connective tissue” between Carver’s first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and his later one, Cathedral. There was not as much of a leap as readers suppose. In this sense she is offering up Beginners as an item of interest rather than a finished piece of work – a bootleg if you will. She won’t say – and she smiles and she recedes from the proposition – whether she thinks one or the other is better.

“I really love these stories,” she explains, “and I don’t wish to banish even the book Ray had to stand by, and which made him in a sense internationally known, and which gave him the footing to write Cathedral. It also is a very intimate part of the story. You cannot throw that book away – it’s a very important book. And I think there will be readers who will like some stories better, because of course that book has the advantage of having an editor. We could not go back when this book was restored and clean up things that you would cinch up if you were actually a line editor working with him on what you were going to allow to be his book. So we cannot make a fair comparison on that basis. We can just say what kind of writer we prefer.” She adds that Beginners could never have been published in Carver’s lifetime. “Anything fractious, he’d go like smoke up the stairs.”

This is a smart, nuanced line for Gallagher to take. After all, to seem to be intent on restoring the true genius of the original Ray while simultaneously reaping the benefits accrued to the other Ray might begin to look like a double standard. The only time she becomes remotely heated is when I mention the journalist DT Max, and ask why she didn’t speak to him all those years ago? (Max reported that Gallagher had refused copyright to a scholar who had been in the archive and wanted to show the extent of Lish’s edits.) She says she wanted readers to be able to judge for themselves. “The readers can make up their own minds; we don’t need the journalists, really, to tell us.”

Does everyone want a piece of Raymond Carver? It seems that the much-theorised “death of the author” hasn’t protected him from posthumous attacks. When you read about these battles, you wonder whether they are not serial acts of appropriation. Even Carver’s first wife has written a memoir, in which she writes of the early stories composed while she was married to Carver in a protective vein, saying she felt angry about Lish’s changes. “I must say, as the first reader, I resented it when Lish boldly changed the title.” (She also reports that Lish told her she could only help Carver by releasing him from the bonds of family life.) It all depends on what you think a “normal” relationship between a writer and an editor would be, what a “normal” marriage would be. Is there ever such a thing?

For her part, Gallagher describes her relationship with Carver as “collaborative”. She helped him, and it was reciprocal. She began to write short stories after she met him; he wrote more poems. She believes that had he lived, they would have carried on in that vein, lending each other their native forms, “because we were very stimulating to each other”. Since his death, she has built two volumes of poetry around his memory – Moon Crossing Bridge, which was an act of mourning, and Dear Ghosts, published three years ago.

Gallagher describes the way she would read “every story as it came from his pen”, how they would sit side by side on the couch and go through each one, page by page. “In my companioning of Ray’s work,” she says, “I felt very free to give suggestions, and he wanted that very much. Sometimes he would say: ‘Well, write it out how you would do it and I’ll figure out my own key from there.’ It would always come back in the key of Ray.” In a book called Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years With Ray, Gallagher prints a page from Carver’s typescript for the last story he ever wrote, “Errand”. On it, she has written by hand her suggestion for the last paragraph. If you compare this page to the story as it was eventually published, you’ll find that the very last words of Carver’s very last story were Gallagher’s.

She had referred, earlier in our conversation, to the latter stages of Lish’s relationship with Carver as “appropriational”. I ask if she feels there is any possessiveness in her own relationship with him.

“You can’t possess a great writer,” she replies. “They’re out there for us all. Why would I want to possess him? I had him for 10 beautiful, amazing years, and I think he’s his own gift, out there to the ages. I do not consider that I formed Ray – Ray formed himself.”

He couldn’t have done it without you, though? I suggest.

“I certainly think he couldn’t have. That is true,” she laughs. “Amen! Because he really had quite a chaotic life before, and I’m a very orderly person – I mean in my interior world,” she adds with another giggle. “Don’t look at my housekeeping!”

Now Gallagher has a new partner, Josie Gray, an Irish painter who had not touched a paintbrush until he met her, and whose naive gouaches are on display all over her house. She encouraged him in his work, and now she spends her mornings on admin relating to Carver’s work or Gray’s before writing in the afternoons. She divides her time between Port Angeles and her cottage in Ireland, for which she has a great affection, and where she spent time with Carver.

“Ray said: the great thing about living longer is that you get to know more of the story,” Gallagher smiles as we start to think about leaving. “And I have gotten to know a lot more of the story that he and I were living. Some threads have dropped out of that story, but a whole new story began that still has all this interweaving with my life with Ray.”★

Beginners by Raymond Carver is published by Jonathan Cape on 15 October at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847

Not even a broadly sympathetic biography of Alan Clark can do anything to disguise his truly horrible personality, says Rachel Cooke

A couple of reviewers have already quietly noted that Ion Trewin’s biography of Alan Clark, Tory pterodactyl extraordinaire, is authorised, and thus rather more discreet than perhaps it should be. And it is true that Trewin has skated disappointingly over a lot of the sex. I would very much have liked him to track down “the coven”, which is how Al charmingly referred to Valerie Harkness and her two daughters, all three of whom he slept with over a period of 14 years. It would be interesting to know, this time without the input of Max Clifford, what they really felt about this man, his rapacious appetites, his ungentlemanly indiscretion.

But this is not to say that the weeks the author spent cosied up at Saltwood Castle with Clark’s papers were a waste of time. His book is much more than hagiography. Granted, on occasion Trewin gives his subject the benefit of the doubt when really he should be taking the biographical equivalent of a crop to his behind. Most of the time, though, his loyalty to Clark’s widow, Jane, is no match for the pressure exerted, even from beyond the grave, by Clark’s truly horrible personality: weird, insolent, philandering, self-pitying, self-important, cruel, snobbish, obsessed with cars and, most delightful of all, so right-wing that he excitedly likened Mrs Thatcher’s escape from the Brighton bomb to the same wonderful good fortune that saved Hitler from von Stauffenberg’s misfiring briefcase. 

Clark’s friends (and let us not forget that Alastair Campbell counts himself among their number) like to tell us that his lifelong admiration of the Nazis was a kind of tease. But I wonder. Even as a little boy, he was a supporter of fascism. His sister, Celly, recalls being shocked that when the family discussed the Spanish Civil War, Alan, not yet a teenager, announced that he was a supporter of Franco.

Then again, perhaps he was just desperate to be noticed. Clark’s childhood, thanks to the fame of his father, Kenneth, director of the National Gallery, surveyor of the King’s pictures and the presenter of BBC TV’s Civilisation, was peopled by stars, in whose presence young Al, gangling, big-jawed and directionless, must have felt like a dumb blob. Papa numbered Edith Wharton and Nancy Mitford (to whom a smitten Alan once sent a valentine card) among his friends, and regularly played host – at home in Portland Place – to the King and Queen. His mother, Jane, dark-lipped in Schiaparelli, had a love affair with William Walton.

This is not to say, however, that they were so distracted as to be unloving. Indeed, one of the most striking examples of Clark’s peculiar neediness as a man are his adult claims that he was emotionally abused by his cold, absent parents. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the opposite was true. Trewin frequently quotes from letters they sent to their son in which they sound positively doting for people of their class and time. And they spoiled him: with presents and, later, with money. As an adult, any financial problem – and there were many, born of his backgammon debts and general fecklessness – was easily solved. Clark would simply touch his pa for a Pissarro to flog. 

After Eton and Oxford, and having neatly avoided national service, Clark retired to a house in Rye to write fiction (badly) and history (rather better, though he was apt to be lazy; unable to trace the source of the quote that British troops in the First World War were “lions led by donkeys”, which he needed to back up the title of his book, The Donkeys, he simply made one up). It was in Rye or, to be precise, on Camber Sands nearby that he first clapped eyes on a schoolgirl called Jane. “She is a perfect victim,” Clark wrote in his diary. And, later: “I can mould her. I know she is pliable.”

Jane was rather less excited at the prospect of this man more than twice her age, at least at the beginning. “I remember this person mincing along,” she tells Trewin. “I remember thinking I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a conceitedly pompous walk.” But the two embarked on a relationship all the same. At first, the way Clark tells it, Jane was a tease, though this turned him on and he got his way in the end.

On one occasion, Trewin tells us, Jane’s period was late. Clark was terrified; she was still under-age. When it eventually arrived, he celebrated by playing Tannhäuser on his gramophone. Do I need to unpick the significance of such a choice? Perhaps not, though it is worth mentioning that Clark was such a deluded self-mythologiser he must regularly have needed the bolstering qualities provided by a blast of a Wagner. What crazed self-belief! Shortly before his 30th birthday, when he was deeply in debt and had so far achieved almost nothing by way of a career, Clark wrote in his diary of his “big man potential”. Later on, when he was an MP, he continued to be convinced that he would one day lead the party, even as he pootled along in the junior ministerial jobs for which he showed relatively little natural aptitude. 

Clark married Jane in 1958, when she was 16, and in doing so committed her to a life of regular humiliation. Sexually, his diary was almost as tightly packed as his ministerial box and, sometimes, she hated him. It is often said of men like Clark that they simply love women. But this is not so; in my experience, philanderers more often fear, even hate, women, a view with which John le Carré, who was briefly a friend of Clark’s, seems to concur. “Women were the enemy for him, I think,” he tells Trewin. Le Carré, calm and clear, is brilliant on Clark, telling the reader very convincingly of his “unreconciled anger”, his “potential for evil” and, perhaps most damning of all, his hatred of waiters: “He treated them like shit.”

Nevertheless, when Clark stood for Parliament – he was elected the MP for Plymouth Sutton at the age of 45 – Jane campaigned with him like a good girl. At this point, Trewin’s pacy narrative goes off the boil a little, possibly because Clark’s brilliantly readable diaries have already covered the same period and in a rather less clenched manner. Still, there’s plenty to amuse and even more to make your blood boil. The spectacle of Clark at the dispatch box, taking the piss out of sexual equality legislation, is enraging, though perhaps not as enraging as listening to his Tory colleagues retrospectively defend him from such a charge.

Trewin’s account of events such as the Matrix Churchill affair – Clark, you will recall, thought it perfectly right that the engineering firm sell arms to Iraq – are faultlessly detailed, but they fascinate far less than, say, his revelation of Clark’s belief in reflexology (he favoured a woman from Hythe called Mrs Frowd). In combination, though, they quickly help you to work out why he never made it to the cabinet. 

Clark died, in 1999, at the age of 71, as he lived: a certain amount of histrionics were involved, not least the piling up of his guilt so far as Jane was concerned. Suddenly, he was all love. And she, still devoted, returned the favour, burying him in the grounds of his beloved Saltwood Castle, another thing inherited from his parents, before the press even knew that he was dead. Ta-da! Was Clark received into the Catholic church in the days before he died? Jane still insists not, though Father Michael Seed, the “priest to the stars”, undoubtedly hovered creepily at his bedside, as is his wont.

Trewin ends his book by quoting from Clark’s obituaries and by suggesting that, for all his failures as a man and as a politician, his diaries will ensure that he lives on. He is probably right. They are so very delicious, providing as they do a ringside seat at Mrs Thatcher’s Shakespearean downfall. But still, we should be wary of getting carried away. A pithy journal does not a warrior make, not even if one listens to Tannhäuser while reading it.

Peter Ackroyd considers the influence of water on the art, architecture and psyche of Venice

Literary Chicago hasn’t run out of steam but has moved into a more reflective period, suggests a new Granta anthology of Chicago writing

If you were on a quiz show, and were asked which American city is the most written about in literature, you might well buzz and answer: New York. You’d have plenty of material: from Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Tenants of Moonbloom, which found bracing poetry in the slums of 1960s Manhattan, to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which packed so much of Gotham’s teeming life into its 800-odd pages that critics recently voted it the second-best American novel of the last quarter-century. In fact, you’d probably have people shouting out novels from the audience.

But would you get the points? Not according to the new issue of Granta magazine. It’s a collection of new writing about Chicago, a city that is stalked by the redoubtable ghosts of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel. Its aim seems to be to prove that while those writers have created the Chicago of our imaginations – the roughest city going – there is still plenty left to be said.

Certainly, all the big Chicagoan themes are here. Aleksandar Hemon reflects on the immigrant experience in his memoir about playing soccer with men from every corner of the planet in a Chicago park. Dinaw Mengestu ponders the city’s obsession with Big Money, based on his experience of running his father’s courier business. And Maria Venegas’s memoir, Bulletproof Vest, helps explain why Chicago was once called “the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap”. (Read an extract here.)

Chicago has always had a rough-and-tumble relationship with literature. Writers have been landing punches on its nose since Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), which celebrated the town while harshly depicting its grime and obsession with money. Nelson Algren’s 1942 novel Never Come Morning was, in his own words, “a thinly fictionalised report on a neighbourhood where, if you cared to get hit on the head and dragged into an alley, it was as likely as any”. It shone a light on the “tortured, useless, lightless, loveless lives” of the locals.

These writers stamped their identities on the city. Saul Bellow’s underworld of fixers, gangsters and hangers-on have made his picaresque Chicago as “familiar a locale in literature as Joyce’s Dublin”, according to one biographer. And many feel that Algren’s prose poem/essay, Chicago: City On the Make (1951), captured the city better than any other work. Terkel called it “the best book about Chicago”.

But something has changed. Novels such as Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March were written during the surge of postwar American triumphalism. At the time, the race for the Great American Novel was, for some writers, still on. These things have changed now: America’s position in the world is shifting, and writers have largely given up trying to cram an entire nation into a novel. Granta has shown that Chicago is still producing great literature. But in publishing this collection, the editors ask a bigger question: have we now entered a period where writers are less likely to be so passionate about American cities?

Recent novels that have explored life in urban America – Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution (winner of the Guardian first book award in 2007) or Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End – have brilliantly rendered places such as Washington and Chicago, but they have perhaps done so without as much gushing pride as Bellow and Algren. The latter once wrote of Chicago: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Can we expect less of that in the future?

Maria Venegas will be speaking with Dinaw Mengestu and Neil Steinberg and Granta editor John Freeman at the Royal Festival Hall at 7.45pm on 23 September. southbankcentre.co.uk/literature-spoken-word

Richard Dawkins talks about why it’s time for a book setting out the evidence for evolution and how the media have made him into a militant atheist

Meg Rosoff’s first historical novel grips Mary Hoffman

The one thing you can predict about a new Meg Rosoff novel is its unpredictability. How I Live Now was set in the near future, and Just in Case and What I Was in the present, and all three featured very different main characters and plots. The Bride’s Farewell is her first historical novel, set in the 19th century, and has been widely compared with Hardy.

Pell rises early, leaving her wedding dress spread out on a chair, saddles her horse Jack and slips away from the house. She’s decided she can’t possibly marry Birdie, the smith’s son, so she’s running away. But her plans are complicated by Bean, her mute little brother, who insists, silently, on accompanying her.

There was a time when Pell was sympathetic to the idea of marrying Birdie - until he blew it by offering her a “house full of children”. She’s seen what it’s done to her own mother, bearing her brood to a drunken and violent husband. “Toil and hardship and a clamour of mouths to feed? Not now, Pell thought. Not ever.”

Pell has no real plan beyond going to the Salisbury horse fair and finding work. She certainly doesn’t anticipate losing Bean and her horse. The central section of the book has her and the reader close to despair as she searches for them both. In the course of her wanderings she again comes across Dogman, a hunter and trapper she met in Salisbury, into whose cowshed she moves for the winter with no company apart from a dog she has acquired from a Gypsy family.

Dogman is taciturn, though not “a Mr Darcy type”, as the press release fatuously claims. The hunter’s strong, silent virtues come to the fore when Pell is assaulted by a baker’s brother, whose marriage proposal she turns down. She has a broken arm and is covered with bruises when Dogman finds her slumped and feverish in the straw of the cowshed. “He said not a word but gathered her up in his arms … and took her to his cottage.” That would be the Hardy touch, then - except that two days and two pages later, he’s more like a DH Lawrence character, and “from that day on they lived as man and wife”. Although I am not entirely convinced by the silent lover - Pell never knows his real name and apparently never asks - I am completely won over by the other love story in this book. That is Pell’s passion for horses, which surely mirrors the writer’s own.

Pell finds work as a groom, after Dogman has gone off to visit a suddenly revealed wife and child, and it is in the stables that she finds a kind of happiness. Her understanding of and need to be around horses is Pell’s defining characteristic. By then she has rescued two of her sisters from the workhouse, after finding out that their parents have died in a mysterious fire, and has become the family’s breadwinner.

But there is still the fate of Bean and Jack to be resolved. And this is where Rosoff comes into her incomparable own: each has found his own place in the world, the way Pell must. The Gypsy woman holds the key to a large part of the story in a way Pell never recognises and is implacable in her determination to avenge an old wrong, which we are privileged to know about.

The title is perhaps misleading; in spite of many partings and sorrows, this is a book in which the heroine rises to greet what life throws at her. Not Hardy. Pure Rosoff.

• Mary Hoffman’s novel Troubadour is published by Bloomsbury. To order The Bride’s Farewell for £9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop