Authors: Nick Hornby

Ten Years in the Tub (102 page)

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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Well. Obviously that's not me, in any way whatsoever. I'm an adventurer, a gourmand, a womanizer, a
bon viveur
, a surfer, a bungee jumper, a gambler, an occasional pugilist, a Scrabble player, a man who wrings every last drop from life's dripping sponge. But, you know. I thought it might chime with one or two of you lot. Nerds. And it certainly would have chimed with Montaigne.

I'm afraid I am going to recommend yet another epic poem about the Mau Mau uprisingâthis time Adam Foulds's extraordinary and pitch-perfect
The Broken Word
. It will occupy maybe an hour of your life, and you won't regret a single second of it. Foulds has written an apparently brilliant novel,
The Quickening Maze
, about the poet John Clare, in whom I have obviously
had no previous interest, but this has the narrative drive of a novel anyway. Set in the 1950s (
der
, say the people who know all about the Mau Mau, which I'm presuming isn't every single one of you), it tells the story of Tom, a young Englishman who, in the summer between school and university, goes to visit his parents in Kenya, and is drawn into a horrific, nightmarish suppression of a violent rebellion. If there were money to be made from cinematic adaptations of bloody, politically aware but deeply humanistic long-form poetry, then the film rights to
The Broken Word
would make Foulds rich.

Such is his talent that Foulds can elevate just about any banal domestic conversation. In the last section of the poem, Tom is attempting to seduce a young woman at university, and the dialogue is full of
no
s and
that's not nice
s, the flat, commonplace rejections of a 1950s courtship. But what gives the passage its chilling power is everything that has gone before: how much of the violence Tom has seen is contained in him now? The control here is such that the language doesn't have to be anything other than humdrum to be powerful, layered, dense, and that's some trick to pull off. Why the Mau Mau uprising? At the end of the poem, Tom and the girl he has been forcing himself upon are looking in a jeweler's window; the children they would have had together, born at the end of the 1950s and early '60s, sent to English public schools, are as we speak running our banks and our armies, our country, even.

These are three of the best books I've read in years, and I read them in the last four weeks, and they are all contemporaryâ
How to Live
and
Book of Days
were published in 2010,
The Broken Word
was published in 2008. So despite all my showing off and name-dropping, a narrative poem published two years ago and set in the 1950s is the closest I've come to the ancient world. But then, that's the whole point, isn't it? Great writing is going on all around us, always has done, always will.