After a break of a couple of years, I decided to resubscribe to Granta, prompted perhaps by news of a new editor (Jason Cowley) and a re-launch. Not that there was anything much wrong with the magazine (book?), before, but somehow, Granta was something that didn't fit in easily to my book-reading schedule and tended to end up on the shelf un-read for some months after it arrived. Let's face it, Granta is not exactly something that can be skimmed through, and to read it cover to cover takes quite a commitment of time. Anyway, Granta 101 arrived just in time for me to take it to France for a short holiday, and what better to take on the lengthy ferry crossing to Le Havre?
Sailing to France on the rather fine ship operated by Transmanche was, as expected, just the place to read Granta - with a five hour journey, you have no alternative other than to settle down to something substantial and by the time I returned to England a few days later I can only say that resubscribing to Granta was an excellent idea.
The Paris Intifada by Andrew Hussey is what Granta is all about. Hussey, is highly qualified to write this article on the Paris Banlieue, which lie around the peripherique. We have all read newspapers articles or seen television pictures of the rioting in "the suburbs", but Hussey gives us an in-depth tour of the area and encounters the people who live there. He bravely meets people who by the sound of it could easily lock him in a lost apartment and torture him to death (this has happened to one unfortunate in 2006), and manages to engage them in conversation about their alienation and their feelings about the city on the other side of the ring-road. Because Hussey knows so much about the political and cultural predicament of the Banlieue he is able to set what he finds in a broad context and help his readers understand what is really going on in this deeply troubled community.
Similarly, Robert Macfarlane's article, Blitzed Beijing, enables us to see behind the scenes, this time of a Beijing preparing frenziedly for the Olympics with an orgy of destruction of old communities. Macfarlane walks us through the city from one end to the other (illustrated by an excellent little map), encountering people along the way and describing what he sees.
All three pieces of fiction in Granta 101 are excellent. Joshua Ferris recounts the story of an elderly lady living on an island in Seattle and the response she draws from her daughter as she goes slowly mad. Annie Proulx tells us of happenings at the Mellowhorn Retirement Home, and Rick Moody's Videos of the Dead recounts the development of a strange memorial service for the deceased. Granta certainly enriched my sea crossing with these three pieces.
The photographic pages are fantastic. In words by Lavinia Greenlaw and photographs by Gautier Deblonde, the spirit of the Arctic and some of the people who live there is captured beautifully. The photographs are a joy to look at and I keep revisiting them some days after I first saw them.
Perhaps the most significant piece in the Granta 101 is The Judgement of Lut by Tim Lott. This describes the life and last days of his film agent, Rod Hall. This is a long piece of writing, providing the background and then the details of a fairly dreadful murder, and its impact on those who knew the victim. Remarkably fine writing and by the time you reach the end you feel totally involved with the events and can almost feel the sense of sorrow experienced by Rod Hall's family and friends.
If I have one complaint it would be about the first three short articles none of which impressed me at all. I'll pass over Ruth Franklin's Dreams of Reason (other than to say that after a couple of more readings, I still don't know why its the first article in Granta or even why its in there at all), and move on to the irritating Visual Thinking by Douglas Coupland. This short paean to the Helvetica font, seems to have been lifted straight from Private Eye's "Pseuds' Corner" but at least its not quite as depressing as the third piece, Witness, by Louise Dean, a voyeuristic little article in which the death of a vagrant prompts some beautiful thoughts ("when I first saw the man larking about I said, 'Thank God for him, he's restored my faith in humankind: we are containable, unpredictable, one at a time! I didn't think that just half an hour later, his skull would be smashing on the concrete . . ."). Thankfully, none of these first three articles took me more than a few minutes to read, and after that, Granta seemed to get into its stride and recover the high qualities of the many older issues I have on my shelves.
