Looking back at the books I’ve read this year, of 60 or so just nine have been in translation from other languages.  Worse still, only one of those did I enjoy unequivocally (Stefan Zweig’s Chess).  Is it me or them?  Am I a philistine, or is there a cultural and linguistic barrier which means I will never enjoy translated literature as much as stuff written in English?  What better way to find out than to try this season’s hot foreign property, Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses.

It was published in Norway in 2003, where it won two awards.  Translated into English in 2005 by Anne Born, it won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year.  But not only is this the best foreign language work recently published; a few weeks ago it also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, making it apparently the best book in any language, anywhere in the world, available in English, this year.  It was up against some pretty stiff competition: Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee and others. Great expectations.

One thing Out Stealing Horses does not do is radically rearrange your stereotype of Scandanavia.  The people here are taciturn, laconic, moody.  Brooding.   Brooding hardest of all is our narrator, Trond, who is living a life of chosen solitude in the remote forests of Norway.  The book takes us between his present existence and the childhood days which changed his life.

“I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it,” Trond tells us.  Well: you’ve come to the right place.  While the tentative, misty prose has its seductive qualities, another word for it would be soporific.

…picked our rakes up and walked out fanwise with the right distance between us and started to rake the grass from all sides towards the rack, and it was obvious at once why the handles were so long.  They provided radius enough for us to cover the whole space together, and not so much as a straw was left behind, but it was tough on our palms with the rake rubbing forwards and backwards a thousand times, and we had to wear gloves to save the skin from being torn and prevent burns and blisters after one hour only.  And then we filled the first wire, some with hayforks and balance and great precision, others with their hands, like my father and I, who did not have the same experience.  But that went well too, and the inner side of our bare arms turned slowly green, and the wire filled up, and we fixed up another one and filled that one too, and then another, until we have five wires crammed full one above the other, and the top one with a slightly shallower layer of grass hung down like a thatched roof on each side, so when the rain came it would just run off, and the rack could stand there for months and the hay would be just as good right under the outermost layer…

But it does flare into life in places, most notable when Trond and his childhood friend Jon go ‘out stealing horses’ and Jon does something sudden and shocking when they are looking at birds’ eggs in a tree.  The reason for his ’sudden breakdown’ is even more horrifying and provides the engine for the subsequent revelations in the story.

There is also a pleasing quality to the book’s serenade to a life of physical labour among nature: barely a scene passes without wood being chopped, logs being rolled, or dogs or horses being men’s greatest companions (”I landed on the horse’s back a bit too close to its neck, and its shoulder bones hit me in the crotch and sent a jet of nausea up into my throat”).  And there are interesting things to be told about the rarely discussed role of Norwegian civilians in the second world war.

But the prose never really engaged me, and I knew we were in trouble when I felt the page lighting up on recognising the work of other writers.  Petterson peppers the later pages with the opening lines of The Go-Between (”The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”) and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (”It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known”).  It doesn’t serve to flatter him.  I wondered if there might be other famous opening lines too - the narrator is a fan of the novels of Charles Dickens, though I didn’t spot any of his.  And that sums up my experience of Out Stealing Horses: not the best of tomes, but not the worst of tomes either.

What to make of Clive James, the polymath’s polymath who gave us Margarita Pracatan, the mould that they broke when they were making Stephen Fry?  “I still don’t feel that I have Made It,” he tells us in his new memoir, North Face of Soho.  “An onlooker might say that I have Done Something.  But I’m still not entirely sure about the ’something’, and not at all sure about the ‘I’.”

We can see where he’s coming from.  The man is a great and erudite writer and entertainer, but where are the final achievements?  The four novels are out of print.   The collected poetry (”The book of my enemy has been remaindered / And I am glad”) sustains his soul (”Mentally I was still living from one poem to the next … as I still do today”) but can’t be earning much in royalties.  Most of the books listed By the Same Author are collections of television reviews and previously published essays.  And to most British people over 30 he is best known for poking fun at Scandanavian condom adverts on Sunday night TV.

As with other great wits like Oscar Wilde, then, the life is the achievement; and the life is summed up in - the life is - the four volumes of autobiography - Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was in June - of which this is the latest, and which surely will be read on and on, a permanent legacy (and “clearly another volume will be necessary”).  This is the volume which deals with life after university: the world of work.  And the answer to the question above is here too, because James (like many of us) did not plan his career, but fell into it.  The falling was longer and bumpier than Alice’s down the rabbit hole, and he writes engagingly here of his inability to say no, and of how his addictive personality combined with effortful overwork and alcohol and dope overuse to leave him without regular income until his early 30s.

For most of this time, and beyond, James was a jobbing reviewer and critic, living on thin and irregular cheques until he simultaneously accepted two full time jobs hundreds of miles apart: as presenter and writer of Granada TV’s Cinema, and as the Observer newspaper’s TV critic.  And so his twin loves of hearing his own voice and seeing his own words in print were firmly fused, never really to be parted.

It’s James’s wit as much as his erudition that he’s known for, and he still has the masterful way with capturing an image: Richard Burton’s head “was as big as a tea chest. You had to lean sideways to look past him.” Another actor is “possessed of features so finely chiselled that he appeared to be in profile even when viewed from front on.”  A stuntman in a mishap “smashed his spine into a string of broken beads.”

And James is a fund of stories not only interesting but beautifully told about the infamous and unfamous, such as the secret desire of Jack Cardiff, Powell and Pressburger’s gifted cinematographer, to make a film out of an atrocious historical potboiler with what Cardiff considered “marvellous dialogue” (”Gadzooks! Fain would I not face thy glittering blade, Dinwiddie”). The reason for this was that Cardiff

was an interpretive artist, not a creative one, and the raw stuff of movies - the script - depended on a mystery he was not equipped to penetrate. … For Jack, the written word was magic …[He] thought that words, any words, had a numinous status simply because they had been written down.

We get a whole chapter of this story, including real marvellous dialogue and rich comedy, from a man who knows how to make the written word magic. Or there’s the account of interviewing Burt Lancaster on the exterior shoot of a Michael Winner film, when lunch is called:

The mess tent was in plain sight, about two hundred yards away. Lancaster stood up from his chair, but that was as far as he went by himself. He stared at Winner with a weary impatience. Winner took the cue and shouted, “A car for Mr Lancaster!” A black Mercedes 600 longer than a school bus loomed across the grass and stopped precisely so that the action hero could step directly into it after the back door had been opened by the assistant director, the PR attaché, and other members of the door-opening party that I could not identify. The Mercedes set off on its epic journey across two hundred yards of grass, arriving at the sacred tent only a short time before the rest of us arrived on foot. Lancaster’s door remained firmly closed until it was opened by the chauffeur, the assistant director, the PR attaché, the other members of the door-opening party, and Winner himself. Winner congratulated Lancaster on his successful voyage in terms which would have embarrassed Lindbergh after his arrival in Paris. It was a graphic demonstration of the perennial need for the institution of monarchy: because there is a total, ineradicable potential for subservient ceremonial bullshit in the universe and it all has to go somewhere.

Practically every line in the book is as quotable as this.  Partly this is because James is never afraid to extrapolate a maxim from an experience, or to express himself in grand principles of truth which, because of his assurance and intelligence, we come to trust almost instinctively.  Yet the overall tone of the book is companionable and self-deprecating, though he reminds us, “it may have self-aggrandisation as an underlying motive, just as conceit almost always underlies a show of modesty.”  Nonetheless, for a man whose wide-ranging abilities still leave him wondering, “What could I be said to have achieved if I were taken now?,” well, this will do nicely to be going on with.

Reading Ben Elton’s prose immediately after Salman Rushdie’s rich symphony of language and Colm Toibin’s unfussy elegance, provides quite a distinction. (And that is the last time that Ben Elton’s prose and distinction will ever be used in the same sentence.) It’s like being hit over the head with brightly coloured bricks, an effect enhanced by the big squarish typeface that shouts at you for 460 pages. But then Elton’s at his best when writing novels that aren’t really novels but cartoonish satires of things he can get really angry about: global warming, drug hypocrisy … and reality TV. A few years ago he wrote Dead Famous, a brilliantly vicious assault on Big Brother. Chart Throb skewers The X Factor and Pop Idol in the same invigorating way.

Chart Throb is the account of the production and execution of a series of a ‘fictional’ TV talent show. The parallels with The X Factor are not only glaringly obvious but deliberate, and in a clever move to avoid tricky libel actions, Elton has his judges Calvin Simms (control freak media mogul), Beryl Blenheim (’rock chick from way back’ and Botoxed star of docusoap The Blenheims) and Rodney Root (washed-up former boy band svengali) make occasional references to Simon Cowell, Sharon Osbourne and Louis Walsh, just to show that they’re not them. He also has their speech patterns and public perceptions down pat, so that it’s impossible to read the characters’ dialogue other than in the voices of their real-life counterparts.

And so Elton gets to work. Just as Dead Famous showed how much he really, really hated Big Brother, so Chart Throb displays his contempt for The X Factor in every line. It’s a deliciously caustic performance, set in a world where “we’ve turned the whole country into one vast medieval village so that we can all stand in the market square and laugh at the idiots,” where “anything not beautiful or fashionable was deemed worthless,” and where celebrities are arrested with “a level of media frenzy that, twenty years before, would have been reserved for a visit from the President.”

But what really gets the vinegar flowing in Elton’s veins is the level of deceit involved in the production of the Chart Throb TV show. “Every week,” says Calvin, “one or other of us gravely informs some wide-eyed innocent that they could sell a lot of records, and the public never seems to mind that almost none of them actually do.” We read this and begin thinking of all those Pop Factor Idol Academy Stars winners who sank without trace (from ten series in the UK, just two resulting winners are still going strong). Simms explains why:

People think I’m so clever because the winners of the show will be signed to my record company. Big deal! I get to make Joe Nobody’s one and only fucking record. Fuck that! I make more money out of five minutes of telephone voting than I will out the entire recording career of this year’s finalists. He, she or they are worth more to me before they win than they ever will be after.

Which makes us wonder if the other charges Elton brings against his show can also be true for the real life versions. That the vast majority of the thousands of auditionees in the halls in the opening weeks are never actually seen by the three star judges - “do the maths,” Elton says - and a complex intercutting of footage is used to give the impression that Simms, Blenheim and Root travel the country, when they just do one day’s filming for all the open heats. Furthermore, that the finalists - chosen on their qualities as Clingers, Blingers and Mingers, and almost never as Singers - are chosen well in advance of them ever opening their mouths. Does Elton have inside information, or is he merely speculating? Either way, it justifies explosions of anger against trivialisation like this:

‘You have all this power, all this influence, all this talent, and what do you do with it? You make the most vapid and forgettable entertainment show in history.’

‘Is there anything wrong with entertainment being vapid and forgettable?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s great telly, I admit it. But it’s corrosive, isn’t it? It undermines standards. I mean it used to be possible to be hugely entertaining without being crap as well, look at The Beatles.’

‘That was genius. If you judge people by that sort of standard nobody would make anything.’

‘Yes, but there were lots of great bands around in the sixties, too many to count. It was almost as if the Beatles were leading by example, as if their example raised everybody’s game. Now you’re the biggest thing. You are the example.’

Or, as Simms states later, “We don’t deal in ideas or substance. We deal in personalities and disposable emotions. In fact, along the way we’ve actually made ideas and substance look boring and stupid.”

It’s this rage that drives the book. The brutal truth is that the other things which are supposed to drive novels aren’t all that hot here. The characters are either ciphers for real people (indeed so convincing are they that I half wonder if the re-arrangements for this year’s X Factor were announced to distance the show slightly from the Chart Throb formula) or 2D puppets for Elton’s ’serious’ points, which tend to be as manipulative as the show. It’s only through build-up of goodwill that this comes across not as hypocrisy, but as fighting fire with fire. And the central plot pivots are too ludicrous for words. It also goes on too long, particularly in the auditions and finals sections (and so is, again, entirely faithful to the shows it satirises). But its enjoyable vim and vigour keeps it a thoroughly entertaining read, and if it’s destined to become meaningless and superfluous when the shows themselves fizzle out, then it’s a sacrifice surely worth making.