Exciting change of format today. We’re going to start with a quiz. There are two questions: one which is impossibly difficult, except perhaps for any people I share a bed with; the other is not totally unreasonable, if novels are your thing.

But first a philosophical question. If asked: ‘Who is your favourite novelist?’, the philosopher CEM Joad would probably have replied: ‘It all depends what you mean by favourite.’ Joad was a regular panelist on that very British, indeed very BBC, institution – The Brains Trust. Each week in the 1940s on radio, and the 1950s on television, a panel of intellectuals would respond to questions submitted by listeners. There was the occasional slightly flippant question, but for the most part this resembled what I have always fondly imagined Cambridge University common-room conversation might be like: very bright, in some cases conceited, minds struggling to reach eternal truths while scoring intellectual points off each other. (In fact, I suspect Cambridge University common-room conversation, even then, was as much about which horse you fancied in the 3:30 at Kempton Park racecourse.) The panel were given no prior view of the questions, and there was much to admire in their ability to think on their feet. Please don’t think that I was some kind of wunderkind following the discussion at the age of 5; I have childhood memories of the programme, but I have also been enjoying the wonders of YouTube, to refresh my memory.

So, just what does favourite mean in reference to a novelist. There are several authors whose novels I enjoy very much whenever I come across them – and, perhaps interestingly, most of these are women. However, there is a small group of authors for whom I make a conscious effort to read their every book. So, here’s the impossible question: can you guess what almost all of my favourite authors (by this definition) have in common?

Give up? Well, they are all called John. I know: ridiculous, isn’t it? I swear that it was not a deliberate choice; it was something that only dawned on me a few years ago. A slight clarification: this is more a record of the authors each of whom, at different ages, have been my favourite author: some I have grown out of; others, I suspect, may have grown out of me; drifting apart is quite a common experience in many long-term relationships.

Question 2, and much easier, is: How many of the Johns (there are seven of them, incidentally) can you name? To help you, here they all are.

Starting at the top right, we have John Steinbeck, who, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, swept me off my feet in my mid-teens. His portrayals of the dignity and aspirations of the little man, and of the ways in which everyday life challenges us to be heroic, were a celebration of the ordinary that allowed my adolescent self to daydream extravagantly.

A little later, I started reading science fiction, attracted by the intellectual questions and mental games authors like Asimov posed and played. I was particularly attracted to first John Wyndham and then John Christopher (top left and centre, respectively), both of whom took our world and tweaked one element, then placed some hapless man in the street (never a woman, as I didn’t notice then) in the centre of this potentially earth-shattering scenario and explored how he adjusted to, coped with, and eventually defeated the threat. If I had managed to visualise myself as Tom Joad, the dirt-poor dust-belt 1930s migrant farm-worker whose story is told in Grapes of Wrath, then identifying with Richard Gayford, the educated, middle-class, English narrator of The Midwich Cuckoos, required scarcely any imagination. At the time, I was already annoyed by the attitude that science fiction was not ‘real’ literature. I argued then, and I still would, that distorting one aspect of our world often allows an author to place social and moral issues under the microscope. Certainly, much of science fiction is genre writing, but John Wyndham, devoured as a teenager, repays a closer and more nuanced reading as an adult. For a more detailed analysis of his work, here’s a review from the Guardian. (Recommending an article from The Grauniad? What’s got into me?)

At bottom left sits a pensive, apparently ill-at-ease David Cornwell, who earns his place on this list through his pen-name of John le Carre. He has been the author whose books I have had to read soon after they are published (well, soon after they are published in paperback, anyway) since I first encountered The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in the cinema, with Richard Burton giving such a nuanced and understated performance. If labelling science fiction as just a genre annoys me, then dismissing le Carre as a writer of spy novels enrages me. To my mind, what le Carre has done, throughout his 58-and-counting-year career, and in almost all of his 25 novels, is to use the world of the spy to consider the contemporary human condition. Placing his characters in this world has allowed le Carre to explore all of the lies, deceptions, betrayals, moral ambiguities and uncertainties of the modern world, in an environment where all of these things are intensified. Certainly, I relish le Carre’s descriptions of the craft of spycraft, the skills, techniques, tricks of the dark arts; I am under the spell of his wonderful plotting and control of the narrative flow, the unexpected twists and turns of the story. What singles him out for me, however, is the brilliance with which he uses espionage as a metaphor for modern life.

One of the pleasures of accompanying le Carre for 52 of those 58 years has been to see how his themes broaden out to embrace whatever issues occupy us in the ‘real’ world in the period when he is writing. Another pleasure has been the company of George Smiley, who is a character in nine of the novels, and who I regard as an avuncular friend, whether in print, or as recreated brilliantly by Alec Guiness in a TV adaptation or equally brilliantly by Simon Russell Beale on radio.

I was delighted to see that William Boyd feels much as I do (perhaps that should be other way round) about le Carre’s place in English literature.  You can read his appraisal here.

In my early twenties, it was time to cross the Pond again, for a very long love affair with John Updike (second from the left in the bottom row, and probably the most easily recognisable of the seven). If you are reading this, Jackie Factor, then thank you for lending me The Centaur, and introducing me to the first of many urban and small-town middle-class communities of friends, with interlocking relationships that embrace friendship, rivalry, sexual attraction, adultery. We stayed together through the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, with its so richly discontent protagonist, and for some time after. Updike has a lyric tone that invests his characters’ lives with poetry; in a very different way from Steinbeck, Updike celebrates the ordinary. We parted company with The Witches of Eastwick, which seems to me written by someone other than Updike.

Staying in the States, third from the left at the bottom is John Irving. In many ways he is difficult to categorise. His novels are wide-ranging thematically and in their setting. However, you do know you are always going to get an elephant, a circus and some wrestling. How does Irving manage to make their appearance in every novel not laughable but completely natural? I have no idea. Irving is one of the funniest and most serious of novelists. Like Steinbeck, he celebrates the extraordinariness of the ordinary person.

Irving’s technique for writing a novel is unusual, to say the least. As he himself has explained it: I write endings first. I write last sentences – sometimes last paragraphs – first. I know where I am going. I write collision course stories. He claims that he would have no idea how to begin a story if he did not know exactly where it was going. There are at least two effects of this writing method. There is almost always a lot of foreshadowing in an Irving novel: incidents occur whose significance only becomes apparent much later in the novel. Sometimes, this foreshadowing becomes a leitmotif, a refrain that runs through the entire book and gives it an intensity and integrity. An Irving novel has tremendous drive and sense of purpose. If you haven’t read A Prayer for Owen Meany, please stop reading this twaddle now, get yourself a copy, and read it. It is a novel that drives relentlessly to a sledgehammer conclusion; if the last sentence does not move you to tears, then perhaps you should reconsider reading fiction. If the pleasure of starting a new le Carre novel lies in the anticipation of the analysis of the human condition (and the intellectual pleasure of wrestling with a conundrum), then starting a new John Irving is like climbing into your seat on a roller coaster: you don’t know what lies ahead, but you know that it will be exhilarating, and that at no time will your car leave the tracks for even a second: it feels as if you are free-falling, but you are actually firmly anchored to a preset route.

Last (bottom right) – and double points if you recognized him – is John Banville, Irish novelist and short story writer. I cannot charcaterise the themes or settings of his work, which includes a trilogy imagining the lives of, respectively, Kepler, Newton and Copernicus, as well as novels on the work of art and the artist. What does characterise all his work is a quality more commonly found in short stories than novels: he writes prose of such elegance and clarity that it could be poetry. He is a flawless stylist, while never sounding forced. I read The Blue Guitar to Bernice a couple of months ago, and the shape of the words in my mouth was, for me, a rich pleasure. Banville also has the distinction of being the only author to whom I have sent a fan email. (Incidentally, I got a very nice reply from his publisher, explaining that while Banville was grateful for my email, the publisher was sure I wouldn’t want the author to take time replying to me himself when he could be penning his next novel – which I indeed wouldn’t.) Banville has been described as ‘the heir to Proust, via Nabokov’, although he usually writes much slimmer volumes than Proust. He is also often brilliantly funny. He is quoted as saying that he loathes all of his books, which, I suspect, places him in a minority of one.

And there you have them, my seven Johns. Do let me know if you think I have missed any, and if any of the above nudges you towards someone you haven’t yet read, then so much the better. Happy reading.

No up-to-date photo this week; instead, a glimpse of a budding reader, many months ago!

Five weeks ago, I gave a light-hearted account of the kids’ trials and tribulations in releasing their lift from the port and getting the container delivered to the land. For a heart-wrenching portrayal of what it felt like actually living through that, you can watch Micha’el’s latest vlogumentary on their YouTube site. (Note: liking and subscribing are not discouraged.)