Craig Raine is an eminent man of letters. A first class poet, editor and academic. What he isn’t, I fear, is a novelist. He’s best known as the founding father of what his friend James Fenton dubbed the Martian School of Poetry, but this is, at the age of 65, his first novel. “It is not a poet’s novel,” he says. “Finely written with lots of description and a little bit boring. It’s a novelist’s novel that is filthy and funny.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Up to a point.
Raine, who was born in Bishop Auckland in 1944 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford, worked for Ian Hamilton at the New Review before becoming poetry editor of the New Statesman and then, in 1981, of Faber & Faber. He was also a lecturer at Exeter, Lincoln and Christ Church before becoming a fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1991 until he retired last month. He made his name with his second collection of poetry, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, in 1979. The critical acclaim for that volume of verse made him – at 35 – the hot new kid on the block and the book’s title was taken to describe a group of poets – the Martian School – who turned the ordinary into the extraordinary by close and fresh observation of everyday objects.
As well as ten volumes of poetry, he has written a verse drama – 1953, a version of Racine’s Andromaque – a couple of librettos – The Electrification of the Soviet Union, an opera with music by Nigel Osborne based on The Last Summer by Boris Pasternak, and Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, with music by Michael Berkeley – and several volumes of criticism, including a controversial book on TS Eliot which defended his predecessor at Faber from the charge of anti-Semitism. He is also founder-editor of the tri-quarterly literary magazine Areté, launched in 1999.
Raine says Heartbreak is a novel “about people whose hearts are damaged but who don’t show it” but it’s actually a collection of separate, inter-linked short stories with several academic digressions, which read like tutorials, on subjects such as Henry James, William Golding’s widow and the role of Enobarbus in Antony & Cleopatra thrown in for good measure. It’s elegant, waspish and witty; entertaining and erudite and, on occasion, very amusing. But what it isn’t, sadly, is a fully-formed novel.
