The Invasion Handbook
Tom Paulin
208pp, Faber, £12.99
Your auntie has already paid for this book. And your uncle. Your grannie. Your mum, your dad. And you too, if you play the National Lottery. Tom Paulin was one of the "amazing people" awarded money by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), funded by the National Lottery, in order that they might continue to be amazing. Paulin's cut of the public purse was £75,000. According to Nesta, "Tom will draw on photography, film and music to create radical new poetic forms and styles aimed at extending the boundaries of our current notions of poetry". The Invasion Handbook is the boundary-extending result - the "first instalment", apparently, of an "epic in cento form", the first repayment of the public's confidence in the poet.
Many would agree that Paulin is amazing, although they might disagree as to why. His knuckle-rapping public performances and his breathtaking arrogance are pretty amazing. "Like Prometheus", he writes in an old essay, with typical overstatement and self-importance, "the critic steals fire from heaven and brings it to humans on this earth". Humans on this earth might marvel also at his brilliant critical leaps and jumps on the page, his acute sensitivity in the close reading and analysis of poetry, and his own head-banging attempts at writing poetry. Paulin comes not just bearing fire; he is on fire.
Paulin it is who single-handedly turned the television programme Late Review into the intellectual equivalent of The Jerry Springer Show . Paulin it is who, in these pages, recently described Thomas Stearns and Vivienne Eliot as "snobbish, right-wing fascists". Paulin it is who was busy last year denouncing Guardian journalists Linda Grant and Ian Buruma as "feeble" and "Zionists" because they dared to criticise his poem "Killed in Crossfire", in which he used the unfortunate phrase "Zionist SS". This is also someone who, from time to time, educates young people as the GM Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford.
Like a lot of overeducated people, Paulin seems to think it is clever to be rude. He is consistently fierce, a proverbial grass-gnashing Nebuchadnezzar. "It must be possible", he once wrote, "to speak plainly for a new civility." It must be possible, but it is not something at which he has made any great attempt.
When he is not ranting, he writes - and when he wants to, he can write quite reasonably. He produced an early, careful book about Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception (1975), and then the obligatory controversial book, Ireland and the English Crisis (1984). His recent book about William Hazlitt, The Day-Star of Liberty (2000) is a wonder: as much a manifesto as it is an act of criticism.
And then there's the poetry. Paulin's work as a poet up to now could be divided into two neat halves: the formal restraint and lyricism of his first three volumes, A State of Justice (1977), The Strange Museum (1980), and Liberty Tree (1983), and then the much looser-lined, unpunctuated and associative keenings of his later work, with the sharp-edged Fivemiletown (1987) marking the divide. The Invasion Handbook is a new stage in Paulin's development as a poet. The book's many strengths and weaknesses may be characterised in just one word: ambition.
The Invasion Handbook is a book about the second world war, part of a larger work conceived, say Paulin's publishers, "in several volumes". This first volume is made of scraps and patches of other writing, constructed from quotations, allusions, little lyric excursions and prose embellishments and interludes - all relating to the war. This book contains poems with titles such as "Vladimir Illich" and "The Night of the Long Knives" and "Nazi-Soviet Pact". You get the idea.
So, the £75,000 question. Is it worth it? Well, Paulin certainly seems at last to have found a subject and a form big enough to suit him. He has successfully translated his dispositions into a schema. For years he has been attempting to justify and explain his Northern Irish "Puritan" inheritance. But in true Puritan tradition, his has really been a project of self-improvement and self-expansion. His great virtue is neither sympathy nor understanding. It is knowledge, and he has at last found a way to exercise this virtue in poetry. The Invasion Handbook is a poem with a practical purpose: there is a reference at one point to it being perhaps a "cultural primer". Here comes Paulin the Puritan priming the pump, leading us whores to culture: Pound would be proud. The book's a brag, but it's an achievement.
In the poem "Martello" in Liberty Tree (1983), Paulin asked, "Can you describe history I'd like to know?" Well, yes, evidently you can. You can do it in anecdotes. Hitler, for example, features in The Invasion Handbook , made terrible in miniature: "Hitler at high society banquets didn't know how to eat artichoke. He would spoon sugar into vintage wines."
Or you can describe history by free association - by raising debate, through internal monologue, cryptic suggestion, constant self-correction and spoof, of which in this book there are plenty. One part of the poem "Attack in the West" begins "Imagine no imagine not". This one might consider a statement of Paulin's intentions and methods: invitation-cum-instruction-cum-rebuke.
The book has many failings - it's a big book. We should grant Paulin his overall structure, a colourful, curiously comforting mass - cento means "patchwork" - that just about hangs together. But some of the detail in the stitching! The obsessive, nudging wordplay is a habit now, and simply annoying: "Merz", for example, begins "must be Schmerz / of course I twitter am". He doesn't seem to trust his readers to have read the same books he's read, or to have the same range of reference. "Do I need / To spell it out? Is it possible / That none of you can understand?" he writes in an early poem, from The Strange Museum . He can't resist spelling out. And he can't resist a phrase such as "clement as Attlee" either, such as might have occurred to him when he was still in short trousers.
Demanding study, deserving of attention, The Invasion Handbook will prove popular among professional code-crackers and the creators of curricula. Its value, for this reason alone, is therefore considerable. The great thing is, we've all paid for it already. So don't buy it. Steal it. Or just wait till your children bring it home with them from school.
Ian Sansom's The Truth about Babies is published by Granta in June.
