While Coetzee’s novel is primarily a story of personal disgrace – our protagonist is cast out of his university’s ivory tower thanks to his inappropriate fondness for students – the country’s political transformation is not a simple backdrop. I happened to finish Disgrace just as the Guardian reported on the plight of a couple of white South African asylum seekers refused residence in the USA. Whites who, like Professor Lurie, have failed to find a comfortable place in the new South Africa.

So this is a novel that captures change experienced from the other side; those favoured by an unfair system; those forced to surrender privilege. The professor doesn’t appear to hanker for apartheid’s return, but his disgrace is symptomatic of a world view somehow incompatible with the new South Africa. The country has transformed without bloody revenge, but that doesn’t mean there are not scores to settle and in Coetzee’s world such issues are worked out personally.

A Booker Prize winner, Disgrace obviously fits the emerging literary genre and it’s an accomplished piece. Yet I found the style somehow distancing – almost alienating – holding me back too far from the people on the page; capturing a story that needs to be told, yet somehow too coldly.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel……Cloud Atlas

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In the quiet old days before blogs filled cyberspace and clogged Google – before Google and even before Alta Vista – people used to resort to pen and paper and write a letter to their local rag.

This first step towards interactivity was not as popular as all this blogging malarkey might make you think. My first proper employer – a Stockport public relations consultants – had a publishing arm that produced an equestrian magazine called Hoofprint (I’ve no idea if this link’s correct). It did okay, but we had to make up letters to fill the space and on one occasion competition entries (this was tricky, as I had to make sure my entries were good enough to be printed as runners-up without bettering the winners).

Anyway. There are still some good old-fashioned letters pages and Katharine and I make a point of checking out the Manchester Evening News’s postbag every night. 153,125 copies of the MEN are sold each day, making it the UK’s third biggest evening newspaper and even they print almost every letter they receive; look here and here’s a cracker. Then there’s the pennames people use…

It’s sad that Postbag’s web presence – www.manchesteronline.co.uk/postbag is so poorly maintained. Some days’ letters get uploaded, some don’t. I guess there’s some bored geek whose job it is to upload the daily rants and that some days he (almost certainly he) simply can’t be bothered (probably writing his blog). Which is a shame because I wanted to share the letter of an old Swintonian called Ed, published on Monday 26 April. With the web archive skipping a couple of days, I used a feedback form to ask if Monday would appear and to my surprise – I was expecting to get the bored geek – the operations director of Guardian Media Group’s regional digital division replied in such a way as to reveal he knew little of blogs and even less of the MEN’s postbag’s place on his website.

So it falls to me to bring Ed to cyberspace. Ed hasn’t gotten over Swinton’s absorption by the City of Salford in 1974; ‘Real Swinton people still detest Salford and all it stands for…when I pass the Salford sign… I feel it should not be there… oh and I come from Lancashire not Manchester or Salford’. I don’t believe Ed. I think he’s gotten a little carried away. Should I ever go the same way, please shoot me.

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Michela Wrong uses her New Statesman column to argue for more corpses on TV as exposure to the realities of war – like the 800 civilians killed by the US in Fallujah over last couple of weeks – can only turn us into peaceniks.

News bosses seem desperate to save us from the horror, preferring safe images of ‘choppers rattling across the sky, marines opening fire in an eerie green glow’, you know, the kind of stuff that makes you proud. Yet I recall that before hostilities began, it was war supporters who wanted more gore. The argued that faced with images of torture, gas attacks and summary execution under the old Iraqi regime, the public’s natural – albeit base – response would have been anger and a call for revenge.

It’s not just war images that are censored. Concurrent with Michela’s campaign, others are fighting to ensure our television screens are at all times suitable for viewing by the most sensitive 10 year old. Nobody seems to be making the case that exposing children to violent imagery will produce more passive adults.

Violence begets violence – ‘why don’t we just bomb the lot of them?’ – more gore means more war supported by a fearful population whipped into a frenzy, like that of a ten year old shooting PlayStation monsters.

Scared and scary

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Monster’s not the gore-fest some make it out to be – unless the words ‘based on a true story’ set your teeth on edge. It’s okay as a non-judgemental biopic of a serial killer whose decline – nasty die, then naughty, then good – seems too steady. Theron’s Oscar winning ugly is no substitute for fully realised characterisation.

A watchable 7.5 out of 10

(PS After seeing Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, I realise I’ve been harsh on Theron. 14/6/4)

Adaptation……El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed)

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