Andrew Hook

Best of 2008

The best thing that happened in 2008? Well, no doubt like a great many people across the world, I don't find this question difficult to answer. Amid so much doom and gloom, the election of Senator Obama as the next president of the USA was a moment of extraordinary and exhilarating hope and joy. For so many people everywhere, but especially for all my friends in America, years of darkness and despondency had finally come to an end. 
     'Say not, the struggle naught availeth,...But westward look the land is bright.'
 
 
Worst of 2008

The worst thing that happened? 2008 has been a King Lear of a year. Encountering his eyeless father on the blasted heath, Edgar is forced to recognise that he was wrong in believing he had already experienced the worst: 'the worst is not, So long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'' So what was the worst in 2008? Zimbabwe? Kenya? Darfur? The Congo? Chinese earthquakes? Mumbai? Ongoing violence, death and destruction in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza? How can one choose? At the cathartic end of King Lear, Shakespeare is able to suggest that the worst is over, the violence a thing of the past: 'The oldest hath borne most: we that are young, Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'
     May one hope that the end of 2008 will bring even this degree of comfort? The bleak answer is probably not. Better to keep in mind the anguished opening words of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' most tortured sonnets: 'No worst, there is none.'
 
Book of 2008
 
Books in 2008? I hope I'll be allowed to mention two. Occasionally I bump into people who once upon a time were students of mine. Perhaps they recall odd lectures I'd given on King Lear or Paradise Lost or The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. But sometimes they remember something else of more permanent benefit: that I'd recommended The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Originally published in 1959, hardly a hundred pages long, and constantly reprinted, it is the one and only guide to good writing I believe in. Keep it at your side.
     The best of 2008? For me the clear winner was Kieron Smith, Boy.  James Kelman back on top form. A wonderfully imaginative recreation of ordinary Scottish life and culture.

Andrew Hook is former professor of English literature at Glasgow University

Walter Humes [click here]