The 2005 Editors' Picture Awards shortlist is now available. As ever, there's some very impressive photjournalism. But in a world of bold and brash sporting events, terrible natural disasters and graphic wars, I was particularly taken by John James' entry for the Photoessay category, in which he follows the small traumas and excitements of a boy during his first day at school.

Labels: Photography and Art

The vibrant world of this novel is too big and too busy, bursting chaotically through the traditional seams of the rural Indian town of Ayemenem where it is set. Roy constructs, through a snowballing, growing structure of tiny details, a riotous environment of human life, of insects, of satellite television, business enterprises, weather, sexualities, educations, politicians and conflicting ethnicities.

Like that later Booker-prize winner, Life of Pi, the novel employs the perspectives of the fairy-tale, placing children - in the form of the twins Estha and Rahel and the newcomer to their world, the English-born Sophie Mol - as the characters about whom the asynchronous narrative is orientated, and through whose naive and roaming eyes the reader watches. Entering the minds of the young, this work implies, can help adults to establish order in a complex, apparently random and disconnected, postmodern world because children understand (though they often misinterpret) their various discoveries in acceptably imprecise terms, in relation to other, earlier, small moments of discovery. Every new object or lesson is described in terms of something different, by itself insignificant, which they already know or have learnt: a squashed frog leaves a frog-shaped stain on the road, and so a dead person leaves a human-shaped hole in the universe; a sexual deviant sells orange drink, and his semen is another form of juice. Children advance happily, though not always innocently, through metaphor, of which this novel is an adult's sustained, delightful and complex version.

Labels: Arundhati Roy, Literature

I don't have much to say about what was, as in the previous two, a fairly mundane campaign and a wholly anticipated result. Within the limits always going to be imposed by the farcical British electoral system - in which the Conservatives can gain more votes than Labour but fewer seats, or the Lib Dems have a fifth of the vote but only a tenth of Parliament - the result was very pleasing.

Sitting on the fence, by Stephen Von Der Heyde [From BBC News: In Pictures]The Conservatives did not get in, and thus can not kick those millions (or is it merely thousands?) of immigrants back to where they belong (a war zone on the other side of the globe will do very nicely, thank-you); the Lib Dems achieved their best result in modern political history, and will have learnt the valuable lesson for next time that they need to focus on - and will gain by - splitting not only the Labour vote, but the Conservative vote as well; and with his reduced majority Tony Blair will no longer be able to govern with such presidential style, and those bills which his party disagrees with (perhaps because they are bad bills, TB?) may now get filtered out, regardless of the lashes of the Whips.

Labels: general election, Politics