Liverpool as a port for memories in the new novel from Orange Prize winner Linda Grant.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 24 May 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Linda Grant was born in Liverpool and that's her view of the city. I was there this week and they have two fantastic art galleries and a sophisticated football manager among other things.

Bonnie Greer, I think she's wrong about Liverpool, is she right about the rest of it?

BONNIE GREER:
I was moved by this book, but I was moved more by, not what was in the book but what I could relate to personally - about exile, about coming face-to-face with your life and so forth. That's what moved me about When I Lived In Modern Times.

The problem is the prose in this novel never actually lives. She's so busy giving us information. She's doing it because she's doing something quite important which is documenting an invisible minority, which are the Jewish people.

That's extremely important but she writes as if she's never going to write another book again. She misses the central metaphor in this book which is actually not the synagogue she's looking for, not the hotel that one of the characters is building, but the cold cream the mother brings over on the Kinder Transport.

It's a beautiful metaphor - whenever the mother puts the cold cream on, but she loses that, she misses it. The other big thing technically is that one of the characters is supposed to be a native Chicagoan. So am I and I did not recognise any of this as Chicago speech at all. It jarred badly for me.

MARK LAWSON:
John Carey, Linda Grant came out of journalism and it seems as if she's trying to make a merger between the two forms, journalism and fiction?

JOHN CAREY:
I think that's slagging off journalism a bit. Journalism can be very good. This is not a book...

MARK LAWSON:
I wasn't suggesting it was bad.

JOHN CAREY:
This is terrible, I think and journalism should be better than this. This is written in cliches. The characters are impossible, I don't believe them for a moment.

The woman is meant to be an intellectual. She was on Newsnight, the hot academic babe on Newsnight. Well, there is not an academic idea in the book.

As for Joseph, the chap who's building the hotel to house art works, he says nothing to make you think he knows anything about architecture or art. They're ciphers, these characters.

You're right, the cold cream should be the central thing as the book is very concerned about bodily decay, so that would have been a lovely central symbol. But the book was so cluttered it never came out.

MARK LAWSON:
I wonder which of our hot intellectual babes the character was based on? Miranda?

MIRANDA SAWYER:
I started off reading this and really hating it and after a while I did get to like it. I got to like Alix as a character but mostly because of the discussion of her body falling apart. The fact that she got to 49 and didn't have a lover and how that felt.

Where it was good, was when she was talking about what it's like to be a woman who's getting older. I think that really worked, It's just the other stuff that doesn't get going at all.

MARK LAWSON:
Bonnie, that is important because you have so many novels now about women in their 30s finding the right man just in time. This is a more realistic and more interesting subject.

BONNIE GREER:
This novel is trying to be something more than a woman getting older. This novel is about a people in exile, a people attempting to find their place in this world.

That's the big idea that Linda Grant is trying to explore. That's important. What I think she doesn't yet do is let go. It's as if she has so much to say to us, she's desperate to say it, but she doesn't let go of the work. That is a very important idea.

JOHN CAREY:
She's not big enough for these themes. When it ends in Dresden, they meet this aunt who went through the Dresden fire bombing. If you read the accounts of survivors, they are some of the most terrible documents to come out of the twentieth century.

Here it's used to top off a romantic novel. It seems indecent. She's just not big enough for the themes she writes about.

MARK LAWSON:
It's not a cliched romantic novel. It's not sentimental.

JOHN CAREY:
No, the stuff about bodily decay, that's what it should have been about.

MIRANDA SAWYER:
Although you said it's not cliched, I did feel at the end, I don't want to spoil it, but there was a Mills & Boon bit. I thought this was moving towards I wonder what's going to happen.

MARK LAWSON:
There's much more realism about what's happening to the body and why.

BONNIE GREER:
But hang on, if I can say the book isn't big enough, that the things she's trying to create, instead of putting it in this form, which is a quite conventional form, she should let it go and let it fly. Spread it out, let it be bigger.

MARK LAWSON:
Still Here by Linda Grant is out in hardback now.