Arts View: Nick Ahad

Over the festive break I had the rare opportunity to get stuck in to a few good books, not for work, but because I wanted to – Stephen Fry’s autobiography, Sunjeev Sahota’s Ours Are the Streets and King Crow, the debut from Michael Stewart.

I also started the latest Michael Arditti novel, Jubilate, a wonderful exploration of love, loss, faith and the many forms it can take.

The novel is engrossing, one of those beautifully written stories that takes you deep inside a character – it reminded me of The End of the Affair. I was really getting my teeth stuck into it and then... the new year started, bringing with it all the stresses, strains and time stealers that seem to accompany January. I kept trying to snatch bits of time to return to Lourdes, the setting of Jubilate, but found there was little supply. Then I was struck down with a virus that meant I had barely the energy to lift a book – all I’ve really been able to do since the end of January and for a large part of this month is slump on the couch or in bed, waiting for the next coughing fit to wrack my body.

Fortunately – very fortunately – my home has a “man cave”, equipped with a TV and sofa that now bears an imprint of my unshfiting body where I have ensconced myself this past two weeks. Even more fortunately, my illness coincided with the launch of the new TV channel Sky Atlantic.

Now, I detest Rupert Murdoch’s rapacious buying up of the media like it is his personal playground as much as anybody else, but the devil has all the best tunes – and I confess I am one of Sky’s several million subscribers. Watching Sky Atlantic’s Boardwalk Empire, Treme and Blue Bloods, I realised that we are living through one of the great eras of television drama.

I missed The Sopranos, the series that arguably heralded this golden age, the first time round – fortunately Sky Atlantic shows the whole shebang from the start this week.

A few nights ago I actually tired of immersing myself in the complex lives of these sprawling American families and had just about enough energy to lift up a book and returned to Jubilate and realised why Sky Atlantic’s brilliant shows are so brilliant. These series, where the stories unfold over such a long time and in which the lives of the characters are explored forensically is the form of storytelling that comes closest to the depth, breadth and scope of a novel.

The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men – they are truly brilliant, historic even, pieces of television. But they are also the sort of time stealers that got between me and Jubilate. I can now report that it is a wonderful novel, from start to finish.