Forget beige – meet the women who are ageing with attitude

Angela Neustatter, author of The Year I Turn ... – one of a slew of books for older women who won’t ‘age gracefully’. Photograph: Olly Hoeben

Apart from a few "frumpy years" in her 50s, when she lost confidence in her right to wear leopardskin tights, author Angela Neustatter says she has never let age define her.

Now she wants her latest book to be a call to arms to young as well as older women to fight back against the "invisibility" that is said to descend once they pass the first flush of youth.

The Year I Turn … is just one of a slew of books and films coming out that suggests Neustatter is among a growing band of women who refuse to go quietly into middle age and beyond.

A trend that began with Lynne Segal's Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing will be joined by In Your Prime: How to Age Disgracefully by India Knight, which is due out in June. Why Frenchwomen Don't Get Facelifts came out in January, with its author, Mireille Guiliano, claiming: "Ageing gracefully is an expression I don't like. Ageing with attitude is what I believe in."

Neustatter, who is 70, added: "This invisibility thing is so ridiculous, ludicrous. And conforming to someone's idea of what you should look like or wear at any particular age is patently not logical. A woman should not be restricted to beige because she is 50. Or not listened to because she isn't young.

"We need to have more confidence in having a voice and I do think, from the people I know and meet, that things are starting to change. Women won't be so easily ignored and younger women are playing a part in that, too. The explosion of feminism again among the young, and their interest in what older women have done, is fabulous."

Interest in older women – albeit those who have always refused to be invisible – bodes well for the latest book by Germaine Greer, who at 75 has rediscovered herself as a conservationist, and for 64-year-old Arianna Huffington's Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Wellbeing, Wisdom, and Wonder, which is tipped to be a bestseller, even before its March publication date.

The grey women's pound is being chased in film, too. In an interview with the Guardian last week, actress Kristin Scott Thomas, 53, said the film industry is starting to notice that there is a market for films about older people. Pointing to the fact that, for a start, the whole population is ageing – "so they've got to make something to entertain us" – and that teenagers no longer dominate box-office receipts, she pointed to the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, as well as the return to TV of Birds of a Feather. "I just think there really need to be stories about people who have been through life and are still hopeful."

Even fashion magazines are beginning to regularly feature an older model, or offer style advice for age groups who won't be buying crop-tops this time around, thanks. Designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Donna Karan and Diane von Furstenberg have not allowed themselves to fade away. We've come a long way since Jean Paul Gaultier was still able to "shock" by using grey-haired models on the catwalk, back in the 1980s. Last week's unveiling of an American Apparel underwear campaign featuring 62-year-old Jacky O'Shaughnessy caused very little stir.

"It all comes with the strong caveat, however, that if you are poor, or caring for someone, or suffering from bad health, then none of this will apply," said Neustatter. "I'm aware of that and I am very lucky in that regard. I'm not suggesting for a minute that all is wonderful for everyone, because it is certainly not. But, [there is] a certain group [of older women], who have looked after themselves and think, I will buy those leopardskin tights or wear a shorter skirt, if that's what I am comfortable with.

"I'm not saying 70 is the new 50. Seventy is the new 70. It's very different from being 50 when you're at that stage of 'is that it?' and worrying if you're with the right person or have done enough, but it is also fun.

"There is no reason in the world why you shouldn't be heard. Older women have something to say – and we will say it."

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The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson – review

Femme fatale: our hero meets his former college sweetheart in a Boston bar. Then things go downhill… Photograph: Alamy

If ever there was a perfect victim for a femme fatale to sink her claws into, it is George Foss, the inept protagonist of Peter Swanson's Larsson-esquely titled debut, The Girl With a Clock for a Heart. George is approaching 40, bored, and feels "as though his world had been slowly drained of all its colours". He has spent the 20 years since his college sweetheart disappeared thinking, mistakenly, that he sees her everywhere. Then, one August night in Boston, there she really is.

She's in danger; she needs his help. Will George deliver a huge stash of banknotes to the man she stole them from, and say sorry from her while he's at it? Of course he will. Will he do this despite being punched in the kidneys by someone who is hunting her, and despite knowing she is very far from who she says she is? Of course he will.

She's very attractive, after all, and was his first love. Swanson's thriller weaves together two timelines: George at college, meeting the girl he knew then as Audrey, falling for her, then grieving when he learns she's killed herself over the Christmas holidays. There's a wonderful scene when he visits her parents, and realises the picture they have of their Audrey isn't his. His Audrey – Liana Decter – is still alive, and may have done some terrible things to escape her real past.

Then there's George in the present, spotting Liana in his local bar, being drawn into her femme fatale world of guns and tranquilliser darts, false identities and diamond robberies.

Swanson has set out to create a hero who is just an average guy thrown into a world of crime he has no idea how to handle. Fair enough. But George is so terribly clueless! Perhaps he hasn't read enough thrillers, and he should be forgiven for being in thrall to Liana, but he makes such silly mistakes. He unnecessarily breaks into a deserted house which is almost certainly linked to the Bad Goings On. He locks sliding glass doors to protect himself from a baddie with a gun. He forgets his mobile when heading into danger.

And he keeps going to sleep! He's even tempted to nod off after the most dramatic scene in the book. A reader is hard pressed not to shout "yes George" when the character wonders "if the limited banks of his memory were entirely filled with details of Liana, all used up on the first semester of college, those 16 heady weeks".

Yet i'ts hard not to warm to this book – and very hard not to read it in one sitting. Of course it's faintly preposterous – at one point there is even a steak knife concealed in a pair of knickers – but it's also lots of fun. Swanson's writing is clean and measured, he throws in a ton of cliff-hangers, and he plays out his stolen identity concept – impossible in the age of Facebook, but how intriguing to remember how it wouldn't have been, 20 years ago – to thrilling, chilling effect.

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The Mistress Contract; Happy Days; The Cement Garden – review

Danny Webb and Saskia Reeves in The Mistress Contract at the Royal Court: 'a real-life story, and an annoying one'. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Samuel Butler said it was very good of God to let Thomas and Jane Carlyle marry each other: it meant that only two people rather than four were made miserable. I felt much the same about the She and He in Abi Morgan's new play The Mistress Contract. Thank goodness this pair got together and prevented another couple being driven mad with boredom.

The Mistress Contractby Abi MorganRoyal Court, LondonStarts 30 JanuaryUntil 22 MarchBox office:
020 7565 5000Venue website

She and He (no names) are lovers. They knew each other at college but then lost touch. Twenty years and several marriages later they meet again and start an affair. She, a teacher who seems to spend more time in women's groups than with her students, finds herself becoming angry with their arrangements and proposes a deal, a written contract. In return for "mistress services" (which boils down to sex whenever and however her lover wants it), he will supply "tasteful accommodations" and "expenses". He, an affluent businessman, accepts eagerly – once he's run the paperwork past his lawyer. The arrangement is enduring. Neatly concealed till the end of Abi Morgan's play is the fact of their spectacular ages.

This is a real-life story, perhaps even a true one. Morgan has based her plays on tapes the couple made of their conversations in restaurants, in bed, over breakfast. It's also an annoying one. "She" seems hellbent on giving feminism a bad name. She talks up her miseries, not least the unpleasantness of sucking cocks, but runs herself down: "I am much less skilled at speaking." She speaks a lot, of equality as if it were as measurable as a bag of sugar. She is stuck in a parody of feminism which sees it as naturally opposed to the idea of liking men. He is stereotypically short on emotional nuance and eager to get his trousers off, pretty much for anyone. Both start from the assumption that He will have a good time in the sack and She won't.

Saskia Reeves and Danny Webb can't make this grim couple engaging, though with great skill they suggest their gradual ageing. Of course He and She don't have to be likable to be interesting, but to demand attention their conversation needs more layers than this. Their only topic is themselves. There are no undercurrents, no surprising contradictions, hardly any tonal variety. In Vicky Featherstone's production everything is explicit. Merle Hensel's design shows a parched, unchanging Californian landscape with a phallic cactus. This allows some meaningful talk about the need for irrigation. Until the very end all exchanges take place with Reeves and Webb standing as if, far from having a series of intimate encounters, they were engaged in public debate.

As perhaps they were all along. It turns out that those tapes were made with a purpose other than that of recollection. They are turned into a book. And now, of course, a play. So enmired is He and She's language in the idea of mercantile exchange it should come as no surprise that they want to cash in their memories. Was that the point all along?

Juliet Stevenson in Happy Days: ‘Her sincerity and fervent naturalism light up the role.’ Photograph: Tristram Kenton

You would have to go a long way to find a more intensely feminist play than Happy Days, which was first staged in 1961. It makes a woman the centre of a play that talks of the human condition. You can, it suggests, have a handbag and still speak for everyone. For me, this has always been a more genial, though not more ingratiating play than Waiting for Godot. It is one of Beckett's Charon-like dramas, ferrying a human audience from daily life to the other side of realism. It has, as does Krapp's Last Tape, one foot in the dull and one in the barmy. "What's it meant to mean?" asks a man, looking at this female yapping away while "stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground". "What," responds his wife, "are you meant to mean?" The marvellous thing about this exchange, exactly catching some first responses to Beckett, is that it is within the play itself.

At first Juliet Stevenson seems an unlikely Beckettian. She doesn't offer the customary music hall vivacity or bleached wanness. In fact, her sincerity and fervent naturalism light up the role of Winnie. She steers a fine line between braveness and bravura with nothing of the incantatory in her speech. She dips cosily but adventurously into her marvellous bag, as if it's likely to contain, along with a gun, the heavens' embroidered cloths. She shows life leaching from her, as it does from the terminally ill. In Natalie Abrahami's absorbing production each lurch towards death is accompanied by a fizzling roar. At the same time, Vicki Mortimer's sympathetic, bleak design makes the landscape look like a costume. A warmly coloured skirt of shingle at first spreads out like a New Look frock. Later, thanks to the great Paule Constable's lighting, that shingle becomes grey, and risen around Stevenson's neck like a surgical collar.

'Florid and bustling': Georgia Clarke-Day, George Mackay and Ruby Bentall in The Cement Garden at the Vaults. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The Vaults might seem a perfect setting for The Cement Garden. Under Waterloo station, led up to by a concrete graffiti corridor, the place echoes with the rumble of trains, as Ian McEwan's first novel rumbles with the approach of sex and police cars and discovery and death. Yet this is not a perfect match of styles. McEwan's prose is slinky with wit and suggestion. Its tale of a parent buried in the cellar, and adolescent fumbles buried under bewildered shame is offered up almost implacably, as if it were an everyday story of youthful folk. McEwan rarely raises his voice. David Aula's production too often does so. Its limber young cast swing from girders. The youngest child, over-emphatically powerless, is played by a brown paper puppet. Spoken directly to the audience, running over the action as a commentary, the first-person narrative is made florid and bustling.

This staging is not frightening, but it is full of ideas and slowly the evening delivers some feeling of the novel. Ruby Bentall has the smug seductiveness of a cat; David Annen almost bursts from his skin with frustration. One aspect, often overlooked in excitement about sibling incest scenes, sings out clearly. You are against boys dressing as girls because you think it's bad to be a girl, one child coolly points out. Feminism is here too.

Star ratings (out of 5)
The Mistress Contract **
Happy Days ****
The Cement Garden ***

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Tom's Midnight Garden by Phillippa Pearce - review

Tom's Midnight Garden explores time and how it can be turned back. It is a very exciting book that has a hidden mystical presence and all the time you are reading it you find lots of clues that all add up to one big surprise at the end; but when it comes to it, you realise you've known all along.

It all starts when Tom's brother Peter gets the measles at the start of the summer holidays. Tom is taken away to his aunt and uncle's against his will; not
allowed to be in his house in fear of catching measles but not allowed to mix
with the public in case he already has them. So he has to spend all day every
day cooped up inside with nothing in the slightest to interest him. He is trying to get to sleep when he hears the old grandfather clock strike one – no hang on two – it had skipped an hour and yet it carried on – three, four, five!

"Yes, and it hadn't finished yet: Eleven! Twelve! 'Fancy striking midnight twice
in one night!' jeered Tom, sleepily. Thirteen! proclaimed the clock, and then
stopped striking."

This is an extremely good book about going back in time and I would recommend it to people who need a change because there aren't many books like it. It would appeal to nearly all ages as I first read it when I was eight and still love it now I am twelve. So if you come across it in your library or bookshop, do pick it up, you won't regret it.

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The novel: not heading south, any time soon

Tony White reading his novel Shackleton's Man Goes South, which is being published by the Science Museum.

Tony White's last "traditional" novel was published by Faber in 2003 – that is, traditional in its form and distribution. Michael Moorcock, writing in the Guardian, said that Foxy-T, a story about call shops and kids in the East End of London, proved that the contemporary novel "has never been more alive". Its riot of street slang and Bengali-cockney idiom expressed the hybrid modernity of the contemporary city. But White's work since has been anything but traditional, and even more contemporary.

In 2012, White was invited by art producers Situations and Bristol city council to create "Missorts", an audiobook app for the centre of the city. It's triggered by GPS as the listener moves through the Temple Meads and Redcliffe areas. White collaborated not only with the council, but app developers, a composer, other writers, local libraries and a local church. It's a permanent public artwork, telling a story about the area, and was accompanied by a novella, Missorts Volume II, available as a paperback or free ebook.

Now the Science Museum has published a new book, and its first novel: Shackleton's Man Goes South. At heart a book about climate change, it's also, says White, "a kind of alternative history of publishing in extremis, examples of the apparent human necessity of finding new ways to tell and share stories, and how the future of writing, publishing and reading might need to be as much in the low-tech past as the hi-tech present".

Visitors to the museum's Atmosphere gallery can download the novel for free – as can anyone from its website. (Physical copies can be bought from the museum's shop too.) For White, these collaborations allow him to explore the possibilities of writing further, and see their effects more directly: "As the physical square footage of the traditional book trade diminishes, these commissions have given me the chance to engage directly with readers and to learn from them."

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The Godfather by Mario Puzo - review

Having dominated both popular film culture and literature for the last 40 years, Mario Puzo's world renowned masterpiece The Godfather is the undisputed patriarch of an awe-inspiring legacy. It's translation onto screen was magnificent (part 3 excluded) but there can be no shortage of superlatives to describe the book in which this idea was first born.

1946. New York. Picture Don Corleone; a family man; a generous man; a reasonable man ... and ruthless Sicilian mobster, the hardened Lord of the Cosa Nostra.

But the old man's days are numbered and the future of his empire, built on the sweat and the blood and the grit borne over his long and tumultuous lifetime, rests in the hands of his children. Santino, the angsty, quixotic hot-head; Fredo, the fickle, weak-willed sapling; Tom, his adopted son of German-Irish descent, who despite his irrevocable love for the Don, has not yet proven his cunning or worth. There's Connie, too, frivolous and crude, a daughter who has just been grafted into a doomed marriage.

But, finally, there is Michael, the youngest Corleone who refuses to conform to family tradition. Controversy is an endemic part of him. He enlists to fight in in Second World War as a common "Yank" and then later gets engaged to an All-American Pastor's daughter.

But when his father takes a turn for the worse and old tensions between the five great mafia families of New York intensify, Michael begins to give in to intrinsic Sicilian pride and with betrayal, embitterment, bloodshed and a narcotics operation fraught with the eminence of capital punishment, he falls.

A good man's heart goes cold, pickled in the sour juices of revenge. Family values are taken to a new, frankly preposterous high. Unparalleled levels of gang violence and mindless murder are opened up in Puzo's almost musical and poignant narrative (the reader can practically taste the bitter citrus of Sicilian lemon on a dusty Italian evening).

This book is powerful and simply brilliant. The characters, so hardened and caustic at first glance, are in truth foolish or at least under the influence of greed and blood-thirsty ambition. But they are also sad, sad microcosms, none more so than the protagonist, Michael. What appears to be his heroism and desperation to escape forced Sicilian "norm" at the beginning of the novel change so subtly throughout the story that Michael's transition from good to bad is almost seamless.

And then, when the gunfire and butchery has ceased, you yourself are left questioning to what limits you would go for your family's protection.

But, of course, nothing is ever personal. Just business.

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? - Berlin 2014: first look review

Mild academic facade ... Noam Chomsky. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Here is an intriguing proposition: a filmed encounter between scatterbrained film director Michel Gondry and the distinguished linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. With its subtitle "an animated conversation", you know that Gondry won't be restricting himself to the traditional head-shot interview format, and that proves to be the case: much of Chomsky's musing is illustrated with squiggly, hand-drawn graphics that do a nice job at elucidating some of the more rarified concepts that are aired. Moreover, Gondry occasionally interjects with amusing voiceovers: apologising for his poor English, his difficulties with the animation, and the like.

The conversation itself sticks largely to Chomsky's work in linguistics and philosophy – we don't get Chomsky-the-fashionable-political-activist, but rather we dip a toe in his real achievements in academia. The title, it turns out, refers to a conundrum Chomsky poses in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures: how transforming a complex sentence ("The man who is tall is happy") into a question is an operation of instinctive and non-logical grammar. At least, that's how Chomsky patiently explains it to Gondry, whose puppy-dog enthusiasm transmits itself from the screen in bright early-MTV colours.

Gondry makes some headway in burrowing behind Chomsky's mild academic facade: by asking him about his early life, what he does for entertainment, and about his recently deceased wife, we get a sudden glimpse of Chomsky-the-human-being (no doubt entirely trivial ones, if you're a signed-up Chomskyite). But little asides – such as hearing him talk about his parents' interest in cultural Zionism, or his regular jail time when his kids were growing up, or just the fact he and his wife liked to be alone with each other – create an unexpectedly rounded portrait.

But the bulk of the film is devoted to giving Chomsky space to explain his theories to a non-academic audience. It might be possible to see Gondry's broken-English stumblings and random-association images as complementing Chomsky's descriptions of generative grammar, but I'm not sure this is entirely the case; in the nicest possible way, this is teacher-and-pupil stuff. You can only regret that Gondry missed the chance to repeat Woody Allen's legendary philosophy class gag – "I cheated on my metaphysics final. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me". I wonder what Chomsky would have made of that?

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