30/01/17: Nick Papadimitriou – Scarp: In Search of London's Outer Limits (2013)

"I felt growing in me a pulsating county consciousness. I could sense sun-heated scraps of corrugated iron beneath which adders sheltered, bin liners of rags strewn in wastes by remorseless A roads, scentless mayweed on gravel mounds nodding in the breeze by wretched abandoned orchards, languid afternoons spent sitting and sipping white wine in the gardens of big houses on the edge of the Hertfordshire atom towns, generations of owls and cats ruthlessly terminated by strychnine. I became a squirming energy spewing forth rats and roaches, disused fire extinguishers rusting in derelict office blocks in Hemel Hempstead or Stevenage. I roared, a fiery demiurge, below the pantiled bungalows, the pubs decked out in brewer's Tudor, throwing all this multiplicity into the world in my fury before subsiding back into the humming darkness of the undifferentiated planetary mass."

"Scarp" is the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment. Nick Papadimitriou walks this landscape and writes about it with a poetic, almost mystical sensibility. He seems to fuse with the landscape itself, "becoming" the places and histories he describes. In one stunning chapter he inhabits the mind of a rook who lives across the ages and charts the changing world.

In a spot-on Amazon review, someone named "JF Lawrence" explains it thus: "Scarp the place is a secular locus of the mysterium, ungraspable by its seer as he trudges across its plains, traces its causeways and culverts, notes with a botanist’s rigour its flora and an animal lover’s gentleness its fauna, relates tales of local characters and their fortunes, inhabiting them like a psychedelicised dybbuk, uniting his consciousness with that of the earth and elements. Scarp the book is the testament of a unique and extraordinary mind that has created itself in the image of the numinous north London/Hertfordshire/Middlesex mindscape, a book of visionary hope, a deconstruction and reintegration of its subject and its subject’s perambulating magus."

I enjoy reading what's called "psychogeography" (see also Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, and the work of Rebecca Solnit). This may be the most imaginative book so far in that loose, expansive field. In fact, it reaches way beyond mere psychogeography – that label can only limit what this book achieves. With its flights of fancy and deep eccentricity, it creates an entirely new form, absorbing nature writing, local history, and surreal, impressionistic autobiographical monologue that flits between fiction and non-fiction with no hang-ups about being consistent with either. This truly remarkable book "blew my mind", genuinely changing the way I think about my environment. How many authors can do that?

Excitingly, Nick P is working on a follow-up with the wonderful title Middlesex/Codeine Linctus.

06/01/17: Frank Herbert – Dune (1965)

Dune was on my shelf a long time before I finally started reading it this week. I'm rather fond of this book, even though parts of it seem not especially well written. In places, it's philosophical and almost psychedelic. But it's expansive, too, ambitiously creating an entire world – and a universe beyond. I also have a slight attachment to it because my Dad read the entire series of six books during the 1980s (with different jacket designs). This old paperback is from 1968 and when I opened it the spine immediately cracked in several places. One other curious thing about this novel is that the exact same image was later used for Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, despite the picture clearly illustrating aspects of the Dune story (such as the blue eyes of the Fremen on Arrakis). Was there really such a shortage of sci-fi art at this time?

01/01/17: Lawrence Block – Sinner Man (2016)

Borrowed from Barnet Libraries. This was Lawrence Block's first crime novel, somehow lost for 50 years and only published again at the end of 2016. There's an interesting afterword about its tangled history by the author, who himself never saw a copy of the original book. As for the novel itself, it's a fast-paced thriller about a man whose wife dies after he hits her. Rather than own up to the police, he takes off and begins a new life working with the Mafia. Initially, everything goes to plan, but of course it can't stay that way... This is an entertaining read. Not up there with the best of Block, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless.