26/12/18: Tim Parks – Rapids (2005)

Fascinating novel that keeps you guessing. The plot details the relationships between a bunch of holidaying kayakers and their instructors Clive (an environmental activist) and Michaela (his emotionally fragile girlfriend). You sense immediately that the danger of the rapids they ride will mirror the danger of the relationships that are developing within the “community experience”.

Tim Parks carefully weaves together several narratives and successfully increases the tension by using character to drive drama. Menace and threat are always imminent. It is to the author’s credit, however, that the book does not end the way you think it will. Instead, it continues in an almost surreal manner.

One gripe: there are a few typos. Twice within two pages there were misplaced apostrophes (“you’re hand’s bleeding” and “you’re head filling with blood”). Was it not proof-read?

That aside, it’s his best novel since Europa. It stays with you.

20/12/18: Sebastian Junger – The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997)

Turned into a successful film starring George Clooney, The Perfect Storm details the drama of the Andrea Gail, a Massachusetts swordfishing boat that was caught in a storm of vast proportions in 1991.

The biggest challenge to the author is that none of the crew survived to tell their stories. I was curious to see how he would piece together the narrative without the help of testimonies from those who were there. He does this using a variety of sources. There’s plenty of detail on shipping lore and ways of life in the small town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Radio reports to other ships and observations on weather patterns from other craft in the vicinity help build the picture. Plus he has interviewed rescue workers and survivors from other dramas in the same once-in-a-lifetime event, along with affected families and colleagues.

It’s so much richer and fuller than the film, and yet the film did its best to cram in what it could and was surprisingly faithful to the text. But whereas the book can take several pages to explain how – for example – rescue swimmers jump into the sea and have a strong chance of survival, in the film this looks reckless and even unbelievable. Likewise, the author can take the time to explain how ships float – or don’t – and goes into detail on the science of sinking. Later he tackles the science of drowning – what actually happens in those last few seconds. Disturbing stuff.

But overall it’s the humanity of the book that makes it special. Junger has a real sense of the lives at stake and he’s sensitive to the many losses. It’s never merely an adventure yarn.

18/12/18: Iain Broome – A Is for Angelica (2012)

A novel about a man who spies on his neighbours and keeps files on their activities. We learn that he does this to help cope with a personal crisis: his wife has had a stroke, he is her sole carer and – as a result of his grief – he is keeping this secret from his friends and family.

The premise is intriguing, but elements of the plot never have the ring of truth about them so the characters and their motivations rarely convince. Even the dog seems unbelievable. Sometimes you’re not sure if a scene is meant to be funny or slightly disturbing. There’s a “suburban whimsy” aspect that could have been mined for comedy but which doesn’t really work.

But, surprisingly, as the book progressed and I continued reading I found myself becoming more and more engrossed in the peculiar story. You do want to find out how it will end. Yet ultimately it articulates such a bleak scenario that you’re left wondering why the author felt the need to share this with the world.

30/11/18: Will Self – Junk Mail (1995)

Excellent anthology of essays, interviews and other ephemera. In the introduction, Self explains that  the book was originally intended to focus on drugs. (At one point the title was to be Junk Male.) Even though that focus changed, drugs are the subject of the first quarter of the collection and remain a major theme throughout. Articles include a review of William S. Burroughs’ collected letters, a visit to a crack den and a visit to the drug-rehabilitation centre at Downview prison in Surrey. He watches David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch with members of an Oxford drug clinic and offers assorted thoughts on English motorways, Nicholson Baker and the wit of Woody Allen. There are also thought-provoking essays on the IRA, Satanic abuse, cryogenics and Englishness and English culture.

There are insightful interviews with J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis. Refreshingly, Self’s intelligence is such that he understands those authors’ work well enough to instigate meaningful conversations that shed light on their writing and his own. There’s also an entertaining piece in which he meets Bret Easton Ellis and is disappointed to find him a thoroughly likeable, decent kind of guy.

All it lacks is an index.

26/11/18: Howard Jacobson – Pussy (2017)

Prince Fracassus, heir a fictional Republic named Urbs-Ludus, is a thinly veiled Donald Trump and this short novel parodies the US president’s rise to power. It takes you from his birth to election night. Unsurprisingly, Jacobson paints him as a hateful person without a single redeeming feature. He’s a spoiled, whining bully who abuses his power and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

The most interesting passages are the ones dealing with his childhood and various failed attempts to educate him:

“Words! Until now he had whimpered, exclaimed, ejaculated, and whatever he had wanted had come to him on a golden platter amid praise and plaudits. So why, he wondered – or would have wondered had he possessed the words to wonder with – the necessity for change? The enormity of the shock, for any child, of having to go from pointing to naming cannot be exaggerated. But for Fracassus, for whom to wish was to be given, it was as catastrophic as birth. To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you. Fracassus knew of no such difference. The world had been his, to eat, to tear, to kick. He hadn’t had to name it. The world was him. Fracassus.”

Inevitably, Fracassus finds his outlet in Twitter: “...Twitter didn’t entail any of the tedious conversational niceties he feared. Twitter was an assertion of the tweeter’s will, full stop. It imposed no obligation to listen or respond.”

While Jacobson makes some good points, the book ultimately fails because its subject is already way beyond satire. There’s nothing you can say or do about Trump that makes him any less dangerous or any easier to comprehend. Also, this could have been a funny book but somehow isn’t. Maybe the very real menace is just too close and too raw to work as comedy. Let’s hope that we all last long enough to be able to look back on these times and laugh.

22/11/18: Vera Caspary – Laura (1943)

A hardboiled, noir-ish thriller. Detective Mark McPherson investigates what he considers to be the murder of Laura Hunt by looking into the motivations of the various men who loved her. But inevitably, nothing is as it seems and a major plot twist turns this into a different kind of crime. Interesting shifts of narration keep you guessing as three different men in love with Laura all reveal hidden secrets. It’s difficult to say more without giving away what happens. This is a highly readable novel, with emotional insights and a depth of character that isn’t always found in this kind of fiction. It’s very clever the way the story is told from different perspectives, allowing the reader to accumulate knowledge without ever quite piecing it all together. Laura was made into a film in 1944 starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb and Vincent Price.

01/11/18: Jez Butterworth – Jerusalem (2009)

This sad and funny state-of-England play offers a snapshot of the life of Johnny “Rooster” Byron, who lives as a small-town drug dealer and petty crook in a caravan in the woods. After years of living on the edge of the law, the net is tightening around him. A local thug is after him and he’s about to be evicted by the council. Meanwhile, a bunch of friends and hangers-on drift in and out of his orbit – partly to score drugs and partly because Johnny’s charisma acts as a magnet for local outcasts and losers. The play makes some fairly damning points about social conformity and where the country is heading.

30/10/18: Matthew De Abaitua – Self & I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition (2018)

Fascinating. Matthew De Abaitua worked as Will Self’s live-in assistant in a remote Suffolk cottage. Self acts as an inspiration and sort of mentor for the author’s own literary aspirations. The memoir flits between the time in the cottage (much of it spent alone while Self was travelling) and other episodes from his life. It’s a hybrid of autobiography, literary criticism and social history – a real window into how different life was in the 1990s, the last era before the dominance of the internet.

20/10/18: Mark Mason – Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground (2011)

Mark Mason sets out to walk every tube line overground, passing all 269 stations from Acton Town to Woodside Park. It’s a good idea for a book and one that works some of the time. I read this while commuting on the tube and several times found myself at or near the station he was passing. He varies things a little by walking one line at night (Jubilee) and one in heavy snow (Metropolitan). He walks part of the Northern Line with Geoff Nicholson (author of The Lost Art of Walking) and part of the Metropolitan Line with Bill Drummond. Like Will Self, he also walks to Heathrow Airport – but unlike Self, he doesn’t then catch a plane and walk into New York.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Mason writes too little about the physical and psychological experiences of walking. I want to hear about the conceptualisation, the effort, the feats of endurance, the blisters, the mental fatigue, the moments of joy and despair and what it means to him to walk so far. Instead, while he touches on these things briefly, it often reads like a collection of facts and trivia stitched together around the ‘tube walking’ device – not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but not quite the book it could have been. Even when he walks the Circle Line as a pub crawl with a friend, stopping for a drink at a pub corresponding to every station, he doesn't address the questions you might expect to have been answered. How drunk was he? How did he feel the next day? Did he really fall out with his companion on the walk (as is hinted)? And how much did all those drinks cost? 

Ultimately, it’s great for facts. I learned that the longest line is the Central (46 miles), which includes the longest journey with no change (West Ruislip to Epping) and the least-used station on the network (Roding Valley). The District Line has most stations, with 60. The most vowels used in a station name (five) is shared by Mansion House and South Ealing. The longest tunnel is on the Northern Line: Morden to East Finchley, Bank branch), at 17.3 miles. The deepest station is Hampstead (192 feet) and the highest point above ground is the Dollis Brook viaduct near Mill Hill East (58 feet).  The only line that connects with all the others is the Jubilee, which also is the line that crosses the Thames the most times (four).

29/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)

As I read it, the spine on this old paperback copy soon disintegrated and the pages started falling out. I found myself picking off what was left of the glue until I simply had a pile of loose pages that could not be salvaged. I then recycled these as I went along – a messy and unappealing way to read.

This saga of a man who flits between two women isn’t one of my favourite Murdoch novels. Here’s one typically overwrought speech: “Your youth and your beauty are holy to me. I worship your innocence. Trust me and give it to me. It is the right time. And love me just a little in your heart without fear. I have no will to entangle you or to hold you. I will be kind to you and will set you free and even send you from me. How could I presume to speak about your mother if this were not so? I want you now and I need you now and this is something which your destiny and not mine has ordained. But I need your affection too. I have never begged for anyone’s affection before, but I beg for yours now. If you can give it to me as you love me the world will be made anew in which your manhood begins.”

People simply do not speak like this and I’m pretty sure they didn’t in 1974, either. Also, while her entangled human relationships always make for engaging material, her presentation of children is oddly unbelievable. But what the novel lacks in credibility, it more than makes up for in depth: her situations and moral dilemmas really make you think.

19/08/18: John Bayley – Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)

A moving account of their life together. Bayley flits between a history of their relationship (meeting in Oxford, low-key marriage, studious if messy cohabitation) and present-day observations about Iris living with Alzheimer’s. (She would die in 1999 and he in 2015.)

Although his account is written with obvious love and tenderness, it’s uncomfortable to read about him caring for his ailing wife. Details of how he washes her, for example, feel too private and intimate to be shared with the general reader, who knows Murdoch only through the great intellect displayed in her writing. Sometimes her condition seems so pitiful, such as when he describes he repeatedly asking the same question or watching children’s television:

“At the same time she will watch the animated cartoons on children’s TV with something approaching glee. They can be a great stand-by at ten or so – the trickiest time – till eleven in the morning. I usually watch the Teletubbies with her, and become absorbed myself in their odd little sunlit world, peopled with real rabbits, real sky, real grass. Or so it seems. Is some human agency inside the creatures, some actual and cunning little mannikin? It certainly looks like it, and the illusion, if such it is, continues to hold both our attentions.”

You feel voyeuristic reading this stuff, even if he did choose to share it with the public – for example, when he describes how she “stoops like an old tramp to pick up scraps of candy paper or cigarette ends from the pavement”. With Iris clearly having no say in the matter, you are left with no choice but to accept the wish of a husband to write about the woman he loves.

There are moving passages and also anecdotes of their friends and travels. There’s not much about her books or her writing processes, frustratingly, although he does sometimes reveal the people and places behind certain stories. If nothing else, it sends you straight back to the novels where her fierce intelligence remains alive and undimmed.

13/08/18: Doc Pasquale – Back in the Rain: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (2015)

This is a very short book – I read it on a couple of tube journeys – without any page numbers. Frustratingly, roughly half of it is backstory detailing how Dylan came to be in the position to write and record this masterpiece. The basic facts of his 1967–1974 life and career are conveyed concisely and with empathy, but if you have read other Dylan books you will find no remarkable new insights here. The analysis of the album itself – a record famously made and then re-made before it was released – forms the all-too-brief core of the book. A few typos slightly spoil Back in the Rain, but it works well as a useful companion to the album. I just wish the author had dug deeper into the topic.

12/08/18: Patrick Süskind – The Pigeon (1988)

My third novel in a row from the Holborn Library 20p shelf. This is a brilliantly written account of one day in the life of a man whose world is turned upside down by a simple event. Translated from German by John E. Woods, the writing perfectly captures the sense of balance and control that is threatened by the bird of the title. Jonathan Noel is brought to the brink of total despair by the sudden appearance of a pigeon in the hallway of his apartment. This unexpected arrival is a symbol of randomness in a life that is otherwise completely regimented. The author expertly conveys how this one breach of order begins a chain reaction of existential torment. It’s a mark of the strong premise and its execution that you simultaneously sympathise with Noel’s plight while realising just how ridiculous he is being.

11/08/18: Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat (1970)

This made the shortlist of the “lost Booker Prize” of 1970, which was retrospectively announced in 2010 and won by J.G. Farrell’s Troubles.

It’s a disturbing short novel about a woman who travels to another country and arranges her own murder – a study of mental illness and alienation. There are flashes of wit and social insight, but the knowledge that it will end in a violent death – and the cold, clinical way that the protagonist seems to engineer this – makes for a rather nasty read.

It also has some of the strangest jacket copy I have ever encountered:

11/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Italian Girl (1964)

“The extreme beauty of the scene put me into an instant trance. It was always a trick of my nature to be subject to these sudden enchantments of the visible world, when a particular scene would become so radiant with form and reality as to snatch me out of myself and make me oblivious of all my purposes. Beauty is such self-forgetting.” (p.59)

This was 20p from Holborn library – astonishing value for money.

Plot: engraver Edmund Narraway learns that his mother has died and returns to his large family home to pay his respects. There, he finds his family in a state of extreme disarray. His brother is having an affair, as is his brother’s wife. Meanwhile, his niece is pregnant. Edmund soon becomes tangled up in their relationships, with his presence only complicating matters further.

As always with Iris Murdoch, there’s real intensity in these situations: every conversation seems highly charged. Every meeting has consequences. Every action has dramatic implications. It’s a short but thrilling novel that’s sadly not regarded as one of Murdoch’s best.

From the book jacket: “Against a hallucinatory background of water garden and camellia trees, real emotional violence keeps breaking out. Once again Miss Murdoch shows her extraordinary talent for keeping the story going and the reader guessing through a series of events which peel off layer after layer of delusion till the core is revealed.” I can only agree as regards the “hallucinatory background” but “keeping the story going” is damning this great writer with faint praise.

06/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea (1978)

A dazzling novel that understandably won the Booker Prize in 1978. Charles Arrowby is a successful theatre director and playwright who retires to the sea and begins writing his memoirs. People from his past keep showing up and he is witness to strange, possibly supernatural events (I especially liked the haunted-house motifs). He discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Mary “Hartley” Fitch, is living nearby and embarks on an obsessive quest to claim her from her husband – even though it is made clear that she has not aged well.

In fact, we soon question Charles’ recollections altogether: was the couple’s entire youthful relationship something he had idealised and embellished over time? Is he truly infatuated or having some kind of delusional breakdown? Just how reliable is this narrator, who we often see more “objectively” through the eyes of his various visitors? As Charles’ obsession grows, the situation begins to spiral out of anyone’s control.

The sea is described wonderfully: almost a character in its own right. There’s also a lot about food (“Only a fool despises tomato ketchup,” he notes at one point). Iris Murdoch’s fiction often seems emotionally overwrought, but it’s actually that quality that I admire about her writing. Situations and relationships are examined in microscopic detail and with a spiritual, philosophical depth that other authors simply do not attempt. You know from the start that someone is going to drown in the sea, but it’s a mark of the tangled threads she weaves that you can never guess who.

As the book progresses, the plot takes increasingly surreal twists. Murdoch plays with elements of mysticism, melodrama and even farce as she works through to a resolution (of sorts). Like all great art, it works on multiple levels and leaves you thinking.

20/07/18: Anna Kavan – Ice (1967)

From the blurb on the back: “No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it.”

This short novel – £1 from the Octavia Foundation on High Street Kensington – really annoyed me. A chronicle of unexplained obsession set during an unspecified disaster, it frustrates on every page.

Ice is creeping across the world. A man pursues a woman. Beyond those basics, it quickly becomes evident that none of the events described can be assumed to have definitively taken place:

“Reality had become something of an unknown quantity to me,” says the narrator. And: “The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams”. Because of the constant blurring between “objective” events (if there are any) and the narrator’s visions, you end up not believing in any of it. Indeed, the narrator’s unreliability is hammered home with tedious frequency. The nature of reality is an interesting theme that has been explored by countless authors in more engaging ways. 

“My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.”

Yes, we get it! But two pages later he reports “an odd sort of fragmentation of my ideas”. But this goes on and on: “it dawned on me that this was the reality, and those other things the dream. All of a sudden the life I had been lately living appeared unreal: it simply was not credible any longer.”

“I fled from the room in utter confusion,” explains the narrator at one point, summing up the exasperating novel in a nutshell by adding that he “did not know what had happened, or if anything had”. 

“All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.”

The characters are vague and sketchy. What we do learn of them shows them to be too unpleasant to care about. The “plot” does gather pace towards the end and it finally becomes engaging. I tried to read this while waiting for a delayed flight and it was absolutely not the engrossing book I hoped it would be – or needed in that situation. There are curious typos, as well. In two places, the word “re-started” is printed as “re-tarted”. You can only assume that Penguin scanned an old copy of the book and failed to check the results.

14/07/18: Geoff Nicholson – The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism (2008)

“I feît that Oxford Street needed to be redeemed. I thought it might be a good place to do my particular, strange, walking project. I came to a decision. I would make six transits of Oxford Street, there and back, from Tottenham Court Road tube station at the east end of the street to Marble Arch at the west, and back again. I would spread them out over the course of one day. I would see how the street and my walking changed.”

The title sums it up pretty well. The book examines every aspect of walking – a particular passion of the author – from competitive and historical walkers, to spiritual matters and walking in graveyards. Although he meets Iain Sinclair, who rightly describes Canary Wharf as one of the worst areas for walking, Nicholson is fairly dismissive of the label “psychogeography”, stating: “It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn’t have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me, what I’d really known all along, that walking isn’t much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That’s why I love it and love doing it.”

The book is good for alerting you to cultural reference points. There’s plenty on J.G. Ballard, whose work I already love, but it was useful to be made aware of Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steve Gough’s naked walking projects, which led me to view the excellent BBC documentary One Life: The Naked Rambler.

I also respect Nicholson for his dislike of a certain sport: “My hatred of golf knows few bounds. It seems to me that golf isn’t merely a good walk spoiled, but rather a good piece of walking territory made inaccessible, annexed by fuckwits in pastel clothing.” Well said.

The least successful part of the book involves his thoughts on walking and popular music. It’s all very well listing songs with “walk” in the title, but he fails to examine them on any deeper level – for example, “I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash really isn’t a song about walking. The metaphor could have been explored but that opportunity isn't taken. A few typos and errors along the way (there’s no Bob Dylan song called “Tom Paine”) also lose him points, but in general this is well worth your time.

19/06/18: Lawrence Block – Small Town (2003)

A New York crime thriller that cleverly assembles a group of loosely connected people and explores the threads that increasingly tie them together. There’s a crime writer accused of murder, a former police commissioner who somehow can’t get the case out of his mind, a gallery owner exploring the outer extremes of her sexuality and a serial killer driven insane by the grief of losing his family because of September 11th. In fact, the destruction of the twin towers is at the heart of this story. It’s very much a New York novel, with a love for the city infusing even the more disturbing elements.

If there’s one criticism it’s that – after a long build up – matters seem wrapped up a little too quickly and conveniently at the end. As usual, Block’s prose is dynamic enough that you’d be happy for the whole thing to have continued for a few more hundred pages.

29/05/18: Anita Brookner – The Debut (1981)

Not many novels mention Totteridge, so I was pleased to read this: “Mrs. Cutler had spent the previous weekend with her sister-in-law, whom she loathed, in Totteridge (‘Beautiful place she's got there. Just like the country’).”

The Debut is a witty and insightful look at families and how dysfunctional they are. Ruth, an earnest young academic researching the works of Balzac, ends up putting her ambitions on hold as a result of her eccentric and demanding parents. There’s real poignancy, with plenty of laugh-and-cry-at-the-same-time moments. The character of Ruth’s mother, a minor actress, is especially well drawn.

Ultimately it’s a sad book about the ways our hopes and dreams are so often limited by the actions of others and circumstances beyond our control.

07/05/18: Martin Amis – The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1986–2016 (2017)

I’m a big fan of Martin Amis and his collections of essays have always been as entertaining as his novels.

This book is organised around loose themes such as literature, politics, sport and more personal preoccupations. Most of these pieces are compelling even when you don’t care much for the subject – Princess Diana, the porn film industry and losing at poker in Las Vegas.

He can be very funny in places: “I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain)”.

He absolutely savages Jeremy Corbyn, calling him “undereducated” and “humourless”, with “no grasp of the national character”. And he’s extremely astute about Donald Trump in a piece written in May 2016: “Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is? Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, Trump is telling us that he, like every other honest Republican, is a xenophobe, and proud of it. That is worth knowing. And what he is additionally telling us is that roughly 50 per cent of Americans hanker for a political contender who a) knows nothing at all about politics, and b) won’t need to learn – because the old ‘politics’ will be rendered defunct on his first day in office.”

Some of the other political essays were less riveting, and occasionally certain pieces don’t quite deliver. A review of a Philip Roth biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont, for example, simply consists of Martin’s own thoughts on Philip Roth’s career. Almost nothing is said about the book he’s meant to be reviewing.

I was disappointed to find some errors, too. The inside jacket states that “Martin Amis is the author of 10 novels”, then the list of his fiction offers 16 titles – of which 14 are novels. Similarly, it’s a shame to see Don DeLillo’s name spelt as “De Lillo” on page 234 when it was written correctly on pages 177–185. Given how much Martin values and writes about precision in language, he should at least have had a decent proof-reader go through this.

One of the most enjoyable offerings is an affectionate portrait of his friend Christopher Hitchens from 2010, written after he became ill but before his death (December 2011). “The Hitch”, Amis claims, thinks “like a child”, writes “like a distinguished author” and speaks “like a genius”.

Best of all are his illuminating articles on literature. Amis really gets to grips with J.G. Ballard, Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and brings sparkling insight to their work.

29/04/18: Lawrence Block – The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (1980)

Another in the series of novels about a bookseller who has a rather more lucrative second profession as a thief. Gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr acquires a valuable rare coin, only to find out that the fence he hopes can sell it for him is murdered. As usual, Bernie is accompanied by his wisecracking best friend Carolyn Kaiser. And as usual, the dialogue is crisp and witty.

But while it’s a thoroughly readable novel, the plot was more flimsy and less believable than usual. So it works for Block fans who just love the amiable rhythms of his sentences, but it will be less satisfying to those craving a genuinely compelling "whodunnit".

24/04/18: Atticus Lish – Preparation for the Next Life (2015)

Unusually for book blurb, the text on the back cover sums it up pretty well: “Underpaid and overworked, illegal immigrant Zou Lei survives by taking odd jobs in Chinese restaurants in the underbelly of New York, sleeping on a blackened mattress in an overcrowded boarding house. Brad Skinner, traumatised and volatile, his psyche ravaged by three tours in Iraq, hitchhikes to the city hoping to exorcise his demons. Meeting in the margins of Queens, each finds something they long for in the other, and their unlikely love story becomes the heart of one of the most powerful and widely acclaimed novels in years.”

The novel takes a highly detailed approach to the grim and unforgiving reality of attempting to live in New York outside of mainstream society. It’s heartbreaking to read about the extent of poverty and suffering, and the unrelenting struggle the characters face. Brad’s fragile state is all too convincingly depicted: post-traumatic stress disorder has left him horribly damaged. Meeting Zou Lei appears to offer hope: “they could form an army of their own, a two-person unit, to fight these difficult battles involving his mental recovery and her immigration status”. But there are no simple solutions. Life becomes further complicated for Brad when he makes an enemy of a sadistically violent ex-con (the son of his landlady) and you sense that there won’t be a happy ending...

In many ways this is a brutal novel. It’s certainly the least sentimental “love story” I have read, although it’s not really a love story at all. Instead, it’s an account of two desperate people trying to find their place in the world. What makes it impressive is the way the author piles on detail after detail, building real intensity – for example, when he describes Zou Lei’s long and delirious night walk from Queens to Great Neck. There are also remarkable passages depicting the mess and clutter of city life, the food people eat, and the impersonal vastness of a huge city in a huge country that doesn’t care if you live or die.

And while the book builds slowly, it becomes compulsively readable from the moment that its two main plot strands start to converge. By the end I was absolutely transfixed, even though it’s such a damning indictment of modern life that it’s painful to read.

13/04/18: Olivia Laing – The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016)

“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others.”

“Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Though it wasn’t by any means a comfortable experience, I began to wonder if Woolf wasn’t right, if there wasn’t more to the experience than meets the eye – if, in fact, it didn’t drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive...What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?” 

In this brilliant analysis of what it is to be lonely in an urban environment, Olivia Laing draws on examples from art and culture as diverse as Henry Darger, internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, Edward Hopper, Zoe Leonard, Klaus Nomi, Andy Warhol (and Valerie Solanas, who shot him) and David Wojnarowicz. Her sensitive biographies of these figures – one per chapter – bring out the prominence of loneliness in each of their lives. She observes how, in many cases, that loneliness served as a guiding principle in their work. Also factored in at various points are Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and singers Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Billie Holiday.

This isn’t a dry academic exercise, although Laing does bring an academic’s rigour to her analysis. It’s a deeply personal work. She’s not afraid to expose her own vulnerability and to talk about the “shame” she associates with being alone. You are left in no doubt that she understands how it feels: “It feels like being hungry: being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”

There’s a compassionate section on the impact of AIDS on 1980s America and how poorly it was understood at first. The isolating effects of the internet and social media in more recent decades are also considered. I found the book most interesting when the author wrote about her own life, and would have welcome even more of that. Her experiences of using Twitter – and how it both connected and distanced her from others – will strike a chord with anyone who checks their phone a little too often.

I particularly like the ways she weaves together apparently incongruous threads, with the subject of one chapter naturally popping up again in another with a satisfying sense of connectivity. It’s a fluid construction, with the book flitting effortlessly between genres: art criticism, autobiography, biography and psychogeography. At its heart is a deep empathy for anyone who has ever felt alone.

09/04/18: Ian Fleming – Thunderball (1961)

I wanted to read a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, having only read the pastiche by Kingsley Amis. Thunderball, filmed in 1965 (and then remade in 1983 as Never Say Never Again), may not have been the best place to start.

There’s a lot wrong with this book. It certainly hasn’t dated well. Some of the lines are pure Alan Partridge: “Petacchi inched the great nose of the plane down. Any moment now! It was going to be easy! His fingers played with the controls as delicately as if they were the erotic trigger points on a woman. Five hundred feet, four hundred...”

Plus, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s almost ridiculously sexist: “Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other’s faces.” The same chapter also states that the driving mirror is “an accessory rarely used by women except for making up their faces”.

No one could get away with this now: “there was an earthy warmth in the cheeks that suggested a good healthy peasant strain from the Italian Alps and her breasts, high-riding and deeply V-ed, were from the same stock. The general impression, Bond decided, was of a wilful, high-tempered, sensual girl – a beautiful Arab mare who would only allow herself to be ridden by a horseman with steel thighs and velvet hands, and then only with curb and saw bit – and then only when he had broken her to bridle and saddle.”

Thunderball is slow to get going. Even when it does get going, it’s dull: there’s a strange lack of suspense. For a thriller, it simply lacks thrills. There’s a lack of narrative tension and action. For much of the plot you have the frustration of watching Bond slowly learn what you, the reader, learned more than a hundred pages back. Even when the “big climax” finally arrives, it amounts to little more than an underwater scuffle between scuba divers. The fact that the entire world is in peril – owing to the theft of two atomic bombs – is oddly not milked for the drama that that fact should present.

If it’s worth reading at all, it’s for the little insights into Bond’s character: “Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses, but on his empty stomach, and in his febrile state, the sugary brew acted almost as an intoxicant. Three cups he reckoned had the effect, not of hard liquor, but of just about half a bottle of champagne in the outside world, in real life.”

Then there’s the peculiar section at the health farm: “Was his personality changing? Was he losing his edge, his point, his identity? Was he losing the vices that were so much part of his ruthless, cruel, fundamentally tough character? Who was he in process of becoming? A soft, dreaming, kindly idealist who would naturally leave the Service and become instead a prison visitor, interest himself in youth clubs, march with the H-bomb marchers, eat nut cutlets, try and change the world for the better?”

But, curious psychology aside, this is one of the worst novels I’ve ever read.

06/04/18: Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty – A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs and Dangerous Days at Sea (2010)

“My head was hurting. What seemed so simple—a kidnapping for money—had turned weird. Yemen, suicide attacks, fatwas, Fatah, souls exchanging places. I had to fight to keep my mind right. The real obstacle wasn’t the Somalis, I told myself. It was fear. Every time I pushed through it, I found that I could persevere.”

This is the true story that was made into Paul Greengrass’s terrifying 2013 film Captain Phillips. That film attracted controversy, with some members of the ship’s crew disputing its accuracy, but having now read the book I can fully believe this account of what happened.

Richard Phillips was captain of the Maersk Alabama, a US cargo ship travelling off the Horn of Africa. The ship was boarded by Somali pirates hoping for a huge ransom pay-out. After a few desperate hours, during which he played for time and helped his crew to escape, Phillips managed to get the pirates off his ship and onto a lifeboat. While his crew were saved, he was forced to join them as a hostage. What followed was a five-day siege at sea.

Like the film, this survivor diary is tense and gripping. Phillips lives with fear around the clock. His captors practise fake executions, observe baffling religious rituals involving the ropes that he’s tied up with, and attempt various kinds of psychological torture.

“We all set our endurance levels low, out of fear we will fail,” he writes at one point. “We think, So long as I have this job, or this house, or this partner, or this amount of money, I’ll be okay. But what happens when those things are taken away from you? And more—your freedom, your dignity, even things we take for granted, like your ability to use a bathroom? What happens when people try to take away even your life? You find that you are a larger and a stronger personality than you ever imagined you were. That your strength and your faith don’t depend on how secure you are. They’re independent of those things.”

Riveting stuff.

24/02/17: David Keenan – This Is Memorial Device (2017)

I’ve never read anything like this before. It’s a novel that takes the form of a biography of an obscure band, Memorial Device, based in Airdrie, western Scotland, in the early 1980s. Assembled by fan Ross Raymond, the book consists of various recollections, interviews and essays by people associated with this micro-scene. It digresses wildly and the group supposedly at the core of the story never comes into focus. This isn’t a failing of the book. It seems to be a deliberate reminder that the more deeply you probe into history looking for answers, the more questions you will find. It also makes the point that the group was far less important than the sense of community it briefly inspired. Possibly, the scene was so fragmented and insignificant that it never even counted as a scene – except to those who invested their time and emotions in these characters and who need to sustain their myth.

In the hands of a lesser author, this could so easily have become cheery, blokey nostalgia for men of a certain age who grew up with punk and post-punk. Instead it’s something much more realistic and savage.

Various appendices extend the illusion that this is a real biography. There’s a list of bands in the scene: “A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986”. There are accounts of the major and minor players in the story. And there’s even a 25-page index – deliberately itemising the contents of the novel in ridiculous detail.

Parts of it are incoherent and hard-going, but that's presumably deliberate. When it clicks into place – such as chapters 17 and 24 – it’s so compulsively readable that you wish more of the book had been presented this way.

04/02/18: Deborah Levy – Swimming Home (2011)

Shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize, this is a short, funny and disturbing novel about mental illness. Two English couples, one with a 14-year-old daughter, holiday in a villa near Nice. As the back cover explains: “Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's wife allow her to remain?”

This book reminded me of The Accidental (2005) by Ali Smith, which also sees a mysterious stranger moving in with a family and transforming their lives. And the intense relationships unfolding by the pool of a hot holiday villa made me think of The Pregnant Widow (2010) by Martin Amis.

Kitty Finch, we soon learn, is “mental”. As the story unfolds you know it can’t end happily. It’s a hugely intelligent piece of work that distills the complexity of human human behaviour into economical sentences.

03/02/18: Ottessa Moshfegh – Eileen (2016)

“Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.”

Shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, this is a hugely atmospheric, claustrophobic, wintry novel that takes on a noirish/Hitchcockian element and becomes highly compelling.

Eileen lives a life of quiet desperation and self-loathing with a grim job at a boys’ prison. Her home life is a prison too, as she thanklessly cares for her dangerous alcoholic father. Then she meets the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John and her fortunes are transformed. You become aware that her life is about to change drastically, and the anticipation of the defining event is what the entire book builds up to. The novel is slow to get going but that’s precisely the point: she makes you feel the painful reality of isolation and loneliness.

But this isn’t a depressing book, nor a worthy slice of “misery lit”. The narrator’s sharp observation and the darkest possible wit – plus the old-person-looking-back-at-their-life perspective and steadily escalating tension – give it a strong narrative pull. By the final 100 pages I was transfixed.

21/01/18: Glendon Swarthout – Luck and Pluck (1973)

From the back cover: “Charlie is one of the good guys, a good old clean-cut American boy, right down to his Brooks Brothers suit and cordovan wing-tip shoes. He heads off to LA in search of gainful employment and the American Dream. Right there on Wilshire Boulevard he finds it in the hands of Combs-Cohn-LoPresto, top-line Ad agency. Down in the street he meets underground Lulu and Leo the countercultural rocket. There are a lot of laughs, especially as C-C-L stipulate a few things when he joins them: it's creative chastity for Charlie or sex and the sack. But Charlie has the last laugh, and it's a gut-buster.”

Exploring a clever but ridiculous plot, Luck and Pluck tells the tale of a young man who leaves a Native American reservation in New Mexico, moves to Los Angeles and joins an advertising firm. When he learns that they are scamming him, he decides to scam them in return.

It races along with some of-its-time satire about the counterculture. Our hero’s apartment is slowly taken over by hippies and hangers-on, including “the sandal-maker, the bead-stringer, the wool-spinner, the tie-dyer, the ceramicist, the folk-singers, the organic gardener, the Alpha Wave nut, the two Jesus freaks”, plus a pompous, self-absorbed anarchist intent on blowing up “snack food shops”.

There are wider themes about freedom and commercialism, but this short novel is essentially a witty and entertaining shaggy-dog story. A pleasing way to pass a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon.

05/01/18: Peter Hook – Substance: Inside New Order (2016)

Offering tall tales and ripping yarns in which he reconstructs entire conversations from the early 1980s with suspiciously precise recall, Peter Hook carries on the story he has already partly told in his Haçienda nightclub and Joy Division books. It begins with the group’s decision to carry on without Ian Curtis. Having all their equipment stolen in New York, they returned to the UK and bought all-new kit. This was partly what set them on a different course as a synth-based band.

He makes no secret of his dislike of singer Bernard Sumner, taking every opportunity to ridicule him. Likewise he has little respect for Gillian Gilbert, the keyboard player, and he credits her with minimal creative input.

It’s fascinating to read about the absolute mess of New Order’s business and tax affairs. They naively took little interest in their accounts, with their finances catastrophically tied up in the economic black hole that was the Haçienda, and they wasted millions owing to mismanagement.

Hook’s tales of hedonism, groupies and wild rock-star behaviour are at odds with the myth of New Order as a somewhat dour, icy unit: “On record, of course, we remained a perfect cerebral proposition, beloved of intellectuals everywhere. In real life, however, we continued to lay waste to that image wherever we went.”

There’s also a fair bit of what went wrong in the New Order democracy. Hook blames the other three for attempting to minimise his input, placing his bass too low in the mix and making them even more of a synth band in the process: “And it was funny, because much later, when Bernard went off to do Electronic with Johnny Marr, I'd hear that he was doing the same to Johnny. Barney had one of the world's best guitarists on board and and filling all the tracks up and leaving Johnny just one track for he’d layer hundreds of keyboards and sequencers on the songs, mixing them and filling all the tracks up and leaving Johnny just one track for his guitar.” In fact, according to Hook, Marr had initially suggested working with him instead (“hand on heart, it happened”).

From the late 1980s, New Order seemed to become a battle of egos between Sumner and Hook, both regarding themselves as the keeper of the legacy. Sumner’s own book, Chapter and Verse, is frequently referenced in this one, with Hook swearing on his children’s lives that certain statements were completely false.

In addition to the running narrative, there are discographies and tour listings for each year of the group, with Hook’s added commentary. There are also “geek alert” boxes in which technical equipment and processes are explained.

This is a huge piece of work – 752 pages – and you do wonder how he can remember so much from so long ago, but it’s a very entertaining read that rattles along with endless anecdotes and a healthy dose of retrospective wisdom. It could have been even bigger. In an interview on the Salon website, Hook is quoted as saying: "The actual book was 300,000 words and 1,200 pages, and the publisher insisted we cut it down to below 800. We actually lost a third of the book, which was heartbreaking. So it had a hell of a lot more detail, and a hell of a lot more stories and geek alerts in it. It was another book, basically. So we’ve got that held in reserve for whenever we can find a way to use it."

Things go really wrong as the band become increasingly estranged and work on solo projects (Electronic, The Other Two, Revenge), Hook becomes a cocaine addict, they are forced to record Republic (which Hook regards as a Summer solo LP) to save the Factory debts, but Factory goes bankrupt anyway. Later come Hook’s alcoholism and Hook and Sumner beginning to loathe the sight of one another, until Hook finally announced that he’d left the group in 2007. He believed that they had split up, but that wouldn’t be the end. Sumner reconvened with Morris and Gilbert to record an additional “New Order” album (released in 2015) and ugly legal tangles would follow. It’s an all-too-familiar story of how a bunch of young and ambitious friends end up being business associates at best and arch enemies at worst.

One other thing you can’t help noticing is that the death toll in this story has been fairly drastic:
• Ian Curtis died in 1980, aged 23.
• Martin Hannett, their producer, died in 1991, aged 42.
• Rob Gretton, their manager, died in 1999, aged 46.
• Tony Wilson, Factory boss, died in 2007, aged 57.
and
• Caroline Aherne, his wife from 1994–97, died in 2016, aged 52.

Substance is often funny and often tragic, but always fascinating.