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.