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.