26/03/19: Nicholson Baker – The Mezzanine (1988)

It was interesting to read this classic after working through much of the author’s other work. His first book, The Mezzanine is an astonishing achievement that slows down time to detail the events and – in particular – the thoughts that took place in a single office lunch break.

There are super-detailed analyses (with long digressive footnotes) on shoelaces, drinking straws and ice cube trays. Baker really gets inside the mundane reality of objects – almost down to the atomic level – and makes you see them afresh. He finds sensual pleasure in exploring the most ordinary and familiar things.

One brilliant section offers four reasons why you should feel less upset about the death of brain cells as you age. Another astounding passage describes the ways that “staplers have followed, lagging by about ten years, the broad changes we have witnessed in train locomotives and phonograph tonearms, both of which they resemble”.

Whether delighting in the joys of perforation or contemplating what people do while alone in lifts, this novel (which isn’t really a novel at all) amounts to a terrific rendering of consciousness.

22/03/19: Tony Hobbs – One Pair of Boots: Land’s End to John O’Groats (2000)

I was very keen to read about a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats (a.k.a. the LeJoG), but this wasn’t quite the account I was hoping for. The author generally fails to inspire with his descriptions of the physical feat of undertaking the walk, which he completes slowly over nearly 15 weeks. Nor does he especially engage the reader with descriptions of people and places along the way, although it’s touching when he seems to make a friend called Nicky:

“She was tall, with a mop of thick light brown hair, spoke with a soft Devon accent, and was reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea...In the dark we left the pub and walked the half mile to where Nicky was camped. She held a torch while I put up my tent, and then we looked at the stars, she pointing out the Plough and North Star.”

You wonder if he is somewhat smitten, although he misses the chance to use an obvious joke about carrying a torch.

His interlude aside, the book, like the journey itself, seems to lack passion and purpose. There’s a charity angle (£2 goes to the MS Society for every copy sold), but this is only mentioned when he’s close to finishing. It’s not presented as a motivating factor for his walk. He visits a lot of churches and takes a lot of wrong turns, but you don’t really learn how he feels about anything.

For a narrative like this to succeed, it cannot simply be a list of places trudged through, meals eaten and places camped at. It needs to do something with that information to give you a reason to invest your time in the story and experience it for yourself. He could have taken one aspect – such as the fact that he “consumed 285 pints of beer of 83 different varieties” – and framed the entire narrative around that. It could have worked so much better as Land’s End to John O’Groats in 285 Pints.

But despite all this, I grew to like the author and found myself wanting to get to the end to see him finish his journey – even if the huge achievement of his reaching that point fails to even warrant a new paragraph in the text. There’s something about the sheer ordinariness – the complete lack of pretension – that makes this book difficult to dislike.

13/03/19: Phoebe Smith – Extreme Sleeps: Adventures of a Wild Camper (2013)

This was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “Leave one, take one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

Believing that you don’t need to travel far to find real wilderness, Phoebe Smith hikes to obscure and remote UK locations and then camps in them. Each chapter covers one such location and details what happened when she travelled and slept there. Sometimes it’s fascinating (camping beside the wreckage at the crash site of a World War II bomber) and sometimes it’s a little mundane and repetitious.

There are quite a few typos and sometimes the grammar doesn’t work. See, for example, this awkwardly dangling sentence: “Looking at the map, the River Liza which feeds the reservoir, should have been nearer to where I was standing.” This implies that the river is looking at the map. The commas are in the wrong places, too.

That said, Smith’s cheery and energetic writing bounces along. It's friendly and upbeat – an amiable read.

04/03/19: Deborah Levy – Hot Milk (2016)

“I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?”

I enjoyed The Cost of Living so much that I wanted to read more Deborah Levy. This Booker Prize-shortlisted novel features more of the same dry wit. And it has a similar “voice”.

Excellently plotted, it details what happens when anthropology student Sofia accompanies her mother from England to Spain for treatment at a specialist health clinic. In the sultry idyll of the hot beaches where jellyfish sting swimmers, Sofia begins two relationships – one with a man and one with a woman. As her mother’s mysterious ailment is explored by the enigmatic Mr. Gomez, Sofia reflects on her relationship with her mother and her place in the world.

It’s the best novel I’ve read for a long time. Deborah Levy weaves the threads together with such subtle humour and expanding richness that it’s a joy to read. Recurring motifs – the medusa jellyfish, an embroidered shirt, a taxidermy exhibit, the screensaver image on a broken laptop – resonate throughout and become increasingly laden with symbolic meaning. They combine to create something that feels mythically powerful.