31/07/20: Sarah Waters – The Little Stranger (2009)

This 500-page novel, shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, initially frustrated me. I don’t like to give up on books, but for 200 pages I found it fairly uninvolving. A couple of times I nearly hurled it across the room. Only as I approached the halfway mark did it begin to come alive and hook me in.

The story deals with a country doctor becoming involved with the Ayres family (a mother, her son Roddy and her daughter Caroline) and the fading Warwickshire stately home in which they live. It pretty soon becomes apparent that supernatural forces permeate the house and influence events there – with tragic consequences – but the doctor refuses to accept this possibility and attributes everything to mental delusion. His relationship with the house and family is further complicated when he falls in love with Caroline Ayres.

The supernatural material is handled expertly and with real subtlety. Allowing everything to be explained away, the author enables her narrator to doubt the very events he is observing. But it is infuriating to only see the world through his dull, unimaginative eyes. He’s a stuffy, rigid character, and while the story clearly needs his scepticism, his inflexible worldview does make for a less interesting authorial voice. He’s also there to draw out the theme of class inequality. His attraction to the family is ambiguously tied up with his own social aspirations.

By the end of the book, the slow pace has become transfixing. You know that more bad things are going to happen and sure enough they do.

26/05/20: Luke Haines – Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (2009)

“I am none of the following, but have been described variously as: the pioneer of, the godfather of, the man who invented, the butcher of, and the forgotten man of Britpop (1990s version). Let’s not get too bogged down in tracing the lineage any further back. It’s never cost-effective and always leads back to a caveman banging a rock with the tusk of a woolly mammoth.”

Luke Haines was never really a part of Britpop. The Auteurs were a band on the outskirts of that scene, who predated most of the nonsense associated with those acts. He’s a brilliantly acerbic, extremely witty narrator (I read both of his books twice) and most of what he has to say about his contemporaries is not very complimentary:

“The full idiocy of the era has yet to be felt. But I already loathe the brashness, the vicars-and-tarts-forced-jollity of the Blur–Elastica alliance. The head boy and head girl appear to be doing rather well for themselves. I had more of a Carrie-style ending in mind for the nauseating couple.”

He reserves particular dislike for Suede. “The Auteurs are European, intense and intellectual,” he states. “Suede are a quick fix. Baked beans and sulphate. Brett’s pseudo-bumboy androgyny is more Grange Hill than Bowie.” He keeps coming back to them, too: “I’ve heard their single and I know I can outwrite them. Brett’s got a few good lines and knows there’s a bit of mileage to be had in writing lyrics about ‘retards’ and ‘dads’, but overall they’re just a little too reliant on the old wasted-glamour-in-council-estates routine.” He also has a bash at The The, who he toured and fell out with.

Haines depicts the rise and fall of The Auteurs, not shying away from his own self-destructive role in their ups and downs. By the sounds of it, they were never a “proper” band in the old-fashioned “gang of mates against the world” sense of the word. The bassist was his girlfriend and the cellist irritated Haines so much that he refuses to call him anything other than “The Cellist” throughout the text.

The book concludes with a happy ending of sorts – the formation of a second group, Black Box Recorder.

A savage satire on 1990s culture, Bad Vibes is hugely entertaining.

26/09/19: Christopher McDougall – Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009)

Brilliantly uncategorisable book about ultrarunning, the Tarahumara people of Chihuahua, Mexico, and a 50-mile desert endurance race that the author himself takes part in.

It’s a rambling, restless narrative covering a lot of ground (literally!), but the writing is razor-sharp and very witty. As well as bring a vital work of ethnography, it’s an almost gonzo journalist account of being a runner that brings to life various colourful characters.

McDougall argues along the lines of the “endurance running hypothesis”, i.e., that humans developed the ability to run for long distances so that they could run down their prey.

Perhaps the most memorable part is chapter 25, in which he details how terrible trainers are for your feet. He investigates barefoot running and provides compelling evidence that trainers offer nothing whatsoever beyond protection from rough surfaces and the cold. In fact, he argues that modern running shoes are actively bad for us – denying the human foot its own evolutionary genius by ironically cushioning it into experiencing even more impact. And therefore making us run unnaturally and harmfully. This, he claims, means that the more “hi-tech” the trainer, the more likely we are to be injured. His argument is backed up with a lot of respectable research and suggests the world is being sold a lie about running shoes.

Born to Run is highly recommended – entertaining, funny and informative. Worth a read, whether or not you yourself run.

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.

07/03/17: Nick Papadimitriou – Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley & Hendon (2009)

"In order to 'frame' the zone within which the murders described in this book occurred I undertook a series of long walks crossing the borough in order to examine the site of each killing. It quickly became apparent that Barnet was not the featureless zone I had presumed it to be. On the contrary – a quiet yet brooding power lurks in our hilly region of serried rooftops and arterial roads."

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in... is a multi-author, multi-region local-history series. All of these books have absolutely horrible cover designs. I've never previously wanted to read a "true crime" or "local history" book, but was delighted to learn that Nick Papadimitriou – author of the astonishing Scarp – had written the account of grisly misadventures relating to my local area. He states that "my aim in writing was to evoke a dark and destabilising resonance – echoes of events murmuring below the streets, roads and parks which form the backdrop to our everyday". It covers the period of c. 1500 to 1959 and becomes more compelling as it reaches the modern era. 

Unlike Scarp, it's a book of character portraits, but his fascination with "deep topography" still informs the writing. It's very much filled with a strong sense of place and it helps that I know many of the streets and exact locations he describes. The 1931 murder of the Edgware tramp "Pigsticker" appears in Scarp as well, so was clearly one that caught the author's imagination. 

This grim book makes for fascinating reading and reminds you that people haven't changed very much. The ordinary, matter-of-fact nature of the crimes – often committed in the name of love or as a result of sheer foolishness – makes them especially powerful to read about.

26/09/15: Jordan Belfort – Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison (2009)

For some reason I assumed this sequel to The Wolf of Wall Street would be about Jordan Belfort's time in prison. In fact, he doesn't go to prison until the very end of this book. The bulk of it details his legal case, with lengthy recaps detailing how he came to be the Wolf in the first place. The lengthy recollections of his earlier life allow for further stories of excess, and also a strong sense of how he slowly develops and matures. There's also some moving writing about his growing relationship with his children, who come to symbolise hope for his (post-criminal) future.

At the end he talks about how reading Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities helped him find his writing voice, and you can certainly see the influence – larger-than-life characters are often built up into nicknamed caricatures, from his second wife ("The Duchess") to his Russian girlfriend ("KGB"). Then there's "OCD", "Magnum", "The Witch" and so on.

If you liked the first book, you should find this every bit as enjoyable. He writes so well that he is entertaining and insightful whatever the subject matter.