Just William's Luck

A Man In Love - Karl Ove Knausgaard

2013-05-13T17:25:00.001+01:00

Book Blog becomes Book Vlog

2013-05-07T10:53:00.000+01:00

The Mussel Feast - The Childhood of Jesus

2013-03-28T10:00:00.000Z

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

The latest series from plucky publisher and champion of translated fiction Peirene Press is their Turning points series. Continuing their focus on books that can (and preferably should) be read in a single sitting this series looks at 'revolutionary moments' and opens with this novella from Germany where it is a bestseller that has remained in print since 1990. That date coincides with the fall of the Berlin Wall of course and Vanderbeke has said that she wrote the book as an attempt to 'understand how revolutions start' but placing the conflict within a family unit.

The family in question are awaiting the return of their father from an important business trip which they expect to have sealed his final promotion. As a result the plan that evening is to enjoy the meal of the title and the book opens as a mother and her two teenage children go about the ritual of preparing and cooking four kilos of mussels in anticipation of his return. As the clock ticks past the time he would usually come home, and then past the time they planned to eat, and then even further into the evening, the foundations of this cosy family set up begin to crumble away and we realise that the three people at home are living in the shadow of a tyrannical father.

The book itself is only just over a hundred pages but I must confess that I made several abortive attempts to read it before I finally managed to finish it. Part of this is to do with what I mentioned above; this, and probably all of Peirene's titles benefit from being read in one go (in fact what book isn't more of a joy when you can devote some serious time to devouring it?) and my snatched attempts on the train or at work simply didn't do enough to catch me in. That said, having now finished it after finding a miraculous morning to myself, I'm still a little lukewarm about it compared to some of the enthusiastic readers elsewhere.

This is effectively a 100 page monologue, with no paragraphs, and delivered in a voice which never really excited me. Yes, there are moments of dark humour, and there's a perverse joy to be found in the slow reveal of just how oppressed this family really is, but I never quite clicked with the tone nor was I sufficiently enthused by the allegorical nature. Vanderbeke does write wonderfully though when using subtle symbols to add atmosphere and feeling to the scene. That huge pot of mussels for instance is ominous at the start with its strange noises as the mussels cook and shift about, then their increasing distastefulness as they sit there and lose heat, colour and appeal, whilst the family wait for the patriarch who may or may not ever walk through the door.

Published now by Peirene Press.

The Childhood of Jesus - J M Coetzee

A new novel from Coetzee is always going to be exciting, especially if you've recently started reading and enjoying his books and doubly so if you suspect that it might be in the vein of those allegorical novels that you have loved rather than the slightly intimidating recent works that feature various incarnations of the man himself. A bit of a disappointment then to be confronted by a book which is both so blatantly allegorical that it comes across as almost juvenile (No, I haven't lost it and just called Coetzee juvenile, just the effect of some of the rather heavy-handed Christian imagery or thought) whilst also managing to be completely baffling in its use of allegory so that I, and many other readers, were left scratching their heads at the end wondering what on earth all that was about.

After a journey across the sea, a man and a boy arrive in a new country where they are assigned new names and ages and begin to learn Spanish, the language of this, their new home. Simón is not the father or grandfather of David, the boy under his charge, but has assumed responsibility for him during their crossing and has set his heart on reuniting him with his mother whom he is convinced he will recognise when he sees her. The two of them are welcomed into a Kafkaesque bureaucracy in the city of Novilla that is by turns helpful and frustrating and even when the two of them begin to find their feet with some kind of shelter, employment and food they find themselves living in a country where food is basic, desires simple and no thought is wasted on the past which many seem to have simply forgotten or left behind.

Simón finds work as a stevedore in the port, unloading back-breaking sacks of grain from huge ships and indulging in philosophical chats with his co-workers. He strikes up an odd relationship with a woman, Elena, who challenges his notions of companionship and attraction. Then he meets a woman who he becomes convinced is David's mother. The novel is filled with conversation after conversation, debate after debate; some, as I've said, dotted with such obvious lines and symbols of Christianity that it's almost funny, some frankly bizarre like a discussion about the poo-ness of poo, the point at which it ceases to be our poo and joins all of the other general poo in the sewer (I sh*t you not).

All the while we are stumbling along with the plot or searching for meaning in and behind the conversations what actually remains for the reader to hold onto and take away? For me personally there was a lot about parenthood, care and how we shape the lives of those in our charge. It is clear that Simón cares deeply for David (feeling his absence like the loss of 'a limb or perhaps even his heart') which makes it all the more bizarre that he can hand him over to, ostensibly, a complete stranger as a mother. I found the book to be increasingly distressing to read as a result and think it may be some time before I have fully come to terms with it and begun to unravel what meaning lies behind it.

Published now by Harvill Secker.

The Silence of Animals - Montague Terrace

2013-03-20T10:00:00.000Z

The Silence of Animals - John Gray

It was over a decade ago that I read John Gray's provocative book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. It really was like a shock to the brain filled with incendiary thoughts that infused and infuriated me in equal measure. Its hard after the intervening years to remember much of the detail of the book (it's hard after those years and the arrival of two children to remember much at all) but one thing remained very clear in my mind and that was Gray's huge mistrust in the Enlightenment idea of progress. This he felt was the biggest lie that we humans tell ourselves; not only that we are by nature different from the other animals on the planet but that our achievements in science and technology are making our lives anything more than superficially better. As he expresses in this new book - 'Lacking a self-image of the sort humans cherish, other animals are content to be what they are. For human beings the struggle for survival is a struggle against themselves'. The Silence of Animals is billed very much as a sequel to that book, developing on those same themes to further illustrate how we delude ourselves with notions of progress and content ourselves with fantasy and myth in order to support those thoughts.

Whereas Straw Dogs read like the thoughts of the author, backed up by occasional literary sources, this follow up is far more like a companion piece with much deeper references from other works of literature. Borges, Orwell, Ballard and Conrad are all cited and having read some of the writers he quotes in the intervening years I was able to confront the thoughts head on and find them stimulating in a different way to those I had had to take for granted when reading the first book. But my overall impression on finishing the book was that this was less a development of his ideas than a reinforcement of them. It was as though Gray had spent the last decade finding support for his personal philosophy in the literature he read and now wanted to share it as if to say, 'See, I'm not the only one.' This is fine, naturally, and there are lots of interesting thoughts along the way, particularly when examining our propensity to fiction and how it shapes our lives and Gray's thoughts on how the whole concept of talents might be a terrible straitjacket on our personal potential rather than the best way to realise it. It just means that this volume lacks some of the fire of its predecessor and will probably further annoy anyone who took exception to his thoughts from then too.

There is an interesting battle as well with biblical references and images. Gray frequently aims to show that there is very little difference between the comforts of organised religion and religious faith alongside the faith that accompanies the Enlightenment ideal of progress. If religion is the opiate of the people then 'like cheap music, the myth of progress lifts the spirits as it numbs the brain'. We must all have at least occasionally wondered about the very meaning of life, the reason for us being here, and Gray is determined that we should let that thought go

Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden meaning? Or does the demand for meaning come from attaching too much sense to language - from thinking that our lives are books we have not yet learnt to read?

We fictionalise our own lives and if we could only accept that, Gray asserts, and also that our world is without meaning we might discover not a loss of value but that 'this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond.' How you may react to that and other thoughts will be entirely personal of course. Gray I'm sure will content himself that T.S Eliot said it best in Burnt Norton - human kind cannot bear much reality.

Published now by Allen Lane

Monatague Terrace by Warren and Gary Pleece

Animals also feature in this graphic novel from the Pleece brothers in the form of an unforgettable rabbit, Marvo the magic bunny, companion and co star to a rather shambolic magician called Marty. They are just two inhabitants of the fading Art deco housing block that gives the novel its name and which contains more nuttiness than a Reece's peanut butter cup.

The book is made up of 12 main stories and a few interludes and through them we meet the varied inhabitants of this bonkers building. Each of the stories is as tenuously linked as we all might be to the comings and goings of those around us but also by something slightly deeper relating to the building itself. There is a faded singer who sits around listening to his biggest hit, a bright young thing novelist with writer's block, a genius scientist with a price on his head, someone calling himself The Puppeteer, and an old special forces operative who may look like a granny but who hasn't quite given up the fight yet.

Given all the craziness this is a pretty disparate novel and how well it all holds together will depend on how many of the stories you really connect with. The device that holds them all together might come across as a bit silly and even nostalgic, and that's the prevailing feeling I was left with; something like the curious quality that comes with watching Tales of the Unexpected. This book is easy to read and to enjoy but there's not enough beneath that Art deco facade to send me back in again.

Published now by Jonathan Cape

My Elvis Blackout - Simon Crump

2013-03-12T09:14:00.001Z

'The long dream is over'

I got a Kindle for Christmas. Hurrah, I am now part of the 21st Century. Apparently. My main excitement on receiving one was that I would be able to take up Galley Beggar's Press on their kind offer of an e-book copy of Simon Crump's novel My Elvis Blackout. This novel has had an extraordinary life already as Crump mentions in a new afterword that comes with this edition. Iy has been 'a chapbook, a hardback, a trade paperback, a tee-shirt, a short film, a CD and even a band'. It has also at one point been reproduced in its entirety on an Elvis fansite attributed to a man named Jurgen. Now it is available again with a new introduction from Jon McGregor, a fantastic review from the ever-reliable Mr Self and a few quick words from me to support this short, fucked-up and truly unforgettable little gem.

How on earth to begin to describe this bizarre book? My Elvis Blackout comes as a series of short fictions or vignettes. Each features or is about Elvis in some way, shape or form but not the Elvis that we know. This Elvis comes in many guises and each story might be said to illuminate some facet of his character or some aspect of fame, celebrity, culture, indulgence, violence and death. To pinch the best line from John Self's review, 'it is a mirrorball made of highly polished razor blades, reflecting different aspects of the King'.

There is violence and absurdity on every other page and often at the same time (this after all is a novel in which Barbara Cartland's mutilated body is buried on only the second page and Chris de Burgh is murdered not just once but twice after coming back as a headless zombie). But then there are moments that are strangely affecting, perhaps all the more so coming as they do buried amongst so much mayhem. The chapter headed Elvis: Fat Fucked-Up Fool has an opening paragraph that shows perfectly the combination of madness and pathos.

His greatest fear was of being poor and he dwelled upon it constantly. He took handfuls of jewels and cash into the backyard at Graceland and buried them - little treasures to call upon should he find himself penniless. The guys would watch watch Elvis digging in the dark. He cut a pathetic figure as he grunted and sweated over a growing heap of earth, and they would laugh to see his white jump-suit soiled with mud, and they would laugh at this very sad, but nevertheless highly entertaining creature trying to ward off his worst nightmare, and they would laugh and laugh until the tears ran down their bloated piggy faces and down their fat pink necks and into their fancy silk shirts which Elvis had bought them all from Lansky brothers, because he loved them so.

That is a killer paragraph; seemingly throwaway and yet marked by an unforgettable image, biting comment and even an appeal for sympathy. Brilliant. Another example of the way this collection can unseat the reader comes near the end in a chapter titled, Yorkshire Elvis: Part Two. After all the violence that has preceded it, this story seems to augur something horrific when our hero waits for his wife to leave the house before getting out something secret from beneath the floorboards, especially when a missing girl is mentioned. But then Crump gives this particular incarnation of the King a secret you couldn't possibly expect and makes the story into something else entirely. It is hard to know what you might find as you go through the pages of this novel, and very hard to adequately describe the thrill and joy of reading a book that manages to be both silly and deadly serious at the same time, flippant and deadly; as volatile and entertaining a book as you're likely to read all year.

Give Me Everything You Have - Eustace - Benediction

2013-02-19T10:00:00.000Z

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
by James Lasdun

Well here's a powder keg of a book. Let us start with a quick summary of what it is. In 2003 the poet and writer James Lasdun was teaching a fiction workshop at 'a place I'll call Morgan College.' Among the students there was a woman 'I'll call Nasreen.' Lasdun praised a piece of her writing in one class and after the course ended an email correspondence began in which Lasdun hoped to help her in some small way with the novel which she was writing and also he hoped to maybe make a friend of someone he found interesting and different. So far, so innocent. Or is it? Lasdun is at pains in the opening chapters to examine his behaviour at the outset because what developed was a prolonged campaign of obsessive emails, abuse and cyber-bullying in which she tried to besmirch his name and character in a variety of ways leaving Lasdun himself not just shaken and confused but ill as well.

The book is peppered with excerpts from these emails (Lasdun aware of the irony that in quoting so freely from this private correspondence he is behaving in exactly the way that he so deplored in her when she copied other people in on her own emails to him and used the public sphere of Amazon reviews and Wikipedia entries to further muddy his name) which start off friendly and funny, gradually becoming amorous and slightly inappropriate, before becoming suddenly vitriolic, violent and filled with hatred, anti-semitism and delusion. These emails are as baffling for us to read as for Lasdun, if not as personally upsetting. They also caused me a certain amount of unease. Firstly that they were obviously selected from a larger body of correspondance; then that they were often quotes or excerpts and one wondered about any possible context within the rest of the email. Jenny Turner in her Guardain review said that this is a book plagued by too much information and also at times not enough. It was the not enough part that concerned me most.

Taken at face value this book makes clear that this was a campaign of 'verbal terrorism' that Lasdun suffered. The reasons for Nasreen's behaviour are never satisfactorily explained and Lasdun even prefers not to think of her as being mentally ill but someone motivated by a motiveless malice. But how can we not regard her as someone clearly suffering from some kind of mental distress? We just don't know enough about her from this one-sided account of course, and I don't say one-sided in a purely pejorative sense - what else could Lasdun write, however balanced a writer he may aim to be, when attempting to tell such a fraught tale and one in which he is implicated? Reading this as an account of something with a quasi-legal standing (we feel as though this is in many ways a book about a crime being comitted, a book with a victim, protagonist and law enforcement officers) makes for a lot of frustration, Nasreen cannot defend herself and even if we accept Lasdun's inference that she couldn't add anything of any value we can only do that if we accept it all.

If it doesn't quite work as a book of true crime then there are two other ways in which it potentially succeeds. The first of these is probably closer to the way the book is being sold: as a memoir. Lasdun uses this event to write about several other works of literature (you may never need to read another book about Gawain and the Green Knight for example) that illuminate the experience and these sections are fascinating, lucid and wonderfully written. There is another riskier suggestion, a million miles away from the way in which the book is being marketed and that is as a piece of extraordinary experimental fiction. I drop that here merely as a catalyst for discussion, it was something that came up during a little conversation of Twitter the other day, and whilst it may not be true it certainly adds a completely different way of approaching what is an interesting, complex and very troubling reading experience.

Pubished now by Jonathan Cape

Eustace by S J Harris

This debut graphic novel from cartoonist Steven Harris may have some colour on the cover but every page inside is black and white, or rather the many shades of grey in between thanks to his deft and detailed pencil drawings. Eustace is a sickly young boy, exiled to a lonely room in a large house where he is really only visited by the maid, Mrs Perichief, each day as she brings him his stable fare of soup ('not even any kind of soup, just "soup". It's thin and yellowy like old skin.'). Through the novel however he is gradually visited by an ever-growing array of grotesques, beginning with his dreaded great Aunts with their sloppy kisses and secret gifted sixpences. What exactly is going on in Eustace's family is never fully clear although we gather there is some trauma related to his brother Frank, who served in the Great War. Eustace's mother makes a ghostly appearance, ravaged by life, and his father even stumbles into the room, barely able to recognise the son he never sees.

It is the sudden appearance of Eustace's uncle Lucien however that really gets the party started and Eustace's bed becomes the focal point of a congregation of crazies whilst all the while in the background is the hint of something dark and dangerous in Lucien's past that is slowly closing in on him. To my mind Harris's drawings combine the long lines and monochrome of Aubrey Beardsley with the sunken-eyed macabre of Tim Burton. There is something feverish or nightmarish about the procession that passes through the room and one wants to constantly put an arm around poor Eustace and sneak him away somewhere. There is nothing we can do however to protect him from the novel's surreal and comically absurd ending.

Published by Jonathan Cape in March

Benediction by Kent Haruf

It's been a while since Kent Haruf featured on this blog but then it's been a while since he wrote anything, almost ten years in fact since he last wrote about the residents of his fictional town of Holt in Colorado. You can read my thoughts on Plainsong and Eventide and imagine my excitement when I heard that he had written a new novel that would take me back amongst those familiar faces. I was worried I might need to familiarise myself with the previous books but his new novel stands alone and in fact has little to do with any characters from the previous books. The main focus is on 'Dad' Lewis, owner of the hardware store, who receives the news that he is sick with cancer and has just a few weeks left to live. We will also follow the descent of the new preacher and the way in which the women of the town envelop a young girl without her mother but it is Dad Lewis who forms the novel's heart and around whom the people of the town will congregate.

The surprise is that about a hundred pages into the book I wasn't sure that I wanted to carry on. I'm so glad that I did. Haruf's style is deceptively powerful you see. The prose is simple for the most part, the speech direct, the situations fairly everyday, we observe along with the new preacher 'these everyday lives', but what builds inside that structure is a wave of emotion that overwhelms the reader as the book progresses. There are moments that edge toward the melodramatic and the whole novel flies dangerously close to sentiment but in the central story of Dad Lewis in particular you have a sensitive, truthful and painfully affecting story of life, work, relationships, family, alienation, ageing and mortality; the stuff of life in other words. The way in which it manages to combine both the dignity of the way we behave with the indignity of the way our bodies betray us is masterful and there was at least one occasion when I was powerless to stop the tears welling in my eyes.

Published by Picador in April

The Engagement - Orkney - Mr Bridge

2013-02-06T10:47:00.000Z

Three books to take a quick look at, all involving couples, two of which are very unsettling and make amazing use of open spaces to create a sense of claustrophobia, the other a masterpiece from the underrated and, sadly, recently-departed Evan S Connell (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013).

The Engagement by Chloe Hooper

Liese Campbell is an English architect who has fled to the other side of the world in the wake of the financial crisis and begun work in her uncle's real estate business in Melbourne. It is through that work that she meets Alexander Colquhoun, a wealthy farmer looking to buy some property in the area. On one of many apartment viewings they find themselves beginning a game, sex in someone else's property and payment for Liese at the end of it. The game develops and becomes a regular thing, sex in new apartments, more money, and soon invented stories about Liese's other clients. When the novel begins it is at the outset of what she expects will be their final meeting, having announced her intention to leave the country and return to England, as Alexander takes her to his house in the bush for a final weekend with an envelope of cash at the end of it. But this is a novel of lies and confusion, where the reader appears to be in possession of the facts and an eloquent and honest narrator but as the pages slip your fingers you find yourself less and less certain about what is real, what fantasy, and who even to be worried about in a long weekend where a dangerous denouement seems only a page-turn away.

I struggled with this book to be honest and even after persevering and finishing it I remain not wholly convinced. The unreliable narrator is a common literary technique but actually surprisingly tricky to pull off. Notable successes include the deliciously villainous Tarquin Winot in John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure and the slowly revealed complexities behind the care and concern of the eponymous doctor in Patrick McGrath's Dr Haggard's Disease. I really struggled with the psychology of both Liese and Alexander when reading this novel perhaps because it is all coming through the filter of a character we will learn not to trust. I found too much of what they said hard to believe and the dialogue itself pretty clunky in places and even if this can be explained away by the unreliability of the narrator it strikes me that if the device interferes with the effectiveness of the prose then something isn't quite working. Too often I wanted to shake either one of them and get them to actually respond to what had actually been said to them rather than further continuing the ambiguities and confusion.

All of that said, it is an unnerving and thrilling read that creates tension, atmosphere and genuine fear. It could almost read as a metaphorical study of many relationships, the way in which couples do or don't deal with each other's pasts, the stories they tell one another of their lives in order to portray themselves in a certain light, and the way in which these images can be slowly eroded by the stories others tell about us or the gradual emergence of what I will term, with eyebrow raised and tongue firmly in cheek, the truth.

Published now by Jonathan Cape

Orkney by Amy Sackville

Amy Sackville garnered plenty of plaudits and prize nominations with her debut novel, The Still Point and managed to bag the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. I haven't read that and after 50 or so pages of her new novel I was beginning to think that might be a huge mistake but here is another novel of claustrophobic congress which followed a sort of reverse trajectory to the one above but left me with a similar feeling of admiration rather than love, a book I started off loving but which left me by the end feeling rather over-worked and exhausted.

A man and a woman arrive on Orkney for their honeymoon. He is an eminent professor, she a former student. They have come a long way from the scene of their infamous relationship but even on this remote island they are regarded by everyone as a strange couple. Through the professor's narration we soon realise how little he really knows about the woman who has so enchanted him but there is no doubting the spell she has cast on him. Sackville's writing is extraordinary in places and the opening pages create an evocative atmosphere that swept me along with the fervour of his feeling. This kind of writing is hard to sustain however, or rather it is hard to sustain a reading of, by which I mean that some people may find it a bit too much like consciously 'beautiful writing' and even those like me who found the style to be entirely fitting for a literature professor who has had his heart beguiled by a pale and otherworldly creature may find after a while that the novel gets a bit repetitive.

Described rather optimistically as a single sitting read, it is exactly the kind of book that may well benefit from being read in that way (if you happen to have enough time to read 250 pages in one go), the kind of novel that if it has you the reader in its spell, like our poor professor, will probably fly by as a richly engrossing account of love, fantasy and the enchantment and danger of the natural world. There will be just as many readers however who fail to fully fall for its charms and therefore find it a relatively short read that feels overwritten, overwrought and in danger of being suffocated by its own atmosphere.

Published today by Granta Books

Mr Bridge by Evan S Connell

Ah, the Bridges. How wonderful to be able to engage again with Evan S Connell's remarkable couple in Kansas City. You may remember I read and loved Connell's 1959 novel Mrs Bridge last year and at least I didn't have to wait as long as those at the time for its companion piece originally published in 1969. The man who remained a fairly enigmatic presence in the novel bearing his wife's name is now thrust to the forefront and we get to learn what Walter Bridge was thinking during all those hours spent working away from his family and indeed in the small amount of time he spent with them.

Mr Bridge uses the same technique as the earlier novel; short chapters with their own titles, small moments of life that slowly assemble into a rounded portrait of suburban America in the 1930's and 40's. Walter Bridge is a lawyer, the kind of man who works long hours and even brings his work home occasionally. Described by another character as a 'consummate puritan' Walter is a man almost of another time, his morals apparently very fixed, but one of the joys of this book are the ways in which we will come to see that perception altered as we learn more and more about what makes this man tick. Walter likes things that are tangible and dependable. In one early scene we see the genuine joy he gets from opening his safety deposit box and simply leafing through and holding the stocks and shares that are his investments for the future. His love of these is made all the more hilarious later in the novel when we see him making a proud gift of them to his family at Christmas and encouraging them to buy more when they all receive a bequest.

Walter is often baffled by his family, particularly his wife, whose infrequent emotional outbursts leave him completely at a loss and resorting to the only course of action he can imagine which is to gloss over them and pretend they have never happened at all. Walter is also a contradictory man, it is very hard to pin down exactly where he stands with regards to certain prejudices, seeming at times to be anti-semitic or racist and then confounding those thoughts with a secretive action that we will only learn about much later. And this is where the real joy of Connell's writing lies. His prose is measured and unadorned but most importantly as a novelist his is completely non-judgemental. First India and now Walter Bridge are shown to us as they are, without any authorial comment or guidance as to how we are supposed to react to their thoughts, feelings and actions. It is left entirely up to the reader to decide whether to admire, despise or love them (or indeed all of the above) and that kind of writing makes for an involving, moving and complicated read that will make the characters live with you long after finishing the last page.

Published now by Penguin Modern Classics

The Explorer - Doppler - First Novel - The Making Of - Still - Kandak - Ghostwritten

2013-01-03T10:00:00.000Z

Short of time but keen as ever to talk about the books I read you will have to indulge me a little as I compromise with a quick round up of several books that are worth mentioning. I apologise for not being able to go into as much detail as I normally would but I hope that something will be better than nothing (but please let me know if you disagree!)

The Explorer by James Smythe

Towards the end of last year I entered a proper reading funk. I couldn't engage with books I was reading at all, gave up on one after another, often knowing that they were probably really good. I was just too tired and stressed to read, a big worry for someone so keen on reading. I had a little break and then picked up this new novel which a couple of other bloggers had mentioned favourably and which I thought might be just what I needed. It really was. Smythe's novel is narrated by Cormac Easton, a journalist chosen to document a groundbreaking journey into space that will take humans further than they have ever travelled before. However, the crew of the Ishiguro gradually perish one by one until Cormac is the last survivor. What follows is a brilliant examination of fear and grief, remembrance and memory, loneliness, exploration and time. I love space movies but the problem most of them seem to suffer from is that whatever interesting themes they set up in the beginning they nearly always dissolve into humans being chased about by something or other and once you've seen Alien that can't really be topped (yes, Sunshine, I'm looking at you). Smythe's novel does almost the opposite. In a breakneck opening we witness the demise of the crew and the reader is left wondering how on earth he might fill the rest of the novel. I won't give away the brilliant device that is this novel's twist but only say that it is a coup that allows Smythe to make the novel far more philosophical, interesting and moving than I suspect most 'science fiction' to be (I know, I'm probably wrong on that). This novel, very similar in feeling to Duncan Jones' film Moon, comes highly recommended and a huge thank you to the author for breaking my funk and getting me reading again.

Published by Harper Voyager now

Doppler by Erlend Loe

The cover to your left makes this look like a perfect Christmas book and in many ways it is but not at all in a traditional sense. The eponymous Doppler is a man who seemed to be leading a successful life in Oslo until an accident whilst on his mountain bike leads him to reappraise things altogether and determine on leading a solitary existence in the woods where he will live off the land. His resulting hunger leads him to kill an elk in the novel's opening pages and whilst he is successful in that endeavour providing himself with food to eat and meat with which he can barter for other supplies he also finds himself encumbered with that mother's baby elk as a surrogate child. Soon christened Bongo, Doppler uses his new companion as a sounding board for his various foibles with modern society and the two of them struggle to maintain their Eden in the wilderness as various other characters encroach on it. The quirk factor might put off some readers but I found it to be both funny and sharp-witted, a perfect antidote to the commercialisation of Christmas and a great (if belated) stocking filler for anyone in your family who tends to say bah humbug around tis time of year.

Published by Head of Zeus now

First Novel by Nicholas Royle

Already an early contender for cover design of the year, Nicholas Royle's latest novel has far more going for it than that. That title and those very recognisable 'clean white spine with plain black lettering' paperbacks on the cover might lead you to think this is his debut published by Picador but it is actually Royle's seventh novel, albeit his first under the Jonathan Cape imprint. There's lots of other bookish fun along the way as we follow writer, Paul Kinder, author of a novel which didn't do terribly well, now a teacher of creative writing and avid collector of first novels. This meta-fictional novel has many strands to it and part of the fun is trying to work out where you are half the time. Along the way we will encounter, housebreaking, dogging, fighter pilots and loss of various types, in a novel which shows how we all use narrative to shape the story of our lives. A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

Published by Jonathan Cape now

The Making Of by Brecht Evens

Brecht Evens makes the most gorgeous graphic novels. His first, The Wrong Place, had me smiling and admiring at the end of 2011. His latest built on that promise at the end of last year and showcases yet again his glorious watercolour work and fresh approach to graphic storytelling. Watercolour is an odd medium for graphic work, especially in the free-flowing style that Evens employs. Character is often simply delineated by colour or distinguishing features and it is an incredibly effective technique. One character has large hands for example, always dominating his exchanges. 'You should see my Dad's' he says and sure enough when he visits him in his hospital room on the next page what we see are those huge hands waving back. The novel follows an artist, Peterson, as he travels to a small village to work as part of a biennial festival. It's a much smaller operation than he anticipated but what follows is a hilarious exploration of artistic inspiration, expression and shortcomings. Fabulously diverse characters, artwork that leaps off the page and somehow manages to escape it at times, Evens is one to keep watching.

Published by Jonathan Cape now

Still edited by Roelof Bakker

Roelof Bakker is a photographer who focused on the disused Hornsey Town Hall for one project which ended in an exhibition of photographs entitled Still. Bakker then approached several writers to select an image and then write a story based on it, relocating the image so that it wouldn't be about its original location but more about what that image suggested to the author. The anthology is incredibly diverse, featuring some writers I had heard of and read before like Richard Beard, Nicholas Royle and Evie Wyld. Others were completely new to me and that of course is the joy of an anthology. The pictures are wonderful and each reader is sure to find new voices they will want to keep an eye on.

Published by Negative Press now

Upcoming Audio Books

Kandak by Patrick Hennessey

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

As some of you will know I sometimes get the opportunity in my work as an actor to record audio books and I am in the process of recording a couple right now. Patrick Hennessey had great success with his first book The Junior Officer's Reading Club and Kandak follows his exploits training and fighting alongside the fledgling Afghan National Army. What comes across clearly is the confusion of the project, the clash of cultures and the suspicion that develops when things go wrong and soldiers even find themselves under attack from their own side. Hennessey is keen to write however about the bravery, integrity and comradeship that he experienced, something that brought him back to Afghanistan after he had finished in the army to search out those that had clearly become friends during his time there.

Ghostwritten was Mitchell's debut novel and after I recorded the bonkers number9dream last year I now have the task of doing justice to this multi-layered novel. Having read it before but a long time ago it was interesting to see how I felt on a second read. I was pleased to discover that I had roughly the same opinion of it as a novel, slightly daunted by the prospect of narrating effectively its very different sections but always pleased to have something challenging like that to keep me honest.

Both of these will be available unabridged later in the year from Whole Story Audio and W F Howse.

Books of the Year - 2012

2012-12-17T09:00:00.000Z

Last year I made a stack of my end of year picks and took a photo to head the post. This year, having moved house and with books scattered all over the place, I'd struggle to know where exactly to locate most of the books I want to bring to your attention and indeed it was a source of considerable anxiety to me that one of them, packed specially due to its unique qualities, went missing for nigh on a month before it was finally relocated and hurriedly placed on a special shelf for safekeeping.

Anyway, 2012 has been a year filled with enjoyable books, some of which have been very special indeed. Keeping up the blog has been a struggle at times but messages of support have turned up often just when I need them and the enthusiasm of others has always been helpful when a shot in the arm has been required. I'll be absolutely honest and say that next year really will see my posts becoming more sporadic but as long as you really want to hear what I have to say then I will try and make the effort when a book really demands it. Twitter remains an exciting place to learn and share about books and when I pretty much lost the ability to update the blog recently it was there that I managed to keep talking and enthusing about what I was reading.

Below you'll find my picks of the year, a varied collection as always, books that I found in a variety of ways. I've summarised why they made the cut below but please click on the titles to read my in-depth reviews and hopefully you'll find something that you hadn't wanted to buy... until now.

Absolution by Patrick Flanery

I read this debut near the beginning of the year but it has stayed in my mind as one of the year's best new novels, heralding the arrival of a nicely matured voice in fiction. Perhaps the most conventionally 'literary' novel on my list it actually has a rather complex structure with four narrative strands and changing viewpoints. Flanery tackles South Africa's fraught politics but also the weight of personal history and the very nature of truth itself. Ambitious and well executed it's a great read now and a very positive indication hopefully of what's yet to come.

Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee

It's not all about new books and this novel from Coetzee helped to cement him in my mind as a true master. This allegorical novel of violence, oppression and control is written with the kind of universality that makes it feel like a classic; names of people or places are not important, neither is a sense of when or where exactly the novel is set. The unflinching manner of Coetzee's approach makes for an exhilarating and uncomfortable read. A novel that challenges the reader with its views and opinions but leaves you to draw your own conclusions; what more could you ask for?

A Death In The Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Not many books made such an impact on me as this controversial novel and that's why when I was asked to pick just a single book from this year's output by Kim over at Reading Matters, this is the one I plumped for. Knausgaard made a Faustian pact when he decided to write about himself and his own family and the notoriety that has accompanied the publication of his six-volume, fictionalised autobiography is as impressive as the sales figures in his native Norway. Part one looks at drunken adolescence, the death of his father and the alcoholism of his grandmother. The final third is about as a grim a piece of writing as I have ever come across. A book that had me scratching my head about half way through had me itching for more when I finished the final page and with part 2 due next year I can only hope that there are plans to translate and publish the following four books.

Abbot Awaits by Chris Bachelder

Humour. Let's be honest, it's all too often missing from the books of many 'serious' readers apart from the odd flash here and there so when a book comes along that makes you actually laugh and smile with recognition throughout then what a joy that is. Bachelder's take on modern fatherhood is hilarious, beautiful, touching and true. Little vignettes, often of just a page in length cover the final three months of Abbot's wife's second pregnancy. Just the titles of some chapters are enough to elicit a laugh and the real skill is in not allowing the book to suffer any slumps along the way. A perfect gift for any men you may know who are perhaps expecting another arrival anytime soon.

All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque

A genuine classic that will have you mouthing the familiar refrain of those who finally tackle one of those books they always knew they should have read: 'why didn't I read it sooner?' There's not much for me to say here about Remarque's classic war novel other than that it gave me something completely fresh to think about after I'd been performing in War Horse for a couple of years, that it was a distinct pleasure to give copies of it away on World Book Night and that it's exactly the kind of book that was never in any danger when I had a book cull before moving house recently.

Open City by Teju Cole

If I'd got my act together a little sooner then this book would have appeared on last year's book list (along with lots of other people's). It is a frighteningly accomplished novel, bursting with intelligence and written in the kind of fluid prose that makes you want to devour it in a single sitting. A man wanders the streets of New York, meets friends, has a picnic and at one point gets mugged, that's about all you'll get as far as plot goes, but this book is filled with ideas and culture that keep you're brain nourished throughout and there's even a twist of sorts near the novel's end that makes you think all over again about the man with whom you've been wandering.

Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Not dissimilar to the book above, this is another novel with little plot, a diary-like narration and lots of digression but poet Lerner's debut novel has a wicked sense of humour and a fairly repellent hero whom you can't help but be charmed by. An American poet abroad on a fellowship in Madrid smokes spliff, takes pills, experiences culture and generally bullshits his way around his research project. Along the way he questions his validity as poet, man and lover and we enjoy one of the most stimulating debuts since ... well, the book above.

Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway

Championed by bloggers all over the place but none more so than John Self in the pages of The Guardian this is a novel that more than justified the fervour behind it. I had been looking forward to it after my first experience of his writing but I wasn't expecting it to be quite as a good as it was. Ridgway's own irreverence as a writer is either extreme humility or an indication that he, along with most of the reading public, doesn't realise exactly how good he is. The novel is bold and formalistically daring, written with an ease and brilliance that must make other writers want to give up and has a variety and scope that means each reader is sure to identify a different section or sentence as their favourite bit of writing this year. Believe the hype.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

My favourite read from this year's Booker list was a triumph for small publisher And Other Stories and I very nearly included another of their titles, Lightning Rods by Helen De Witt, in this list but decided to mention it here and free up one of these limited berths for another fabulous book (very briefly, Lightning Rods is a whip smart satire that is funny, clever and shocking - read this review for more). Levy's novel is slim but packed full of resonant images, enigmatic characters and telling details. There's a wonderful darkness that clouds proceedings and seldom has there been such an enjoyable sense of being unsettled.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Look, I don't know how many times I have to tell you to read Denis Johnson but will you please just READ DENIS JOHNSON. The fact that the Pulitzer board didn't award a fiction prize this year is bad enough but the fact that they did it when a novel(la) like this landed in their laps in downright scandalous. Johnson's collection of writings is so eclectic and varied that it's difficult to say exactly where this fits in the cannon but as a fan of his I can say that I was surprised by the richness and reward that came from such a slim book, previously published as a story in the Paris Review, thankfully given the proper treatment by Granta who had a storming year with three titles in this best of list.

Building Stories by Chris Ware

What to say about this extraordinary creation? This is the book I mentioned at the very top that went missing in transit and caused me moments of genuine anxiety as I worried that I might not be able to lay my hands on a replacement copy without bankrupting myself even further. Chris Ware opened my eyes to what the graphic novel could be when I read his first book Jimmy Corrigan. I am eternally grateful to him for that because since then I have derived so much pleasure from reading more and more graphic work. For him then to return with a ... I hesitate to call it a book because it is so much more than that ... with such a gift is quite astounding. A book which cements the place of the graphic novel amongst 'serious' literature and shows at the same time how limited its supposed superiors really are, this will no doubt be seen in years to come as a definitive work.

Also worthy of note: Mrs Bridge, Dr Haggard's Disease, Seven Years, Days of the Bagnold Summer and so many more.

Emperor's New Clothes: HHhH and The Yellow Birds.

And the winner is....

2012-11-21T10:58:00.000Z

Finally, after what seemed an eternity in limbo, my broadband service is restored after moving house and I find myself with a moment to make the grand draw in my Murakami giveaway.

Murakami, as anyone who has read him will know, has a thing for cats so I decided to involve my own cat, Willow, in deciding the winner. Each participant's name was printed on a piece of paper and laid face down on the floor. I then let Willow into the room and determined that the piece of paper she first touched her nose to would be the winner.

Willow is a cat of course and therefore wasn't interested in the role I had assigned to her. You can see the haste with which she removed herself from the room.

So we went to plan B. This is George.

He's a very willing helper and with the clear instruction to pick a single piece of paper from all of those in front of him he of course plumped for the one that Fate had placed right by his foot. The lucky winner of a complete set of Murakami's is......

Congratulations Shelley, I have probably already contacted you to let you know but just in case that hasn't come through please email me with your address details and I'll get things moving on your special delivery. Thank you to everyone who entered, sorry that there can only be one winner and I hope to get things moving on the blog once again in the not too distant future...

Just so you know....

2012-11-13T08:08:00.004Z

.... I haven't been kidnapped, I haven't run away with the circus, or with a complete set of Murakami's.

I've just moved, I have no broadband and I should be back with you shortly.

A winner will be announced next week.

Amazing Murakami Giveaway

2012-10-30T09:00:00.000Z

It's my birthday next month but in a neat reversal of tradition I'm going to give you all the chance of an amazing present. Haruki Murakami is an author who tends to inspire fierce loyalty in his fans. Once you've been bitten by the bug there is a wide array of work that bears his unmistakeable stamp. I'm not quite as taken by him as my wife but I've read a few books, although there's only one review here on the blog, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I'm sure I enjoyed more than my review makes it sound. There's no doubt that he's a writer to be taken seriously, so much so that Ladbrokes had him as the favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

Vintage are re-issuing his books with new designs by Noma Bar (for a closer look at each of the designs you can follow this link for poster versions or this article) and I have not one to give away but a complete set, YES, all fifteen books above to one lucky winner.

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate what an amazing prize that is...

...

...bit longer...

...

I KNOW! AMAZING!

So, what do you have to do to win this gorgeous set of books? What fiendish question will I set to sort the fans from the freeloaders?

Don't worry about any of that, this is all about giving so let's make it as simple as possible. Leave a comment below or send me an email by clicking the 'email me' button and you'll go into the hat. A draw will be made in a couple of weeks time, probably by my cat, and one of you is going to be very, very happy.

Good Luck.

The Nao of Brown - Glyn Dillon

2012-10-16T09:00:00.000+01:00

'hafu'

Self Made Hero is an independent publisher of graphic work that has been quietly getting on with things for 5 years now. Making a name for themselves first with graphic versions of classic novels and manga Shakespeare they have widened their net to include crime, sci-fi, biography and more. I'm really interested in the project they began last year however: Original Fiction. I've already reviewed David B's Black Paths and the unsettling Sandcastle from Pierre Oscar-Levy and Frederik Peters (another piece from Peters, Pachyderme, is published this month too) and now comes another to trump them both; a stonkingly good book that deserves its 'original' tag.

Nao Brown is the heroine of novel. That's her on the left. That unusual name comes from her being a 'hafu', half-Japanese, half-English but also seems important when we learn a bit more about her; living in the now, the present moment, is going to become an important notion as we read her story. Nao suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) although her variant is purely obsessional, not the hand-washing and door checking that we might be familiar with but morbid fantasies about sudden violence towards those she interacts with which require a locked cutlery drawer at home and several meditation techniques to try and control those urges.

This is where Dillon makes great use of the graphic format. As our eyes follow the panels, Nao's sudden obsessional thoughts take us by surprise as much as her. They may flood the picture with a red wash or simply appear as a calm extension of her surroundings as in the panel below where a simple airplane flight is fraught with danger with her having been sat right next to the emergency exit.

Nao works in a specialist, boutique toy-shop with her close friend Steve and it is while she is working there one day that she meets Gregory, a washing-machine repair man who will become her latest obsession. This is in part because of his resemblance to a character in her favourite comic series, Ichi by Gil Ichiyama. Both Ichiyama and his comic series are another invention of Dillon's and function as a comic within a comic, allowing him to showcase an entirely different graphic style to the watercolour that dominates the main story (There is even a specially created Ichi website). The contrast in styles is marked and shows Dillon's love for Japanese comic art. You can read more about his two artistic approaches and indeed see how he builds up his artwork in another fantastic 'Director's commentary' on the Forbidden Planet site.

Anyway, Nao's story is firstly one of the ways in which she deals daily with her disease; the constant marks she gives herself out of ten to rank her mental state (with 10 out of 10 being the worst end of the spectrum) and the repeated mantra, 'Mum thinks I’m good' there to remind her that she is not the person who actually breaks the taxi-driver's neck or pushes someone in front of a train. It is also one of her search for love, failing to see where it has always been and struggling to recognise the obstacles that stand in the path she tries to follow. Nao is a character that the reader cannot help but have huge sympathy for mainly because Dillon draws her with such a brilliant knack for character through expression that I found myself completely charmed by her raised eyebrow, her winning smile, her innocent eyes and her desperate need to find some control. In fact Dillon's skill at capturing expression and gesture is worthy of significant praise, as is his beautiful watercolour work. A brilliant quote on the back of the book comes from Jamie Hewlett (creator of Tank Girl and Gorillaz) who says 'The artwork makes me jealous, the storytelling makes me even more jealous and the watercolour painting just pisses me off!' Admiration from one's peers is always welcome, their envy must mean you're really doing something right.

It's also worth pointing out that Self Made Hero have done an amazing job in the production of this book. Beneath the dust-jacket one finds not only a wonderful design embossed onto the white boards beneath but a large map that covers the inside of the dust-jacket when folded out. The paper inside is a wonderful high-quality matt that perfectly suits the watercolour artwork and the pages have even been stained red at their edges to continue the red, black and white colour scheme. All in all, a publication to be applauded, but more importantly than that: read and enjoyed.

The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

2012-10-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

'he remembers'

Futh stands on the ferry deck, holding on to the cold railings with his soft hands.

So begins Alison Moore's Booker shortlisted novel, a triumph for small independent press Salt who I mentioned some time ago when they were running a campaign to help keep the press alive and who will hopefully see a welcome boost to their fortunes after the light that has been shone (groan) on their endeavours by this success. Futh is a middle-aged man, recently separated from his wife, on his way towards a walking holiday in the Rhineland which he hopes will be restorative. On the very first page however he is submerged in memories, in particular those of his last ferry trip at the age of twelve with his father, about a year after both of them had been left by Futh's mother. So this trip has obvious echoes of the last one and this is just the first of many echoes which bounce around the limited space of this short novel making for a read that many have completely fallen for but which I found just a little too heavily symbolic and neat to fully enjoy.

There are two strands to the story; the first following Futh on his trip around Germany as well as the memories of his childhood and marriage, the second concerns Esther who, along with husband Bernard, runs the bed and breakfast which marks the first and last stop on Futh's circular journey. This hotel is called Hellhaus, or Lighthouse. Esther's story is more easily summarised. Her marriage to Bernard is unhappy and violent, her casual sexual encounters with hotel guests the way in which she can provoke a reaction from her recalcitrant husband who may only have wooed and married her as part of his sibling rivalry. The sections of the novel devoted to the two of them have a repetitive, dream-like feel which is good for slowly building tension and unease but certainly makes them feel like the weaker sections of the book, especially when that repetition feels just like repetition. The elements of Esther's story that echo with Futh's can sometimes feel a little forced but I had better explain a bit more about him before I go into that.

As I said above, Futh is immediately assailed by memories when he begins his trip. He may be on the run from his own crumbled marriage but this trip is as much about the fallout from his parents breakup as his own. This comes in the form of two main memories, the first the trip he made with his father to Germany, the second a family holiday in Cornwall that proved to be the decisive moment in his parent's split. The trip with his father was tinged with sadness, Futh desperate for his father to talk about the woman who had deserted them both, only for her memory to be tarnished by doing so, whilst Futh's father goes on nightly conquests to extinguish her completely. Father and son shared a hotel room and Futh remembers the nights when he was supposed to be asleep and his father brought back woman after woman, taking each into the bathroom, a narrow gap in the door allowing Futh to watch them both in the mirror, a memory so present that Futh finds himself now an adult in another hotel bathroom after a bad night's sleep 'not wanting to touch the sink area, 'not wanting to look in the mirror.' This is one example of the way in which Moore writes brilliantly about the way in which memory can affect and infect the present moment.

Carried on this trip (and indeed on the one he made when just 12) is a silver perfume bottle in the shape of a lighthouse 'About ten centimetres tall and three or four in diameter...It has a four-sided tower and a lantern room with tiny storm panes and a domed top. In relief on one side it says 'DRALLE.'' This belonged to Futh's mother and in another example of Moore's connected moments it forms a crucial link to that holiday in Cornwall. Futh remembers a picnic 'on a cliff in blazing sunshine, looking at a lighthouse and listening to his father going on about the old beacon...' This is the moment that Futh's mother makes clear her disenchantment with her marriage and how boring she finds her husband. As Futh's father silently packs their things away Futh, who had been holding his mother's perfume notices something.

...then he looked down at his hand and saw the glass vial broken in his palm, the fleshy pad beneath his thumb cut open. The volatile contents of the lighthouse soaked into his wound, stinging, and ran between his fingers, soaking his boots, and the scent of it rose from him like millions of tiny balloons escaping towards the sky.
For a long time afterwards, he would lift the palm of his hand to his nose, searching for that scent of violets.

Scent and perfume is a major theme, Futh works as a manufacturer of artificial scents and Esther has a fascination with perfume that leads her to rifle through her guest's belongings to occasionally steal some. The scent of violets is mentioned repeatedly, as is that of the camphor that Bernard rubs on himself daily. These on their own would begin to grate after a while but Moore is determined to link and echo things even more and so has Esther own the very same perfume that Futh's mother had. The difference for Esther is that she had asked her new husband to make a gift of it to her, having seen it advertised as 'the most costly perfume sold in America', only to be disappointed by him buying the less expensive wooden case 'cylindrical rather than squared beneath the domed top, and less detailed than the silver one.' There is a very fine line between the point at which symbols, metaphors, themes and motifs add to the impact of a novel and the point at which they start to weigh it down. It may well be a matter of personal taste but personally I found it all too heavy before I was even half way through. Salt are a huge publisher of poetry, a medium I still have yet to get a handle on, and in many ways I found the prose of this novel too heavily laden with the kind of techniques I might expect to find in poetry or even a short story. One moment of suspended danger for example sees Esther walk through the kitchen 'where the chef is pounding cheap cuts of beef, tenderising steaks for dinner, pulping apples, and smashing black walnuts with a rolling pin, beating them beneath a tea towel to keep the shells from flying, to prevent the juice from staining the work surface.' This rather over-worked sentence (could she really see this one man do all of those things whilst passing through the kitchen?) stands in for the violence that is occurring in another room of the hotel, the kind of shot that would feel a little crass if you saw it in a student film (we may get to see if I'm wrong as I believe film rights for The Lighthouse are being contested as we speak).

There are other moments however where echoes and connections really worked for me. The fact that Futh's wife shared the same name with his mother, Angela, feels not so much like literary coincidence but the perfect way to say something about Futh's character, as well as allowing his wife to often issue the killer line in their marriage, 'I'm not your mother.' Futh is a troubling character though with his doormat tendencies. It is a stretch at times to credit his inability to recognise what is happening to his marriage but perhaps that is simply because he was never able to fully achieve what his father had toasted upon his engagement 'l'enterrement de vie de garçon'. 'The burial of a boys life.'

On reflection then this is a novel that intrigued at the outset and has plenty going for it but which slowly wore me down with its claustrophobic imagery and connections. It's worth reminding ourselves I think that this is Moore's debut novel. It's great to see it on the list, great for a publisher like Salt to get some deserved attention, and it'll be great to see what Moore produces in the future, but this isn't the winner for me. We'll find out if I'm right or not next Tuesday.

(Watch it win now)

Building Stories - Chris Ware

2012-10-04T09:00:00.000+01:00

'in pictures revealed'

The space above the first line of my reviews is for the cover image of whatever book it happens to be. A review of a graphic novel will often be accompanied by a few other pictures of the work itself to give you an idea of the artwork and design. Both of those features seem somewhat inadequate when writing a post on Chris Ware's latest, an opus that he has been working on for years. Building Stories is a collation of strips previously published in the Nest Magazine, The New Yorker, Kramer's Ergot, and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. These diverse strips may have been finally brought together but this is a graphic novel with no clear beginning or end. Published as 14 separate books, booklets, newspapers and something that resembles a game board this is a cornucopia for Ware enthusiasts. It is a vast and beautifully produced collection of work, boxed with great attention to detail. This is just what you might expect if you have read Ware before or if McSweeney's has ever popped through your letterbox. In fact this book reminded me very much of a combination of McSweeney's issue 13 (a collection of comic strips curated by Ware) and 17 ("Made To Look Like It Came In Your Mailbox") and it's important from the off not to let the presentation of this work blind us to whether it is actually any good or not. This kind of thing has been done before and we should ask whether the box of goodies adds anything to the reading experience, becomes an inherent part of it, or whether it possibly detracts from its impact.

I'm being a bit unfair there. Not to Ware, but to you because I'm making it sound like I might start criticising this amazing work when in fact I love it. I loved it when it arrived via courier and I removed it from the world's largest jiffy bag. I actually hugged it to my chest once I had it in my hands. I then spent several weeks working my way through it at a leisurely pace, rationing myself to make sure that I didn't rush through it and find myself bereft too soon. I won't say it was a joy to read, anyone who has read any Ware before will now that joy isn't an emotion that appears to easily, but it was a pleasure and a privilege to be able to read it before anyone else's opinion appeared, savouring each section and allowing the work to come together in my own mind in the way I had happened to assemble it through the choices I made in which booklet to read next. This is the most remarkable thing about it. It has no set beginning or end and it is up to the reader to decide which order they read things in. If it is true that we impose a narrative on our own lives then the really revolutionary thing about this graphic work is that we the reader impose the structure of the narrative onto the lives of its three main characters. How we read about them and the order in which we do so cannot help but alter the way in which we experience their stories and so each reader is going to experience the book in a different way, something that would be true of any book of course but even more so with this one that doesn't determine the way in which the reader might read it. But the fact that there is no set order doesn't mean that there isn't an order. Reading against the strict chronology can throw up some interesting conflicts. It would for example be interesting enough to read about a woman who desperately wants a child and who finally achieves it but it's even more interesting to read about a woman struggling with the realities of motherhood and then to see how much she desired it in the past.

Building Stories focuses on a three-storey building in Chicago. It has three main tenants beginning with the old lady who owns it on the ground floor, a couple breaking apart on the first floor and woman who longs to be a mother on the top floor. Ware doesn't stop there, he also gives us two comics dedicated to 'Branford, the Best Bee in the World', a worker bee who tries to be a good husband even whilst he fantasises desperately about having it off with the queen. He also allows the building itself to become a character, not in the usual literary sense that reviewers are fond of noting to show how well written a location or locale might be but in a very real sense; the building is given a voice, it narrates the odd panel, intrigued by its inhabitants having seen so many come and go.

I don't really want to say to much about the trajectories of the main characters but for those unfamiliar with Ware's work it might be worth mentioning some of his preoccupations. The spinster on the ground floor spends much of her time thinking about the past of course, providing a link with the building's own beginnings and a different era in Chicago. She isn't the only though. The woman on the first floor who has such an abusive relationship with her boyfriend naturally thinks back to when they were happier and she felt more attractive. Even the woman on the top floor, who eventually comes to dominate the piece as the main protagonist, who seems to be so forward thinking with her wishes for the future cannot help but look back on her past relationships and family life even at the very moment that she begins to achieve some of what she has always longed for. She will eventually move out to the suburbs with her partner and daughter but this only brings a new set of anxieties and troubles

This is not a book to be reading if you're at a low ebb. Let us be very clear about that. Ware's world view makes for pretty depressing reading. A friend of mine picked up a small booklet when I first unwrapped the bundle at work and started to read it. It is a narrow letterbox of a booklet that details in small panel after small panel nothing less than the spiritual vexation of motherhood. It is a tough thing read even though it contains very little to actually 'read', leaving you exhausted and heavy by the end and like you need a lie down. My friend handed it back almost shaking her head, very unsure of what it was she had just experienced (she is a mother herself) but certain I think that she wouldn't be rushing back for more. It isn't just the format of this book that requires time of the reader but the content of it too. It isn't the kind of book that you're going to want to rush through, it takes time to absorb the detail of each page, the aesthetic of each section, the assimilation of the whole and even after you've finished the work in its it's going to take some time to process. Once you've done that though I think you're actually going to want to read it again. How does he do that?!

I said at the beginning that we should be careful not to just say 'Ooh, pretty' and proclaim this as a work of genius before looking a little deeper at the content. If you will accept from me that there is plenty of content to be getting stuck into then we can now go back and praise this book for how damn good-looking it is too. Yes, it has been beautifully produced; yes, you are going to want to handle all of it an awful lot; yes, you are going to spend every minute required to read the painfully small text on some pages and follow some of the equally small panels on their waltz around the page. The construction of some pages, the eye for detail and symmetry, the architecture of the comic itself is breathtaking at times. There are several large double-page spreads which will take a good reading session to take in and at the end of it I found myself actually sighing with contentment, even at the same time as I might be wincing with regret and pain at what I had just read. The sheer number of hours that must have gone into making this book are perfectly reflected in the hours of enjoyment that you will receive in reading it. That is a rare occurrence in the graphic medium, where all too often the long stretch of an artist's endeavours can be flicked through in a matter of minutes so that even if we really enjoy them it is hard to really savour them.

I also questioned in my review of The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone where we might find the graphic work that utilised modern technology in its production. Ware's work isn't using any boundary breaking technology in its execution but it does engage with the modern world and its use of technology. Mobile phones, text messages, laptops, e-readers and tablets all make an appearance but so too does the loneliness and isolation that accompanies them. He shows the absurdity of couple sat opposite each other, each focused on their own screen, their faces illuminated by the glow that emanates from them. He shows the impossibility of reading tone in text communication and the huge frustration that often lies disguised behind it. There is a heartbreaking section in which our heroine stands naked before her partner, the awkwardness of her nakedness and the fact that this is something of a pre-arranged assignation based on the daily timetable of a pair of parents with a short gap in their responsibilities made even more acute by the fact that her partner (himself lying naked on the bed with his penis lying flaccidly on his thigh) is so wrapped up in the cool glow of his iPad that he hasn't noticed her standing there at all.

If you've read Ware before then this is probably on your Christmas list already but if it isn't or if you're reading this with an interest in his work or in graphic novels in general then do yourself a favour and get it on there. You can buy it from today for less than twenty pounds. That is bonkers, frankly. It's a beautifully made thing that would be worth the money even if the content wasn't as good as it is, but the fact that Ware shows once again that he's an innovator of the form, able to direct the eye around the page quite unlike anyone else, and that he puts so much of the decision making power into the reader's hands is probably the biggest gift of all. Treat yourself, or someone else. It even comes ready-boxed.

Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

2012-10-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

'all my etc'

To have been so intimate with Kitty Flinch had been a pressure, a pain, a shock, an experiment, but most of all it had been a mistake. He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.
'Yes,' she said. 'Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.'

I really meant to read this some time ago. When I saw details of a novel with an intro from Tom McCarthy my ears pricked up. Then came a glowing review from Mr Self in the Guardian. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until its Booker long-listing that I finally took the plunge and how frustrating not to have read and enjoyed it sooner. What would have been even cooler than reading it nice and early, before the other plaudits arrived, would have been to be amongst the names printed within the cover as supporters who brought the novel to publication. Publisher And Other Stories uses a subscription model you see, helping to show that there is a market and support for a title before it goes into print, and each of those subscribers will see their name printed at the back of the titles they have helped bring into being. That must pretty good, even more so now that the book has been short-listed too.

Anyway, before I begin to sound like a pitch for subscribers (click here for details!) let's look at the book itself. I'm thrilled to see it on the Booker list, not just as a triumph for small independent publishers but also to show that dark and challenging fiction has a place in the running for a prize that lost some of its lustre last year with the sniping about readability. In fact with a shortlist like this year's one wonders if there will still be so much clamour for the new Literature Prize. Swimming Home is the perfect rebuttal because its set up could so easily herald the kind of middle-class fare that encourages so much sniping at literature prizes and 'literary' fiction in general. Two families holiday at a villa in the hills above Nice. Joe and Isabel Jacobs are there with their 14 year-old daughter Nina. Joe is a poet, Isabel a war reporter. Their friends Mitchell and Laura run a failing shop in Euston that sells primitive weapons and African jewellery. It all sounds cosy enough but we are unseated immediately as the Jacobs come out to the pool ('more like a pond') and think they see something floating in the deep end, Joe wondering if it's a bear. This is Kitty Finch who is actually swimming naked underwater, an interloper in their midst who claims to be there due to a mix up with dates and who insinuates herself into the family's holiday. I was reminded of Ali Smith's The Accidental in which Amber was the uninvited guest on another middle-class holiday. The two books don't have much in common beyond that, but that sense of unease and the way in which a stranger can have a devastating impact on a family unit was all too familiar.

Kitty is an extraordinary creation and I found it fascinating the way a female novelist approached this provocateur in comparison to how I fear a male novelist would handle things. Yes, standing next to her 'was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gases seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating' and yes, she spends large parts of the book it would seem with very little clothes on (this same technique is often on display in British theatre where productions of new plays force some poor kid out of drama school to parade around with it all out on show because that's the only way to demonstrate youthful sexual allure, or temptation, or something or other) but whilst we might expect her allure to come from being some perfect, pert ingenue she is only ever 'almost pretty, with her narrow waist and long hair glowing in the dark, but ragged too, not far off someone begging outside a train station holding up a homeless and hungry sign.'

She had a north London accent. Her front teeth were crooked. When she wasn't stammering and blushing she looked like she'd been sculpted from wax in a dark workshop in Venice. If she was a botanist she obviously did not spend much time outside. Whoever had made her was clever. She could swim and cry and blush and say things like 'hogged it.'

These and other descriptions of her are so effective in their detail and the way in which they demonstrate how difficult the Jacobs and the other residents find dealing with her. She always seems dangerous in some way and yet we can never quite work out why. This is perhaps due to the opening page (part of which I quoted at the top of this post), a scene on a mountain road with Kitty and Joe in a car together, a scene that returns later in the book, sightly altered, taking on the feel of a dream. The reader always senses that proceedings could well career off the road and down the side of the mountain.

Joe and Isabel's marriage is in trouble and Kitty could well be the catalyst to blow things apart. Is this why Isabel insists that she stay rather than leave at the beginning of the novel? She couldn't possibly know that Kitty is in fact there because she is a huge fan of Joe's poetry and that she has brought a poem of her own, whose title is what lends this novel its own, for him to read. This writing link is so strong that Joe is convinced he can hear lines of his own poetry in what Kitty says to him. Kitty and Joe are also linked by their respective depressions, Joe having written famously about his treatment and Kitty having just come off her own medication, Seroxat. Joe puts off reading her poem for as long as he can but finally relents (we will read only snatches of it, with its repeated use of 'etc') and his reaction comes close to describing the effect of reading the novel.

To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.

There is so much hidden under the surface of the writing, just as Kitty herself was disguised under the surface of the pool when they arrived, things are alluded to, imagery and symbols are potent and interesting and each of the characters is expertly suggested by pitch-perfect detail. For the young daughter Nina this is a revolutionary moment. Fully aware of the fragile nature of her parent's marriage she is also undergoing her own transformation from child to adult and it is Kitty who assumes the role of mentor whilst the parents are distracted when Nina has her first period. In a wonderfully written scene Kitty grabs her hand and runs with her outside to the pool.

Nina could see her own shadow in the pool and in the sky at the same time. She was tall and long, there was no end to her and no beginning, her body stretched out and vast. She wanted to swim and when Kitty insisted it didn't matter about the blood, she dared herself to take off the bikini and be naked, watching her twin shadow untie the straps more bravely than the real-sized Nina actually felt. She finally jumped into the pool and hid herself in the blanket of leaves that floated in the water, not sure what to do with her new body because it was morphing into something alien and perplexing to her.

The pool is one of the most obvious symbols in the novel but what of its title and that wish as stated by Kitty to get home safely? This is where the novel feels really subversive, taking the middle-class holiday and jeopardising the ability to even escape from it unscathed. Joe, as we have learned early on, has an anglicised name, having fled occupied Poland at the age of five thus committing himself not only to 'leave no trace or trail of his existence' but also of course never to return home.

That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same.

A man who can never really return home, a wife hardened by reporting from fields of conflict, a daughter on the cusp of womanhood and a stranger with mixed motives. This is about as far from the comforting holiday read we might have expected before opening the cover and that is what makes the book so thrilling to read. Dark, dangerous and unknowable, this novel, like the pool at its centre with its covering of fallen leaves has hidden depths and dangers that might just make it the dark horse on this year's Booker list. I certainly hope so because it is easily my favourite of the shortlisted titles I've read.

A shifting perspective

2012-09-25T09:00:00.000+01:00

No review this week but I thought I could point you towards a little project I have initiated. Two years ago I reviewed an out of print book called The New Perspective by K Arnold Price. The book had been chosen by Colm Toibin for a Guardian article called How did we miss these? in which 50 writers chose 'brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine.'

Price's debut novel was published when she was 84 and she only published one more after that. I thought the New Perspective was fantastic, but with copies so scarce and expensive I decided to lend it to anyone interested in giving it a go. What has begun is what I hope will be a kind of international library/book club with some of the network of bloggers and readers that I have connected with over the last 5 years sharing their thoughts on this short novel. First up was Trevor Berrett of The Mookse and the Gripes over in the US. You can find his review here (positive I am glad to say) and I'll let you know as soon as the next one goes up. All I can reveal is that the book has travelled north a little to Canada.

Max at Pechorin's Journal got a copy of the book himself and reviewed it here. He has also passed his copy on so there may be even more reviews to come...

Sea of Ink - Richard Weihe

2012-09-18T09:25:00.003+01:00

'water rendered visible'

This is the third and final novella in Peirene's Small Epic series and they don't come much smaller or epic than this one. 107 pages including 11 illustrations make up 51 short chapters. Contained within those small numbers is the life of a man, the end of the Ming dynasty in China and a meditation on artistic inspiration that applies not just to the visual arts, maybe not just to the arts at all, but applies to everyone when examining what comes before action of any kind. That aspect of the book, and the fact that it is based on the real life of Chinese painter, poet and calligrapher Bada Shanren, mean that you might question how well it succeeds as a piece of fiction in the traditional sense (Weihe's Afterword and Notes on Sources show actually how well he has incorporated his research) but there is no doubt that it provides a calm and meditative read that will reward you with an enormous sense of relaxation if you can absorb it in a single sitting.

The year 1644 saw the end of the Ming dynasty which had ruled China for 276 years. The ruling family had spread far and wide but were slowly and systematically wiped out by the rising Manchu's. Those that had once wielded power were faced with the choice under the new Manchurian dynasty to collaborate or die. We follow the life of the man who was born Zhu Da in 1626, in the eleventh generation of the Yiyang branch of the Ning line of the royal family (Ning being the 17th son of Ming dynasty's founder). A sheltered childhood in the palace allowed him to develop his early prodigious gifts in poetry and art under the tutelage of his father. But with the end of the Ming dynasty and his father's death, Zhu Da is rendered mute, communicating only with his brush, before finally fleeing to the mountains, and the sanctuary of a monastery, leaving behind a wife and child, perhaps guided by wise saying, 'If you are guided by human feelings you will easily lose your way... but if you are guided by nature you will rarely go wrong.'

The opening of this novella is a little like the paragraph above, a potted history and a lot of 'plot' and I might seem to be spoiling things by giving so much away but the plot isn't really the thing. Zhu Da leaves his life as a prince behind, any returning images 'not memories, rather the dream of a life never lived.' Within the monastery he undergoes the first of his transformations, changing his name to Chuanqui, and beginning his next period of tutelage under the instruction of the Abbott Hongmin. The meat of the book is really in what it has to say about creativity, inspiration, art, expression and the position of the person who holds the brush. The Abbott has plenty of wise advice to pass on to his charge and his training is repetitive, physical and demanding. We might not think of a single, fluid swipe of the brush as a physical exertion but we get a real sense of the pain that comes from repeatedly practising movements and getting to the point where he can remove the conscious movement and allow the hand and brush to paint what is there. As his master explains at one point: "Ink is water rendered visible, nothing more. The brush divides what is fluid from everything superfluous."

The plot will catch up Chuanqui (who in turn changes his name to Xuege, then Geshan, Renwu, Lu, Poyun and finally Bada Shanren) who will have to feign madness in order to escape being assimilated into the new order when his identity is uncovered. The adoption of the face of madness, the near-constant name changing and the desire to disappear into the act of painting all throw up interesting thoughts about the position of the artist, particularly in a modern age when the cult of the artist as celebrity or brand is so strong. Bada Shanren has an interest in remaining undetected of course and actively avoids being identified (although he applies his stamp to each of his pictures) but he is constantly striving to locate who he is as an artist for himself. Again, his master will have something to say on the path of the individual artist looking at how to express themselves directly.

'...besides the old role models you also have your own: yourself. You cannot hang on to the beards of the ancients. You must try to be your own life and not the death of another. For this reason the best painting method is the method of no method. Even if the brush, the ink, the drawing are all wrong, what constitutes your "I" still survives. You must not let the brush control you; you must control the brush yourself.'

As I said at the top there are 11 illustrations of Bada Shanren's work throughout the book and one of Weihe's strengths is the way in which he technically describes the act of painting some of them. This might sound counter-intuitive but in the same way that Jean Echenoz used plain description to realise the works of Ravel into the reader's mind, Weihe describes the technique behind the paintings of Bada Shanren, something particularly important in a painting style which is all about technique and what can be achieved by single strokes, changes in pressure and the use of the right ink.

In the centre of the paper he painted a fish from the side, with a shimmering violet back and a silver belly, the tail fins almost semicircular like the bristles of a dry paintbrush. The fish's moth was half open, as if it were about to say something. It's left eye peered up to the edge of the paper with an expression combining fear, suspicion, detachment and scorn.
The eye was a small black dot stuck tot he upper arc of the oval surrounding it.
The fish swam from right to left across the paper.
Bada painted this one fish and no other, then out his name to the paper.
He had perished long ago, but he was still alive. All he feared now was the drought, when the ink no longer flowed and life had been worn down to nothing.
That is how he saw himself.

This novella is perfect reading for any visual artist (I have already passed my copy on to just such a person) but I would argue that its lessons and the thoughts it provoke would apply to anyone working in just about any field of the arts, where inspiration and creativity are as capricious and slippery as a live fish in the hand. In a modern world where everything seems to run at a hectic pace and demand is such that we might simply churn things out rather than take our time there is a lot to be said for giving this book the time it requires to read from cover to cover. That in turn might help us to appreciate the time we should take before making the first stroke, for...

....Is the whole drawing not contained in the first stroke? It must be considered long in advance, perhaps a whole life long, in order to bring it to the paper in one fluid movement at the right moment, without the need or ability to correct it.

Train Dreams - Denis Johnson

2012-09-11T09:00:00.000+01:00

'gone forever'

The book that failed to bag the Pulitzer Prize in the year that the board decided that none of its shortlist deserved the accolade (or couldn't agree on which one did) actually began life as a story in the Paris Review back in 2002. As an avid devourer of Johnson's writing I had been frustrated for many years by seeing the title appear on a certain web-based book supplier but only in German, I believe. How long would it be before this novella finally got published in English again for those of us who'd missed out originally? A whole decade later it is finally in print thanks to Granta who are having a barnstorming year quite frankly. I was a little cautious too however. Johnson's last published work was Nobody Move, a novel which had previously been serialised in Playboy magazine, and whilst I found much to enjoy it felt like a bit of filler after his opus Tree of Smoke. So I was a little worried when Train Dreams finally saw the light of day. Was this going to be another bit of (previously published) filler before the next major work? Let me answer my own question with an emphatic no! Train Dreams is far from being filler. It may only be just over 100 pages, a novella, but it contains a man's life, a lost era and a richness and satisfaction that shouldn't be possible in such a short book. It might even be his best, but his readers are sure to disagree about that. It is certainly worthy of proper publication and in my limited experience of the Pulitzer shortlist (I gave up on The Pale King after reading more pages than in the whole of Train Dreams and Swamplandia! didn't appeal) should probably have picked up that prize.

Train Dreams begins in 1917 with its hero, Robert Granier, part of a group of railway workers that attempt to murder a Chinese labourer. The men have all been working together for Spokane International in Idaho on the construction of a bridge and it is from this half-completed structure that they attempt to throw the accused thief. He manages to escape after spitting curses at his tormentors and Granier in fact believes the man may literally have cursed his life, something we will watch unfold over the following 116 pages. This is an America still being tamed and settled and Granier's work on the railways and in the woods felling trees puts him at the very edge, where the wildness of nature combines with the civilising effect of human settlement. This meeting point is the crux of the novel. Not only do humans behave savagely but nature strikes back with her own forms of destruction, Granier's dog isn't nearly domesticated enough, running with wolves. Even his young child appears unsafe in the low light of his cabin.

In the dark he felt his daughter's eyes turn on him like a cornered brute's. It was only his thoughts tricking him but it poured something cold down his spine. He shuddered and pulled the quilt up to his neck.
All of his life Robert Granier was able to recall this very moment on this very night.

Granier works as a choker, looping cable around the wood that has already been felled by sawyers, cleaned up by limbers and cut by buckers, ready to be hauled out from the woods by horses.

Granier relished the work, the straining, the heady exhaustion, the deep rest at the end of the day. He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

That sense is illusory though for, as one of his aged colleagues is keen to warn, 'the trees themselves were killers'. The meeting of man and nature is important again because 'It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.' We might expect this to presage an accident whilst he works but the forest attacks Granier in another way entirely when a fire sweeps through the valley where his wife and daughter live and he returns home to find no trace of them at all. So begins the solitary phase of his life (apart from that dog for company), one that he will share with the reader, one in which he will continue to live at the boundaries of the tamed world for "God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit."

Johnson has often written about those on the margins of society but in Granier he has a man even more isolated than most. Grieving for his losses for the rest of his life he is afraid of his dreams, of his wandering mind and the fleeting contact he has with others is just enough to keep him within the realms of what we might consider a normal life. A little like his dog we feel that left alone for long enough he might cross over to that wild side becoming even more connected to the landscape around him rather than the railway he helped to build right through it. Johnson's prose is perfectly pitched so that the dream-like or visionary image can break through the surface of civility, and in its exploration of themes as varied as racial integration, violence and isolation he also manages to make us question how sure a hold we have on what makes us human.

This is the kind of book that makes the reader marvel at how much the author has managed to cram in but which never feels crowded or overworked. I have barely mentioned any of the incident and not even hinted at the quite extraordinary way in which the story develops and concludes. It is a gem of a novella, not neat at all but rugged and dangerous, written with the kind of skill that manages to hide all the machinery away so that the reader doesn't even realise how it is all done; and whilst it is obviously a treat for those like me who already know what an amazing writer Johnson is it will be an even bigger treat for those who have yet to discover him. You lucky bastards.

The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers

2012-09-04T09:14:00.000+01:00

'the curve of the bell'

A yellow bird
With a yellow bill
Was perched upon
My windowsill

I lured him in
With a piece of bread
And then I smashed
His fucking head...

Traditional U.S Army Marching Cadence

Some people are swayed by the blurbs that come attached to the dust-jacket of new novels and some aren't, but whichever camp you fall in you can't help but be impressed by the sheer calibre of the names adorning Kevin Powers debut novel, not to mention their fervour. You'll see Chris Cleave, Ann Patchett and Colm Toibin in the cover shot above but you can also add Alice Sebold, Anthony Swofford and Tom Wolfe to that roll call with Wolfe calling it "the All Quiet on the Western Front for America's Arab wars." That's some pretty impressive blurbage but as is always the case, it doesn't really mean anything when you sit down to read a book yourself. The very first thing I will say in its favour is that despite the text in my advance proof being virtually microscopic I persevered way beyond my usual threshold for tiny type (with the final dramatic irony being that a finished copy arrived the very day after I finished it). Powers is a poet and an Iraq war veteran and his debut novel about that conflict and its impact showcases both of those traits, containing both the veracity you'd hope for from a real soldier and some amazing and quite beautiful writing from the poet.

The novel is narrated by Pvt John Bartle who makes a close link with another private, Daniel Murphy, when the two of them are training at Fort Dix. Bartle is 21 ("as full of time as my body would allow. But looking back from where I am, almost thirty, old enough, I can see myself for what I was. Barely a man. Not a man. Life was in me, but it splashed as if at the bottom of a nearly empty bowl."), Murph is just 18 and considerably greener, leading Bartle to make a promise he can never keep to Murph's mother, 'I promise I'll bring him home to you.' This is the pact that frames the novel.

The two men are deployed to Al Tafar in the Ninevah Province of Iraq. Daily life alternates between periods of torpor and dangerous patrols, with the threat of mortars, RPG's and IED's never far away. With US fatalities running at about 970 both Bartle and Murph obsess about not becoming the Army's thousandth casualty, their photo sure to be used in making them exactly the wrong kind of poster boy for America's conflicts abroad. In a telling fillip on the received wisdom about military unity Bartle expresses one of the psychological tools necessary for survival.

...I'd been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth. Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not. You're nothing, that's the secret: a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number in a sea of dust. And we somehow thought those numbers were a sign of our own insignificance.

Powers is strong as you might expect on the psychological impact of war, death and danger. We suspect early on that it will be Bartle's duty to remain strong when Murph falters but the truth is that both of them, and most of the men around them, cannot help but be traumatised by the bloody, terrifying and unpredictable nature of the conflict, with only the indomitable Sgt Sterling maintaining an aura of invincibility and strength. Bartle cannot help but ruminate on the difference between his grandfather's war with its 'destinations and purpose' and the 'slow, bloody parade' of his own campaign with its repeated battles for the same territory and the general lack of any measurable progress. This is where I would begin to question what the novel really achieves beneath the veneer of good writing. We have the dependable superior, the green recruits, the sensitive and poetic narrator, we have the banality of murder, the trauma of death, the parade of destruction. All of these are present in most narratives of war so what if anything does Powers add to the cannon?

We probably all want to know (and Powers isn't afraid to have a reporter ask the clichéd question) what combat actually feels like. By allowing young Murph to provide the answer he achieves a simplicity that avoids cliché, out of the mouths of babes....

"It's like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it. And know it. Death, or whatever, it's either coming or it's not. It's kind of like that," he continued, "like that split second in the car wreck, except for here it can last for goddamn days."

The reader is trying to measure the effect of trauma too because we know from the outset that Murph doesn't make it and also that war did something to him. Bartle too has spent a lot of time since, trying to pinpoint the moment he noticed a change in his charge, 'somehow thinking that if I could figure out where he had begun to slide down the curve of the bell that I could do something about it. But these are subtle shifts, like trying to measure the degrees of grey when evening comes.' Trauma is the novel's major theme, in fact those expecting to read a traditional war novel filled with incident may well be disappointed by only a couple of moments of military engagement. This is a novel about the legacy of war, of the trauma suffered by those fighting it not only at the point at which they are fighting but most importantly when they return home.

This is where the novel could really have excelled for me because this is the real untold story of war, the story of the survivors and how difficult they can find it to settle back into their civilian lives when they return home. In Remarque's classic All Quiet... he used his hero's visit home on leave to point up the awkwardness of engaging with his own family who didn't understand what horrors he had witnessed and his desperate desire to get back to the front amongst those who did. Bartle too returns home to his family and feels as though he's 'being eaten from the inside out' because he is constantly being thanked by those who are grateful for what they're doing over there and yet he can't tell them how awful it is making him feel. We also experience how the slightest noise can trigger a memory of mortars falling and an instinctive reaction to brace for impact, and we sense the mental prison that Bartle is being backed into.

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of the fact. So it goes.

As I say, this element of the book could have been fantastic, and in many ways the style with which Powers writes Bartle's decay is impressive but I wanted to engage with that darkness a little more. There are two reasons I think for some of those quotes on the front and back. The first is to do with feeling. Powers does write in a way that makes you feel things: fear, disgust and confusion for example, and that's why I think he resonates with writer's like Cleave and Sebold. The other is to do with timing. How many novels are there about the Iraq war? Surprisingly few (and none that are going to receive the marketing push that this one will) and so Powers has the virtue of having got there first. How Wolfe can possibly acclaim this book to be in the same canon as All Quiet... is beyond me. We won't know for years and years what the classic novel of the Iraq war might be, and this one isn't doing anything sufficiently new to warrant the excitement attached to it.

But I don't want to be too down on a book that has considerable strengths. Powers writes well, really well at times and it was only occasionally that his beautiful writing began to feel like a concious attempt to do 'beautiful writing' rather than what the novel seemed to demand. He began writing the novel to try and put into words what it's really like 'over there' and his approach is to focus less on the fighting and more on the time that surrounds it. That seems like the right place to look and if the resulting novel doesn't quite hit the heights that I had hoped for at the beginning then that may be as much me wanting it to be a novel it isn't as Power's failure to make it the novel it could have been. Near the novel's end Bartle is given a map of Iraq, a map which would, like every other be very soon out of date - 'less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions, drawn to scale. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow."

For another view on The Yellow Birds and other Iraq-related fiction check out this post from former embedded reporter Nathan S. Webster

NW - Zadie Smith

2012-08-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

'never neutral'

After a seven year wait we have another novel from Zadie Smith. Well, you might have been waiting for it but this is the first book of hers that I've read so if you want to know if it's as good as that other one of hers that you liked then you'll need to check with someone else. That time gap though, and the title of the novel (and the fact that reviews have been strictly embargoed until publication) always meant that this was going to be something of an event publication, a shoo-in perhaps for another Booker nomination (the judges did not agree I'm afraid), and what appeared to be another state of the nation novel (or state of the city) to follow on from John Lanchester's Capital. The first thing to say is that it doesn't read like that kind of book at all. Smith does capture an area of London and a small sample of its people but I'm not sure she has much interest in trying to incorporate a grand message about living in London near the beginning of the 21st century (or if there is I'm not sure what it is), it all feels far more personal than that. By focussing on four main characters who all share a starting point in life, the fictional housing estate of Caldwell, but whose trajectories since have been very different, and then allowing their paths to cross naturally she does make sociological points, political and racial ones too, but it is in personal relationships and the characters of the two women in particular that she finds most success.

NW is of course North West London and we are around and about Willesden and the Kilburn High Road. The novel opens (and you can read it yourself here) with a section entitled Visitation. First we have a literary tracking shot to establish the locale and then a face to face confrontation as Leah opens the door to a hysterical woman begging for help. This is Shar, who still lives on the Caldwell estate, visible across the way from where Leah now lives ('From there to here, a journey longer than it looks'). Shar needs help, or rather money, and it is only after this sometimes frantic exchange, which manages to incorporate some reminiscences about their shared schooling at Brayton, and Shar's departure that Leah begins to suspect that she has been victim to some rather elaborate begging or a well-scripted mugging with no violence. This section is written with fragmented sentences, thoughts jagging about, snatches of music, typographical experiments (see below), memories inserted in special chapters numbered 37 (a number given mystical significance by a friend of Leah's); it is a stylistic tour de force which will probably attract as many readers as it repels.

Then comes a section called Guest in which we meet Felix. This was the least memorable section for me, Felix never really engaged me as a character, and it made little impression on me beyond the brutality and inherent danger in the engaging with other people in London. This will become an important theme of the book however, and I'll come back to communication later, so I'm wary of discounting this section entirely but, as I say, it didn't really contribute much for me apart from a neat way of viewing the way different London boroughs segregate themselves -

He considered the tube map. It did not express his reality. The centre was not 'Oxford Circus' but the bright lights of Kilburn High Road. 'Wimbledon' was the countryside, 'Pimlico' pure science fiction.

Next comes Host which makes up over a third of the novel, consisting of 185 short, numbered and named chapters, and is the most successful part of the book. Maybe I've just got the taste for these short chapters but it is such an effective way of capturing character, covering time and including a whole life in a short number of pages. Here the focus is Leah's childhood friend Natalie, although when they were growing up she was Keisha (just as Zadie herself used to be Sadie). Natalie is the most interesting character in the novel, the most developed (do I dare make any connection between her and the author?) and also the most obvious to follow in terms of someone making an escape from humble beginnings on the Caldwell estate.

She is probably as surprised to have come out of Brayton as it is surprised to have spawned her. Nat, the girl done good from their thousand-kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from. To live like this you would have to forget everything that came before. How else could you manage?

Natalie's story is one of re-invention, perhaps that is the only way a woman from a council estate can make a career in law, a woman of colour. At one stage she receives some advice from another woman like her, a QC.

'The first lesson is: turn yourself down. One notch. Two. Because this is not neutral.' She passed a hand over her neat fram from her head to her lap, like a scanner. 'This is never neutral.'

The collection of short chapters take in her childhood, her friendship with Leah, her upward trajectory, her success and its burdens, marriage, children, and always this lurking sense that none of it feels as good as it should do, the girl done good doesn't feel nearly as good as she should.

Walking down the Kilburn High Road Natalie Blake had a strong desire to slip into the lives of other people. It was hard to see how this desire could be practicably satisfied or what, if anything, it really meant. 'Slip into' was an imprecise thought...Listening was not enough. Natalie Blake wanted to know people. To be intimately involved with them.

Another form of reinvention will allow her to transgress, to go against everything that her life appears to amount to and in a novel about (mis)communication it is just one example of how a flawed attempt can have dire consequences.

The observant amongst you will have noticed that so far I have only mentioned three of the four main characters. The final member of the cast is Nathan Bogle, spoken of in disapproving tones in the early parts of the book before making his main appearance in a section entitled Crossing. Bogle is a shadowy figure, a supposed failure, exactly what we might expect to come forth from a housing estate and yet he actually seems most at ease in the terrain of the novel, a man content with his lot, his status. This is one of the more alarming conclusions to draw from the book, that the environment is so hostile and set, that it is those who attempt to lift themselves above it who will inevitably fail or even fall victim to it.

London has long been characterised as city in which so many people live and yet so few of whom actually connect. I have experienced that first hand and know also the fear of engaging the wrong person in conversation or debate. In one memorable scene in a children's playground a group of women confront a young lad who is smoking. It very quickly escalates with talk of disrespect and where people come from before calming down again but it is a perfect example of the simple engagement that can quickly become aggressive and even fatal. Smith captures these exchanges brilliantly and in fact the dialogue throughout the book is diverse, idiomatic and convincing. With such variety in the writing style for each section of this novel it isn't a surprise that my first experience of reading her fiction wasn't a complete success (and I have heard others say that she might be a better essayist) but those sections that I did like, I really liked. Smith has been quoted as saying that she finds all aspects of writing a novel tough apart from the dialogue. This I find fascinating because part of me wonders what she might produce if she turned her hand to writing a play. I doubt it will ever happen but if you're reading Zadie (!) then give it a little thought. And think about a nice part for a man approaching his late thirties with laughter lines and maybe the odd grey hair whilst you're at it.

Shrapnel - William Wharton

2012-08-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

'tales I never told'

William Wharton is best known as the author of the novel Birdy, winner of a National Book Award and later turned into a film by Alan Parker starring Nicholas Cage (back when he used to do proper acting) and Matthew Modine (two other novels of his were subsequently filmed - Dad and A Midnight Clear - both starring Jack Lemmon). It is hard to get much biographical information about the man himself, I have only just learned for instance that his real name is Albert William Du Aime, but it has often been assumed that his novels are partly autobiographical. One quirk of his writing career was an unusual popularity in Poland which lead to many books being published only in that language (including a sequel to Birdy). One of those was this memoir which has now been published in English thanks to The Friday Project. Many of those who served in the Second World War (and indeed in any conflict) came home with experiences and memories that they had little wish to share despite the frequent enquiries of their families and loved ones. Wharton was no different. Having volunteered to fight in that war and eventually come home injured after the Battle of the Bulge he kept many of his experiences a secret until he finally felt compelled to put them down on paper. What he produced was one of the most refreshingly honest accounts of war I have read, written with a deceptively light touch that still manages to make an impact. There is a feeling throughout of a man who can't quite believe that he is being asked to do what he does, or that he continues to find himself in a position to be asked.

One evening in New York I had dinner with Kurt Vonnegut. He asked me, 'How was your war?" I flippantly responded by recounting the number of court martials in which I had been involved. It was not a good answer. War for me, though brief, had been a soul-shaking trauma. I was scared, miserable and I lost confidence in human beings, especially myself. It was a very unhappy experience.
It was not a pleasant experience writing this book either. When dug up, the buried guilts of youth smell of dirty rags and old blood. There are many things that happened to me, and because of me, of which I am not proud, events impossible to defend now: callousness, cowardice, cupidity, deception. I did not tell these stories to my children. My ego wasn't strong enough to handle it then, perhaps it isn't even now, when I'm over seventy years old. We shall see.

That extract comes near the beginning of the book, a confession of sorts, and a neat precis of what is to come. In short chapters Wharton takes us from basic training through to his homecoming after victory and his almost anecdotal form makes the book engaging and compelling from first page to last. It is shot through with that humour that comes from those that survive by the narrowest of margins and are then able to look back on the absurdities of war. We meet an early draftee who uses his college education to get out of the army, not by avoiding the draft but by repeatedly and methodically urinating on his mattress (with the aid of an alarm clock) to gain a diagnosis of enuresis and an honourable discharge. We see how Wharton and many of his colleagues look for any opportunity to make their lives easier and, the ultimate goal, to get out of fighting altogether. Trench foot provides one of those avenues, the prospect of a few toes being lopped off 'a small price to pay if we get to snuggle into a warm cosy hospital bed, miles away from this insane scene, and more importantly, have a chance to live.'

This war to me is something like whooping cough or measles you try to get through, or maybe more like chicken pox where you aren't supposed to scratch or you'll have big craters all over your face and body. I'm trying my damnedest not to scratch.

Wharton by his own admission is a bit of a coward ("the difference between being scared and being a coward is having other people find out.") but he also acts with remarkable relaxation in some of the most extreme circumstances. In one of his first actions of the war he is selected for a mission that sees him parachuted behind enemy lines on his own to deliver a radio to the French resistance, a suicidal mission that he somehow survives, setting the tone for several close escapes in the future, and one of many examples of ways in which those in command are happy to send soldiers on patrols and missions that will almost certainly end in their deaths.

Death of course makes many an appearance, as much in those instances when soldiers narrowly escape it as when they finally succumb. Wharton finds an entirely fresh perspective on it when he is reunited briefly with the man who had been the school bully responsible for flushing his head down the toilet.

It's a terrible shock to see someone who's been such a menace in your childhood... who took so much joy from your life, lying there empty, bloody, spattered with dirt particles and shrapnel pitted into his skin... Some things are hard to live past.

Wharton's honesty is particularly powerful when he opens out from his own personal failings to those of the liberating forces as a whole. He and we become witnesses to the terrible behaviour of military force, to the things you might expect from conquests of the past like rape and pillage. The Russians may have been cast as the villains by the American top brass but Wharton is clear that the behaviour of American troops was just as bad. He himself stole gemstones from jewellery, gradually building up a substantial nest-egg which he hides in a German gas mask ready for the time when victory sends them home. His plan is only foiled by an extraordinary attack on their camp from a group of Hitler Youth. But what the book is always building towards is an incident in which he reports a massacre by their own troops - '...a really bad way to end a war. If there's a good way to end a war I don't know what it is, but this was a bad way to end one.' It is an episode that forces Wharton to examine his personal morality and despite having described himself as 'sort of an incipient psychopath, or at least, a misanthrope' it yet again places him in opposition to those in authority.

That opposition is probably what saved his ego when writing this memoir. Always the first to point out his own weaknesses and failings he is also careful to portray those in command as either weak, misguided or ultimately cruel, with a total disregard for the lives of the men underneath them. Wharton's occasional connections with those around him belie his casting as misanthrope, he may be ashamed of his conduct in war but there are moments of atonement. At the end of it all however it is his frankness and ability to hold up his hands that not only saves his telling but makes it such an interesting story.

Mrs Bridge - Evan S Connell

2012-08-14T09:00:00.000+01:00

'exquisite idleness'

You may remember my enthusiastic review for Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits back in March, but if you don't then one of the joys of that book was its structure. Short chapters, often of only a page or so, revealed little nuggets of insight. One of that novel's own images was of a window segmented into many panes so that the view outside was separated into many distinct pictures - 'There is not one pane that is not beautiful'. Whether Bachelder had read this novel from 1959 before writing his own I have no idea but it shares that same structure: short chapters with their own titles, snapshots of a life lived (and here it is much more of a life, Abbott was only granted three months but we get to see the entire marriage of Mrs Bridge), which come together to create a 'pointillist portrait' of a woman and an era that is very much in the past and yet so easy for us to connect to thanks to Connell's sensitive handling of his creation.

All I can do in writing this post is to say quite simply that the book deserves its title of modern classic, tell you that it's an immensely enjoyable read and then give you extract after extract to demonstrate my point; so if you want to skip all that and just go and order yourself a copy then I won't be offended at all. It is a brilliant book, you won't regret it, but if you're still unconvinced then please read on. Mrs Bridge was Connell's first novel, originally published in 1959, and provides an acutely observed portrait of a suburban wife in the inter-war years. Her husband works long hours that provide a comfortable life for her and her three children, she is connected to her community (by which I mean those parts of it that are mirror-images of her own background and class) and it would be quite simple for her to sleep-walk through life with the small joys that it brings but Connell slowly allows her to question how happy an existence that might be and to let her keep asking questions about what her purpose might be. In fact it is her friend Grace Barron who articulates early on the questions that will come to dominate her life too.

'India, I've never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything. I don't know how other people live, or think, or even how they believe. Are we right? Do we believe the right things?'

These nagging doubts keep nipping away throughout a book in which life nevertheless ticks away. A novel made up of fleeting moments even includes a section in which Mrs Bridge reads a book containing a passage that observes that some people skim through life without ever seeing 'all it may contain.' She is interrupted in her reading, places the book on the mantel and whilst meaning to return to it, never does. As her life passes by she cannot 'get over the feeling that something was drawing steadily away from her.' She resolves to ask her husband whether he feels the same way at all when he returns from work one evening whilst also recalling the dreams they used to share, her not caring so much what his ambitions were but caring only for him. Then comes the realisation that his busy work life, which she had always thought of as a 'temporary condition', will in fact mean that she never sees very much of her husband.

They had started off together to explore something that promised to be wonderful, and, of course, there had been wonderful times. And yet, thought Mrs Bridge, why is it that we haven't - that nothing has - that whatever we - ?

The relationship between husband and wife is brilliantly observed despite the fact that their interactions are limited by his busy working life. On her 48th birthday her husband takes her to the club for dinner and announces that they will be going on a trip to Europe. Whilst he talks excitedly about all the places they will visit she remembers a similar conversation when he had promised that they would undertake this very trip, a conversation that seemed to have taken place 'eight or ten years ago, but it was more than twenty, and on this day she was forty-eight years old.' Growing sad at this thought she gazes out of the window at a gathering storm 'and the distant thunder seemed to be warning her that one day this world she knew and loved would be annihilated.' What then follows is the approach of a tornado which sends other diners down to the basement for safety but Mr Bridge refuses to be moved from his steak and continues eating. Despite her anxieties Mrs Bridge remains at his side. 'For nearly a quarter of a century she had done as he told her, and what he had said would happen had indeed come to pass, and what he had said would not occur had not occurred. Why, then, should she not believe him now?' They both remain and the tornado does indeed pass, 'whether impressed by his intransigence or touched by her devotion.'

Connell knows that the smallest things can set a mind racing and it is whilst on that trip to Paris that she spots her husband dwelling by a shop window and sees that what held his attention was a black lace bra 'with the tips cut off.' Why had he stood there looking so serious? She then remembers the time he revealed that as a child he had wanted to be a great composer, what other secrets might there be? 'Who was he really?' This territory is familiar from reading K Arnold Price's The New Perspective (recently enjoyed and reviewed by Trevor over here) and that questioning of the very basis of all that seems solid is what makes this novel grow in power and interest as it develops. Mrs Bridge becomes more and more fascinating as the short chapters progress, she is simply a more interesting person than we might have given her credit for at the outset. There is also something perversely gratifying about watching a privileged character struggling with the very aspects of their life that others might term comfortable, and I'll confess to a sort of morbid curiosity as to whether she could ever 'explain how the leisure of her life - that exquisite idleness he had created by giving her everything - was driving her insane?'

Sitting at her dressing table applying cold cream she suddenly asks who she is, how she got here, who the man undressing in the same room might be. She is gratified as she applies her white mask of 'sweetly scented anonymity' but when she looks in the mirror she realises that the smile she feels is nowhere to be seen. 'All the same, being committed, there was nothing to do but proceed.'

At the same time as her relationship with her husband has had distance added to it, the relationship with her children, one of the factors that altered her married life of course, slowly alters as they grow up and another form of distance comes into play. In one brilliant section her son builds a tower out of rubbish on a vacant lot. As it gets bigger and more solid, and the need to tackle him about taking it down more urgent she recognises that her reticence in doing so is because she realises the time has come for her to talk with him like an adult and she is not sure sure she is equal to it.

There are wonderful flashes of humour of course, quite often from puncturing outdated notions or unfashionable or prejudiced opinions. Looking at the varying Christmas decorations in the neighbourhood for example they stumble upon a bungalow with 'a life-size cut-out of Santa Claus on the roof, six reindeer in the front yard, candles in every window, and by the front door an enormous cardboard birthday cake with one candle. '

On the cake was this message:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR JESUS.
'My word, how extreme,' said Mrs Bridge thoughtfully. 'Some Italians must live there.'

Little giggles like that combine with stunning observations of our closest relationships, the gestures that we make in order to show love (including the ones that fail like an out-of-practice Mrs Bridge's attempt to make a loaf of pineapple bread whose failure is met at first with a stoical 'Never mind' from her husband who then buys her a dozen roses the next day), to produce a novel that delights with its humanity, its sympathy, and its belief that even with all our flaws there is a part of us that wants to be better. It also has one of the best endings to a novel that I can remember. Unlike this review. Like I said: just go read the damn thing. You can thank me later.

The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone - Ravi Thornton and Andy Hixon

2012-08-07T09:00:00.001+01:00

'dreadful desires'

I am, as you will know if you read this blog with any regularity, a fan of the graphic novel. This is partly to do with the form and its possibilities when compared to prose but I would have to be honest and say that a lot of the time it has to do with aesthetics. I like pictures, I like artwork, I am often drawn to graphic novels whose artwork does something for me. But for all their innovation with storytelling techniques the vast majority of comics and graphic novels that I see remain very traditional in their execution. They are drawn, sketched, occasionally painted but more often than not firmly rooted in the artistic techniques that have existed for many, many years. Where then are the graphic works that utilise the tools of the modern era?

Well, one look at the front cover of this new work from writer Ravi Thornton and illustrator Andy Hixon tells you that this is a book that has little to do with pen and ink. That said, it would be wrong of me to say that this is imagery created solely in a computer processor, far from it, as Andy Hixon's work is all sculpted from clay of one sort or another, decorated with a dab of paint before being photographed and then 'taken into Photoshop for arranging, colouring and texturing.' This combination of traditional sculpture and computer manipulation gives the images a look that I have never seen before in graphic novels, looking both real and impossible, hyper-real or dream-like, unsettling throughout. This book is also a riposte to those who think comics are only for kids. This is a very adult and disturbing tale that manages to be both terrifying and almost romantic by its final pages. On a first read it is almost too upsetting but each subsequent experience shows the beauty of the work that has gone into it.

Before they met Brin and Brent were considered dysfunctional, 'Disordered, destructive, sexually shambolic. She is rattled. He is loose.' When they meet and come together 'they are truly insane' and yet they manage to present themselves at The House of Care for the Grossly Infirm where they are employed together. Set within spare grounds the house holds Those Committed and another building called the Rehabilitation Pool. It is in the pool that Brin and Brent work, keeping the tiled floors clean with bleach that burns the soles of Those Committed and the water chlorinated above safe levels so that they flail and moan whilst Brin and Brent retire to their den to watch through holes drilled in the wall and to 'celebrate disgust' with sessions of 'hard beating, hard sex.'

Into this dark set up comes an innocent looking child called Minno Marylebone who lets herself through the back door into the pool each night and bathes in the waters there. This regular ritual of hers happens unbeknownst to the pool's guardians but we have a nagging sense that she will not be able to keep her visits a secret and a creeping unease about what might happen to her if she is discovered.

I won't spoil it any further by telling what happens in the third section of the book, only that we are told in that final chapter, 'That Brin and Bent catch Minno Marylebone is perhaps the most fortunate thing.' Italics are the writer's own. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the book is that it is prefaced by a comment from Thornton in which she confesses that the tale is a metaphorical rendering of 'something bad' that happened to her in the past. It is one of those things I am both keen to know and scared to even ask about. Both Thornton and Hixon have provided a director's commentary on the making of the book which is an interesting read, particularly the part about images being censored by the printers. The book is also much more than a simple book having already spawned a musical score and with a ballet app in the pipeline. A ballet app? I hear you ask. I have no idea, but everything about this partnership and this book has me yearning to know more. You too hopefully.

Hawthorn & Child - Keith Ridgway

2012-07-31T09:00:00.000+01:00

'Random is never really random'

Amongst a select group of readers there is a lot of enthusiasm for Keith Ridgway. They may not agree on what his best work is but there is certainly consensus that he is one of the most interesting writers working today. His latest novel is the first to be published by Granta who have been making all the big waves in 2012 with fabulous titles like Peter Stamm's Seven Years, Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station, Justin Torres' We The Animals and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams still to come. One book I had been eagerly anticipating, after enjoying his story collection Standard Time, was this new novel from Ridgway and those of you who read John Self's Asylum site or follow him on Twitter will have already been bashed around the head several times with how good it is. It really is very good. All the more dispiriting then to learn that on its publication day Waterstones, which has over 300 stores nationwide, had ordered a grand total of 18 copies.

I can't do anything about how Waterstones buys books, all I can do is bang on about this cracker sufficiently hard enough to send you to your preferred book outlet of choice and order a copy. I fail to see how you could be disappointed. How can I be so sure? Well, it seems to me there are two kinds of thing that can excite you about a book. The publishing industry as it stands can create plenty of buzz behind debut or event novels, books that like to stand up very tall on their own and demand that you all read them and discuss them. The quality of writing in those books is not the point. Amidst all the hubbub that is the insane phenomenon of 50 Shades of Grey (which took just eleven weeks to sell over a million copies, smashing the previous record held by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code which took a leisurely 36 weeks to do the same) I only ever hear people saying how badly written it is, but who cares? Other books like Room or The Slap used quirk or debate to fuel enthusiasm, the kind of water-cooler chatter that helps build word-of-mouth success. I've read plenty of interesting debuts only to be disappointed by the follow up before watching that author fade away (presumably having made enough from the much publicised six-figure advance to not have to worry about writing much more).

What I get excited about is finding an author who I want to read time and again. Philip Roth, Denis Johnson, J M Coetzee, Graham Greene, Stefan Zweig, W G Sebald, John Burnside - these are writers who haven't just written one good book, but several, and provided innovation and exploration for those readers devoted to them. Locking on to a modern writer like that seems to be getting harder with publishers less wiling or able to nurture writers as in days of old. Fail to shift enough copies or win an award and you may find yourself being forced to write a werewolf trilogy to keep the...erm, wolf from the door. Why is Ridgway amongst the writers that you should be interested in reading? Lets start with just how enjoyable this book is. There is nothing quite like reading a novel and getting a kick out of each successive page in terms of pure enjoyment. Ridgway writes with that deceptive ease that makes you feel as though the book is an easy read even whilst it dares to reach the parts other novels cannot reach.

Hawthorn and Child are two detectives whom we meet in the opening chapter within a dream of Hawthorn's. How's that for a playful beginning? They go to investigate a seemingly random shooting in which the victim claims to have been shot by a vintage car, we might expect this to go on to be a police procedural, albeit of a rather unusual kind, but don't expect to get any answers to this case or indeed any other. In fact don't expect this book to give you any of the usual assurances of a narrative novel. Whilst Hawthorn and Child may lend it their names you would struggle to even call them the main protagonists. 'We are not at the centre of things, said Child' and he is right, as the book's various chapters introduce us to new characters and storylines, the two detectives returning periodically a little like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hawthorn is the most fascinating of the two, a somewhat depressive figure, 'crooked somehow', prone to drifting off; making cryptic, literary notes that have little bearing on the case in hand. He is also gay and in one bravura section entitled How To Have Fun With A Fat Man Ridgway manages to write about Hawthorn policing a riot and attending an orgy in a sauna at the same time. Sometimes it is clear which location we are in but all too often Ridgway's brilliant use of language keeps it ambiguous and points up the similarities between these two seemingly opposed scenarios.

At a signal they move away form the wall. They move towards he others. It is always a confrontation. It is always a stand off. Hawthorn is shoulder to shoulder with men like himself. He is eye to eye across the air. He is picking out certain faces. He is making calculations. There are certain things he wants to do. There are things he doesn't want to do. These things are always people. He accepts or declines each face. Each set of shoulders. He is agreeing to and refusing each body in turn. His mind is ahead of him. He is saying yes to that one, no to that one. He is choosing. Choice is an illusion.

Each chapter has its own title, inviting us to treat this like a collection of linked stories. Some of these are so successfully independent that they give the pleasure of reading a perfectly honed short story. When this happens more than once in the novel you get the slightly giddy feeling of too much of a good thing. No complaints here however. Goo Book for example, in which we meet the driver of the elusive criminal Mishazzo and enter his relationship with his girlfriend, neither of whom can actually say tender things to one another but choose to write them instead in a notebook for the other to find, thus freeing themselves up to indulge a far more exotic sexual life (involving some of what is presumably making 50 Shades so popular), is a brilliant, self-contained gem (so much so that it was printed in the New Yorker here). It could stand alone as a short story and satisfy you completely but placed where it is in the novel it adds not only a frisson of something unexpected but also something close to sentimentality; a moment of genuine romance no matter how tainted.

They lay next to each other in the bed and touched each other and laid their faces one against the other and when they were tired of talking they fucked and when they were tired of fucking they talked, and many different afternoons became one afternoon that persisted in his mind for the rest of his life and he never knew what to make of it, then or after.

Marching Songs is another section that thrives out of context (again there's the opportunity to read it as such thanks to the publisher themselves here). It is a quite brilliant monologue, not just because of its distinctive voice, scattered subjects and obsessive detail but because whilst it is like a direct address monologue it is very much a piece of writing that makes virtue of itself as a piece of writing. I'm sure it could be read brilliantly out loud by an actor or the author himself but it reads so well on the page that the perverse pleasure is there for everyone who picks up the book (or clicks on the link above). A piece that captures brilliantly the morbid curiosity of the modern world, where videos of every kind of accident and atrocity can viewed whenever we like and as often as we like ("You can watch it all. Over and over.") actually had me personally unable to stop myself viewing some of the videos detailed. There is something compelling about the heroism of Formula One driver David Purley as he seeks to save the life of his friend and fellow driver Roger Williamson in the Dutch Grand Prix of 1973 but Ridgway manages to make even more of it with his simple description and commentary on the event.

I have read novels before that use the linked story format to make up their whole. Some of them work better than others. Ridgway almost goes one step further by eschewing the idea that these linked stories should come together to provide a narrative. As I said earlier, there will be no solution to the shooting incident that opens the book (sorry, spoiler!), but that is never really the point. The combined narratives of each chapter satisfy on their own in the same way that an unresolved short story can. The fact that there is not one but several of them and that they all inhabit the same world and share some of the same characters is what actually made the book such a success to me. Along the way you will meet criminals and the men who pursue them, family members, a premiership referee who sees ghosts, a secret brethren of wolves in conflict with other animals (yes, really) and yet none of it ever seems absurd. It is quirky in all the right ways and all goes to show what I said at the very beginning. There are some writers you read and come back to again and again because they consistently produce work of quality, variety and ingenuity. Ridgway has joined that list for me (in fact I enjoyed this one so much I read it twice - and I never do that), I can only hope that he will do the same for other readers too.