Alec's Oddments

Modernism

2011-02-26T12:19:00.002Z

As well as scribbling away I'm currently trying to make an anthology of splendid stuff by people on my MA course. I think this counts as self-self-publishing, or something: the whole production process is happening in-house. And by 'house', I mean 'room in university tower block where I have a laptop with InDesign on it'. With any luck by early June you'll be able to buy copies of The Manchester Anthology.

To support this I'm blogging about the entire publishing process.

Oh, and I've joined Twitter. I've no idea why. Maybe it's because it's my birthday today so I want to do something that makes me feel down with the kids again. Anyway: AlecIJohnson is my username, and I'm going to attempt some kind of link thing.

Snoozing

2010-12-29T15:47:00.000Z

Oh 'eck, I've been neglecting this blog. It was terrifically exciting at first, but now the novelty has worn off I'm starting to lose interest. A bit like parenting, then. Is there an internet social services?

The real reason is that this was something I did when I was going to work every day, as a way to make myself write things more often. Now that writing is my main pursuit, I find it harder to write as a hobby. There's still lots I want to scribble about, and lots I will eventually, gradually, put up here, but for now it's on a go-slow, possibly as some kind of industrial action against my novel. Which is doing very nicely, thanks for asking. It still has jokes and burglaries and Cyprus and Yorkshire and twisty bits of plot and it's still driving me entirely insane.

So no posts about Martin Amis (his reading list of rubbish first novels by great authors; his father's impressions; Saul Bellow's jacket; shorter than you'd expect), attempting to write proper literature essays again (Flaubert, Borges, long words made up by mad Frenchmen), hearing proper poets (why Seamus Heaney makes hippies faint) or fiction workshops (adverbs are evil, America rocks, and self-confidence is dead).

Not yet, anyway.

Centos

2010-12-11T10:50:00.000Z

Things said to me by ex-girlfriends and in rejection letters from literary journals

Dear Alec,

I’m sorry.

You're not quite what I'm looking for right now, but please continue trying.

You’re slightly too sentimental for my tastes, and less engaging than I had anticipated, though quite charming.

Unfortunately you lack pace in the middle, and you’re longer than I usually like.

I receive several hundred submissions a month so unfortunately cannot provide individual feedback.

I don't think you're taking this thing seriously.

Yours sincerely.

Things said to me by ex-girlfriends and in rejection letters from literary journals which, for legal reasons, were left out of my previous poem

Dear Alec,

Please stop hanging around outside my office.

House of Hair

2010-12-01T12:09:00.001Z

First published in issue 379 of Cat World (October 2009). In case you're wondering, yes, it is possible for shamelessly rude, incompetent people to make a cuddly magazine for people who want pictures of cats being loveable but don't have an internet connection. They still owe me either full payment (I have part of it now) or an explanation of what the devil they think they're playing at.

But here's the article, anyway.

House of Hair

After a few years floating between flats in London, a fellow really starts to miss his cats. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you about the strange emptiness of a house that isn’t covered in fluff and discarded toy mice. That’s why, when hunting for my last move, I found myself powerfully drawn to the adverts saying things like ‘must be cat-lover’, ‘to share with two professionals and one hairy mog’, or ‘not suitable for asthmatics’. In the end, I found myself in West London, in residence with an excitable tabby and its owner.

At first, everything was ideal. The wee beastie did all that a cat should do: chased dressing gown cords, jammed his head into glasses of water, hid from the hoover. This was all as it should be, and the world was a brighter, albeit hairier, place. However, soon I realised that something was wrong.

London can be a wild and dangerous place if you’re only two feet long and have a sadly incomplete understanding of the Green Cross Code. This, and the fact that the flat’s on the top floor, probably explain why this little fellow is what I am told is called a ‘house cat’. He’s only been outdoors once, and that was when he fell out of a window. Occasionally he escapes through the front door onto the staircase, and then stands around, bewildered by the extent of the universe, like an astronaut looking at the earth from space.

The problem is that I’m rapidly coming to realise that there’s no such thing as a ‘house cat’. He’s just a cat, and so isn’t suited to being locked in four rooms and abandoned for most of each day. An indoor cat is still a small inquisitive creature that would really rather like to try climbing some trees. I know this because in the absence of trees he has attempted to climb almost everything else, resulting so far in the destruction of one mirror, one lamp and several tumblers since my arrival a few months ago. You shouldn’t cage a cat up, even if the cage is comparatively large and contains a substantial number of cushions. In his stir-crazed state, he is never tired, and spends hours running back and forth, crashing into furniture and doors, and scampering noisily around in the middle of the night. He seems to be entirely inexhaustible. It he were a rabbit, he’d be auditioning for Duracell adverts.

This imprisonment also means that he will panic at any efforts to further shrink his diminutive world. For instance, if you want to have a shower, and happen to close the bathroom door, there will, soon enough, be a frantic and persistent scrabbling. If you give in, clamber out of the shower and open the door, the fuzzy creature will proceed to sit in the sink and stare at you. I don’t know why I should find this embarrassing, but showering under the watchful gaze of a cat feels like being the subject of a particularly disdainful edition of How to Look Good Naked.

Worse than the bathroom, however, is the bedroom. I’ve lived with cats before: I know that if I leave the door open I will be woken at dawn by something standing on my head or trying to eat my toes. So I close my door. However, with claustrophobia cat, this is isn’t an option: on the hour, every hour, there will come a forlorn scratching and battering at the door, quite capable of waking anyone with even vaguely functioning ears. As you might imagine, I haven’t exactly been sleeping well.

But my woes are obviously insignificant compared to those of the poor mad feline. A house without windows would be a pretty miserable place, but I’m tempted to say that for a house cat it would be a small mercy. My fellow lodger spends hour after hour perched on sofas staring from the window, admiring the trees, counting the clouds, and wondering what pigeon tastes like. True, most cats enjoy a spot of window-gazing, but this little chap has the mournful gaze of the condemned prisoner, watching a world he might never tread foot in again. He might never have experienced the outdoors, but he still has to stare at it, and imagine what it feels like.

There’s a practical side to this, too: without the experience of trying to eat anything that jumps, flits or scuttles, my feline associate doesn’t really understand how food works. Without the experience of discovering that although frogs bounce, they don’t make good snacks, and that there’s only a certain amount of grass a stomach can take before it all goes horribly wrong, a cat becomes about as discriminatory as a Hoover. Aside from his cat biscuits, his diet consists of flies, wasps, flower petals, bits of thread, and anything he can steal from a plate. Nothing seems to be off-limits: I’ve had to confiscate hair-clips, and he chews up ballpoints faster than a sub-editor. In other words, this isn’t a cat that could be renowned for his digestive stability. There’s nothing like trying to eat a bee for small piles of yellow goo on the carpet. I’m no vet, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t healthy.

There’s a final, more selfish side to the cat conundrum. Without an outdoors, there’s nowhere for a cat to deposit its regular cargo of hair. Leave the house for a few days and there’s so much fur in the air that the indoors looks like it’s foggy. Recently, the vacuum cleaner has given its notice and threatened to call union action, so now the problem grows worse practically by the minute.

This is the first time I’ve lived with an indoor cat, and perhaps these days its a fairly wide-spread phenomenon, but every evening I come closer to forming a feline liberation front, possibly involving rope ladders, balaclavas and helicopters. I can’t help feeling that the invention of the house cat is a dubious extension of the ‘pet as cuddly toy’ mindset. Yes, it’s great to live with a cat about the place, but a single floor of a small flat is hardly the best way to keep a mog healthy, happy and non-psychotic.

And I haven’t even mentioned the litter tray...

Greeks Bearing Gifts

2010-11-09T14:07:00.002Z

Here's the current opening from Greeks Bearing Gifts, the novel I'm working on at the moment. I'm basically thinking of it as Howard Jacobson for gingers. More specifically, it's a combination of three illustrious genres:

Ethnic minority kid grows up in crap town
Narrator has a difficult relationship with father
Gentlemanly thievery

So here's that extract. If it looks familiar that's because it's developed from a rushed short story I wrote a while ago.

When I was ten my father taught me how to punch people, on the assumption that it would be a useful skill for an ugly boy with red hair. He turned out to be right, but for all the wrong reasons.

It wasn’t until several decades later that I had occasion to remember my clobbering lessons, and I recall thinking, as I walloped the Turkish soldier, that my father had been right: just like the catwalk, or childbirth, it’s all in the hips.

As they arrested me, I realised how surprising it was that I hadn’t managed to thump anyone until the age of forty-two. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had the opportunity, or didn’t move in the right circles. I was practically in the old-boys’ network by then, if the rigorously nefarious can be said to have one.

I never meant to become a criminal, mainly because I was paralysed with embarrassment by the idea of my parents attending my trial, with my father sat in the front row of the visitors’ gallery crunching sweets and lamenting, and my mother scowling at journalists and blaming my behaviour on the English.

The English aren’t entirely innocent, of course. They have an awful habit of being somewhere in the background, sighing and wringing their hands, whenever something goes wrong. In my case, though, they have to share responsibility with both my parents. And Sebastian, and Eoin, and all the rest, I suppose.

The day my life first hinted at going off the rails was cold, dank, malodourous, and generally like the rotton floorboard at the back of the airing cupboard. Most days were, in Yorkshire in 1969. We didn’t get a summer of love, up there. We barely got a summer at all. Just watch a BBC Four documentary if you don't believe me. Some of my memories are even in black and white.

Dressed in our best, my mother, my sister and I were closing my father's cafe and preparing to carry the day's takings to my father's club, where they would be locked in the safe. A lot of buildings carried the description 'my father's', in that town. We weren't rich, you understand; he just liked opening businesses. I was entrusted with carrying a small sack of coins, which I enjoyed because it made me feel like a dashing burglar lugging his swag, or, when I was feeling more civic-minded, a policeman carrying the swag back again. It was usually the first one.

We pottered along the road, my mother striding along on her bulletproof fell-runner's legs, and me scurrying beside her. My sister, Helena, wasn't scurrying, because she was ten months old, and besides which she was destined to be a lady of elegance, and so would never stoop to such movements. I don't think she ever even crawled: she made men do that for her. In those days, though, she spent the journey wrapped up in a shawl, sleeping, slung over my mother's shoulder.

After a brisk march, we came to the club. It was ‘the’ club because there weren’t any others in town. We lived in Mizzenfold, a collection of streets in West Yorkshire that could only really call itself a ‘town’ on days when it was feeling particularly confident. Today the club would be called a nightclub, but in those days it was described, without a trace of humour, as a discotheque. It was, specifically, Nick’s Discotheque, where Nick was my father. I didn’t call him that, of course: he was papa.

He was ‘papa’, rather than ‘dad’, or ‘pa’, or ‘old man’, because my father was Greek, or possibly Cypriot. Definitions get fuzzy as soon as borders become involved. What he was very clear about was that he was not a Turk. The reasons changed over the years, from culture to land to war crimes to mere habit, but a sense of unremitting fury was nearly always there. In the early 1960s he ditched Cyprus and wound up in Yorkshire because he fancied his chances against a bunch of louts with cricket bats and haircuts like a nits ward more than he did against politics. He explained it to me one day.

"Son." He always began this way, presumably to remind himself who I was. "You can choose your enemies, and it is wisest to choose ones that don’t know you." Then he attributed the remark to Alexander the Great, as he did with nearly everything clever that crossed his mind. It’s his fault that I grew up with an inflated impression of the wit and wisdom of ancient military leaders.

His first name was Nikos, which became Nick, and his surname was Diamontopoulos, which became Diamond, mainly because Diamantopoulos didn't fit on any of the official forms. And in those days there were a lot of official forms for people who wanted to flee a bomb-scarred, divided nation like Cyprus and settle in a bomb-scarred, divided nation like the United Kingdom of Great Britain And Possibly Also Northern Ireland, Depending On Whom You Ask.

You try having a pa called Nick Diamond and see if you can avoid ending up a thief.

My parents married, which is what one did in those days, in an entirely confusing ceremony that involved one church, two ministers, three languages, and a suspicious lack of relatives. You see, my mother was Scottish, insistently so, and that explains the second language. The third one was the registry man, who, in a suit and tie that made accountancy look like rock and roll, was so entirely English that one-third of his bone marrow was tea, and he couldn't understand a word either my mother or my father said. It's entirely possible that they couldn't understand one another either, which might be why the marriage was so successful.

The progeny of a Scots lass and a Greek gentleman do not turn out to be beautiful half-breeds, with flaming locks, dusky eyes and modelling contracts. Rather than a cordial agreement between the two sets of genes, you get a fight, in which one ethnic origin kicks the shit out of the other. I am a Scotsman. I have limbs and hair all over the place, and I melt if I look at the sun. My sister is Greek. Her dark hair shimmers, her eyes flash and she breaks crockery. We're so different that if we appear somewhere together and give our surname, people think we're married. Either that or they start muttering about milkmen. That's when my sister slaps them, because she's Greek. I, being Scottish, retreat into the highlands to plot revenge in the winter months. A genetic aptitude for long-term plotting has proved very useful.

But this underlying Greekness is why my name, Jon, was short for Yanaka, not Jonathan. It was also why when we reached the club, there was a crowd outside it. Like everything seemed to be in those days, the crowd was split down the middle. On one side were the local lads, with their shiny skulls, chewing gum, leather jackets and jug-handle ears, and on the other were the foreign boys who worked for my father, arrayed in aprons, suits or waistcoats, depending on whether they worked the kitchens, the doors or the bar. Around both of these chorus lines was a circle of the uncertain, the townsfolk who liked my father because he brought them a greasy café, a launderette, a corner shop and something that resembled night-life, but liked the local lads because, well, you know, they were Freddy's boys from down the road and they were good kids really and it was just high spirits and they'd settle down when they got older.

In front of each of the two nervous, embarrassed gangs was a champion. The locals had Ken Fenwick, who owned the pub, and didn't like the way my father's club sold drinks he'd rather sell himself. He was a hefty, bulging man who wore clothes that were too small, possibly because they were cheaper than the kind of overgrown coats that would actually fit him.

Opposite him was my father, who looked embarrassingly small but, lest we forget, came from the country that invented athletics. He was also blinking like a lost mole, because he'd taken his glasses off.

"Son, the spectacles, they cost more than my face." He later explained.

None of this is how my mother described it. After we'd shoved our way through the crowd to our rightful ringside seats, I pulled at her sleeve, looked up with the wise, worried eyes of childhood, and asked her what was going on. She scowled at me, then at the circle, then at her husband, then answered me.

"It's business."

Then my father punched Ken Fenwick in the neck.

My mother’s understanding of business came to inform much of my working life.

Facts and fiction

2010-11-01T21:14:00.001Z

Wanted to post something, since it's been a while. I've been reading a bit, getting back into fencing, learning where to get a cheap pint, and have actually written an essay, for the first time in four years. But mostly I've been trying to write, in this case a comedy about being half Scottish and half Greek-Cypriot, and growing up in Yorkshire. And then becoming a burglar. Extract possibly turning up in the student paper next week, incidentally...

This, believe it or not, involves actual history: things that happened before I even considered becoming a foetus. And that, the horror the horror, means research. Obviously this is mostly a combination of Google and Wikipedia, but occasionally, in between making up lies, scripting bad jokes and inventing geography, it has involved creeping into the bit of the library normally reserved for people doing real subjects, and looking up facts and stuff.

However, when you're trying to write about the Cyprus Problem (what Britain calls it when it wants to make it sound like Cyprus's own fault) or the Cyprus Dispute (what Britain calls it when it wants several thousand years of disgruntlement, unease and intermittent killing to sound like two neighbours squabbling over a leylandii), you don't get facts. Just stuff.

This is because when you get to the library you find that most of the books about Cyprus are ridiculous rants so partisan they make Sarah Palin look rational. My particular favourite cover:

Ways to make it clear that your book will be completely worthless to anyone attempting to get a neutral perspective on a conflict:

Call your book 'Bloody truth'. The lack of definite article helpfully and accurately makes this sound like ''This bloody truth thing, it's always getting in the way of my attempts to write propaganda'.

Also put your title in Greek, to make it clear which side of the Greek/Turkish divide you're on.

In case the Greek lettering didn't give it away, draw the Turkish-occupied area of Cyprus as if it's a tide of dripping blood. Because that's always classy.

Luckily, most readers of this section of the library aren't bothered about disinterested research, because they already know everything that happened in precise detail. They're only in the library to correct the errors in existing books on the subject. So from another book, RR Denktash's The Cyprus Triangle, which takes the Turkish side, you get pages that look like this:

Not sure how much of this will be visible, but some of the crossed-out graffiti says that there's a lie on almost every page of the book. Luckily for me, at least three people have had an argument about almost every page of the book, and have detailed their disputes in the marginalia. This front page isn't exceptional: it's typical. Although I'm quite impressed by the way someone's actually annotated the author's name.

Yes, Christopher Hitchens has written an apparently reasonably decent book about all this (it's partially accepted by both sides since it mostly blames Britain), but some bugger had nabbed it from the library already, without taking it out on their card, so I was left with the nutters, and a faintly apologetic volume by a British diplomat whose main thesis seemed to be 'it was like that when I got there'.

Fortunately, once I'd had enough of all these serious secondary sources, I turned to advice leaflets for British servicemen stationed on the island:

Ah, the 1960s. How sad they're gone. Well, sad as long as you're a rich straight white male, anyway.

A tale from New York

2010-10-05T10:59:00.003+01:00

Just over a year ago I visited New York, and one evening a strange thing happened. Well, quite a few strange things happened on various evenings, but this one seemed worth writing down. Typed it up a while ago, but realised this morning that I'd never put it up here.

In September last year I was visiting New York, staying with friends in the Bronx, not far from the Fordham Road subway stop. One night I went to visit another friend elsewhere in the city, and we spent a pleasant evening doing the kind of things old friends do when they are briefly on the same continent and not sure when they'll next see each other: we ate at a restaurant with no cutlery, we meandered between bars, we sauntered along boulevards and avenues in search of things that would make me gawp. Life was good. New York is a bright city even in the darkness.

I left my friend at his rooms and descended into the subway, feeling about as confident as anyone can when faced with the NY train labyrinth late at night when armed with a comedy accent, an air of innocent confusion and a genetic lack of any sense of direction. Somehow, a little after midnight, I made it to Fordham Road. This was when that profound absence of geographical prowess started to cause trouble. My walk back wasn't long, but I swiftly learnt that the problem with the grid system is that every direction looks fairly similar, and each pavement can feel just right enough to make you walk along it for half a mile or so the wrong way. After a few false starts, a few unfamiliar sights and a few doubts, I decided I needed help.

One of the first things I learnt about New York was that local love of not just giving directions but discussing them, debating them, drawing in whole crowds of passers-by to analyse the best route across town. In my first few days there I'd ended up in more conversations with strangers than I'd managed in three years of London. Yup, it's a cliché, but from my pretty limited experience it's true: New Yorkers really do like talking to people. I suppose when you've got a train system that complicated and a city that exciting you get used to having bewildered tourists standing around blinking like owls out in the day.

So, having been saved by strangers several times already, I decided it was worth another try. Sadly, it turns out that these things work a bit differently when you're pottering around the Bronx, alone, in the middle of the night. Like I say: innocent confusion.

Now, I wasn't a complete halfwit, and I wasn't about to plead for help from the nearest gang of kids in baseball caps, keychains and rolled-up trousers. Fortunately there didn't seem to be anyone shifty out that night. Or, in fact, anyone at all. It was a quiet evening, with the bricks and tarmac kept company by little but rats, pigeons and the odd lost traveller. Fortunately, someone did eventually come along, and it was someone who looked pleasant and unthreatening enough to be worth talking to: a plump, thirty-something black woman with a shopping bag, sensible shoes and an air of knowing where she was going.

"Excuse me," I said, apparently kicking off a whole string of Hollywood memories of tall, gaunt English villains who emerge from country houses and boarding schools with a complete lack of morals and qualms. She stopped and looked at me. She seemed startled, and a little suspicious, but I thought I might as well carry on. "Do you happen to know the way..."

I could have continued the question, but it wouldn't have made much difference: by that point she was halfway up the street, racing away from me at a fairly respectable middle-distance speed. I started to understand what the sensible shoes had been for.

I was left standing in the street, feeling like I'd just committed a crime, and wondering if I could have made a worse first impression if I'd been brandishing a knife. I looked again at the unfamiliar street signs, and blessed the name of mobile telephones.

Survival

2010-09-30T14:15:00.004+01:00

At some point I'll do a proper 'what actually happens in a fiction workshop' post, but basically it went well. I went in with a short story, and came out with a shorter one and a list of ways to hack it up and reassemble it more pleasingly. It's a bit like stealing bodies to build a monster - some bits are going to get chucked into the gut bucket, and other parts will need to be expanded or refined to make sure you end up with something you can be proud of, rather than something that will go on a rampage and have to be dumped somewhere in the arctic*.

People were kind. This is good. I thank them for helpful comments and sparing of my self-respect. I think my monster is now looking reasonably attractive. It might not be a thing of holiness, but it shouldn't scare the villagers.

Also, here is another strange thing that my cameraphone spotted, this time in the library. It hasn't come out beautifully, despite my edgy Photoshop skills, but yes, that is a drinks machine. No, there doesn't seem to be an exception for bottled water.

Recently read

The Female Eunch. Brilliant when it's angry (which is most of the time), dull and outdated when it tries to be statistical.

Reading

Short stories by Chekhov, Oates and Nabokov

Recently written

'Mysteries' - why you shouldn't go on holiday with someone who's read The Da Vinci Code
An opening for something with the working title of Greeks Bearing Gifts. It's like Howard Jacobson for gingers. Only rubbish.

Writing

A story about why you shouldn't take fencing too seriously.

* This metaphor should not be taken as a suggestion that short stories can kill your friends, fiancés and family.

In the beginning were some words.

2010-09-26T15:07:00.000+01:00

I’m being workshopped tomorrow. Right now I’m heartily regretting sticking my hand up when they asked for volunteers for the first week. Actually, that’s only half-true – I’m also massively excited about having all my wonky little words torn to bits by MJ Hyland and my fellow scribbly postgrad types (who, on first meetings, give the impression of being a first-rate bunch).

Also, I wanted to put this up:

This door is outside my flat in halls. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to resist opening it. I’ll be sorely disappointed if whatever’s behind it doesn’t have claws and/or teeth.

Finally, since I’m not doing proper reviews at the moment, brief comments on what I’ve read recently:

Light, by M John Harrison. Amazing. Definitely lives up to the hype. To my surprise, I didn’t find the prose as magnificent as in some of Harrison’s other work. However, there’s a similar underlying melancholy to that in The Course of the Heart, which gives the wild, futuristuc plot lines a haunting human edge. A good one to throw at people who are skeptical about the literary potential of science fiction. In this, the spaceships aren't just there for the sake of it: they’re a medium for talking about humanity, loneliness, and trying to run away from one’s self.

My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey. My first of his novels, and not one of the massively celebrated ones. Still first-class, though – some great writing and mucking about with different voices. I can see why he’s hot stuff, and definitely want to check out some more.

Our Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas. Not a sequel or a follow-on to The End of Mr Y, but sharing a similar approach to writing: take a genre (thriller for Mr Y, romance for Our Tragic Universe) and layer it in fun but serious discussions of literary, scientific and philosophical ideas until it makes your brain go a bit melty. I think this one’s better, but that might be because it’s so much about the structuring of stories, which is something I’ve been worrying about myself recently.

Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert. Matches its reputation. Simple and tragic in structure, its strength is in the amazing depth of character and ability to describe life in detail without being dreary. Wonderfully careful in what it says and does not say – bar a few awkward references to ‘corruption’ it always lets you judge for yourself, so the characters, while universally weak and flawed, attain a humanity that it’s hard not to feel some affection for them.

Why must I read a string of really great books just as I stop reviewing the buggers?

Howard Jacobson at the Guardian Book Club

2010-09-24T10:20:00.000+01:00

As part of the Manchester creative writing MA, we’re occasionally posted off en masse to literary events, which are a little bit like gigs held by really awkward people who can’t afford backing bands. The first, happily falling on the first day, was Howard Jacobson talking about Kalooki Nights as part of the Guardian Book Club.

I’ve read The Mighty Walzer fairly recently, and mostly fell for its melancholy, often hilarious coming of age tales, its story and sub-stories of family, friendship and community. Kalooki Nights is similar in many ways, but with the characterisation inverted. Its protagonist, Max Glickman, is a disgruntled, cynical cartoonist, entranced and repelled, and certainly obsessed, by being Jewish, with the grand horror of the Holocaust never far from his thoughts. Where Oliver in The Mighty Walzer hid inside himself, Max lashes out, whether in self-deprecating cartoons or out loud, in vicious arguments with his string of anti-Semitic wives.

Although also a meandering story of maturation, uneasy friendship, troubled families and Mancunian Jewishness, Kalooki Nights feels very different to The Mighty Walzer. This is due less to their differences of activity (ping pong in Walzer, the monstrous crime of an old friend in Kalooki) than to the characterisation – both narrators have their own styles of humour and storytelling, despite superficial similiarities.

Overall I prefer The Mighty Walzer, because I’m more attracted to its withdrawn, put-upon narrator obsessed with the idea of making something of himself. Also, in Kalooki Nights I was sometimes frustrated by Max’s insistence on understanding all of Jewishness and Jewish life as a single entity – his own obsession with his race, culture and religion often lead to him speaking about it in absolute terms, as one unified mass of humanity. It’s essential to the novel, and it’s part of the point of Max’s character, but sheer enjoyment of first-person narratives often rests on how likeable (or monstrous, I suppose, but that isn’t a relevant approach here) the speakers are, and I think that’s a big part of my preference for young master Walzer.

Anyway, the event.

In person, Jacobson is just as entertaining as his books, revelling in his expansive hand gestures and in exchanging playfully barbed comments with his interviewer (the calm, dry John Mullan, a sort of literary John Peel). What I found myself admiring most was his willingness to talk about the underlying ideas of his novels. They read as stories of real people’s lives, full of incident, accident and humour, but they’re also novels with depth of meaning – novels that engage with debates. In Kalooki Nights that debate is over the power, significance and appropriateness of comedy. Jacobson argues, convincingly and sometimes uproariously, that humour is an essential part of literature that’s too often overlooked. He says that comedy is essential to the darkest, most serious subjects, and points at the Holocaust jokes in Kalooki Nights as a way of reclaiming loathing – to take in and invert evil, and so to render it harmless.

He also viewed this as an area where bravery was required: we must bring ourselves to laugh at things, or at least be willing to laugh at them, so that we can deal with them. There’s only so far you can get by being relentlessly grim, gritty and grumpy. Fair point, I think, and one that’s also visible in writers like Michael Chabon, who’s someone I keep returning to these days.

One topic that was interesting from a creative writing perspective was his engagement (or rather, argument) with plot. Jacobson’s books wander through their protagonists’ lives in pursuit of anecdote and character. They don’t relentlessly pursue challenge and achievement – they don’t follow clues, evade peril, or follow tragic or comic narrative structures. They just happen. He describes this as the pursuit of story, not plot. He enjoys telling stories, but is profoundly uninterested in getting stuck into mechanical, insistent plotting.

I certainly don’t agree with this wholeheartedly, since I reckon there are many fascinating things that can be done with plots, but it’s an important point when you consider taht Jacobson’s books work. They aren’t barbed and hooked with tricks and twists that assume the reader is a hyperactive nine-year-old who’ll get bored unless something explodes on every other page. They saunter on by, and yet are engrossing and entertaining. While plot-heavy approaches have their fans and their advantages, Jacobson shows that they aren’t necessary: there’s no fundamental need for every book to be built like an airport thriller.

But back to the event. There were some great lines, and some intriguing insights – I recommend popping round to have a listen to Jacobson if you get the chance. The one that sticks in my head is his old claim that he isn’t the British Philip Roth – he’s the Jewish Jane Austen. Writing that down makes it sound arrogant, but he made it sound mischievous. Like the grandeur of Oliver’s father in The Mighty Walzer, Jacobson isn’t one to do himself down – his humour is big – as expansive as his hand gestures – and he isn’t afraid to get stuck in.

Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

2010-09-22T10:18:00.001+01:00

Probably my last review for a while - I had this stashed away and thought I might as well post it since I have something on seeing Jacobson at the Guardian book club to put up later.

*

This is a comedy, in the sense that sometimes it makes you laugh. If you want to get all genre-theory about it, though, there’s nothing comic here at all. This is a melancholy maturation tale, a gentle, sad trip through the narrator’s adolescence and where it took him. This is humour as humanity, as a defence against the dark.

Oliver Walzer is a quiet, withdrawn child with a streak of grandeur. He quivers through childhood in a series of worries and disappointments until he discovers ping-pong, and, more importantly, realises that he’s rather good at it. He finds confidence and friendship in sport, but also a new cast for his worries and disappointments. Oliver is good, but not brilliant, at a sport that no one who does not play it cares about. This is no heroic Hollywood sporting epic with a villain to be defeated and a medal to be won, as Oliver’s dreams ironically recognise, as his reveries about defeating the Japanese world champion slip into erotic fantasies of running off with the geisha mistress he imagines for his imagined nemesis.

Instead of victory, this is about the terror of mediocrity. Sport is a way for Oliver to unleash his grandeur – to try to define himself, to feel that he and his talents are distinct from the common mass of humanity. And of course he fails. Anyone who’s been mildly decent at a minority non-team sport will recognise the psychology of Oliver’s victories and defeats: thrill and despair, peculiar certainties of success, the need for an alibi, the way games can be thrown away so easily and so foolishly, ack, the whole joy and bloody frustration of it all. This side of the book is wonderful: it’s about coming to terms with that inevitable failure, that knowledge that we aren’t the best, and realising that the things that matter, our families, friends and minds, aren’t grand at all.

This is where the jokes come in. Delivered in a colloquial, naturalistic prose style that sounds almost like it’s being told aloud, but which remains witty and eloquent, The Mighty Walzer rips through tales of Oliver’s father’s shonky business, the clumsy operations of his ping-pong team, his sexual awakening in all its grubby detail, his friendships and infatuations. These comic set-pieces become resevoirs of emotion for Oliver. It is the laughter that he remembers and which matters when things drift, as they must, towards death.

Much of the joy comes from the feeble yet lovingly created characters, whether the infinite shyness of Oliver’s mother’s family, the booming desperation of his father’s, or the impressive array of flaws that define his fellow ping-pongers. The cast and their acitivities are larger-than-life, but only slightly: enough to make them memorable, but never enough to make them cartoons. Their burdens help to make them human. This way of writing makes things like heroes and villains look childish.

As far as weaknesses go, I think the problem here is the structure. The novel has set itself a difficult task: it wants to show us Oliver looking back on his formative years. This leads, perhaps inevitably, to glossing over adulthood in a flurry of brief vignettes that lack the psychological conviction of the rest of the novel. Once Oliver leaves for university, he suddenly picks out a path in life, suddenly marries, divorces, leaves the country and grows old. This is all necessary to fill in the gaps before the essential scenes of later life, but it’s slightly unsatisfying. Some scenes, such as the sudden choice of career and years of life based on a single evening’s guilt at the start of university, seem hurried: more of a collection of jokes (and the university pages are among the funniest in the book) than a part of Oliver’s real life. But maybe that’s the point: childhood and adolesence are what’s real to Oliver, and they, in the end, are what makes him who he is.

There’s a glib way of describing this book, which seems almost legally obliged to pop up in every review: Philip Roth for Mancunians. Keep the Jewish background, the dirty jokes, the coming-of-age, the sadness and ruin behind the laughter, the neurosis, and then replace various bits of America with the markets, streets, houses and mild urban decay of the North of England. It’s a simplification, of course, but it more or less works, partly because it describes the style and themes of The Mighty Walzer, but also because it suggests, entirely correctly, that this is a very good book.

Why Asda is The Pilgrim's Progress for the 21st century

2010-09-19T18:11:00.001+01:00

It rained today. I was not entirely surprised.

My life is now folded into a long, narrow room in a long, narrow building*. As far as I know, Manchester is not a long, narrow city, but if it were that could have been a very satisfying opening sentence. Not for the first time today, I curse geography.

I have been walking the city, you see. Not exactly flaneuring - just bemused, usually futile, attempts to find obvious places. I have now established where I should go to pick up my shiny new student card (cue 'do you do a student discount?' in every possible place I can spend money). It's right next to where I live. I discovered this after pottering about the city for most of an hour looking for it. There is probably a moral in this story. If you know what it is, please tell me.

More usefully, I have found The Asda at the End of the World. It is the size of the Vatican, and just as inaccessible. Sadly, that appears to be where the similarities end, although I can't imagine Calvinists are huge fans of Asda, either.

There is a reason for the religious comparisons, by the way: John Bunyan. Using the giant hyper mega Asda is like setting out on a great and perilous journey in pursuit of a noble goal. It begins with the maze of windy estate streets, continues through the near-certain death of the million-lane motorway intersection and ends after the welcome-to-Communist-Russia queue. And if, like poor old Ignorant, you reach the gates of the Heavenly City (here represented by slightly cheaper food purchases) without your roll (wallet, this being secular capitalism), all your efforts will be for naught, and you'll be cast out to the car park of great woe. If they'd had car parks in those days, I bet there'd have been one in Pilgrim's Progress somewhere.

Basically, I'm not going back there on a Sunday afternoon. I now intend to do all my shopping at obscure nameless hours of night and morn. I might try to train myself into some kind of somnambulant lucid-dream based automatic shopping system.

Things happen tomorrow. This is exciting.

* I live on the twelfth floor. By the end of this year, I'm either going to be a Commonwealth-standard stair-runner (does this sport exist? If not, why not? It could be a gritty, urban version of fell-running) or someone far more patient with lifts.

I'll be gone before the summer turns to rain. Sort of.

2010-09-13T10:18:00.000+01:00

You know what? I’m no longer a Londoner. No longer must I trek to work past cheeky street urchins, charming cockneys, screeching teenagers, drug runners, prophets of doom, doe-eyed starlets, braying Sloanes, baffled tourists, drunks of every stripe, malignant lawyers, and the Queen. Or any of the other things years of reading have led me to believe fill this city.

Not because Manchester won’t have any of these things, you understand (except the Queen, presumably): it’s just that I won’t be trekking to work any more. It is time, for a short and thrilling year, to invert my proportions of leisure and survival: now I’ll publish in the dark, nameless hours, and spend most of the day writing and writing and writing.

Now is the time for the expensive replacing all the duff things I’ve bashed holes in and not bothered replacing over the past four years: keyboard, trainers, socks, bedside lamp, alarm clock, soul. I have assembled this list as a result of Saturday afternoon, when I wrapped my troubles in dreams and my books in cardboard boxes, preparing for my deLondonification. Now, lurking in Bath for a week with my parents before hitting the motorways and heading north, I have assessed my possessions and have determined that my life, according to the tenets of advanced consumer capitalism, consists of:

Books: many. And much as I like small presses, why must their paperbacks be a different height to the rest?
Socks: simultaneously too many and not enough.
Things that need ironing: apparently infinite.
Cuboid objects: the box I am proud of.
Non-cuboid objects: the box I despise. Does this make me alarmingly OCD?
Cuddly toy, x2. The womble might have to retire to the attic, now I'll be half a country away from an SW postcode.
Stationery: couldn’t possibly say where all this came from. And no, I wouldn’t believe those rumours about me and the stationery cupboard on my last day at work. People say all sorts.
Equipment for sports I don’t play any more. My equivalent of ‘dancing shoes, never worn’.

My brain’s bouncing all over the place like a puppy on a coffee drip. Next stop, Manchester. Actually, no: next stop, buying lots of cutlery. Last stop, Manchester. No, that sounds too final. Oh, sod it, you know what I mean. I'll have to stop using third-hand train metaphors, now that I'm going to a city without an underground.

GK Chesterton: Napoleon of Notting Hill

2010-09-12T18:51:00.000+01:00

Oh Gilbert, Gilbert. Whatever are we to do with you?

GK Chesterton gets a lot of stick for being an arch-conservative, stolid and old-fashioned, supporting outdated morals, values, prose and beliefs at a time when modernism was shocking and delighting the literary world. In a way, this is justified. In the same way that, say, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a modernist who happens to have been born a Victorian, Chesterton sometimes seems like a Victorian displaced by about thirty years.

However, despite occasional moments of forehead-slapping sexism and pomposity, he has managed to grab much of what was great about being a decent fellow of the old school. He stands up for what is basically good, while writing with wit, imagination and charm. After a hundred years of watching political and religious extremes causing immense suffering, Chesterton should be respected for being persistently and reasonably moderate.

Also, when you do disagree with him, you don’t find yourself hating him. He can present an argument or position with such style and good humour that you end up wishing you agreed. This is, famously, the guy who converted CS Lewis to Christianity, and if you read his writing about all that God business you can see why. It isn’t that his arguments are the finest ever put down, or that he is the greatest philosopher since we came up with the word, but merely that he makes being religious seem so right, so pleasant, so imaginatively inspiring. I’m far from being a Catholic, but Father Brown has come closer to tempting me than any number of real priests could.

But this isn’t about religion, so I’ll save all that for another time. This post is about The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a sort of romantic, England-of-shopkeepers take on a utopian HG Wells novel. Wells is even mentioned in the opening chapter, where the state of Chesterton’s imagined future is described. It’s 1984, and in a surprising turn of events, the world hasn’t changed at all since the turn of the century. 1984 London is more or less identical to the London of 1904 (when the book was written), chiefly because everyone is far too bored to alter anything. Society, culture and life have stultified, and politics has been reduced to an uninterested non-hereditary monarchy, where a new king is selected at random whenever the previous one dies. There is no tyranny, no horror, just blandness.

This changeless civilisation is disrupted when a funny little chap called Auberon Quin is selected as king. He treats the entire arrangement as an enormous joke, and enjoys using his powers and privilege to ridicule the dull, serious men around him. He reintroduces pageantry, insists on absurd uniforms, and tries to enforce territorial distinctions between West London boroughs. At first this is all fairly harmless, but when Adam Wayne, as an intense but impressionable child, encounters his ludicrous monarch, something inside him changes.

Ten years later, Wayne is a fierce young man with a fervent belief in the independence and importance of Notting Hill. When a collection of bureaucrats from neighbouring districts want to build a thoroughfare through Pump Street, in the heart of Notting Hill, Wayne refuses, and goes to the barricades to defend his opinion. At first there is half-hearted conflict, but soon real violence erupts, as the besieged men of Notting Hill rebuff their assailants. The king rushes around in pride and dismay as Wayne and his supporters fight and die for his joke, but as the conflict grows he finds himself drawn ever more towards Wayne’s absurd but nobly romantic position.

Yes, it’s pretty loopy, and that’s half its charm. Much of Chesterton is about using a joke to find a truth, and here Quin’s frivolous, humorous ideas accidentally give birth to Wayne’s much more serious, deeply held beliefs. Amid jokes about journalism, civic pride, the nature of London shops, government, and anything else that strikes the fancy of Chesterton and his characters, the central theme is the nobility, the goodness, of believing. Not believing in a god, but of having a cause, of caring, of just being bothered about something, rather than slinking away into a meaningless, empty existence. Quin and Wayne are the laughter and the fury: the two sides of this urge to have something bright and worthwhile in life.

Half the fun of the book is watching this being taken too far, but by the end you do find yourself, like Quin, admiring the awful madness that has taken place. It’s an uneasy argument, one that finds glory in war and heroism in needless horror, but the book knows this: it is asking you, the reader, to stand up for the small things. To fight not just for your grandest philosophies and statements, but for your neighbourhood, your local shops, and everything else that would make David Cameron proud.

So no, it isn’t sexy politics, and it doesn’t want to be. It elevates moderation into its own warped form of radicalism, and it’s a testament to Chesterton’s writing, charm and imagination that he makes this work. It’s a prime example of where reading someone else’s viewpoint is engaging and enjoyable.

Sadly, though, there’s another area of wonky attitudes that I found harder to accept. Take a look at this:

'Wayne had something feminine in his character; he belonged to that class of persons who forget their meals when anything interesting is in hand. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her, art is only beautiful as an echo or shadow of it.'

And there’s a lot more along those lines. What’s more, there are no women anywhere in the book, with the exception of a few weepy figures in crowd scenes. Okay, when this was written married women had only been allowed to own property for about twenty years, but this isn’t about whether the author’s attitudes are acceptable to any given reader. No – it’s about whether this sexism damages the book, and sadly I think it does. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is about societies, about a city, and this overwhelming masculinity ruins the image of the city. Yes, most of it is about war and violence, but in say, a medieval romance, which is similarly phallocentric when it comes to waving about spears and swords, there are always women present somewhere, even if it’s only as a witch stealing a man’s holiness by tempting him with, oh the horror, sex. Here there is nothing. Nobody is married, has loves, fears, or any concerns about women. Worse than offering a risible image of the female, which at least a reader can get annoyed by, here there is a mysterious absence. A hole in humanity.

This vast omission aside, The Napoleon of Notting Hill is an interesting little book. It’s basically an argument stretched and warped until it turned into a story, and it is fun in the same way as a Swiftian satire, along the unsubtle lines of Battle of the Books, and it does leave you thinking. However, as the lack of women suggests, it doesn’t work so well as a full novel. It’s an idea disguised as an adventure, and it’s clever and engaging and intelligent and generally worth a look, but if you want to see Chesterton at his best you’re better of with the magnificent The Man Who Was Thursday or the early Father Brown stories.

The new lit three: joining the dots

2010-09-06T19:34:00.001+01:00

The past bits of this series have looked at various small projects that have hinted at the directions that literature could go in, using either new methods of delivery or collaboration. The next question is what will happen when people start throwing cash at these changes, trying to combine them into grand projects that present new forms of storytelling. And wouldn’t you know it, people are already trying it.

Here I’m concentrating on two projects and comparing their approaches. One is the centralised, corporate advertising exercise, The Conspiracy for Good, and the other is the slightly mysterious historical fiction conglomerate, The Mongoliad. These are of course very different, but they both involve using social media and the internet to draw an audience into a large-scale work of fiction.

The Mongoliad is currently in beta testing, only opened its website in the past few weeks, and will probably be kicking off properly near the end of the year. Details are still slightly sparse, but it seems to be an attempt, involving authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, plus a horde of other writers, programmers and assorted assistants, to create a shared universe based on the year 1241, when the Mongol armies were poised to cause trouble in Europe. As far as I can tell, it will begin with a serialised novel and then expand into what they aren’t ashamed of calling ‘para-narrative’. They claim this will involve storytelling methods that are ‘pleasingly unique’. Once this official text has laid the groundwork for a setting, the plan is to open the world up to the community of readers/consumers, who will generate content alongside the official staff. It sounds a bit like a cross between a novel and wikipedia, and with Neal Stephenson at the helm I’m certainly intrigued.

The Conspiracy for Good might be sponsored by Nokia, and might appear to have a pretty standard good/evil plot construction, but as a concept it has enormous promise. It’s the brainchild of Tim Kring, who created Heroes, and it’s described as an alternative reality game. It began with a series of viral videos setting up the good and evil organisations in the story, and did manage to cause a bit of ‘this is clearly a hoax’ fuss, which is generally a good sign, despite the mobile phone company logos all over the place. It seems to be a straightforward story that is played out through internet media and live performances, where the narrative is pushed forward by the actions of readers/viewers/whatevers. People involved have to solve clues on websites (there appears to have been some pretend-hacking stuff involving The Pirate Bay, which is impressive grey-market penetration for a corporate affair) and attend events to trigger new segments of story.

So these are pretty different projects, both with quite serious chunks of cash and technology behind them. I think the Mongoliad sounds far more interesting as a piece of writing, but The Conspiracy For Good sounds better as a concept. I like its ideas about audience-involvement, where rather than being a platform for fan-fiction it is asking people to treat its world as real. Soaps and other successful, long-running creations often succeed because they lead to fans having conversations as if characters were real people. Having fans as agents in the story could create another layer of immersion, assuming people can be persuaded to overcome the irony instinct.

However, although I like this principle, I’m less keen on the actual art. It seems a bit bland and basic, and the celebrity cameos seem more like naff marketing than ways of combining the story with reality. Also, as a word child, I’m faintly irritated by how much of it is told through videos. I like the ways they’re concealed and released, but I much prefer text for this kind of thing. Clips are supposed to be accessible, but they tie you in and force you to watch them on their own terms, in a situation where you have a computer with speakers or headphones. Text can be browsed and skimmed much more easily, as well as put together more cheaply, making the medium more accessible. Just look at the massive irritation that the BBC news website has turned into now that it's replaced half of its proper news content with videos. No longer can you click on a headline and flick through to pick up the facts: you have to turn up the volume and sit through a local news anchor somewhere sauntering through a script.

The Mongoliad, on the other hand, is tempting. I suspect its delivery will turn out to be less revolutionary than it claims, but even if it’s just a serialised novel with some high-tech bits and pieces tacked on, it might be worth a look simply for the canonical chunks of text. It’s possible that the collaborative writing might be almost as interesting, thanks to some rating and officiating techniques they have apparently created, but I’m not sure. The big problem with writing in a mass medium like the internet is sorting the good from the bad - finding the diamonds in the rough. If the communal elements of The Mongoliad are going to work, it needs to find a way of doing this, and so of making readers care as much about stories written by anonymous users as they do about chapters written by Neal Stephenson.

My real point is not whether one or both of these will succeed or fail, but that their existence is interesting, and points to the sort of things that might happen in the future. One area that could go either way is increased corporate involvement. The generation of these large interactive tales could require the kind of money that will need corporate sponsorship and support, and so turn authors into content-creators for evil global mega-corporations. On the other hand, there might be a growth of grass-roots writing in the collaborative vein of things like The Mongoliad, gradually lessening the monetary aspects of literature and making it into a public resource. Obviously the most likely route is that we’ll carry on being somewhere in between these extremes, but hey, imagining dystopian futures is one of the best things about writing...

Anyway, that’s the end of this little series. It’s been interesting to write about and research (where ‘research’ equals scrabbling about on Google. It’s the modern way), but it’ll be more interesting to live through. Electrobooks and associated devices are currently still a bit rubbish, a bit niche and a bit basic, but something will change. In her kind reply to an e-mail I sent, Kate Pullinger said ‘writers need to be thinking beyond the printed page - most ebooks are still, essentially, the printed page on screen, nothing more’. The novel has plenty more years in it, but I think it will soon find excitable offspring rushing around its feet, and those children of fiction could grow up to be just as exciting as the parent.

But no, I won't be buying an e-book reader just yet...

Cory Doctorow: Makers

2010-09-02T20:28:00.001+01:00

Yeah, yeah, money’s broken, everyone’s poor and depressed, no one knows when it’s going to get better, and if I see one more weather metaphor for the economy I’m going to slap someone with a thesaurus. There is a recession. It’s getting old.

That’s why it’s interesting to start thinking about what happens next, to read a few wild theories about new shapes that wealth might take, about what money will be doing once this century pulls itself together. Cory Doctorow’s Makers begins with the tale of New Work, a New Deal-style economic transformation that sees America embracing a high-tech craft culture, giving garage-savants, hobby inventors and techy artists access to the mass infrastructure and abundance of waste material left behind, unused, in the wreckage of advanced consumer capitalism.

At the heart of this rejuvenation are Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, buddies who like nothing better than mucking around in an abandoned shopping centre, building crazy gadgets and toys to sell on the internet. When they’re picked up by Landon Kettlewell, a business investor with deep pockets and a madcap plan, the journalist Suzanne Church attaches herself to the team and soon finds herself the semi-official chronicler of New Work.

The exuberant first part of the novel watches New Work inflate itself to gargantuan proportions. Then the bubble does what bubbles do, and the novel moves on. Years later, with New Work a fondly remembered ruin, Perry and Lester are still ensconced in their mall, now running a community-constructed nostalgia ride. Now a bit of plot appears: a villainous competitive intelligence type from Disney is out to sabotage them, mainly out of jealousy caused by the gradual fading of Disneyworld.

Apparently the book was originally called Themepunks, and I do wonder if the New Work sections were tacked on once the economy went to pieces. Most of the rest of the book is made up of the conflict between Perry and Lester and Disney, and their gradual discovery that being a corporate twonk is bad, and having a laugh building stuff with the people, for the people, is just, like, awesome.

In fairness, the plot does a good job avoiding cliches: several times I was becoming irritated by the direciton I thought the book was about to take, but it then veered off on another route. Makers also offers an original, convincing near future, and the gadgets are really fun and clever: you can just about see most of them working, if not being quite the roaring successes they become in the book. It feels modern, filled with brands and fledgling inventions you might have read about on the gimmick pages of newspaper supplements.

It’s fun reading about the gadgets, but as a complete novel Makers drags. Too many segments, characters and plot arcs are introduced too late, with the best example being a goth kid who insists on being called Death Waits. He’s actually quite a pleasant character, a bit geeky, obsessive and pathetic, yet likeably enthusiastic. And yes, his name is a subject of ridicule, don’t worry. The problem isn’t him, but how he appears as a minor character, becomes a major one, then vanishes. Just as I started to care about him, he faded out, as if Doctorow couldn’t decide what to do with him. The same goes for a few others, such as Tjan, the business manager, and Eve, Kettlewell’s wife. Doctorow sets up interesting conflicts and situations but doesn’t play them out.

This is a pity, since despite touting itself as a near-future sci-fi novel, Makers is quite character-based. It deserves credit for not turning into a silly thriller filled with fighting and futuristic weapons. It shows us real people in an almost-real setting, struggling in the same ways people do in present-day novels. And they’re pleasant, interesting people, too. The four main players have convincing friendships and interests, and they go through such anguish that I couldn’t help feeling for them.

‘Couldn’t help’, though – see that? This is where I bring up the thing that killed the book for me. Worse than the wonky structuring is the writing. The prose is spectacularly careless, written as if dictated by a kid to some of his friends. It’s casual and vague, filled with descriptions like ‘he was really built’, and:

‘Perry nodded and cracked another beer. The cool air was weirding him out.’

I suppose this colloquial delivery saves time, and if Makers had been written more elaborately an already overlong novel would have stretched even further. But it’s not just the shorthand description that irritates me: it’s the lack of imagination in the writing. One metaphor, which was pretty tired to begin with, is even used twice on the same page (‘spend money like water’, p484 of the UK paperback, if you care). Slang which is fine in the characters’ mouths sounds lazy when it’s used in the narrative, and there were quite a few acronyms I had to look up (CHUD, TSA). These aren’t major structural flaws, just minor points that could easily have been cleared up by a bit more concentration on the prose.

Then there’s the way characters act. Again, it’s as if it’s shorthand for how you expect people to act – a slightly childish repetition of actions that are supposed to illustrate certain characteristics. So when someone tells a joke (which happens a lot, although few of them are very funny) everyone laughs uproariously, usually clutching their sides; and when someone is happy they do a little dance. This isn’t characterisation – say, a person with a particular tendency to display their emotions in an extravagant fashion – but a tendency to make everyone act this way. I gather that Doctorow’s previous book (Little Brother) was a young adult piece. Makers could be too, if it weren’t for the occasional extreme sex (weirdly pornographic) and violence (hideous, although in a way this is admirable – it doesn’t make physical damage into a temporary, mild inconvenience – injuries are painful and have long-term consequences. There is no action-hero invincibility here).

So a flawed, sometimes annoying, but nonetheless interesting novel. Despite its ponderous length and poor prose I read it quickly, and if you’d asked me during the first half I’d have said I was enjoying it a lot. It almost redeems itself with its epilogue, but otherwise I found my attention wandering by the end. However, even then I was interested in what Doctorow had to say with his setting, and, slightly surprisingly, I cared about the main characters. Like a lot of slightly ropey science fiction, Makers feels less like a bad novel and more like a missed opportunity.

The new lit part two: a beast with many heads

2010-08-30T10:55:00.000+01:00

The previous post in this microseries fumbled about with new forms of fiction, mostly involving using computers and the internet to transmit arty words in different ways. This time I’m going to look not at the words themselves but at the people behind them, and how people are starting to challenge and reconstruct the concept of an author.

Last week I briefly mentioned Cory Doctorow, as someone who releases his work as free e-books but still sells physical copies. Initially this was it: an unusual openness about possessing the text. However, he later rereleased the same books with a slightly different licence – one that allowed derivative works as well as free sharing and distribution. This amounts to an official recognition of fan fiction, a peculiar phenomenon that writers greet with mixtures of fear, pride and confusion. It’s a weird subculture of writing, and it seems to be both a massive outpouring of creative energy, a genuine communal enterprise, and a complete waste of time. For all the joy people seem to get out of writing and reading the stuff, I can’t quite get away from the idea that there are people writing things based on other people’s works when they could be writing their own. Ideas are the easy bit – if you’re going to put in the work of writing something, why not let yourself have the fun of making it all up, too?

However, Doctorow isn’t the only one who’s granted official recognition to fan works. A decade ago a chap called Eric Flint knocked together 1632, the first in a series of alternative history novels, in which a small twentieth century American town, including all its technology and inhabitants, is transported through time and space into the middle of Germany during the 30 Years’ War. It sounds faintly silly and bizarrely entertaining, but for the purposes of this article what’s more important than the novel’s literary merit is what happened next. Instead of merely scribbling a few sequels, Flint opened up the universe he had created, encouraging the wave of fan fiction and outside interest inspired by the first novel. Now, ten years later, there are a dozen novels, an anthology, several associated works and, most impressively, The Grantville Gazette, a regularly published short fiction magazine (paying good rates) specifically for derivative works of the series. Gosh. Looking at this as a whole, Eric Flint looks less like ‘the author’ and more like an editor in chief, or a publishing director, overseeing and guiding a range of efforts, as well as taking part himself.

Nor is this a one-off crackpot scheme. The idea of collaborative fiction is basically an extension of the anthology: gather a bundle of writers, and give them a set group of characters, themes and places to work with. Although not exactly new (hell, look at the Bible), this approach has been given a slightly different form by the internet. It’s now much easier to arrange open submissions and communicate details of the world and changes to it. There are wikis, forums and blogs offering new ways to explore settings and concepts outside the bounds of the fiction itself. By decentralising the idea of the author, fiction can acquire a new layer of content, becoming grander and more detailed than a conventional series of books, as well as being generated and populated much more swiftly.

Once again it’s fantasy and science fiction leading the way, thanks to their occasionally creepy obsession with the minutiae of fictional worlds. M John Harrison, lord of sentences and wrangler of genres, has railed against this world-building (sadly the original post is offline now), and he has a point – most of this stuff is irrelevant to what literature conventionally sets out to achieve. The value of a novel is more than an accumulation of details. However, this communal world-building is a form of art made up (primarily) of words. It’s creative, it relies on good writing to succeed, and it offers stories within stories within stories, as well as new ways of immersing readers in texts, often changing them from passive, external readers, to people involved in expanding the world that has entertained them. So this kind of communal effort, despite the ‘great clomping foot of nerdism' has its benefits.

The genres aren’t ahead just because they tend to involve made-up worlds. They’re also there because they have a ready-made community. There are conventions, and authors who are willing to talk to fans, but more importantly there is an outsider culture, a bit like when you see two smokers chatting at a party solely because one of them needed a light. It is easier for genre readers to band together and collaborate, because there is a ready-made link between them. Here, about halfway through his talk, I think in the chapter on 'bifurcated culture', Neal Stephenson tells a story about the peculiar shared excitement of genre fans. Sure, it's only anecdotal evidence, but I think it makes a nice point. It would be interesting to compare the atmospheres and comparative senses of unity at, say, Hay on Wye and a science fiction convention.

However, non-genre has its own efforts. I mentioned Geoff Ryman and Kate Pullinger before as people who were willing to experiment with structure, and they’re both also relevant from a collaborative perspective. Ryman made efforts to put together a follow-up to 253 called Another One Along in a Minute, which would use a similar structure (brief descriptions of the bodies and minds of passengers waiting for a tube), but be written by outside contributors. Sadly, this never quite got off the ground, for reasons explained here, but people certainly offered contributions: there was interest in that kind of collaborative project.

Speaking of ‘off the ground’, Kate Pullinger has a project called Flight Paths, which is described as a ‘networked novel’. It tries to bring interactivity and collaboration to real issues, in this case immigration, and it uses the international reach and the enormous variety of humanity offered by the internet to assemble a book about borders and differing cultural perspectives. This has assembled an impressive body of work, and one that has serious intent, real social breadth and some quality writing. It’s also real – real-world, real issues, real stories. As a result much of the writing is based on true stories, perhaps making it closer to narrative journalism like the fabulous Mr Beller’s Neighbourhood instead, but in projects like these the line between fiction and fact becomes blurred, and the text becomes all the healthier for it.

As Another One Along in a Minute shows, not every experiment has succeeded. This isn’t a problem: that’s how the process of discovery works, and the collision between writing and the net is still young, ungainly and scatterbrained. There is pointless tat out there, but there is also potential - massive potential for creating in new ways. And there are some major projects in the works that look like they might play with this technique and take it to new heights. Or just fail in a fascinating way. Either way, I’ll be happy. See next week for what I’m hinting at.

One last point: I’m not saying this kind of collaboration is the monolithic future of writing. I’m saying it’s a growth area and an expanding medium, but not one that is about to crush literature, see novels driven before it, and hear the lamentations of their prose. This isn’t the death of the author, but a new shape for the author to take.

Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths

2010-08-26T21:01:00.007+01:00

Jorge Luis Borges has a tremendous reputation among slightly odd people (I think I first encountered him during my efforts to read everything JG Ballard ever wrote, from classics to curiosities to shopping lists), so he’s been on my radar a while, without my ever having read anything by him. He was fairly notable for his essays and poetry, too, but I concentrated on his short stories and what Labyrinths classifies as ‘parables’, which, thankfully, ain’t exactly New Testament material.

So after meandering through this greatest hits collection, I’ve come to the conclusion that ole’ Borges was a bright fellow. I found myself reading a surreal series of short stories packed with ideas about reading, writing, metaphysics, identity, and all that sort of thing. Some of them even had plots and characters, too.

This was a difficult review to write, for there was a temptation to go through each individual story in great, dreary depth. The stories are compact, but dense, and their weightiness inspires serious discussion and efforts at criticism. They are strange and alluring, and, like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, another collection of miniatures that veer away from character and plot, weirdly inspiring. Their lack of conventional story structure makes them more into catalysts for thought than tales that are fun to read. Dialogue is rare; prose is dense and technical:

‘Let us imagine Droctulft sub specie aeternitatis, not the individual Droctulft, who no doubt was unique and unfathomable (all individuals are), but the generic type formed from him and many others by tradition, which is the effect of oblivion and memory.’

That’s from ‘Story of the Captive and the Warrior’, and it’s not atypical. There is no clear distinction between the prose of Borges’ essays and his stories. ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, as well as being a story, insists that it is actually a description of a hypothetical story. ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is presented as an academic article about the discovery or invention of a fictional, theoretical alternative world. I could say they are stories presented as non-fiction, but perhaps it would be more fitting to describe them as non-fiction about things that, purely by chance, happen not to be true.

Sometimes this is deviously effective, giving bizarre, fascinating ideas a sense of depth and history. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, a twistedly philosophical spy thriller, uses framing statements to wedge itself firmly into reality, even as its main narrator develops a dream-like atmosphere of inverted oriental exoticism. It begins:

‘On page 22 of Liddell Hart’s History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauben line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for 24 July 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th.’

But once it gets going you hit this:

‘The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind, dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, or of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. Thus I arrived before a tall, rusty gate.’

At other times, though, this mixture of styles is frustrating, as beautiful ideas are presented raw, rather than developed into full fictions of equal lustre. Admittedly, the full fictions aren’t what Borges sets out to do, but it’s what I sometimes wish he had done. ‘The Lottery at Babylon’, for instance, has a truly entrancing premise which it constructs magnificently, but there is no story to it: it is nothing but concept.

I was saddened by these conceptual tales precisely because of the genius that so clearly lurks behind them. Throughout the collection I bumped into ideas and images that found their way into my mind, and have stayed with me since reading, particularly ‘The Circlular Ruins’, ‘Funes the Memorius’, ‘Death and the Compass’, and ‘The Immortal’. The last of these, with its deserts and cities of madness and confusion, made me understand Ballard’s adoration: Borges too does with words what surrealists like Delvaux and de Chirico did with the echoing and mysterious spaces of their canvasses. Check out this marvellously ominous slice of atmospherics from ‘The Immortal’:

‘In the depths of a corridor, an unforeseen wall halted me; a remote light fell from above. I raised by confused eyes: in the vertiginous, extreme heights I saw a circle of sky so blue that it seemed purple. Some metal rungs scaled the wall. I was limp with fatigue, but I climbed up, stopping only at times to sob clumsily with joy. I began to glimspe capitals and astragals, triangular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City.’

Ah, look - ‘labyrinths’. This collection’s title is no casual naming. Borges concocts his own vocabulary of symbols, an interlocking set of terms of mazes, cities, libraries, religious terms and arcana. This vocabulary, this style, so fine and elaborately constructed, adds to the oneiric atmosphere that contrasts with the stories’ other, more technical approach to prose. This strange combination of techniques does not invite the reader in, but once you’re there, reading actively, it’s hard to escape. There are stories I would like to read again and again to unravel all their layers of meaning and symbol, to get to grips with their questions about the nature of reality and perception.

Equally, though, if you’re not in the right mood, frame of mind, or even mode of transport, you can scrabble through a few dusty pages and feel that you’ve gained nothing at all. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those tales I have mentioned as becoming inhabitants of certain corners of my mind are among the most ‘complete’ in this collection – the ones that are most similar to conventional short fiction, often playing with the form of the detective story, but using that genre’s clues and twists for metaphysical comment as well as, or instead of, plot development. My favourites, probably unsurprisingly, were those furthest from the frustrating high-concept miniatures.

Perhaps this is a preference for which I should condemn myself: maybe I’m just too much of a square to really appreciate this stuff, or just not up to the task of reading with sufficient depth. Perhaps I am a sluggish moth battering itself, uncomprehending, against a great literary light. But if so I do not think I am alone, and sadly I suspect it will be only a small group, to be envied and respected, that will love the more theoretical elements of Borges. But even so, you should read some, just to experience it. They are different, ingenious, and certainly brilliant. The question is whether you care for the form that brilliance takes.

The Green Man 2010

2010-08-24T21:45:00.013+01:00

It might be precisely because its climate is entirely unsuited to festivals that Britain is so obsessed with them. By now there must be enough to give every farm in the country a weekend off in favour of being tramped across by several thousand drunkards in wellingtons. In other words, just like normal farming, but with more people.

The unwieldy excesses of the festival scene lead to a few difficulties, even beyond finding enough empty weekends. First there is a limit to the number of people willing to spend cash on a trip involving the highest chances of trenchfoot since the Somme. Admittedly there is less shelling and fewer machine guns (although plenty of bad poetry and poison gas), but a festival is definitely a dirty weekend: you leave hygiene at home, unsuspecting, while you run off with another lifestyle. Obviously this is not for everyone, and I doubt many could find it in their hearts and wallets to go to more than one or two in a year.

Then there's the music. A glance at last year's lineups gave the impression that Jarvis Cocker was spending most of his summer's Saturday's playing to several different crowds at the same time. Yes, there are plenty of minor bands willing to fill up the lunchtime slots in exchange for a shiny wristband and a packet of crisps, but if you're going to draw crowds you need headliners, and until someone discovers a way to clone musicians that doesn't involve Simon Cowell, that means a bit of a struggle.

Finally there is the tyranny of the calendar. In an average year (assuming no cataclysmic climate alterations that will see Glastonbury 2024 being nostalgic about mud as a jolly alternative to tornadoes and earthquakes) there are only about three weekends that are really suitable to standing outdoors for the entire day, staring at a stage. Including all the ones that are just about acceptable if you're not picky (and if you own a tent in the first place, it's a fair bet that you aren't), you could probably double that. Triple if you're a masochist. That clearly isn't enough to share between all the festivals, and the major ones don't want to clash because they're often aiming for the same groups of people. The little ones don't want to clash either, but they don't tend to have a choice.

I've just come back from the Green Man, and it's pretty much nailed most of the festival problems, even if it is in turn nailed by the last one. I'll get the grumbly bit over and done with because there's already too much weather ranting in the world. Look, mid-August in a Welsh valley is no time to be anywhere near open sky. Apparently they had the site blessed by druids to avoid rain. Call me a cynic, but after this weekend I'm starting to lose faith in ancient pagan rituals. I hate to think of all those goats sacrificed in vain.

Persistent rain aside, the Green Man gets most of it right. At about 5,000 people (I think) it finds a pleasant niche halfway between miniature local shindigs that resemble large garden parties, and giant stomping monster festivals with lakes of filth and crowds that could populate small countries.

On the whole it does the same thing with the music: instead of getting middle-grade mainstream bands, it picks up huge names from slightly outside the basic canon of rock and roll. Okay, Doves are a touch bland (although I rather like them), but plumping for Joanna Newsom on as the last night's headliner is inspired and adventurous without being unlistenably obscure (for most of the audience, anyway - I heard a few bewildered grumblings). She does win the 'awkward stage banter' award, though, for a weird ramble about swimming in rivers (and the harp retuning heckle: 'It was in tune this morning'; 'Welcome to Wales!') . And the Flaming Lips, well, the stories about their stage shows are true. I want more bear attacks and space bubbles in popular music. They make perfect sense as a headliner: ridiculously entertaining, totally off their faces, and completely accessible. If Wayne Coyne didn't have a band, he'd have a cult. And I'd join it.

Step away from the headliners, and the charming peculiarity of the lineup becomes even more apparent. The lower echelons of the stage times tend to be much more interesting than the guitar-bass-drums-yelping generica they could have become at a festival with more money to fling around. On the whole there was an intriguing mixture of folky and psychedelic poppy stuff that I rather liked. Put simply, there were a lot of banjos.

The highlights I saw coming were the Flaming Lips, Mumford and Sons, Beirut, Laura Marling and Wild Beasts. The ones that came out of nowhere for me were Matthew and the Atlas, Caitlin Rose and Joker's Daughter. Honorary mention to Coco's Lovers for losing power, but then opting for a barefoot acoustic performance from the middle of the Chai Wallah tent to an unexpectedly vast crowd (rain can do great things for little bands), and leaving everyone loving them. They clearly acquired a taste for busking: afterwards they were spotted playing all over the rest of the festival, still not wearing any shoes. Slightly disappointed by John Grant (once of The Czars). Some brilliant songs, and certainly the best voice of the festival, but the set was almost ruined by a truly awful wailing synthesiser keyboard. Still, nothing can stop Paint the Moon being stunning.

Also much fun to be had in the cinema tent in the mornings before the bands open up. I have now discovered that Buster Keaton is amazing (Jackie Chan was right all along) and that lovingly made short animations are among the lovelier things to watch when there is a monsoon outside.

Oh, and they burnt a wicker man at the end (minus Scottish policeman. I think), which would have been amazing if the rain hadn't chosen that hour to go completely berzerk, and if some halfwit family hadn't insisted on thrusting a giant golf umbrella right in my face. They were wearing perfectly serivceable waterproofs, too. Bah.

Anyway, here's my first effort at a Spotify playlist. This is one played by each of the bands I saw, with the following non-Spotify exceptions: Joanna Newsom (does her log cabin not have internet?), Coco's Lovers, Dom Coyote, Brigyn (ironic folk cover of La Roux's Bulletproof? Yes please) and Zen Elephant. Hope it works.

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake

2010-08-18T21:49:00.000+01:00

You know how there are some authors who cobble together book after book that win award after award solely because they’re so dull that they must, automatically, be in some way worthy? The kind of writing my Dad calls ‘middle-class women’s books’, and that the papers will describe, archly, as ‘likely to be nominated for the Booker’? Well, Margaret Atwood isn’t one of them. She wins award after award and sells book after book solely on the basis of being exceedingly good.

What’s more, she has some kind of magical rut-evading device nailed to her typewriter, which means she can slink from genre to genre and setting to setting, throwing together sentences with a dark wit; a long, indulgent sigh over the weaknesses of humanity; and an honest rage at the injustices of society.

Oryx and Crake is up there with Atwood’s best, and Atwood’s best is up there with the best (whatever that means). Yes, she has been known to get a bit snotty about people calling some of her books science fiction, but if she’ll carry on writing them I’m quite happy for her to call them what she likes. I’m charitable like that.

This review is based on a re-reading, because I’ve got The Year of the Flood languishing on my shelf, and I wanted to refresh my memories of Oryx and Crake before sitting down with the new one. However, this is not a book that relies on the twists of its plot to trap the reader: it loses little and gains much in a second glance.

This thing we call civilisation has been torn apart, and a battered, weary man called Snowman sits in its wreckage, alone but for the attentions of a strangely perfect yet peculiarly animal tribe called the Crakers, who treat him as a prophet or priest of their absent creator. Bored, lonely and running out of supplies, Snowman sets out on a journey to where he began his life in the new wilderness, returning to a science compound called Paradice in search of weapons and food. The sections following Snowman’s post-cataclysmic wanderings alternate with the tale of how humanity met its end, seen through the eyes of Jimmy, Snowman’s pre-fall self.

Since it begins in the aftermath, you know where the story will lead. You read to see why, and to watch, helpless, as obession, jealousy, selfishness and carelessness lead to the demise of all our cities, discoveries, rights and wrongs.

You also read to watch two different worlds unfold in the same physical location. Snowman’s land is unforgiving. An overgrown jungle of plants and collapsed buildings, it is ravaged by weather, swept by both tropical storms and fearsome sun on a daily basis. Survival relies on scavenging for supplies, staying out of the heat and the twisters, and evading the attentions of the mutated and modified creatures that lurk in the undergrowth, grown dangerously predatory. The atmosphere is powerful, combining the growth of new forms of nature with the collapsing fragments of the old, human, order. Rather than being just a collection of pretty descriptions of broken things, the narrative gives an impression of a functioning ecosystem:

“A long scrawl of birds unwinds from the empty towers – gulls, egrets, herons, heading off to fish along the shore. A mile or so to the south, a salt marsh is forming on a one-time landfill dotted with semi-flooded townhouses. That’s where all the birds are going: minnow city.”

Jimmy, in contrast to all this, lives in a hyper-modern network of self-contained compounds, surrounded by sophisticated technology and elaborate genetic engineering. In these paranoid gated communities corporations work on ingenious scientific developments that lurk on the borderlands between progress and horror:

“What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

‘What the hell is it?’ said Jimmy.

‘Those are chickens,’ said Crake. ‘Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one.’"

And it’s not just tasteless synthetic food: the internet’s full of sponsored murder and child pornography, civil liberties are a historical joke, freak diseases flash through populations, and everything is geared towards the invention and promotion of the latest technological fashions. Outside the compounds, in the pleeblands, life is even less pleasant: a grimy, deadly, polluted place of oppression and ultracapitalist excess.

As in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates a disturbing and convincing near-future, but this one feels more complete. It benefits from its ambiguity: where The Handmaid’s Tale was inescapably horrific, here there are traces of improvement and development amid the coldness and inequity, making the world more believable.

Jimmy is an observer of this world, but not quite part of it. He is a word person in the demesne of the numerate. His gradual drift into the dissatisfied life of an outsider is enjoyable and distressing in equal measure. Atwood carefully fits her world and corresponding comments on society into the background of a funny yet melancholic maturation tale, as Jimmy grows into a selfish young man who’s part of the system around him but who can’t quite be satisfied with it. It isn’t the usual angry rebel approach to dystopia, where the story follows the revolutionary as they try to dismantle the dominant society, but instead is a classic story of Jimmy’s growth, adolescence and adulthood, and his friendship with Crake, the system's wunderkind and destroyer, across these years.

And this friendship is brilliantly drawn: they are fine characters, and as their history comes closer to the present, leading up to Jimmy’s transformation into Snowman, you see that in the end, no matter what world we create for ourselves, what really drives things is not the grand topics like science or morals, but humanity – our personal desires and fears; love, hate, obsession. Like all great books it is about us – all of us. In comparing Jimmy to the beautiful but primitive and ridiculous Crakers, the novel reminds us that humanity’s greatness is inextricably bound to its monstrosity.

This strength leads straight to a flaw, and it’s one I find in a lot of apocalyptic scenes: that visions of the disaster scene are occasionally a bit dull. Although I love the principle of cataclysmic fiction, there’s only so much scavenging I can deal with. Oryx and Crake doesn’t turn into an urban survival handbook like The Road, thank goodness (and it's written in proper sentences, too), but the brilliance of the Jimmy story still limits the interest I felt in the Snowman tale. This world is beautifully presented, but it drags, perhaps because of the lack of human interaction that is such a necessary part of it.

But look past this: Oryx and Crake is excellent. It’s a powerful, human, and expertly constructed tale that with its flawed characters and ambiguous world manages to be instructive without being didactic. I think I'm ready for the Year of the Flood...

The new lit part one: text's adventures

2010-08-16T21:38:00.003+01:00

This is the first part of the short series on emerging forms of fiction that I introduced last week. Inspired by the gradual, struggling, wailing infancy of the electrobook, I've tried to assemble something coherent about fiction that exists in strange shapes - the kind of things that remind us that literature doesn't start in verse and finish in novels.

Audience participation

There’ve been attempts to make literature interactive for a while. Some of these have taken the form of wild experiments, such as novels in boxes to be read in any order (see the bits on BS Johnson's The Untouchables here) or oddities like Nabokov’s poem/biography/interpretation exercise Pale Fire, which can’t really be described by any single tag except ‘fiction’. It’s presented as a poem with annotation and commentary by a friend of the author, and the plot and characters emerge through the interventions of this friend. And no, I haven’t read it, because it sounds altogether too much like hard work. Like cricket, Cornish or magic mushrooms, I’m glad it exists, but I’ve no desire to have a go at it.

A more recent experiment with structure is Geoff Ryman’s 253, which I actually have read, so can ramble about with slightly more authority. If you pick up the paperback, it feels a bit like a collection of linked short stories: each of the 253 people on a tube train recieves 253 words describing their background, appearance and thoughts. The tiny stories are strangely powerful, all the more so when they interact with or are connected to other passengers in their carriages. Then, when the tube reaches the end of the line, everything changes again. It feels strange and almost pointless if read in order as a conventional novel, and it’s much more fun to flick through it at random.

For all its high concept, the book isn’t tremendously experimental. Where it becomes more interesting is in its original incarnation: as a website. Here it takes on a new dimension, as the entries on each character offer links to other characters, joining them by profession, geography, appearance or simply where they are in the carriages. No longer is this a story sequence for people with short attention spans: it’s an examination of how humanity, for all its diversity and division, is linked in dozens of tiny, fascinating ways. And this is brought out not solely by the writing, but by the format. Sure, the paperback version has an index, but riffling through the pages doesn’t offer the same experience as bouncing around the internet. It’s in projects like this that calling it ‘the web’ really begins to make sense.

Caught in the net

This seems to be called hypertext fiction, and there’s a bit of it about. 253 uses its online presence to trace patterns through society, bringing humanity together, but it’s easy to imagine ways to use hypertext to explore how characters are racked by fate, to study the role of observers and outsiders in people’s lives, or to draw stories out of details, creating endlessly recursive interconnected segments of fiction. Just writing this paragraph has jammed a few devious ideas into my head. Okay, I'll never get round to writing them, but it's the thought that counts. However, despite the occasional genre magazine actively encouraging the idea, hypertext fiction doesn’t seem to have done much.

Or rather, it hasn’t done a lot under that name. Almost exactly the same thing has been floating around in children’s publishing for years: the choose-your-own-adventure, which for me is an instant flashback to the days when having an age in double figures seemed like something out of far-fetched conspiracy thriller. And these, lo-and-behold, are already making their e-book comeback. It’s perfect for the format: it offers the same feeling of involvement in stories and heroism, but without the need for a pencil and, in particularly edgy cases, a pair of dice.

E-books could make an equally big difference to the adult versions of this kind of fiction. It’s all very well poking about in 253 online, but few people will sit in front of a computer to read anything of length. Cory Doctorow makes all his novels available free online (more on him next time), but he still sells books, partly because I think readers are likely to use the internet to decide that they’re interested, but still want to read the rest on paper. Now, these new-fashioned electrobooks might change that, because now your 253s, Doctorows or whatevers will become as accessible as any other work of fiction. And accessibility is key to popularity – it always has been. At its simplest, in old-school publishing you can’t be a bestseller unless your publisher has printed enough copies.

But mere technology and accessibility won’t be enough to magically make hypertext popular. It also relies on writers. Because like every cheap list of ‘how to make your blog great’ hints will tell you, ‘content is king’. Or whatever position of autocratic privilege floats your flagship. Basically, hypertext needs names. I’ve talked about Ryman because he’s famous (for a given value of ‘fame’ – we are talking about novelists, here) as a writer of linear paper-printed narratives too, so I’ve heard of him. Ditto Doctorow, although his success as a writer seems to have been assisted by his popularity as a blogger: he’s one of the people who run Boing Boing, which is a bit of an internet institution (of the aged and sentimentally adored kind, like Christopher Lee or Marks and Spencers, rather than the kind where you lock up mad people, like Bedlam, or Windsor Castle).

Getting technical

A near relative of hypertext fiction has been floating around for slightly longer, but has also failed to reach a vast audience or to be taken seriously by the mainstream as a medium for literature. It’s another one with childhood memories attached, and back then it was called the ‘text adventure’. I remember being baffled by games based on the Famous Five and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which as I remember it were basically exercises in trying to think exactly like the evil genius who designed the puzzles. Well, these days they’re still around, now called ‘interactive fiction’, and they're trying to combine literature with challenge – a sense of progress, success and failure.

My experience is limited, but it’s a vibrant scene, with plenty of websites and serious, free bits of software designed to help people assemble their imaginings without needing programming knowledge. Clearly these kinds of texts can offer new routes to literature – new ways of presenting characters, the ability to twist and reshape plots, a greater interest in re-reading.

This is also a genre that could be brought greater publicity by e-books and their associates, but there is a problem, or at least a difference. In combining prose art with the success/failure mechanics of computer games, interactive fiction fundamentally changes the reader’s responses. Currently reading lets you get out what you put in. You can skim a text and race through it for a light dusting of plot and ideas, or you can tear it apart word by word and find meaning in every letter. In many cases interactive fiction doesn’t offer you this choice: you can read it how it was meant to be read, or you can fail. Even in works that don’t respond to mistakes with violent death, or which are ingenious enough to offer multiple routes and conclusions, you can’t read passively – you have to respond, type your actions, play it as a game. This kills the emotional contact that novels can be so good at providing: you're looking at the text for clues, not to engage with the characters. It doesn't help that if the reader is acting a character they have to filter their dialogue through a slightly wonky text parser.

That aside, though, I think interactive fiction will grow as iPads and other slates/readers/notepad computers become more popular. Although very different from books, this kind of reading could offer something new to certain kinds of clue-focused detective stories, or tales of adventure and exploration. It will never be the same market as novels, but I think there could be some interaction between the two worlds. And that's a good thing: without experimentation in form, we'll never find out exactly how this sort of thing can work well.

Arting around

At the end of my review of Michael Chabon’s entirely charming Gentlemen of the Road I muttered a plea for publishing to start illustrating novels for adults. This leads to another area where electronic publishing has one up on all those retro wood-pulp oblongs lurking on the shelves: multimedia. Again, so far it’s been treated as a trinket for children, but some people, like Enhanced Editions and Atomic Antelope, are getting rather elaborate.

Mostly this is a bit DVD-extra – you know, fancy widgets that you get slighlty excited about but never actually use. However, there are some efforts to create works where sound and light and generaly wizziness is more integral. Look at Kate Pullinger, for instance. As well as writing well-received ‘normal’ books, she's put together a range of 'digital fiction' that tries to tie together reading and a more general form of interaction - pictures, music, visual games involving text and stories. It's slightly basic, and very child-orientated, but it's a new direction, and it's something that could expand as more people start scratching their chins and getting involved.

Experimental method

Right now these are quirks and gimmicks, assumed to be tricks and games for children and geeks. A few artists experiment with narrative or multimedia, but they do it consciously as an experiment, rather than expecting to be embraced by the public. However, just about the only thing I can guarantee is that people will continue mucking around, and I think electrobooks, in whatever form winds up being most popular, will aid the spread of these alternatives.

And if these new ideas take off, then a few decades later someone will be trying to take another new step forward, and another, until finally, one day, we’re all carting around The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (an elaborate, interactive, futuristic teaching device, entertainment system and childhood companion in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age), and words like ‘publishing’ will seem quaynte and olde worlde. If they don’t already.

Thomas Pynchon: Vineland

2010-08-12T20:37:00.001+01:00

I get the impression that Thomas Pynchon is one of those authors who are famous for writing big, wise books that nobody actually reads, like a drugged-up, American Cervantes, or Thackery, or Joyce. Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day; these are less novels than they are building materials. I always remember the scene in the Whitby Witches (by the brilliant Robin Jarvis, responsible for all the best childhood terrors and a lingering suspicion that rodents are up to something shifty) when someone is murdered with a Dickens novel. You could take out an elephant with the Pynchon back catalogue.

So when I was slinking around the library and felt like seeing what the Pynchon fuss was all about, I turned to the only one of his books on the shelf that I could pick up with one hand: Vineland. I gather that this is generally considered a minor work, but it has its fans, and it had some pretty glowing quotations on the back, including one from Salman Rushdie, so I thought it was worth a shot.

For the first sixty pages or so, I thought I'd found a new writer to worship. It’s a brilliant opening, a freewheeling, madcap, comic introduction to the life of Zoyd Wheeler, semi-retired pothead, professional mental health benefit fraud, and more-or-less devoted father. He’s a ridiculous but strangely charming figure, and the first chapters chart his annual lunatic impersonation, delve into his sarcastic but mutually loving relationship with his daughter, Prairie, and introduce her punk boyfriend (guitarist in Billy Barf and the Vomitones) and a television-addict narcotics cop, Hector Zuniga, who can’t quite decide whether he’s the bewildered Zoyd's best pal or deadliest foe.

This stuff is ace, and with its ageing hippies and underlying familial concerns, soon had me hoping for a panoramic Wonder Boys. The descriptions bounce around extravagantly, there are endless elaborate pop culture references, and you have no idea what’s going to pop up next, but the loopiness is underpinned by the dysfunctional but trenchant bond between Zoyd and Prairie. With all plot signs pointing towards a zany (and that's not a word anyone should use lightly) road trip across America pursued by mysterious governmental forces, I was raring to go.

Then it all went to pieces.

Having set up this touching father-daughter relationship, assembled a fine supporting cast of kooks, and hinted at the Big Themes, Pynchon descends into a maze of convoluted backstory about a series of decreasingly interesting characters. There are some great set pieces (the mob wedding, the big jolly breakfast scene near the end), but every sign of greatness is left to wither by the novel’s lack of focus. I’m normally quite in favour of hurling ideas at the page (I loved Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World, and I can’t get enough of Neal Stephenson), but here I longed for less mucking about with Godzilla references, fewer dreary, obscure karmic discussions with the thanatoids (ghosts, basically, but not quite), less ‘hey, ninjas are cool, right?’ (thus the otherwise inappropriate comparisons to The Gone Away World and Neal Stephenson), and more of what should have been at the heart of the book: Zoyd, his daughter, and Frenesi Gates, his ex-wife, whom he could never help loving.

Frenesi is the nominal focus of much of the narrative, and for a while the book is happy to follow her tale of love, sex and betrayal in ‘60s counterculture, as she, the textbook revolutionary filmmaker, accidentally finds herself working for the man, and surprisingly willingly, too. The man in question here is Brock Vond, the obsessive villain, who spends most of the book trying to make life hell for Zoyd and Co, for reasonably predictable reasons. The 1960s sections are also strong, although sometimes the cartoonishness let down the book’s effort to make big (if also easy and predictable) social points about how the US government was so, like, rilly bad, man, and how pot was totally groovy.

Again, then, signs of promise, even with Zoyd way off-page, as Prairie begins a quest to find her mother. However, by the time they’re reunited any emotion has been drained away by a barrage of one-scene side characters and wanton silliness, primarily instituted by the deeping irritating good-natured gangster Takeshi Fumimota and his ninjette bodyguard DL. These two are responsible for all the faffing about with ninjas, ghosts and similarly bonkers stuff which is sometimes quite cool and good for a few laughs, but overall is too frivolous and long-winded to work. This lets down the efforts of the rest of the book to build emotional bonds with the characters. The wild-eyed, easily distracted narrative means that I was never sure what I was supposed to be concentrating on or caring about, and this led to genuinely important scenes slipping past unnoticed amid the aimless chortling riffs. Oh, and Takeshi’s dialogue really grates:

“You’d be – real interested in this!” Takeshi began, “maybe even – tell me what you think I should do – because frankly, I’m at my wit’s end!”

Takeshi’s insistent exclamations and pauses are part of a general collection of faintly irritating tics that start out as quaint and amusing (‘rilly’ for ‘really’, ‘the Tube’ for ‘television’) but grow tiring after the hundreth repetition.

Yet for every bum note, and every rambling, irrelevant vignette about cookery at the ninjette retreat or a minor character’s lectures on how to steal lingerie, or someone's misadventures during a student revolution, there is a magnificent description that was almost enough to bring me back on board. Sometimes, often at the end of the chapter, something really wonderful happens:

“So the bad ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among... flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, services at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure flourescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant direworks, the spilled, the broken world.”

Or, later:

“... there the Polaroid lay, safe, till it was rescued by a Las Vegas showgirl with a hard glaze but a liquid center whom Prairie reminded of a younger sister, and who returned it to Frenesi when she came around the next day, her heart pounding, her skin aching for it still to be there, to find it again and claim it.”

When he puts his mind to it, Pynchon can write with rhythm and style, and put together sentences the length of a page in which every word feels right. He showboats, flexes his muscles, grins outrageously and puts together a vast string of words that by rights shouldn’t work, but which somehow leave you smiling wistfully at the page.

Then he’ll throw in some stupid jokes about bad movies, switch the narrative to another character you hadn’t previously cared about, and make you wish there were fewer pages. This frustrating oscillation between beauty and self-indulgence plagues the book, leaving it certainly not terrible, but equally certainly not brilliant. Mostly, it’s simply frustrating. Like the lost sixties it conjures up in its finer passages, Vineland promised so much and sometimes even managed to deliver, but in the end fizzled out, with its pupils dilated and its hair in disarray, no longer quite worth caring about.

The new lit: introduction

2010-08-10T19:09:00.002+01:00

E-books, apparently, are going to destroy the universe, or at least kill p-books and dismantle publishing like some kind of revolutionary army, set on building a world in which trees can roam free without being hunted down by publishers and turned into stories. Despite these frequent warnings and a series of overblown and utterly ignored displays in chain bookshops up and down the country, I’ve so far seen a whole three people with dedicated e-book readers, and about half a dozen more with iPads. True, some of the wielders of fancy telephones might be using them to read books, too, but either way I don’t think there’s yet much sign of the great electropublishing takeover.

However, what I have seen are a bunch of interesting people lurking around and trying to work out some more radical approaches to the future of writing, publishing and reading. Because the e-book, whatever you think of having a book with a glowing screen, a battery life and a three-digit price tag, is basically just a different way of transmitting a novel. It's technology, not art. In the long term, whether or not it takes off isn’t that interesting. What’s a bit more exciting is how the introduction of digital technology to writing will affect the things that are offered to us, as readers, and how we can respond to them. I'm stroking my chin about the consequences for fiction, not economics. Mainly because I know faff all about economics.

I’m going to split this into three posts: interactivity, authorship, and combination efforts. The first will be about changes to the actual medium – how the definition of a book might be changing. The second will examine how the role of the author is, or might be, shifting, including a growth of collaboration and shared ideas. The last will look at a few broader projects that combine elements of everything else. These posts will be spread out over the next few weeks, interspersed with reviews and probably some waffle about my forthcoming trip to The Green Man (good grief, actually planning ahead for the ‘blog - this can't be healthy).

By the way, this isn’t an attempt to be a ragged wilderness prophet of bookdom, marching down from the mountaintop with visions of the future. I’m going to be typing about intriguing approaches that are already happening. Some are new, and some have been around for a while. Some have already made their money and moved on, and others are still flopping about in the womb, feeling lovely and warm and worrying about being born. I doubt all of the new ones will succeed, and some will probably never be heard from again, but it’s fascinating that they’re occurring, and they show that approaches to written art are still changing and developing. The novel is only a few hundred years old – imagine what sort of alterations we might see a couple of centuries further on.

China Miéville: Kraken

2010-08-06T20:03:00.002+01:00

[First, a thousand curses upon having to write this on a laptop. You don’t realise how much you miss the number pad until you’re trying to write about someone with an accent in their name.]

China Miéville is the current darling of fantasy, and for ruddy good reason: he makes it original, disturbing and political again, rather than an exercise in rummaging around in Tolkien’s bins and repeating tired old pseudomythology. Content aside, Miéville also has distinctive prose, which is sometimes impressive and sometimes irritating, but is always better than being bland and dreary.

Kraken is Miéville’s latest, in a rare example of my reading being up to date (look, there’re a lot of books out there, alright?), and it’s a frankly bonkers adventure through a deeply seedy magical underbelly of London. It isn’t his best book, since it lacks the intricacy of The Scar or the conceptual genius of The City and The City, but it’s highly enjoyable and full of ideas that will leave you cackling evilly.

Invisible city

Billy Harrow is a curator at the Natural History Museum’s new Darwin Centre. During a routine tour, he discovers the impossible theft of the museum’s prize exhibit: the carefully preserved carcass of a giant squid. Not long after that Billy’s on the run through a warped vision of London, with new factions and foes popping up at every turn.

The conceit is that not far below London’s surface seeths a world of competing supernatural cults and gangs, all with their own powers and agendas. On a fairly routine basis, somebody’s irrational eschatology declares that it’s time for the world to end, and there’s a bit of a ruck. Generally, after a spot of violence and some embarrassed chin-stroking from various prophets, things settle down. This time, though, with the squid vanished and mysterious old powers beginning to move again, the end times really are looking like the end.

This offers a brilliant opportunity for Miéville to do what he does best: make things up. Startling things. Kraken is packed with creatures, preternatural arts, mysterious organisations and all-round oddities, all of which are fitted carefully into his murky, modern mythology of London. There are ferret-worshippers, Chaos Nazis, a practitioner of quantum origami, a trade union for familiars, creatures made from leaves and rubbish and shedloads more. Like Miéville’s children’s book Un Lun Dun, it’s sometimes fantasy by pun, with surreal concepts clearly born of plays on words, such as the henchmen of one of the major villains. A few fall flat (they’re great as concepts, but as names I found ‘Londonmancers’ and ‘gunfarmers’ a bit weak), but, like an episode of Mock the Week, there’s so much being thrown at you that if one idea doesn’t stick there’ll be a bunch more along in a minute.

As some of the madder sounding cults above suggest, Kraken is unashamedly playful, to the extent of one plot twist making fun of the way language is used to construct the system of the unreal. This willingness to muck about extends to the rest of the book, too. Yes, there is horror, but there are also jokes, both by darting around in pop culture and in some of the banter between characters. It’s quite a departure from the grim tone of The City and the City, but it works well: can you imagine a book about squidnapping taking itself seriously?

Overflow text

This barrage of jokes and ideas is often thrilling, but sometimes the proliferation of curiosities bogs down the actual plot. By the end there are so many groups and conflicts (even accounting for all the ones that meet messy ends along the way) that the wrapping up seems perfunctory and slightly disappointing. Plenty happens, but it lacks structure, and sometimes things that should be momentous seem less developed than the sideshows.

Sadly, the same can sometimes be said for the characters. Because Miéville seems determined to show off as much of his psychotic, psychedelic London as possible, there are buckets of characters, most of whom don’t last very long, and rarely have an opportunity develop beyond a talent and an allegiance. This is a pity, because the ones who do manage to stick around are pretty decent. Billy himself is perhaps a little bland (he’s the outsider, the normal guy thrust into the middle of the mess, so this isn't a huge surprise), but some of the other major ones are impressive. The highlight is Kath Collingswood, of the Fundamentalist and Sect Related Crime Unit – the Cult Squad. She’s the police witch, a sort of cross between a bitchy schoolgirl and a hard-bitten investigator. Her development from an obnoxious background character into a major focus of drive and attitude is great fun, and it’s a pity not everyone else is drawn with such attention.

Many of the chapettes and chaps who don’t last for long can blame their briefness on Goss and Subby, who shoot straight to the top spot in the book’s impressive roster of villainy. They are a classic sinister double act – the loquacious, incomprehensible Goss and his silent child, Subby – and they are spectacularly nasty as well as curiously, unsettlingly funny. For those who’ve read Neverwhere, they’re basically Croup and Vandemaar all over again. In fact, sometimes they’re a bit too Croup and Vandemaar. I’ll tell you what, though – that’s a fight I’d like to see.

London Below

That Neverwhere comparison can go quite a lot further, actually. There are undeniable similarities: the other London, the puns, the combination of the sinister and the amusing, the elaborate amalgamation of lore and mythology. They’re both also very good. However, Kraken strikes out in a different direction: where magic in Neverwhere is based on what is old and half-forgotten, in Kraken it’s modern, often literally constructed from the detritus of the city and its culture. Rituals of summoning involve VCRs and cheap paperbacks; cultic warriors employ household produce; and there’s no need for a crystal ball when lampposts and CCTV are around. ‘She plugged in her electric pentacle’, goes one line. This modernity is followed in the politics of the other city, too: there is unionism and brute capitalism instead of monarchy and hereditary power. It’s a brilliantly constructed response to the backward gaze of a lot of fantasy.

The other major difference from Neverwhere’s London Below is that Gaiman’s undercity was very separate from ‘real’ London - Richard is ignored by his old acquaintances. Kraken’s cult-world, on the other hand, drags mundane London in: there is no escape from it. No one is safe from the machinations of unnatural powers. This gives it quite a different atmosphere, for where Neverwhere had an air of outsider otherness, Kraken has a grungy sense of brutal realism to it: anyone who’s walked past a club at kicking-out time will recognise it, whereas Neverwhere is about the things in London that we don’t notice.

Streets of London

This atmosphere is another of Kraken’s strengths. It’s finely tuned, generating a scrappy, scabby, mangy London that is recognisable, despite the magic that pulses through it. Although London is shown as a violent, hideous place, it’s also a home, urgent and alive, and it is something to be loved as well as feared.

'In a city like London...

Stop: that was an unhelpful way to think about it, because there was no city like London. That was the point.'

I’m not going to go down the over-worn ‘city as character’ route, but London is what connects the occasionally disjointed elements of the book. It’s a highly enjoyable London novel, but it’s also one that leaves me quite glad to be leaving town.

That joke isn't funny any more

2010-08-03T21:14:00.001+01:00

I don’t watch enormous quantities of television. What I do watch has been fairly precisely identified by a mysterious focus group at the BBC responsible for making sure that there are always one or two programmes on for People Like Me, and making sure the next one isn’t far away when a series ends. It’s probably possible to construct a new system of seasons by replacing spring, autumn and that lot with Hustle, Doctor Who, Spooks and Being Human (okay, this one’s only had two series, but I need a replacement for David Bowie’s Coma Cops, or whatever the overall title for Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes is. The Hunt Supremacy? Misogyny and Fisticuffs Through the Ages?).

Anyway, there’s been a bit of a summer gap in the regulars (although I gather there are some more Spooks on their way, which is just as well, because I’ve forgotten which characters are still alive), so I’ve found myself staring at a number of book adaptations, beginning with a DVD copy of the old Neverwhere series, moving on to Sky’s Going Postal and the Beeb’s Money, and now hitting Sherlock, which had its second episode on Sunday.

The thing that intrigues me here isn’t how far they are faithful to their sources (not very, on the whole), or how good they are (sticking with ‘not very’ for Neverwhere, and gradually working up to rather decent for Sherlock and its solid approach to Victorian melodrama with added mobile phones), but their approach to humour.

Inappropriate laughter

I think humour is important in television drama. First, it is simply enjoyable. Second, and more importantly to this kind character-based, narrative television (as opposed to sketch shows or sitcoms, where the humour is almost everything), it is a way of developing and making the audience care about the characters. If you find yourself laughing at someone, you’ll be inclined to like them, and that makes you care about them. Handy for television. This is one of the problems with, say, 24 (watch it for plot, suspense or action by all means, but there is nothing likeable and barely anything human about Jack Bauer, partly because he’s about as funny as Lee Evans at a funeral), and possibly one of the reasons why people become so invested in House and The West Wing.

Of the four things I’ve watched recently, three are based on amusing books (okay, the Neverwhere novel actually came after the television series, but this doesn’t really change much). Going Postal is fairly straightforwardly comic, both in humour and in structure. Money is not exactly a comedy – it’s too grim for that – but it is extremely funny. I’m probably on firmer ground calling it a satire – it’s filled with excess and shock that are used to produce brutal, scathing social comment. The jokes are just an added extra. Neverwhere, for all its horror tropes and gothy makeup, is not a thousand miles from being a comic fantasy, since although there’s plenty of peril there is also a lightness of tone and a chirpy heroism behind it. Also, like Money, plenty of wisecracking, even (especially) from the creepy villains.

The exception, then, is Sherlock Holmes. Not that the tales are dreary, witless slogs – they’re thoroughly enjoyable, although I think I may be more of a Professor Challenger man, and I’d take Chesterton’s Father Brown over either any day of the week – but simply that they aren’t comedies.

Now plonk them all on television, and somehow, strangely, the most consistently amusing one is Sherlock, which might as well be called Sherlock Who, since it’s basically the same as the last series of everyone’s favourite campy time-travelling adventure show, but with Martin Freeman instead of Karen Gillan (a pretty unfair trade, if you ask me or any other sane hetero male. Ahem. TV's a visual medium, right?). Both focus on an awfully clever but socially awkward chap with slightly silly hair bounding around solving everyone’s problems, while an innocent sidekick potters along asking questions to give excuses for the hero’s fast-talking, technobabbly explanations of what’s going on. Yes, Sherlock has more murders and fewer beasties from the nether regions of the universe, but the principle is the same. As are the writers, which might have something to do with it.

This similarity is probably why the first episode of Sherlock was very funny, and the second one reasonably laughsome too, despite their being murder mysteries in which folks of varying degrees of innocence are knocked off by bad sorts. It’s mostly classic character stuff: isn’t our title character weird, and isn’t it fun watching him bewilder the mundanes around him? This helps the show: with only three episodes and a strict crime/investigation/solution format, they need to hook us on the characters. By and large, they succeed.

The drought

Why, then, are the others not very amusing at all? Yes, there were a few chuckles to be had in each of Going Postal, Money and Neverwhere, but all were fairly dry compared to their source material. This could, perhaps, be blamed simply on quality, but I think it goes a bit further. For all their flaws (and this isn’t intended as a review), I enjoyed watching all three – I just didn’t spend a long time laughing at them.

The casting suggests that the producers were thinking about this. Neverwhere seems to have been assembled by walking across the sets of British comedies of the 1990s and dragging minor characters away. It’s one of those programmes where every few minutes makes you point at the screen and shout ‘that’s her, you know, off thingy!’. Going Postal, too, is far from short on big names used to scripts with laughter cues. In fact, there’s some overlap, too, in the form of the always-excellent Tamsin Greig (or Fran from Black Books, as a large portion of my brain will forever refer to her). Money aims more for bleak drama, but it’s hard not to see the casting of Nick Frost in the lead role as an attempt to get some comedy respectability too. In fact, I think it’s a mistake, because he’s far too likeable to be a convincing John Self, and in toning down the raucous, hideous elements of his character to fit the actor, they’ve lost a lot of what made the book so evilly hilarious.

Compare Sherlock, where they’ve grabbed a great big comedy name in the shape of Martin Freeman, but dodged accusations of playing it for laughs by making him the straight man (although I suppose he always is, to some degree).

So no, it’s not the casting or the quality of the production – after all, a good joke can be funny even if the rest is rubbish, as opposed to a dramatic scene (Neverwhere’s ending), which relies on the viewer being interested and invested in the rest of the programme.

In the end, I think it comes down to two main points.

Cutting remarks

The first, and lesser, of the two points is that humour is the first thing to go. If you’ve got two, three or four hours to tell a tale, including credits, advert breaks and establishing shots, you’re going to have to lop bits off. Yes, complaining about what’s left out is the standard reaction of a fan to an adaptation, but it goes further than leaving out scenes. With certain (brilliant) exceptions, like the cake/biscuit distinction in Jasper Fforde’s The Big Over Easy, jokes aren’t vital to plots. This means they’re considerably easier for a pencil-wielding television writer to remove, if necessary quite violently. Zapping whole segments of plot is far more likely to destabilise the narrative than just removing the bits that make it enjoyable. That's how you end up with things like Sky's Going Postal, which while reasonably faithful, was actually quite dull. In the hands of Rupert Murdoch’s evil minions, it worked better as a romance than as a comedy.

Prose and cons

The second point is that humour works very differently in books and in scripts. It’s easy to assume (I know I did) that because a novel is funny an adaptation of it will be too. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be that simple. Television humour is usually drawn from dialogue and character, with visual, physical comedy thrown in too. This is because that’s what television offers: tiny people moving about inside a magic box. Books, on the other hand, have all sorts of other tricks: descriptions, characters’ thoughts, and even footnotes. Not only is a lot of the humour in these three books contained in things that just don’t work on television, but there’s also interplay between them: jokes in dialogue can end up relying on unspoken lines in order to be funny.

Money, in particular, suffered from this. The greatness (and repulsiveness) of the book lies in the narrative voice. The television version tried to retain this with a bit of a voice-over, but it didn’t quite work – we still weren’t anywhere near being inside John Self’s head. In the book there is no escape from his voice, even when he isn’t speaking. The television simply could not emulate this, and so found itself flailing around wondering why it wasn’t quite working.

Televised humour also relies on timing and delivery (it’s the way you tell ‘em, etc). Although writers do have to deal with this, it works slightly differently. The rhythm isn’t purely spoken, and the timing can be altered by plonking description in between bits of dialogue. This means that even when the dialogue is the source of the humour, it won’t necessarily convert without some tarting about. Only, er, I can’t think of any examples. I watched them a while ago, okay?

Stating the obvious

Basically, what this comes down to is that Sherlock does better because it’s merely inspired by Sherlock Holmes – a more faithful kind of adaptation is inherently flawed because of the differences between books and moving pictures. And that, I think, is why nobody is ever quite satisfied with adaptations.

Great. I’ve just spent 1,500 words explaining what everyone already knew. Oh well.

PS: Yes, I'm going for a more inclusive labelling policy. Might even go back and jigger about with older posts. This might be a cunning new policy, or it might just be a sign that I have nothing more useful to do with myself this evening.

Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

2010-07-29T20:22:00.001+01:00

(Yes, that is the American hardback cover. I bought it in a wholly gigantic second-hand bookshop in New York last year, figuring I should have something American to read on the ‘plane home. Only as it turned out I didn’t get round to reading it until a few weeks ago.)

Michael Chabon is probably my favourite American author these days, mostly for the obvious reason that he writes brilliant books. Wonder Boys is both hilarious and capable of stirring the soul in a way that few tales of tubby middle-aged wasters can manage. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay takes that most wearisome of genres – ‘wide-angled view of America in the twentieth century’ - and makes it hearty, sorrowful, original, and fun. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union plays the same trick with detective stories, and then adds Yiddish, which is pretty much always a good thing. And as for The Final Solution, you have to be pretty special to get away with a pun about the Holocaust; even more so when it’s in the book’s title.

But I won’t turn this into a general survey of Chabon’s ouevre (although I’ll add that The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is worth a look, and not just for the theory about Born to Run being a staunchly Catholic album; and his short stories aren’t half bad either). The point of mentioning some of the other books is to note Chabon’s willingness to muck about with genre, from the comic books in Kavalier and Clay, to Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s pointing out that there was more to Chandler than a few murders and some wisecracking. Gentlemen of the Road, then, is a love letter to adventure, a swords-and-sandals romp involving elephants, disguises, fighting and trickery. Rarely have I seen a book enjoying itself so much.

Gentlemen of the Road is dedicated to Michael Moorcock, and that gives a fair indication of what’s to come. I think the closest comparison is a sort of historical, Rider Haggard-style romp (minus the casual Victorian racism) crashing into a Fritz Leiber story. Amram and Zelikman, the two swashbuckling heroes, are loosely Jewish (and Abyssinian and Frankish, respectively) versions of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser: one huge and axe-wielding, the other slim and devious. The pair wander the Middle East and the Silk Road, getting into scrapes and trying to keep a few coins in their saddlebags, and find themselves embroiled in a a counter-coup in the Khazar kaganate. The tale rattles along pleasingly, with cliffhangers after most chapters (as befits its original inception as a serial) and plenty of cunning twists, and it all ends rather satisfyingly.

There is much to be said for all this. Chabon is a fine writer, and there is more to Gentlemen of the Road than journeying and killing. The heroes’ underlying melancholy lurks in the background, bringing out the heroes' conflicting need for and dissatisfaction with their lives of violence on the road. I particularly admired Zelikman, who isn't simply a devious shadowy adventurer, but a talented doctor plagued by depression. The friendship between the two main characters feels real, and as the tale progresses you see why they stick around together, despite and because of all they've been through. This characterisation and the often-brutal historical setting mean that the pleasures of adventure are always underpinned by loss and impermanence.

"There was a turbulence around those gates now as, driving out the survivors, bright-shirted men put their shoulders to the oak beams and sealed off the living from the dead, the loot from the looted, and bought themselves the time they would need, or so they hoped, to get away... They were insane with bravery and fools for battle, but like men from one end of the world to the other, they were slaves to their appetitues and to their love of treasure, and with their decks piled high with gold, fresh meat and casks of Georgian wine, the Northmen must as a matter of the highest principle choose profitable retreat over the doubtful glories of combat."

In extracts like this, you can see amid the picaresque chaos and violence both the meandering, luxuriant language and the background disappointment with humanity, the knowing, resigned sense of understanding how people act and the sort of trouble they will inevitably cause.

However, there are limits to these depths. There are smiles and surprises, but not a huge amount more. This is, primarily, a brief jaunt, an homage to a faded genre rather than a startling work in its own right (something which The Yiddish Policemen’s Union does manage to achieve). I think this might be because of the brevity of the novel, and the serial structure. The shortness alone wouldn't hold back someone like Chabon, but there's so much going on in terms of geography and action that there isn't an opportunity to do much between describing events. Everything happens so swiftly that there is little opportunity to develop themes and characters, and the setting is so vast that a lot of it blends into one dusty, chilly whole.

It’s certainly fun, and it’s certainly Chabon. Here you will find the trade mark generosity of description, the openness about gender, the pride in the many faces of Jewishness, and, primarily, the love of literature as a mode of entertainment as well as edification. However, it’s not a major work, and not a brilliant novel. It’s short and enjoyable, but it doesn’t stand up next to Chabon’s others.

But more importantly, it has ace chapter headings, including my favourite in quite a while: ‘On Swimming to the Library at the Heart of the World’.

Oh, and it’s illustrated. Please can we have more illustrated books, publishers? I don’t see why children should get all the fun.

On the advantages and traditions of running a small autocratic principality

2010-07-26T18:08:00.002+01:00

It’s always worth planning how things are going to work once you’re the benevolent dictator of an isolated tropical island paradise. After all, you never know how things will turn out. Many’s the wandering gun-toting imperialist or amoral son of an ex-prime minister who’s accidentally found themselves engaged in a violent military coup. It could happen to any of us.

So, on the basis that one day I might be sat in a pillared, porticoed palace, being fanned with palm leaves and being adored by a grateful or population of tax-evaders, retired banditos, war criminals and accountants for all of the above (oh, and feared and despised by the actual locals, but since when have they been high in the concerns of imperalist missions?), I thought I’d attempt to nail down some of the basics of my pseudo-tyrannical regime.

Examining assorted repressive political foulnesses, I have decided that what I’m really going to need are some slightly loopy laws about artistic expression. So, in an effort to make sure my personal empire at least has some jolly decent books, I have begun some planning.

Archetype rationing

Taking inspiration from the US immigration system (and I’ll wager there aren’t many people who’ve said that before), my island will accept only limited mumbers of certain fictional figures each year. Current restricted categories will be:

Orphaned royalty (or other distressed children with hereditary concerns).
Hookers with hearts of gold.
Strong, silent types.
The mysteriously nameless.
Maverick cops with nothing left to lose. Mainly as a response to the sadly limited quantities of fictional whisky in Johnsonia.
Bad sorts with troubled childhoods.
Witless, inexplicably successful seducers, of any sex, gender or species.
Twins, particularly where used in plot ‘twists’.
Smart-talking, streetwise teenagers trying to hide their emotional vulnerability.

Wanton post-modernism by application only

I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a book about writing a book about writing a book that may or may not be a meta-narrative about reading a book about writing a book, but... oh, wait, actually I am. Anything so referential or self-referential it has no actual identity of its own shall be hit with a big editing stick until it at least starts making sense.

Automatic notification of noir-something crossovers

Have you filmed something in black and white for no particular reason? Are all your characters moody and witty? Have you taken an interesting subgenre and then added Bogarticity? If so, my goon squad will be along shortly to drag you and your new artistic creation to the foot of my throne. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong – I’m just a sucker for this sort of thing and don’t want to miss out.

Severe restrictions on making a fourth instalment in a series

This should be self-explanatory. Yes, there are exceptions, but on the whole the fourth book, film or series is where it all goes to pieces. If you’ve got a jolly decent justification, an attractive presentation with slides, and possibly a tasty bribe, I’ll probably allow it, but you really ought to be thinking twice before committing a quartet. Possible exemptions for short stories.

Official frowning upon for pissing about with grammar

Books only. Did you have a good reason to remove the punctuation and make all your sentences three-word fragments because you thought it looked modern, edgy and punchy? Warning: there is only one correct answer to this question. All passports bearing the name ‘Cormac’ will be turned back at the border.

Trailer trashing

Movies only. If you have ostensibly made a comedy but your trailer makes me remember being violently sick fondly, then you will be locked up until you produce actual humour. If you’re not sure, re-watch the trailer. Do you want to slap everyone involved? If so, please take your film back from whence it came. Ta.

Anyway, that’ll do for now. Please excuse me – I have a revolution to plan. Applications for head of secret police should be sent to the usual address. Please include suggested designs for lapel badge insignia, and list three favoured brands of sinister sunglasses.

Jasper Fforde: Shades of Grey

2010-07-21T20:44:00.002+01:00

On the verge of taking over the world with Thursday Next and the Nursery Crime series, Jasper Fforde has wandered off and come up with something entirely different: Shades of Grey, a futuristic, dystopian comedy that’s roughly a cross between Brave New World and Jennings. With giant swans.

It deserves praise for sheer perversity, but it’s pretty decent, too. Not, sadly, as brilliantly clever as some of the Thursday Nexts or as absurdly amusing as the Nursery Crimes, but solid, unique and interesting in its own right.

In a mysteriously battered Britain populated by peculiar beasties (giant swans, ground sloths and the wonderful bouncing goats) and scattered with remnants of war, vision is no longer quite so multicoloured as we’re used to. Everyone is born with a limited capacity to see colour, and their chromatic ability determines their place in society, from the snooty yellows to the grey underclass. Eddie Russett is a red who’s sent to East Carmine, a small town on the fringes of the wilderness, for humility realignment, but he’s soon involved in mysteries and rebellion as he starts to uncover the sinister undertones of the colourtocracy.

The focus on colour is deviously done, not just in the layers of puns and comedy names, but in the workings of the CMY system and the functioning of a world and society in which people see light differently. The detail lavished here is excellent, and the book does well to make such an unusual concept feel logical and realistic. It's also possibly the least filmable novel since modernism shut up shop, so gets instant points on the 'books are special' scale.

Colour aside, the setting is very Brave New World, presenting a frivolous dystopia rather than an overtly monstrous one in the 1984 mould. Life is run on similar lines to a public school, with prefects running the show, merits as currency, and plenty of snobbery and lapel badges.

This faintly silly society, with its petty feuding, mild subversion and comical bureaucracy, is of course a monstrous, rigid class structure, full of oppressed workers, unquestionable rules and traditions, and corruption among the inherited, authoritarian leaders of society (in other words, still just like a public school). It’s a comic exaggeration of embedded, bourgeois, Daily Mail Britain, a nightmare church fete. The problem is that the satire, while often mildly amusing, lacks bite, perhaps because it picks on such an easy target, and perhaps because it's sometimes a bit twee. It’s funnier in principle than practice, with many a sly smile, but rarely outright laughter. This, describing the library system, is the sort of thing you get:

‘The rules had decreed that books be part of the Successive Great Leap Backwards, but owing to a poorly drafted Leapback directive, staffing levels had remained unchanged and would remain so for ever.’

On top of that, the characters are all a bit obvious: the angry rebel who knows the secrets at the heart of society, the cheeky lad always on the lookout for a deal, the hideous pillars of society, the hero with a good heart who gradually turns against the culture he once believed in. Harrumph. Okay, yes, Shades of Grey is playing games with the naughty-schoolboy genre, with plenty of chucklesome references, like the splendidly obnoxious Violet de Mauve being a dead match for Violet Elizabeth Bott from Just William, so a bit of character typing is inevitable, but overall this side of the story left me slightly disappointed.

However, and this is quite a serious however, the flatness of the characters might be purposeful. Some of it is clearly a result of their society and world: the emotionless responses to violence and the willingness to treat vision as a sign of status are clearly connected to the mysteries of what has happened to humanity, so some of what looks like weak characterisation could be just another trick of the setting.

For, you see, the mysteries are much more interesting than the poking of fun at provincial Britain. Outside the towns there is enticing oddness enhanced by Eddie’s own ignorance:

‘The landscape here was different as the road had been disrupted by several large pockmarks, some of which had filled with water and might have been natural dew ponds but for their uniform roundness. Here and there we could see rusty scrap and twisted aluminium poking from the turf like a metallic harvest that n one had troubled to remove.’

Intriguing signs of the 'Something That Happened' to us, 'the Previous', are woven into the occasional journeys across the ravaged landscape, and it’s all rather enticing.

Fforde showed in the Nursery Crime books that he has a genius for combining ridiculous jokes and elaborate plots, and that is also on show here, although in the style of a sci-fi thriller rather than a detective story. There’s impressive use of cutlery and postcodes as plot twists, and the exploration of the wrecked world, the importance of colour and the mysteries of Britain’s inhabitants are suitably intriguing. There’s a fantastic quantity of background detail, some overt, some impressively obscure, and enough unanswered and partially answered questions that despite my misgivings I’m firmly looking forward to the remaining two books in this series.

Beasties from the deep

2010-07-19T22:46:00.002+01:00

You know how the internet is full of strange things? Well, here’s another to add to the list: win snazzy books by describing a cephalopod. Liking both authors (although I already own and have read Kraken – review coming soon), I reckoned I might as well give it a shot. In scribbling an entry I ended up with a few spare scraps of tiny stories about squishy fishy things, and here they are, mostly discarded because I couldn't cut them down to the word limit. Didn't win, but it was a fun little exercise.

That's Pugwash. I call him that because he lives in the captain's quarters. Tried 'Ishmael', but it didn't work: sounded too dramatic. There's something frivolous about him - if it is a him - that makes Pugwash fit much better. Even down here, so deep there's no light to glister from his wild, unearthly spray of colours, he seems bright and joyous. He flits and puffs through the wreck, stretching, waving and curling, an elegant languour of limbs that seems so carefree compared to the rest of the sea and its cycle of predation, hunger and death. Or perhaps I see that just because he's the closest thing I have to a friend. Not because we converse, or bring one another gifts, or plan on growing old together - though we probably will - but because out of all the curious beasts of these deeps, from the vast shapes that slink through the distance to the shoals of tiny fish that flicker past, he's the only one that seems to see me. He fixes his eyes on me, dark and bottomless as the sea itself, and I think that though I am drowned and lost, perhaps not all of the world has forgotten me.

“You ever look at something like that and feel kind of proud of how far we’ve come?”

Pete scratched the sunburn on his shoulder and squinted at the squid they’d caught. It lay in the net like a pile of tangled cables or torn-out piping – some kind of discarded mess – that had bizarrely managed to become squelchily, feebly alive.

“Um, not exactly.” Said Sarah quietly, kneeling down by the wriggling expiring creature.

“Anyway, I totally need a beer after that. Want one?”

“Sure.” Sarah continued to study the floppy knot of limbs. “No,” she mumbled to the squid when Pete had wandered away. “I look at you and realise how much we still don’t know.”

There’s a bit of me, of all of us, that remembers a more primitive age, chasing buffalo with spears, or perhaps even mucking about in the treetops. So I look at you, jetting through the shallows, a streamlined spiral of flickering arms, and I wonder if part of you remembers being a trench-bound giant, slinking through impossible pressures and darknesses. I wonder if when you seize a little snack-sized fish, you dream that you’re grappling a great whale in the lost, unfathomed depths. And if you are, I don’t blame you. You might have gained the light, but you’ve lost a throne.

“You know how ‘bottom-feeder’ is kind of an insult?” He tapped the glass and the cuttlefish began a slow, futile search for an escape. “No. Course you don’t. You’re a dumb ugly fish. Or whatever. Are you even a fish?” Maybe, he reckoned, peering at the dirty, mottled creature with its bulges and spikes, it should have been called a cuttlething. “Well, anyway, point is, looking at you, scrubbing about down there, I know why it’s an insult.”

Technically, of course, this ancient, forgotten thing of the ocean isn’t a cephalopod, because that is a biological class, a human classification, and to achieve that a creature must be seen, surveyed and analysed. The fleshy mass curled within that tiger-striped whorl of shell, its limbs weaving through the silky, unlit depths, is simply a beast, or perhaps a myth. But if you could speak its tongueless tongue of thoughts and movements, it would tell you that it felt an affinity to nothing but imprints and fossils it might once have called its kin.

*

And this is the one I entered, picked because it was 100 words and slightly odd, which seemed to fit what they were looking for:

There is no name for these few narrow spears of life that flicker through sunken cities and coral empires. Perhaps a scientist, somehow seeing one, might recognise its features, marking its bouquet of tentacles, its tubular body, darting eyes and short, devious fins, and proclaim it part of some long-dead genus or species. But really they are known only by their ink, spoken of in whispers by certain antiquarian photographers who sometimes swear that a figure in a faded sepia frame moved. They are less animals and more myths, half-rumour, half-hope, tales so old they seem to have no beginning.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

2010-07-16T20:52:00.003+01:00

Part of my brain is convinced that I’ve read more Italo Calvino than I actually have. In reality, until now, I’ve nipped through only Our Ancestors and The Path to Spiders’ Nests. This, whether measured in pages or as a proportion of Calvino’s bibliography, is naff all. But somehow, perhaps because of his tremendous reputation, perhaps because of how much I adored Our Ancestors (didn’t think so much of The Path to Spiders’ Nests – I’m only occasionally drawn in by war books), I feel like I’m a fan, a serious reader, someonw who knows what’s going down with this Calvino chap.

This is, of course, nonsense. He’s written masses of stuff, packed wth cleverness, and I’ve had a quick, unanalytical read of a couple of minor works. So to try to do something about this, I decided to check out Invisible Cities. It’s supermodel-skinny by novel standards (it’s been sat next to Cryptonomicon on my bookshelf, which is a bit like parking a mini next to a tank), but it’s one of those books that crops up all over the place.

As it turns out, there’s a reason for this.

Invisible Cities is a collection of 50-odd brief, bizarre, beautiful descriptions of invented cities. This doesn’t make it into some sort of fantasy guidebook, a Rough Guide to Nowhere, but rather an anthology of metaphor, a collection of insights into the ways human society sticks together. The cities are described as if from fables or fairy tales, each impossible and yet meaningful in its own particular way, and labelled by the ideas they discuss: ‘Cities and desire’, ‘Cities and death’, ‘Cities and eyes’.

The vignettes are tied together by a framing narrative in which Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of his travels. These scenes are used to discuss how stories work – how they can be told, and how we can take meaning from them – as Polo and the Khan slowly overcome barriers of language and eventually reality, comparing their existence to the cities Polo imagines or recounts.

The progress of these conversations into metaphysics is matched by the way the cities are arranged. Generally, the earlier cities are more straightforward, and the later more bizarre. So if you pick up something from the start, such as Tamara, part one of ‘Cities and signs’, you find a vaguely possible city with a quirk:

‘... streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.’

The elaborate description of the city’s obsession with signs leads to a comment on pathetic fallacy:

‘... you leave Tamara without having discovered it... In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognising figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant.’

The same structure – description followed by moral – is followed throughout, as the cities become increasingly outlandish. Take, for instance, Argia (cities and the dead part four):

‘... it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stairs another stairway is set in the negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds.’

Here you are far from a mythic travelogue and deep into wonderful twisted corridors of the imagination. The pretence of Polo actually having visited or lived in these places is abandoned. Basically, don’t expect a narrative, or a plot, or any old-school stuff like that. The framing sections turn Invisible Cities into a clever exploration of ways of telling stories and ways of reading (or listening to) them.

However, I found the individual cities much more enjoyable than the theory lessons between Polo and the Khan. The metropoli are described magnificently, and each is given just enough detail to make it fascinating and enticing, but not so much as to destroy the sense of wonder through over-explanation. There is strangeness and extravagance, mystery and emotion, packed into tiny little scraps of prose, any of which feel as if they could play host to a hundred different stories, but which Calvino casts carelessly to the reader as if his head were brimming with the things. It’s enormous fun just to flick the book open and random and read about whre you’ve ended up. I just tried it and wound up in Octavia, ‘the spider-web city’:

‘There is a precipice between two step mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.’

Each city begins with an idea, offers you a description, then leaves you with a message. In other words, each of these 55 tiny scenes is a miniature novel, only one without characters or plot: stories with nothing but setting. It’s a wonderful thing to have sitting nearby, ready to be dipped into whenever you want an image or an idea to run through your head. Looking at it like this, Invisible Cities isn’t really a novel at all, but a reference book for marvels.

Booking for the Booker

2010-07-12T20:27:00.002+01:00

Summer can be a painful time of waiting, with little to do but frolic in the sun, drink things with umbrellas in and burn meat outdoors, all while awaiting the onset of Autumn and the longed-for unveiling of the Booker Prize shortlist. Sorry, the Man Booker Prize – it's been sponsored by an entire gender as a reaction against the rampant sexism of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Actually, I just checked that one, and actually it's now the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Presumably this means future awards will go to whichever book makes the best use of Youtube clips, iPlayer extracts, copyright infringement, pornography, and any other valid uses of broadband.

Anyway, for those who are in anguish awaiting the Booker results, I have good news: this year’s shortlist (because a whole longlist would be far too much like hard work) now consists entirely of books that don't exist (after all, it is a prize for fiction), and here they are:

The Pebbled Path Past Pontypridd

Terry Evans is a successful television producer who has not seen his father for twenty years after declaring his homosexuality. Now he is driving home to the small Welsh mining village where his father lies dying. As he travels, Terry relives his youth and the trials of a young gay man in a traditional, provincial town. A tale of family love and redemption, spanning forty turbulent years and eleven different regional accents. One chapter is written entirely in Welsh. Described by the Times as 'an honest, moving, thought-provoking tale of our times'. Decidedly dull.

Skyscraper Dreams

An author abandons his wife and moves to a nameless city, where finds himself investigating a crime apparently committed by one of his characters. Questions the boundaries of reality and fiction, and raises issues of identity, reality, sanity and the self in a post-structuralist world. Full of unexplained symbols and events that lead towards an inexplicable and deeply unsatisfying ending, this is a journey through the disintegration of the self, as well as of any sense of narrative coherence. Described by the Independent as 'an intelligent and moving exploration of the metaphysical questions that affect all our lives.' Entirely baffling.

The Non-Commissioned Officer's Second Niece

Set in a Finnish border town during the Second World War, this is the romantic tale of two cousins and the soldiers they fall in love with as the fortunes of conflict leave their town occupied first by one army, then another. The only title that will have sold more than 200 copies before it is shortlisted, this would be found in the erotica section were it written by a less established member of the literary mainstream. Extensive descriptions of snow and legs. Described by the Telegraph as 'a moving, sensual tale of loss and the cruelties of human nature.' Frankly wanton.

Twenty-two Geraniums

A preternaturally ancient Indian woman recounts her life to her great-great-grandchildren, weaving an artful picture of colonial rule, and economic and political upheaval through the medium of fairy tale and legend. Packed full of poetic imagery, extraordinarily protracted sentences, bizarre twists of imagination and vague references to historical events that the author couldn't be bothered to research properly. So long that each copy has a carbon footprint the size of an airliner. Described by the Daily Mail as 'an insulting and moving attack on our proud British history.' Trippy.

Right

Set in a hellish London sink estate, this is the story of Paddy, an ageing, unemployed, alcoholic ex-IRA activist, and Muhammad, a young, unemployed, gang member with a drug dependency. Battling against the wrongs of their society and their impossibly stereotypical collection of vices, the duo form an unlikely friendship, as Paddy tries to keep Muhammad from the temptations of fundamentalism and violence, and Muhammad tries to save Paddy from drink, depression and crippling Catholic guilt. Described by the Guardian as 'a moving and inspiring tale of the questions society refuses to answer.' Impressively patronising.

Silver Linings

A meticulously researched historical novel of British society in the early years of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of Caroline, a penniless spinster from a once-noble family. Trying to reconcile her privileged youth with her wasted life, Caroline becomes involved in the suffragette movement, and dedicates her fading years to overthrowing the Victorian moral values that led to her repressed and wretched life, while in the background fall the shadows of Europe's encroaching war. Described by the TLS as 'a moving portrait of fading beauty and lost time'. Hideously depressing.

PS: I do love the Booker really, but come on - is anyone still turned on by emotional difficulties in rural villages? Yes, the prize generally goes to something pretty snazzy, but sometimes it does all get a bit silly. I’d love to have my own go at selecting a few things that I reckon deserve recognition, but I’m rubbish at knowing what came out when, and at being up-to-date with my reading, so I have no idea what’s actually in the running, aside from the obvious ones (Mitchell, who's overdue a victory, Amis, McEwan).

Salman Rushdie: Fury

2010-07-07T20:26:00.004+01:00

The thing about Salman Rushdie, beyond fatwahs, personal life, literary awards and all tht jazz, is that he’s really, really good. He has this magnificent meandering prose, a talent for mythologising, enough oddness to fascinate and enough realism to drag you in.

You know, each time you crack open one of his books, that you’re going to get stories within stories that seem filled with as much emotion, laughter and symbolism as the whole of some other novels. You know that there will be some magic realist loopiness underlying the whole affair, accentuating the flaws and personalities of the characters, bringing them to what feels like more than life. You know, most of all, that you’re going to look quite clever reading it on the Tube.

And that’s one of the weird things: he has a reputation for being difficult, serious, obtuse - literary with a pretentious capital ‘l’. Yet he isn’t. Okay, he’s not exactly monosyllabic, and if you lose yourself in the middle of a sentence you might not find yourself again for a week, but this completely ignores that he’s basically rather good fun. There is activity, surprise, wit, and a sense of playing with the reader and the language. He simply does not write dull sentences, and a large part of me thinks that this, more than character, theme or plot, or is a writer’s real job.

With that in mind, I came to Fury.

Fury

This isn't a perfect book, but it contains some wonderful things, and I think it makes an ideal starting place for anyone who quite fancies checking out Rushdie but thinks Midnight’s Children looks a bit heavy (literally or conceptually). Fury is a Salman Rushdie novel compressed into a smaller space and a smaller time, and I think it benefits from that, because the brevity reins in some of the tangential excesses of the longer works.

Rather than a whole nation, a whole history and a whirlwind of characters and sub-plots, you get New York, the turn of the millennium, and the wealthy, middle-aged Malik Solanka (Solly), who has fled his family to try to rid himself of a horrifying anger.

There are two halves to the narrative. The first half follows Solly as he swelters and rages in his swanky New York apartment, wanders the streets muttering to himself, and experiences the rush, the noise and, yes, the fury of New York at the height of its power. Solly is surrounded by life, in the form of stories – his cleaner, his plumber, his neighbours, and, terrifyingly, a series of high-society murders that coincide with Solly’s memory blackouts. The stories remind Solly that he is hiding from his own story, and the reasons for leaving behind his perfect family.

In the second half of the book, things start happening. There is a flurry of activity, including political upheavel in far-off lands, developments in the murder investigations, and, most importantly, shifts in Solly’s own relationships with his friends, family and lovers, in particular the three women, the furies, who are both his torment and his salvation.

Fiction, fantasy and lies

Solly’s attempts to escape from his troubles are accompanied by the reawakening of his creative talents. In younger days he created a doll, Little Brain, who became a worldwide phenomenon, but was taken out of his hands by the overwhelming power of money. The loss of Little Brain haunts Solly, but as Fury progresses he begins work on a new series of dolls, which at first reflect and later seem to come to control his life.

When, later on, the action shifts away from New York, it acquires a very different tone, and a very different kind of reality. The outside is more mythic, more shrouded in symbols and masks, as Swift’s fictional island, Liliput-Blefescu, becomes both a real place on earth and a fantasy within a fantasy, as its political troubles adopt the images and names of the fantastic, futuristic tales Solly begins to construct.

This is the other side of the book. As well as being about the pressure of the modern world, the modern city, it’s about the significance of fiction. The stories Solly tells become ways for him to understand his own life, just as the stories that Rushdie tells offer us, the readers, ways of interpreting the world. Fury is an argument for the unreal, a diatribe against dreary realists, and I admire that.

Loving and loathing

Rushdie novels often seem to have an enchanted, exaggerated view of love and sex: everyone is supernaturally beautiful, and engaged in tragic lusts and worshipful adorations. Here, the same pattern continues, but the book seems to demythologise the perfect, frequently tragic loves of Rushdie’s other novels: Solly is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a turd. He flits between a series of increasingly beautiful, ideal and idealised women, treats them all dreadfully, and still comes out looking like the injured party.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this. True, it makes sense and fits the setting: this, says Fury, is modern Western culture, where grand love is a combination of lust and mental illness, and where everything is a bit seedy, a bit freaky. But for all this justification, I still found myself slighlty uneasy, and less emotionally invested in Solly’s plight. He winds up seeming like a guy who gets more second chances than he deserves. Sure, he doesn’t get off scot-free, and the ending’s both joyous and ambiguous, but I’ll say no more on either of those points.

Hello America

But for all the ideas, it’s the prose that decides what you’ll think of the book. If you think it’s marvellously extravagant, witty and wild and brilliant, you’ll like the book. If you think it’s self-indulgent, aimless and irritating, you’ll despise it. And annoyingly, I’ve given it back to the library so I can’t give any great examples. But I’ve nabbed the first few lines off an online extract, and it gives a pretty good idea of what to expect:

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherch produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats.

See what I mean? Now, personally, I love it. The rhythm, the lists, the variation in register and complexity, the linguistic jokes – there’s just so much going on I find myself wallowing in the words and almost forgetting about the rest. The city becomes this vast, mighty symbol of American culture, history and power, and so does the book. To oversimplify, if Midnight’s Children is about India, The Satanic Verses is about the UK and Shalimar the Clown is about Kashmir, then Fury is about America. And America, apparently, is where it’s at. Whatever ‘it’ is.

Telling lies about David Bowie

2010-07-05T21:23:00.001+01:00

David Bowie is a mystic shaman of rock and roll, and his believers stretch far, wide and weird. I'm fairly convinced that at least one popular music magazine is contractually obliged to include one Bowie-based headline pun in each issue. Possibly they'll only be allowed to stop when they've covered his entire back catalogue, which could take a while.

I realised I was a Bowie convert when I first heard Starman and discovered that I already knew most of the words. Some might say this is because my parents played it a lot while I was small, but I prefer to believe that Bowie’s songs are so mighty they can become embedded in our souls without us even hearing them.

So, in an attempt to understand the creative process behind these life-transforming slabs of snazziness, here's some entirely made up research into some Bowie classics.

Swanage Daydream

In 1971 Bowie went on a sight-seeing trip to the southern tip of Dorset. Inspired by the seaside resort of Swanage, he began writing songs for what was intended to be a concept album about a middle-aged fisherman suffering a nervous breakdown as changes in society and technology threatened his livelihood. Soon afterwards, Bowie decided that the world wasn’t yet ready for a glam-rock opera about trawler fishing, so he abandoned it in favour of space and aliens. Since this became ‘Moonage Daydream’, all that remains of the project is ‘Five Years’, about a traffic jam on the M27, and a series of puns about bass and Dover soul.

Lace Oddity

Trippy, sexually charged epic about a lingerie catalogue accidentally delivered to Bowie instead of Alvin Stardust, who, by bizarre coincidence, was then living in the flat next door. Became ‘Space Oddity’ after Bowie began his influential scientific research into dark matter.

The Man Who Sold Me A Second Hand Car In Camberwell

Every so often, David Bowie, despite being from Jupiter (not, as is often supposed, Mars – that was just a stage persona) feels the urge to write serious songs about terrible things that afflict poor old planet earth. Usually, the result is amazing, but almost entirely inexplicable. Is China Girl about imperialism? Is Heroes about the Berlin wall? Is Ashes to Ashes about anything at all?

This song was Bowie’s brave attempt to write a specific, straightforward song about a personal experience with the dark, brutal world of used car dealing. However, records suggest that he found the recording process too painful, and abandoned the original lyrics (except ‘and though I was not then, he said I was his friend’) in favour of lots of weird, vague metaphorical stuff, completing the song as ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.

Rock and Stone Suicide

In 1971, while high on life, Bowie had a dream of a previous existence. He became convinced that he was once a geologist who had uncovered a particularly interesting new part of the rock cycle, but whose discovery was covered up by a sinister conglomerate of geography teachers who were terrified that it would overcomplicate the national curriculum. The establishment’s persistent refusal to acknowledge his discovery eventually led the geologist to take his own life. This powerful, moving song was Bowie’s attempt to tell the tale. Changed to ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ after Bowie saw his old school geography teacher lurking in a car over the road clutching a pair of binoculars.

Oh! You Shitty Things

David Bowie likes puppies. He’s less keen on toilet training them. By the time he reached the studio he’d forgiven them, though (they probably made puppy-dog eyes. It seems like a reasonable assumption), and the song became ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’.

Let’s Chant

When Scientology first came on the scene, Bowie was sufficiently intrigued to write this song about the peculiar processes of ‘auditing’ involved in the ‘religion’. His interest arose because of the possibility that the cult might have genuine links to aliens, who might be able to carry a message back to Bowie’s home planet. The song was re-titled to ‘Let’s Dance’ when Bowie realised that founder Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was actually just a greedy, power-fixated liar.

Incidentally, Bowie never sent his message home, after he discovered how high the postage costs would be. Its contents eventually became the lyrics for ‘Everyone Says Hi’.

John, I’m Only Lancing

A keen historian, Bowie wrote this early version of ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ from the perspective of a medieval doctor attending to King John, who burst out in some nasty boils after the stress of dealing with the Magna Carta. The urgent rhythm and Bowie’s anguished squealing throughout the song are all remnants from the original version, representing the king’s agonising wailing as each boil was lanced.

Re-written as ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ after an incident in a discotheque involving a misunderstanding with Lou Reed. The two made up and became firm friends, performing in a pantomime together in 1978. Bowie enjoyed himself so much that he refused to take off his costume until after the cover shoot for Ashes to Ashes, two years later.

I’m Afraid of Ayatollah Khomeini

Written in a spirit of artistic solidarity with Salman Rushie after the Ayatollah pronounced a fatwah upon him. The song was changed to ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ after Khomeini, in an interview, declared his love for Bowie’s work, ‘even Tin Machine’. It has been suggested that the real reason for the change was jealousy after Rushdie wrote a song for U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, rather than for Bowie’s Heathen, which was at one point intended to be a concept album about apostacy.

Golden Bears

An early form of ‘Golden Years’, this was an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the ‘animal plus precious material’ formula of ‘Diamond Dogs’. See also the deleted track ‘Platinum Poodle’, which was later recorded by T-Rex.

Terry Pratchett: Unseen Academicals

2010-07-02T20:34:00.005+01:00

Since it is World Cup season (Wimbledon wouldn't be so uncouth as to try to claim itself a whole season), I decided I needed to learn to understand what this football business is all about, so, like any right-thinking library-dweller, I turned to Terry Pratchett for advice, and picked up Unseen Academicals. It was certainly more fun than watching the England matches. As the back of the book helpfully points out:

'The thing about football - the most important thing about football - is that it is never just about football.'

And of course, the thing about the Discworld is that it’s never just about the Discworld. In the course of thirty-seven novels (and shedloads of associated bumph) the series has gone from being a loose collection of jokes about fantasy to being one of the most reliable, well-intentioned and consistently entertaining sources of satire since Rory Bremner went angry.

This time, it’s about class, belonging, prejudice, race, and not being ground down by, for want of a better term, The Man. I mean, it’s about lots of other stuff, too (like pies), but the really vital images are about trying to make something of oneself – whether it’s clambering out of the crab bucket while others try to haul you back down, ignoring the non-existent hammer of social pressure, persuading the leopard to change his shorts, or working out how to escape from the Shove, the press of baying, surging, roaring football fans:

“It’s a hard life in the Shove when you’re a dumb chuff with no mates.”

“This ain’t the Shove!”

“Better wake up, kid. It’s all Shove.”

The wonderful thing about Terry Pratchett (alright, one of the wonderful things) is how supremely decent he is: he manages to be wittily satirical without being pessimistic. He finds a fundamental goodness in people, and has a real fairness to his moral vision. This means that when his little, oppressed people find ways to flourish in the tough ole’ world, you genuinely feel great about it.

In other words, there is a warm, hopeful glow to the series, and Unseen Academicals is no different. Trev, the fan, the lad, the cheeky chappie who’s basically, when it comes down to it, a good bloke; Glenda, the ingenious night-chef at Unseen University who just wants to look after everyone, and wishes life were a little more like the trashy romances she hides beneath her bed; Juliet, who might be dim but sometimes sees through into the heart of things; and Nutt. Mr Nutt. Whatever he is...

Plot-wise, it’s as clever as ever, with surprises in the right places and a hearty dollop of sentimentality. Archchancellor Ridcully, after some devious Patrician-based machinations, ends up having to put together an Unseen University team for a game of ‘foot-the-ball, or porre boyes funne’, and from there things become, as is their wont, silly. In all the right ways.

It’s funny. Of course it is. This is the Discworld, where there always jokes, fabulous footnotes, lovably wonky characters, scatty, witty dialogue, and cunning little references. There's also a brilliant willingness to spend half the book setting something up just for the sake of a ridiculous pun at the end.

Unseen Academicals won’t convert anyone who shivers at the sight of the word ‘wizard’, but that doesn’t really need saying. The point is that it’s a solid, thoroughly enjoyable Discworld book, and if you like them in general there’s no need to be put off by the inclusion of football or the exclusion of whichever set of characters happens to be your favourite (alright, second favourite – everyone like the Watch best, don’t they?). There are some great cameos (it’s worth it for the drunk Patrician alone) and references to the other books, including some ace insights into long-established characters, but really this one is about the everyday folk of Ankh-Morpork – it’s about society and how it can be made to work, and how we shouldn’t let ourselves be held back by silly prejudices and the nasty oiks that crop up every so often. It’s best summed up by Mr Nutt’s constant, urgent desire to achieve ‘worth’.

“What does ‘worth’ mean, Mr Nutt?”

“It means that you leave the world better than when you found it.”

And if you look at it that way, Sir Terry Pratchett is about as worthy as they come.

The Vex Factor

2010-06-28T20:09:00.008+01:00

The X-Factor, that terrifying combination of talent contest, freak show and Roman ampitheatre, is gearing up for its next series. According to my dazed and bewildered memory, this will be its eight-hundreth edition, and before long every single person in the country will have participated in at least one episode, if necessary being forcibly bundled into a broom cupboard at ITV and made to sing a cruel and unusual karaoke version of California Dreaming.

However, it turns out that some people actually choose to go on the wretched thing, and one of them is my aunt, a genuine showbiz type whose hands you might recognise if you’ve ever spent a day watching QVC. No, I don’t know why you would have, but you never know. This aunt is decidedly good at making a tuneful racket, and armed with a gaggle of old-school showtunes and a willingness to get stuck in (I quote Dermot O’Leary: ‘I bet she doesn’t lose many arguments’) she managed to sashay through to what I think was the fourth round of the show.

I don’t know how far this is in X-Factor terms, but there was a studio audience (four million sixteen-year-olds, who when not screaming, chanting or cheering spent the evening examining their neighbours to make sure their elaborate outfits hadn’t gone out of fashion since recording started), lots of cameras, and a reasonable degree of havoc.

Sadly things didn’t go too well onstage, but I can't really complain about that because it was just the way the game works. Yes, it’s artistically unpleasant that ‘you’re old-fashioned’ is enough to send someone off, but the programme exists to generate publicity for flash-in-the-pan singles sold to the kind of overexcited teens who filled the audience, so it isn’t really surprising. Also, my aunt gave pretty much as good as she got, and refused to go quietly. Having a pop at the panel can only be a good thing, and frankly, being booed by a horde of overexcited audience-loons is something we should all aspire to.

Incidentally, if anyone’s wondering why there seem to be so many angry nutters on these things, you might be interested to know that the contestants are actively encouraged to argue with Cowell & co, presumably so they can be edited into mad, foolish caricatures of themselves. I’m wondering how my irate relative will look once she’s been through the cutting room.

It wasn’t all bad. Auntie'o'mine was also described by Cheryl [insert whatever surname the tabloids currently feel is most appropriate] as ‘The most beautiful 57-year-old I’ve ever seen’. Which is nice, even if it does sideline the whole singing thing that the programme is ostensibly about. Still, at least it shows that Cheryl had read the contestant biographies. Also, despite my grumbling about the pubescent hordes (I felt genuinely old on the tube home. My dad must have felt like Methuselah), there were a few good souls out there, including one gentleman (and his embarrassed friend) who rushed up afterwards with kind words and enthusiasm.

But like I say, this isn’t what I’m here to burble about. No: in a curious inversion of everything I thought I knew about the world, the bit with Simon Cowell was the least offensive part of the programme. The real mess happened behind the scenes.

Each contestant can bring a small army of supporters with them to hang around with them in the run-up to their performance and to hug them wildly as they leave the stage. Intending to be one of these, I turned up at about seven-thirty and meandered into the ‘holding area’, which sounds a bit like it’s where you store livestock or prisoners before transferring them to somewhere less pleasant. This turned out to be fairly appropriate.

The holding area is a large room full of uncomfortable chairs and screens showing X-Factor logos. This is where you wait. You get really good at waiting. I had it easy – by only arriving at half seven, I only had three hours of loitering before things started happening. Others weren’t so lucky – one group of dishevelled, dead-eyed souls had been there since mid-day. Also, you can forget about being looked after while you’re in there: no food or drink is provided, and at no point did anyone know what was going on or how long they would have to wait for something to happen.

Things became worse when the cameras were rolling. The contestants gave pre-show interviews in the holding cell, er, area, and while that was happening the supporters more or less became furniture. We were moved around constantly to make the background look busy and exciting, forbidden from eating or drinking anything we did manage to track down (the crew, bless them, did their best to deal with the increasingly irate public, and after complaints did scrounge us some crisps and water), and we were even told not to talk. Basically, sit down, shut up, and don't do anything that might be distracting or unphotogenic.

Basically, backstage showed little but organisational chaos (‘are you Holly’s family?’, asked one flustered runner) and careless, selfishly commercial thinking. At some point, a bunch of faceless, bean-counting pencilnecks decided it would be a good idea to take sixty-odd people (many of whom had taken days off work to support their friends and family and, indirectly, talkbackTHAMES, the bewilderingly capitalised company that makes the thing), dump them in a room for up to ten hours and treat them like naughty schoolchildren (‘put your telephone away now!’). That, ladies and gentlemen, is the magic of television.

Oh no, wait, what’s this two-thirds of the way down the agreement we were all given?

‘The contributor shall not disclose or permit the disclosure to any persons... of any information relating to... the Programme...’

Buggery, I suppose that means I can’t publish all those words above. In fact, I can’t even publish the bit telling you that I’m not allowed to publish it because I’m also forbidden from ‘permitting the disclosure... of any information relating to... this Agreement’.

Cripes. So, as a result of this ‘ere agreement, I’m not allowed to tell you anything about the programme, and I’m not allowed to tell you why I can’t tell you anything about the programme.

Oh well, lucky I never signed it, isn’t it?

You see, as part of the mess they made backstage, talkbackTHAMES (look, I can’t be bothered to write that nasty bit of branding in full any more, so I’m just going to call it ‘TaT’ from now on) neglected to check that any of their disgruntled internees had actually agreed to their treatment.

Actually, in fairness, most of the agreement isn't that bad, and bar a few typos it’s almost competently written. However, since I object to the idea of banning people from even discussing what’s in it, I thought I’d make the most of not being bound by it, and go hunting for weirdness.

The first thing you notice is that the TaT legal mob don’t do things by halves:

‘[The contribution can be] exhibited or otherwise exploited by all means and in all media and formats throughout the universe.’

The universe? The whole ruddy universe? Not just the UK or the world, or even the solar system or anything like that, but the very boundaries of existence itself. Just what kind of intergalactic merchandising deal is TaT contemplating? Are download sales rocketing among the slime-creatures of Formalhaut b? Do the little grey men want something to play on their spacePods on the long journey home? Is God getting a bit fed up of the whole harp scene?

Alright, that doesn’t make any practical difference, but it is a bit silly. Let’s move on to something a bit more sinister:

‘... the Company shall have the unfettered right to modify the Contribution or any part of it in any way that it sees fit.’

Yes indeed, ‘any way it sees fit’. TaT has no need to make any efforts to make what it shows representative of how people performed or what they did. In fact, if someone annoys them they can edit the recording in any way they like, and anyone involved will have to bow to TaT's opinions 'involving artistic taste and judgement'. Remember that next time you laugh at someone making a pillock of themselves on prime time. Incidentally, TaT can also ‘dub the Contributor’s voice in any language’, which seems a bit bizarre for a singing competition.

Okay, mildly creepy, but not massively unsurprising. Here, however, is one that left me really baffled:

‘Except as fully disclosed in writing to the Company prior to the Programme the Contributor has not now and has never been involved in any criminal proceedings whether as a defendant, witness or in any way whatsoever...’

Not content with keeping an eye on convicted criminals, TaT want to know if you’ve ever been acquitted of doing anything wrong (innocence, apparently, is no defence), or even if you were in the courtroom at the time. Sure, you can notify them in writing in advance, but that isn’t much good if you’re a supporter who’s turned up on the day. Bit of a bugger if you’ve done jury service, or otherwise performed some noble social duty to support the workings of the criminal justice system.

Right, one final manky bit of legal nonsense:

‘The Company shall be entitled to assign the benefit of this agreement either in whole or in part to any to any [sic] of our subsidiary of associated companies or successors in title...’

Sounds reasonable, I suppose, right? Oh, wait, there’s a bit more to this sentence:

‘... and/or any third party.’

Yes, TaT can happily give all the slightly loopy rights mentioned above to absolutely anyone else they feel like. This, I imagine, includes those aliens they’re planning on selling distribution rights to. More distressingly, it also means they can sell ‘the Contributor’s name, likeness, voice, biographical details, photographs... and recordings... separately from or in conjunction with the Programme’ to wrong’uns, like spammers, gangsters, pornographers, totalitarians, pirates, terrorists and the Daily Mail in whatever way they bally well like.

Bah.

Oh, and a cheap parting shot:

‘the Contribution... shall not contain anything which is... calculated to bring the Programme, the Company or the commissioning broadcaster into disrepute.’

Disrepute? Have they watched this stuff?

AS Byatt: Possession

2010-06-26T13:42:00.001+01:00

Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990, and that isn't exactly a surprise. Not only is it brilliant, but it’s so self-reflectively literary that I'm surprised they even bothered with a shortlist. When I call it a literary book I’m not getting into that silly, puzzling but curiously fascinating debate about what distinguishes ‘literary’ fiction from mainstream or genre work, but simply pointing out that Possession is about literature. It is a book about books - about interpreting, about reading, and about writing.

Also, look - a picture! After many months I have managed to acquire a cable for my mobile and actually use the ruddy camera. Yes, it's a bit of a shabby photo, but I reckon I'll get the hang of it eventually.

Roland Michell is a minor, more or less unemployed scholar studying the works of the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, living lovelessly and habitually with his long-term girlfriend Val. In the British Library, examining a book that Ash used to own, Roland finds a letter that suggests that Ash’s apparently conventional and respectable domestic life may have been hiding something a little more spicy. True, he was a Victorian, so 'spicy' could mean some petticoated maidservant flashing a bit of ankle, but it's still a sign of another side to Ash. Investigating the letters, Roland soon links Ash to another poet, Christabel LaMotte, in what just might be a concealed love affair. Investigating LaMotte leads to an expert on her work, Maud Bailey, who becomes as caught up as Roland in the desire to find out what really happened.

In the process of investigating, as you might expect, Maud and Roland edge, ever so carefully, delicately and charmingly, towards a love of their own. It’s a pleasant difference from the usual flaming, urgent, lusting romances of much literature. There is no danger of anyone's bodice getting torn, here. As Maud and Roland both realise, they have spent so long examining love from ideological and theoretical perspectives that they no longer know how to do it themselves. Both of them use their intellects to efface themselves, and as the story draws towards a (satisfying, melancholy and triumphant) climax, they are almost, but never quite, overshadowed by the excellent supporting cast. There’s a lovely moment when all the characters appear together and are described, one by one, except Roland, who is there, but is ignored by the narrative. He’s a lovably pathetic, unheroic hero, and his discovery of what he really values and believes in is all the more enjoyable because of it. Maud, too, finds her strong theoretical opinions contradicting how she actually wants to live, and she gradually breaks down these barriers as she investigates LaMotte’s life.

Love and identity aren’t the only challenges, though, as the attempts to explore the lives of LaMotte and Ash turn into a kind of polite, literary, thoroughly murderless detective story. Other scholars take the place of villains, as Maud and Roland try to keep their discoveries to themselves, evading the clutches of the possessive, obsessive more-or-less-villain Mortimer Cropper; Roland’s dour supervior James Blackadder; and Maud’s wild, exciteable ex-lover and fellow feminist Leonora Stern. Just as much, though, history itself is the antagonist, as the two protagonists try to track down clues scattered through poems, journals and artefacts left behind by the two poets and their associates back in the nineteenth century.

Why history sucks

This side of the novel is mischievously knowing, as the characters consider the literary tropes of the activities they are engaged in – talking about moving from quest to hunt, and commenting that literary critics make natural detectives. Equally, this element of the narrative teases us, withdrawing whenever it seems to be trying to turn into a page-turning mystery. Long descriptions and sections of poetry step in, disrupting the reader’s greed for revelation (which the characters acknowledge is driving their pursuit of the history of LaMotte and Ash) and forcing us to engage with language rather than becoming obsessed with facts and truth.

For Byatt doesn’t just invent two Victorian poets: she invents their work. The chapters begin with, and occasionally consist of, extracts from their works, and they’re distinctly convincing as poems in their own right, as well as being clues about the lives of the fictional authors. This is massively ambitious, but successful: it forces us to engage with the poets as poets, rather than as the subjects of biography. We, as readers, are faced with the same challenges as the characters.

This mixture of poetry and writing about poetry gets Possession involved in a spot of bother about textualism and historicism. The biographical readings (including the feminist and psychoanalytical approaches favoured by Maud and Roland, respectively) begin by trying to use life to illuminate the poems, but end up turning the poems into ways of understanding the authors’ lives. Literature is reduced to history (take that, historians!).

Illustrating this reduction (and that it is a reduction) are three passages set in the nineteenth century, unseen by any of the modern-day characters, beyond their investigations. As well as being powerful scenes in their own right, these show that biographical interpretation is fundamentally futile: we can never know The Truth. History has an existence separate to our perceptions of it, no matter how elegantly and ingeniously we interpret it. At the beginning of the book, all readings based on historical understanding of LaMotte and Ash are wrong, but by the end, after all the revelations and discoveries, they are still missing pieces.

Roland and Maud come to realise this, and let go of their obsessive pursuit of their subjects’ lives, letting themselves think in new ways. Roland in particular realises that when it comes down to it, it is the poetry that matters, not the poets. After all the struggle and drama of the hunt for biography, he rediscovers the fascination of simply reading the work of his favourite poet.

The joy of text

This discovery of the sheer pleasure of reading is the other side of Possession's engagement with criticism. It wonderfully picks out both the joy and the anguish of studying literature:

'“His Agincourt poem and Offa on the dyke. And then Ragnarok.” He hesitated. “They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.”

Maud smiled then. “Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.”'

Even for me, who wouldn’t (and shouldn't) be allowed anywhere near a PhD, this rings true. To study a writer reveals their best and their worst in such detail that one way or another it changes your opinions of them. Not just that, but it can render vast swathes of literature unreadable, by altering what you demand and expect of a good book. Once you have learnt to appreciate what literature can do, it becomes harder to wade through books that don’t even try.

The novel also delves into the bright and dark of criticism. On the one hand it explains why it is worth really examining books rather than just flicking through them to while away train journeys:

'I study – literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and thgen in some sense dangerously powerful – as though we held a clue to the true nature of things.'

On the other hand, it shows how this can be taken too far, and that clinging to specific schools of criticism can leave literature:

'... all reduced like boiling jam to – human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body – and language – all language. And all vegetation is pubic hair.'

This line also highlights that while a serious discussion of how literature works and what it can achieve, Possession is also funny. It has a warm humour that makes affectionate fun of the characters, who are just on the right side of caricature. I often find that a touch of humour makes books, and characters, vastly more human, dragging them away from being plodding discussions of ideas and dreadful events and into little scraps of life, littered with wit and merriment as well as struggle and suffering.

Oh, and it’s good, too

I’ve becomes sidetracked by my crude thoughts on literature itself, now, but this isn’t a necessary part of enjoying this book. It has depths, yes, and I’m sure there is plenty that passed me by entirely, but all that’s less important than it being a good book. No, it isn’t constantly thrilling (I don't think it will count as much of a spoiler if I reveal that there is not a single explosion), and this feels purposeful. All the different layers and modes of narrative, including fairy tales, poems, journals, letters, third-person description and probably a few others I’ve forgotten to mention, turn this into a book about indulging in words, about enjoying reading for its own sake, rather than simply as a way of propelling a reader through a series of mysteries and revelations. So it’s slow, but in a pleasant, languid, detailed way – a way that lets you spend half a page reading about sea anenomes, but that doesn't make you mind.

Clearly not for everybody, then, but it worked for me.

Eating the future

2010-06-21T10:56:00.000+01:00

Last Tuesday, with a spot of time on my hands, I popped down to the Dana Centre to listen to a debate on GM food. I am in no way a scientist, but I do think that clever people mucking about on the boundaries of knowledge is rather amazing, and I do get awfully excited when someone declares that they've created artificial life, have built a massive machine that whangs tiny things together exceedingly fast, or have done anything at all with lasers. I am also a firm believer that 'I wanted to see what would happen' is a perfectly reasonable justification for almost anything involving a lab coat and a research grant. If humanity had been no good at piddling about experimentally we'd never have got beyond fire and wheels.

So I'm fairly partial to the idea of GM foods, and as someone who's never understood the organic food bandwagon (let's return to less efficient farming techniques, only sell the shiniest bits of what we grow, chuck in a massive price hike and some pretty packaging, and somehow convince the Waitrosians that they're saving the planet!), I thought this might be an interesting debate.

It was.

A string of speakers
Sadly, the term 'debate' wasn't quite apt: it was more of a series of roughly speeches with miniature question and answer sessions. Sue Nelson chaired, and the speakers, in order, were Nigel Halford (of the plant science group at Rothamsted Research), Colin Tudge (biologist and writer) and Vivian Moses (ex-academic type and current chair of CropGen). Basically, the respectably large audience assembled, watched a short and fairly rubbish video (made some vague points, simplified some complex issues and irritated all the speakers - it was like one of those primary-coloured BBC education videos from the '70s that they wheeled out every so often at GCSE when the teacher was getting too close to a nervous breakdown), listened to each of the speakers in turn, asking a few questions along the way, split up into some smaller groups for a bit of a chat, pressed some buttons on our electronic voting pads, filled in some questionnaires (in return for a free drink - this is the kind of science I can get used to) and then meandered off into the night, feeling smug and clever for going to a debate at a subsection of the Science Museum instead of watching foot-the-ball.

Another problem with describing this as a debate is that there wasn't really anyone on the other side. Colin Tudge, who can legitimately be described as a curmudgeon, disagreed with the other speakers, yes, but he didn't actually seem to be against GM foods: his main problem seemed to be with the disturbing effects of GM research being commanded by evil global mega corporations. He actually used the term 'neo-liberal economy', and he wasn't talking about Vince Cable - he meant it as in 'neo-Nazi' and 'neocon' - 'neo' is not a jolly prefix.

Grumblepuss
Actually, I'll talk about Colin Tudge a bit more, since he was the most interesting speaker, in the sense that he was the one who most made me want to shout at him. His chief point, aside from the international capitalist conspiracy (which he's probably right about, but turning up dressed like a member of the Wurzels and telling us that drought-resistance is the enemy rather ruined his message), was that agriculture should be run by craft rather than technology. His argument seemed to be that the history of farming, which has fairly obviously gone through some major developments since cave-dwelling, was all fine right up to the point where we started mucking about with genes, at which point it became 'technology' (a word which does not apply to, say, ploughs, hybrid breeding or tractors), and thus mad, bad and dangerous to sow.

There's something to be said for the complaint that modern agriculture has become about good profits rather than good food, but Mr Tudge never seemed to explain the link from this to the concept of genetic modification. Nor did he explain why the long tradition and use of hybrid crops is okay, but modern GM isn't, even though the former is just an uncontrolled, unanalysed version of the latter.

Progress reform
As Nigel Halford, the first speaker, pointed out, there is no black and white distinction between GM and non-GM. Genetics change - that's how it works. Vivian Moses also ran with this point, arguing convincingly that agriculture is technology, and thus that GM is just another step in the constant evolution of humanity's attempts to feed itself. In principle, GM is no different from cross-pollination - it simply skips the sluggish trial and error process of the past.

Basically, these two were a bit more convincing, although they skirted the issue of corporate nastiness (Monsanto: 'we just didn't think anyone would be interested in what we were doing'). I suppose they had the advantage of more or less preaching to the converted: I'm guessing the kind of people who look out for events at the science museum are, on the whole, going to be fairly pro-science.

As for why we should be in favour of GM, this is basically just a list of shiny hopes for the future: resistance to salt, drought, insects and viruses; vitamin supplements; a way to respond to unpredictable climate changes; and generally a way to deal with the increasing demands of population and prosperity in the world. Admittedly, a lot of this is isn't actually happening yet, but it does seem that rejecting a whole avenue of reasearch because of some sentimentality about the olden ways is a bit daft. Don't get me wrong: I love the countryside, I love pretty rolling fields, hedgerows bustling with life, public footpaths and air you can breath without coughing, but I also love the idea of people not dying, and I think it's parochial and selfish to say that because organic farming can feed the M&S brigade it can feed the whole world just as well.

Other intriguing arguments
Intriguingly, Vivian Moses suggested that GM is actually safer than other plant breeding, because it's the only kind of growing that is regulated for allergens, toxins and what-have-you. I think this situation is reasonable (I suppose that GM has the theoretical potential to do less predictable and more dangerous things to crops, so checking what's going on is probably a good idea), but this seems like a fair point: why should people instinctively be afraid of something solely because it has been examined and altered by scientists? We trust science when it tells us that vegetables rock, so why shouldn't we trust it when it reckons it can have a go at making some better ones?

One excellent point came up in the group discussions afterwards, and at some point I'd like to hear the anti-GM lobby (if they exist) comment on it. Many medicines and useful chemicals, including specifically insulin, are produced by modifying the genetics of bacteria. I don't think many of the neo-hippies would argue against the manufacture of insulin, but really this isn't that different to GM food.

The media (boo, hiss)
Amusingly, both sides were convinced that they had been nobbled by media propaganda, which for all the (often-justified) newspaper-bashing that went on, was actually encouraging - the closest thing we can get to media fairness is making everyone feel equally hard-done-by.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of media-bashing, a remarkon 'Frankenstein foods'. This being a reasonably scientific debate, the phrase only came up as a joke, but I just wanted to throw it in here to add another voice to the choir of complaints about it. Not because it's an idiotic Daily Mail scare story standard, but because it's yet another example of half-wits throwing about the murky name of Frankenstein without having even gone into the same room as a copy of the book. For in fact, with only a tiny spot of wrangling, Frankenstein can be used in favour of GM foods.

'Cos good old Doctor F is a brilliant scientist with the potential to do tremendous things for humanity. The problem isn't the science, but the parenting - the book makes it pretty clear that the monster could have been decent, virtuous and productive, if it hadn't been driven to violence and hatred by its absentee father and the unpleasant, distrusting nature of humanity, who lash out violently against anything they don't instantly understand, no matter how marvellous. A bit like they do with GM foods, then...

Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions

2010-06-17T19:39:00.002+01:00

This ‘ere is my second Ken Macleod book, the first being the rather snazzy The Sky Road, which left me distinctly interested in checking out some more. While still being full of admiration, I didn't like The Night Sessions quite so much: it's an odd beast, doing some things very well indeed, and others a little blandly.

What we have is basically a police procedural: bad sort gets up to no good, hero and associates try to track him down while filling in paperwork and faffing about with forensics. Only this one’s set in the future, of the near-and-convincingly-possible variety, and that changes everything.

The background is that in an undefined year not very far away, religious tensions around the world boil over, and everything really goes to pot. A massive series of open conflicts breaks out, eventually leading to a violent official rejection of religion in a number of countries, the ones that matter to the book being Scotland and the US. These are the Faith Wars, or the Oil Wars, depending on who you ask, and they left everyone with a bitter taste in their mouth: religions were, for a while, driven underground or overseas (there are fundamental communities in New Zealand). In Scotland, by the time of the novel’s events, faith is tolerated under an official policy of non-cognisance.

Writing it here, this sounds like a fairly extreme, unlikely dystopian setting, but it’s presented extremely successfully: it doesn’t feel at all impossible, and the unofficial toleration in particular feels realistic – this isn’t some mad, impossibly invasive fascist state, but the kind of world we already live in, only with the tables turned a little. It’s a potentially touchy subject, but for most of the book it’s treated fairly. The religious and non-religious are both given plenty of sympathy, motivation and characterisation, and both ‘sides’ are pleasingly flawed and have their own unease about the modern world. There're also some ace ideas about where culture and subcultures could go in this kind of environment, my favourite being the neo-Gnostics, grumpy goth-like students who believe the world is a simulation. In other words, they're a reaction against the prevailing scientific rationalist mindset, in the same way that some of goth culture is a reaction against the prevailing Christian mindset of today.

This neatly constructed world is supported by generally excellent characterisation. This is done primarily through dialogue – there’s a fine range of subtle voices here, with most major and plenty of minor characters identifiable by their ways of speaking as much as by description. This definitely helped to make people feel alive, rather than just being pawns to support the author’s plot revelations. I'd have liked to see more of some of the minor figures, actually.

The strong treatment of religion and character are both let down in the same two places. One is a bad egg, the crux of the plot, who gets almost no page time and barely any explanation or justification of action. Bit odd, considering how well everyone else is done. The second exception is a semi-major character who undergoes a sudden conversion at the end of the book. He’s given specific, well-drawn and convincingly detailed beliefs early on, and these are maintained throughout, until suddenly, after being pointed at a few mild Biblical oddities, he changes his entire system of belief. It’s not the change that distresses me, because the events of the novel certainly justify this. No, instead it’s the odd focus on a tiny spot of mild Biblical scholarship that is presented as life-changing, when it clearly isn’t. Anyone with this character's beliefs would already have had to deal with much stronger difficulties in their philosophical explorations, and these three little verses seemed like a surprising drop in the otherwise splendid characterisation.

Faith aside, the setting is a detailed but low-concept future, in which everything is more or less recognisable but a bit fancier. It’s science fiction from the news, rather than from the laboratory. There are elaborate forms of social media, for instance, along with nifty search engines called things like Ogle Face and Ogle Earth (see what they did there?). There are space elevators, and big discs that float around the earth, creating artificial eclipses to reduce global warming. There are high-rise farms, robots that assist the police and military, and people can wear glasses or contact lenses with what amounts to a tarted up version of internet access. None of this is described in intricate detail – this isn’t tech-porn. Everything is mentioned as if it’s a normal part of the background, rather than being something marvellous designed to make readers gawp in wonder.

The police work, in particular, is done brilliantly. Everything feels like a sensible extension of the kind of police procedures we see in books set today. They might have an AI joining the dots in the background, but they still do the paperwork and still draw things on a whiteboard, because, like reality, people don't quite trust the machines to do everything. It’s only later in the book that the futuristic parts really start to kick in, and by then you’re used to them.

The high quality of the police procedural element is also, sadly, where I start to have qualms. You see, on the whole I’m not a huge fan of police procedurals. I can get awfully excited about detectives, particularly Father Brown and Philip Marlowe (and do Thursday Next and Sam Vimes count?), but while I’ve been known to tear through some Rebus now and then, I often find the genre too constrained, almost like the western of the modern world – there’s only so much that can be done with it. However many variations of villainy authors come up with, I find that the structures become similar, with the same amount of plot convolution, the same false leads, the same links to hints dropped earlier in the story, the same mildly troubled protagonist, the same guilt and satisfaction, the same points in the narrative punctuated by crimes and explanations.

That, sadly, is also the case here. It’s such a good combination of police procedural and science fiction that it fails to break out of either. Only that sounds bad, and it’s certainly not a bad book. In fact, it's very good - I tore through it in a couple of days, wanting to know what happened next, and wanting to know how the pieces fitted together. The writing is mostly great, and the concept is treated intelligently, showing the flaws of all kinds of extremism, and there is plenty that is unexpected, both in plot and setting. Certainly recommendable, but it's clever and neat rather than magnificent and ingenious.

The nefarious nature of football songs

2010-06-14T20:53:00.004+01:00

Okay, so there's some football or other happening at the moment. No, don’t be silly, I’m not going to write about it. I know almost exactly nothing about the blasted sport (see last weekend's Doctor Who: ‘Football’s the one with the sticks, right?’), and there are already so many people writing clever things about formations and angles and positioning that it’s starting to look like a trigonometry exam out there. So instead of rambling on about the tactics, psychology and breeding habits of football teams, I’m going to become violently and wantonly offended by England football songs.

Apparently England has no official song this year, which is probably a good thing, for the sake of anyone who happens to pass a bus, or a radio, or a sports ground on a semi-regular basis. However, the downside of this is that we'll once again be plagued by the risen dead of songs that we thought we safely entombed more than a decade ago. The two in question, obviously, being 'Three Lions' and 'Vindaloo'. There have been some others, true, but 'World in Motion' was before my time, and nobody can remember that one by Embrace, because it sounded like all the other Embrace songs that nobody can remember.

Three Lions, I suppose, isn't so bad. The Lightning Seeds were basically lovely, and Dizzy Heights was the first album I bought, so I can almost handle this one being dragged from its crypt. However, hearing it again recently, I realised that actually it's a bit weird. For a start, it's packed with specific references to 1996 and 1998, and considering that England didn't exactly win in those years, singing along seems a bit masochistic - almost like singing Easter hymns during the second coming.

But that's a fairly minor point compared to some grimmer lyrical oddities. This goes beyond the Billy Bragg 'And those three lions on his shirt, they never sprung from England's dirt' (from the excellent 'England Half English' - listen here - to the tune of 'John Barleycorn') issue. First, 'football's coming home'. This is doubly curious. For a start, this suggests that football isn't here already. It denies the validity of football as it stands in England at the moment. Not just the bloated premiership, but the enormous grass-roots following, the Sunday leagues; the amateur clubs; the gatherings in the park, barefoot, a bottle of beer in one hand, hoping nobody kicks the ball into the river. Shouldn't this be alienating fans, rather than encouraging them? It's a song supported by the England football team that denies the importance of the millions of fans who sing it and chant it.

Equally, though, 'football's coming home' is an outrageous possessive claim not to a particular competition but to the whole of football itself. It's basically a denial of the internationalism that must be one of football's greatest cultural strengths. It's practically colonial: this isn't a sport, it's an invention, something we own, where we means not you funny foreign blighters.

The 1998 version is particularly bad: 'heroes dressed in grey', 'Ince ready for war'. It doesn't take a literature prat to find this disturbingly militaristic. This simultaneously turns football into a violent conflict, encouraging the kind o hooliganism that England is trying to step away from, but it also glorifies war and lessens the horrors experienced by everyone involved in it. After all, football's something most people play for fun, which probably isn't a word many of the uniformed folks sweltering in Afghanistan would use to describe their experiences. Or at least, I hope it isn't. Maybe they're kept going by the hope that on their exhausted, psychologically scarred return to their families they'll be compared to football players.

Again picking on the 1998 revival, there's one last thing I want to note out from 'Three Lions': 'No more need for dreaming'. This, I think, shows poverty of ambition and again a willingness to patronise loyal fans. This says that an England fan's dreams consist of nothing but that the team will win the World Cup. Aside from the presumptiveness of telling a listener what their dreams consist of (or should consist of), this is a pretty pathetic dream anyway. That a bunch of men with whom you share nothing but a nationality, and over whose performance you have no influence, will win a sporting competition - that's supposed to be a dream? Surely a real dreamer would imagine being part of that team, hoofing a winning penalty, or strategically fouling the other side's captain? After all, dreams are supposed to be beyond our grasp - otherwise they're ambitions, and we'd be out there striving for them, rather than hiding them in our subconscious, only permitted to haunt us in our sleep.

Equally, if to be sat on a sofa watching some people far away (geographically and socially) do something well really is your dream, then shame on you, because it's an absolute abdication of personal responsibility. To let someone else be responsible for whether or not your great hopes are realised is a bit feeble. It's not that it's wrong to want England to win the World Cup, it's that a life is being wasted wherever someone can think of nothing better.

But 'Three Lions' is practically [insert favourite song here] compared to Fat Les's execrable 'Vindaloo'. I'm entirely aware that by discussing it here I'm making a mockery of the word 'song', but gosh, dang and blast it, something has to be said about this monstrosity. Not just it's complete abandonment of lyrics in favour of inane monosyllabic repetition, not just because it is, for want of a better term, cocking awful, but because it's openly racist and constructs an us/them duality that forces the listener into the position of either idiotic fan or evil foe.

The offending lyrics are:

Where on earth are you from?

We're from England

Where you come from

Do you put the kettle on?

Argue that it's just cheeky anglocentricism if you like - ha, ha, don't we all like tea (I don't)? - but that 'we' and 'you' is troubling. The song itself is directed not at a jolly listener, singing along, applauding the sentiment, but at a defensive other. This is continued by 'we all like vindaloo' and 'we're going to score one more than you'. It constructs groups among listeners and defines which group everyone can belong to. It's song as weapon, designed to be pointed at someone from abroad and used to force them into a position of opposition.

In a way, it's impressive that a song with so few lyrics can manage to do so much wrong. Suddenly I can see why an official 2010 anthem seemed like a bad idea.

Leonard Cohen: Beautiful Losers

2010-06-11T19:46:00.003+01:00

If Leonard Cohen had not been born with a perverse genius for words and a voice like a noir prophet, he would probably be just a dirty old man.

As it is, though, well, he’s Leonard Cohen, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you there are records you must listen to and words you must transcribe until there are corners of your mind full of god, sex, death and sadness, and obscure, melancholy jokes about all of the above. He’s a bit special like that. He writes hymns that are to both gods and bodies, and they resonate with loss and hope. He gets in your head, with all the warmth and darkness of a midnight walk in summer. He’s what Nick Cave wants to be when he grows up. He what we should all want to be when we grow up, only most of us will never grow up that far.

But I’ve never known how to write about music, so I’m going to talk about this novel instead.

It’s weird.

The end.

Okay, in more detail, Beautiful Losers is a wild, bizarre, occasionally brilliant, often baffling post-modern novel of identity, whether sexual, religious, national or individual.

The nameless narrator is a scholar, obsessed with his research on a vanished Native American tribe, the A, and the saint Catherine Tekakwitha, who fascinates him as much spiritually and sexually as she does historically. The first part of the novel is the narrator’s reflections on his research, which becomes mingled with ponderings on his own life, particularly his dead wife Edith (one of the few remaining A) and his old friend, F.

Both Edith and F are dead, Edith after a grotesque suicide and F after the long encroachment of syphilitic madness. Both haunt the narrator's thoughts, and their loss turns him inwards, driving him into isolation and insanity. They are both characters by whom the narrator defines himself, and you can see F as entirely imaginery, or as part of the narrator, as they adopt one another’s styles and preoccupations. This becomes more apparent in the second part of the book, which takes the form of a long, rambling, possibly confessional and possibly insane, letter from F to the narrator. F is a manipulative, powerful figure with violent and extravagant sexual and political ambitions, and he changes the narrator and Edith, building them into shapes that please him, even as he destroys them. His letter explains this, but as a self-pitying justification, not an apology. F is compelling but brutal and unpleasant, and that might be what tempts me towards seeing him as a personification of parts of the narrator's mind that are both physically beautiful and psychologically ugly.

Not that the narrator himself is much better, as the brief third part of the book shows. Titled 'An epilogue in the third person', it at last shows how the world sees the narrator: a lonely, filthy old man ensconced in a tree-house with his obsessions. Then in a series of beautiful passages, reality breaks down, leaving you with a lingering sense of having missed something.

Or something like that, anyway. More significant than any attempt to explain the plot is that this is an arcane reflection on sex and god, like a scrambled mess or mass of all the words and themes that would later end up in songs.

There are some glorious magic realist segments where historical descriptions of Catherine Tekakwitha’s life blend into miracle and fable, and similar bizarre scenes where recollections of real life become twisted by fantasy. The modern and the historical mingle playfully, and the prose flits between the humorous and the marvellous, just like the songs. In these moments you see the classic Cohen theme that there is no hard separation between the spiritual and the earthy/earthly. His God is one of sex and the imagination, not one of doctrine and fury.

Similarly, sex is presented as a joyous mixture of the magnificent and the ridiculous. The frequent, explicit scenes of sex are happy to be both erotic and frankly silly, with absurd, comical onomatopoeia and sudden leaps in and out of different styles and scenes. Sex leads to Edith, who is more or less a victim of the perceptions and desires of the two male characters, and since we only see her through their gaze and their narration she is either a type of Catherine Tekakwitha and/or the A (to the narrator) or a lusty sex object (to F). Her suicide is mysterious to the narrators, but feels much clearer to the reader: her objectification leaves her without an independent identity. Perhaps this is something that the men recognise once she is gone, and that partly explains their shared descents into monologues and madness?

Anyway, as is so often the case, Leonard Cohen himself puts it best:

“This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.”

This is all true. It’s a post-modern, stereotypically 1960s stream of thoughts, some of which are beautiful and profound, some of which are filthy and hilarious, some of which are dull and nonsensical. There is not so much a plot or a story as a series of vignettes and linguistic experiments.

If you like that sort of thing, you’ll love this. If you think it sounds like a pretentious, self-indulgent wreck of a novel, you shouldn’t go anywhere near it. I fall somewhere in between, sometimes thinking it remarkable and sometimes thinking it interminable. While I feel unsatisfied by reading it straight through as a novel, I am sure that there are certain scenes and thoughts that will haunt me, and really that’s what you want from this kind of writing.

Basically, though, I’ll stick with the records.

Helvetica Black and the Colon Conspiracy

2010-06-08T22:50:00.004+01:00

'Meet Helvetica Black, a maverick typeface who doesn’t play by the rules.

In downtown Geneva, glyphs are starting to disappear, and when a courier turns up dead, ligatures slashed, trouble starts brewing at the foundry. Pretty soon, Helvetica’s swamped by myriad problems, with a pangram missing, the monospace sabotaged, old-style heavies roaming the city, and rumours of upheaval in Cambria and Georgia.

The futura’s looking grim.'

That’s the jacket blurb for the first Helvetica Black mystery, The Colon Conspiracy, a gritty thriller from the pen of Italo Garamond, the bestselling author of Pantone’s Labyrinth. In celebration of a major new player in the font-based detective genre, I’ve got an exclusive extract from near the start of the book, just as things start to get nasty.

'Helvetica took the ascender up to the top floor, shoved open the door and strode into the room. The walls were spattered with ink, and there was a font lying sprawled on the floor, typeface down. It was hot, and she wished she hadn't worn a hat as well as a jacket. Detective Lucida Roman was already there, dusting for prints. She scowled at Helvetica.

“What took you so long?”

Feeling a spot of colour rush to her cheeks, Helvetica took off her small cap and explained. “Somebody’s blown up that bookshop by the beach.”

Lucida thought for a moment. “The one that sells graphic novels?”

“Yeah – Comic Sands.”

“Must have been a pretty heavy impact.”

Helvetica grimaced and tried not to think of the scene. “There were text bodies everywhere. I think Tahoma Blackletter’s mixed up in it, but I can’t prove anything.” She nodded at the corpse. “What’s the story here?”

Lucida narrowed her eyes. “Jenson’s dead, and it’s a pro job.”

“How the hell?” Demanded Helvetica.

“It’s a long story.”

“Give me the condensed version.”

Lucida looked down at the dead letters, her face grim. “Looks like somebody’s shot the serif."'

McSweeney's 32: 2024

2010-06-01T19:39:00.000+01:00

I hadn't heard of McSweeney's before I found this in my local library (the same one I'm having moral palpitations about), so I picked it up solely because it had a pretty cover (artwork straight on to the hardback seems to be quite hot stuff at the moment, and it does look good. Having said that, my copy of Susanna Clarke's wonderful Ladies of Grace Adieu, from only a few years ago, is already fading, so I'm a bit worried about the long-term shelf life of this style), assuming it was a novel called Thirty-two by a chap called McSweeney who was so famous he didn't need a first name. Still, I'm glad I investigated, and not just because it led me to the McSweeney's website, which is a wonderful mine of ridiculous and amusing bits and pieces that will eat up hours of your life if you let it. No, I'm also pleased because this particular edition is rather good.

Number 32 is called (and set in) 2024, and it’s dedicated to near-future short stories set in various not-quite-on-the-beaten-track spots around the world. This insistence on slightly unusual places is pleasing: it’s good not to be seeing yet another cyber-noir Beijing or New York. As for setting them all in 2024, the aim is to provide a glimpse of a future we might actually be around to see. This tends to be the sort of science fiction I like - Ballardesque visions of the familiar collapsing into pieces that are no longer quite so familiar. The recognisable, reconfigured.

In other words, it's an anthology of things going tits up.

As you might imagine, none of the ten stories are wildly optimistic. This goes beyond the usual problem of stories needing to present their characters with challenges, since the 2000s aren't going to go down in history as a particularly popular decade. The TV nostalgia nights in 20 years' time are going to involve a lot of grainy news footage of burning objects - flags, buildings, people, countries. It's ironic that the only horror we actually predicted was the one that didn't happen - the Millennium bug. Yes, civilisation's in a right mess, but not because of some dinky little computer error. Anyway, the general shoddiness of the here and now means we've no shortage of worries about how the near future might turn out, and the non-existent Mr McSweeney and his adventurers in prose have picked up on a fair number of them (although mostly the ones involving weather), generally in rather nifty ways. Of course art isn't about telling us what breaks - it's about reminding us of what remains. Great literature tells us about the end, but gives us a reason to hang around for it.

And that’s where the strongest stories in this collection shine. Not literally, y’understand. That would be ruddy hard to read.

The opener, ‘Memory Wall’ is probably the best of the lot, and has put a certain Mr Anthony Doerr straight on my ‘to read’ list. Set in South Africa, it is a classic example of how to manage the ferociously difficult melancholy-yet-uplifting trick. Humanity is shown as a creature of breadth and contradictions, in whose hearts good and evil are ever-ready to cohabit. It is a tale of wrongs, but if leaves you with hope and joy.

Its token SF widget is an implant that lets people extract random memories from their minds and keep them on itsy bitsy diskettes. It’s designed to hold back the onset of dementia, but this being humanity, some naughty blighters manage to find some more sinister uses in the pursuit of big wodges of cash. This is a particularly ingenious device (in both senses), and an excellent example of how the features of SF can be used: the memory readers add a literal edge to the story’s metaphorical point that history is always part of the present. We, as individuals and as a species, are made by the past, whether that’s by our memories, our troubled history, or by the fossils which the characters pursue, either for riches or for truth.

Thoroughly recommended, basically.

Although the highlight, 'Memory Wall' is far from the only worthwhile piece. I got a lot of joy from the second story, 'Raw Water', by Wells Tower (a landmark of a name). It has the Ballard thing down pat, but with a cast of grotesques, and a murky, cruel sense of humour. An artificial lake is constructed in the depths of America, and a fancy waterside community constructed around it. Naturally, everything goes wrong, and the town is more or less abandoned, apart from the eccentrics who are drawn to it, and the strange, red water that may or may not be up to something creepy.

I also have a great deal of admiration for ‘The Black Square’ by Chris Adrian. It’s the most mysterious tale, as much fantasy as a near-future, as a strange square is discovered on Nantucket, through which, well, through which something. No one knows, y’see. ‘It’s not suicide’ say its acolytes, who lay grand, long-term plans to jump into the square and into whatever end or beginning lies beyond. It’s about loneliness and despair, but also about what can end them. It’s not about ending lives, but about finding new ones. In other words, that whole upper-downer thing again. And I like it.

The other strong tale is the ferocious ‘The Netherlands Lives With Water’, by Jim Shepard. In terms of setting it’s a fairly straightforward look at climate change: the sea is coming to get us, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. For all our technological fripperies, the planet can nail us whenever it feels that way inclined. Particularly relevant in the wake of the ash cloud that quite casually knocked out all our air travel. On a human level, this, like 'Memory Wall' and 'The Black Square', is about isolation and loss, the way we, like the sea, have tides that can crush us gloriously together or tear us brutally apart. Not a cheery tale, but a powerful one.

Four out of ten heartily recommended isn’t bad going, I reckon. As for the others, they're far from bereft of the good stuff.

In ‘Eighth Wonder’ by Chris Bachelder a flood leaves civilisation struggling inside a baseball stadium, gradually scrabbling back into being a functional community. Lovely tale, but the distant approach to characterisation left me a little cold. I suppose it's about the real architects of humanity not being the named heroes but the forgotten millions, but I'm still not a fan of the distant narrative style.

In J Erin Sweeney’s ‘Oblast’ (probably number five in my hit parade), a human-transmitted flu virus starts wiping out seals, and political machinations rip apart countries. Another nice bit of humanity-as-saviour-and-sinner: we leave ruin in our wake but some of us will always try to save what we can, whether it’s the innocent children of a monstrous ruler, or the last few members of a dying species of seal. Whether they succeed or not is another matter...

‘There Is No Time In Waterloo’, by Sheila Heti, sees teenagers accidentally become the ignorant sages of a confused, counter-scientific society. Some kooky physics stuff, but a bit too clever-clever ironic for my liking.

Heidi Julavits contributes ‘Material Proof of the Failure of Everything’, a depressing read that’s nonetheless strewn with cynical jokes. It’s a satirical political mess, with communism and capitalism replaced by something just as muddled that simply admits that it doesn’t know how to function. There’s more human isolation, as we become worked by the systems we create, almost literally in the case of one character. Clever and nicely written, but for some reason I didn't get much out of it. A bit bleak, perhaps?

Then there’s the marvellously titled ‘The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic’, another governmental nightmare, showing an America in a linguistic crisis, packed full of people and cultures who can’t quite understand one another. It’s witty and knowing, and for all its pessimism manages to find some merriment in the mess: sometimes all our errors work in our favour. Interesting, although vague, image of the future, too. Oddly, I think that what stopped me loving this was that it requires too much knowledge of the US social security system – the plot details left me a bit head-scratchy.

And finally, ‘Sky City’, by Sesshu Foster, told entirely in dialogue. A revolutionary radio station (as in one that supports the revolution, not one that’s changing the world, one wireless at a time) has one of its people hired as a pilot on a loopy hobbyist’s secret high-tech zeppelin, on the night it attempts a rescue/discovery flight to the ambiguously mythic Sky City, a conglomerate of wreckage and survivors from the climate-change-induced twisters that have been tearing up America. A couple of fun ideas (everyone loves zeppelins, right?) and some nifty, sarcastic dialogue, but overall doesn’t quite deliver. I think sometimes it was too knowing – every time it said something profound or artful, the characters back away from it with globs of wit and irony. It’s almost as if the writer didn’t have the confidence in his own images and ideas.

In general, a fine collection. I can’t compare to other issues of McSweeney’s (yet), but as a stand-alone anthology I recommend it. Perhaps not all of the situations are mathematically likely, but that isn't the point. That isn't the point of any speculative fiction. It's about making something that's convincing enough to keep your interest, and then using it to tell you something about humanity that you might not otherwise have considered. And on the whole these stories do that.

There’s lots about money (the greatest drug of all, with its incomparable highs and lows), and plenty about humanity’s capacity for right and wrong (myth tells us that for every monster there is a hero waiting, sharpening a spear. I think this is a fine thought to bear in mind when reading or writing), but the biggest theme of all seems to be loneliness, often reflected through the symbolic power of vast quantities of water. The future, say these writers, will try to draw us into ourselves, and it is our duty to try to resist it.

Oh, yeah, and stop burning shit: you’re breaking the world, man.

[Oh, sod it, another effort at being concise falls to bits. Still, writing this has got me thinking, and that’s the real aim.]

Lost in the supermarket

2010-05-29T15:14:00.002+01:00

Certain regions of supermarkets are lands of horror and darkness. Food is fine. I can do food. Pick things that are tasty and not rotten, put them in basket, wave basket at the automatic scanner thing, hit the automatic scanner thing, then look sheepish while aisle attendant fixes automatic scanner thing. Easy.

However, once you get down to hygiene or household produce, it all gets a bit more terrifying. Those aisles make a fellow feel like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Not in the sense of being a pre-pubescent girl from the 1930s with a dog that looks like something a cat coughed up, but as a result of being adrift in a shiny, colourful, utterly inexplicable world full of strange and slightly threatening objects.

Domestic products seem to be one of the few areas of life where a militaristic communist dystopia sounds pretty decent: at least there you wouldn't have to spend twenty minutes staring at a shelf like a lummox before being able to buy some loo roll. When I find myself trying to compare several dozen indistinguishable brightly coloured varieties of washing up liquid, I do sometimes long to be handed a grimy box of the state-sponsored standard option and then be ordered to move along by a man with a cigar, a machine gun and a raging hatred of humanity.

Instead, your average local supermarket will present you with hordes of options, with minute variations in price and amount, and no discernible way of telling the difference. Years of education do their best to leave us with enquiring minds and a rudimentary grasp of scientific method, so when presented with a wall of washing detergents, we find ourselves asking which one, and why, over and over again. The point of capitalism is supposed to be that we, the almighty consumers, can make an informed decision based on the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. However, since every product is marketed as being the best in every conceivable way, the only things we have to go on are how much they cost and how offensive their packaging is. Applying another of capitalism's greatest inventions, the flow-chart*, the decision-making process looks like this:

(Umm, I should probably declare that this chart is in no way representative of my publishing powers. Point me at InDesign and I can line up pretty boxes. Unfortunately on my steam-powered, wind-up laptop my software options are a little more limited. I feel naked without a drop shadow button.)

Realistically, thanks to the recent demise of money (which is at some point likely to struggle up from the ashes, a bit like the angry henchman at the end of Die Hard, or any other action film of your choice), this elaborate process can usually be cut down to:

- Is it on special offer?

If nothing's on special offer, use the always-reliable** technique for picking restaurant wine, and go for the second cheapest.

There is, of course, an exception to this tyranny of choice: Marks & Spencer, which does fulfil certain aspects of the communist dystopia, namely the lack of choice and the endless queue of the middle classes, but unfortunately neglects the bit where you can actually afford anything. Still, it's a step forward. M&S for the revolution!

* Basically the grown-up version of a choose-your-own adventure book. Fewer of the options lead to being eaten by monsters, unless you're giving a particularly harrowing presentation.

** Warning: not always reliable.

The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills

2010-05-25T21:00:00.002+01:00

Quite honestly, I think I missed something here. Don't get me wrong: I didn't dislike it, but I somehow expected more.

Anyway, before getting into that, the background: Booker-nominated (among other fancy prizes) first novel by Magnus Mills, loosely (I hope) drawing on his actual experiences building high-tensile (not, as the narrator will not hesitate to point out, high-tension) fences. In the book, y'see, a deadpan Englishman is made the foreman of two inept, lazy Scottish fence-builders, Tam and Richie. After some initial work in Scotland, fixing Tam and Richie's previous piece of shoddy work, the trio are squashed into a caravan and sent to England, where they build more fences, and bump into the sinister, faintly mysterious Hall Brothers. Things, expected and unexpected, happen, an elaborate net of themes and hints are set up, and then it all ends, abruptly, with a lingering sense that there's a clever interpretation that will make it all neat, logical and beautiful, if only you could think of what it was.

Yes, the ending is deeply unsatisfying, because you spend half a book picking up ominous portents and possibilities, none of which are ever explored. This is partly the point - the book's about the unsatisfying, repetitious, meaningless nature of a lot of what we do with our lives. Directed by forces we can't understand (Donald, the increasingly psychotic and obsessive boss of the fencing company), we do the same dreary tasks (digging holes, stretching wires, moving materials) again and again, punctuated by the same set of pointless leisure activities (going to the pub, bizarre, incomprehensible interaction with other people) until we die, and are swiftly shoved out the way and forgotten. Not an entirely cheerful moral, it has to be said.

This is all accompanied by prose that matches the themes, and I think this is where my real problem with the book kicks in. I like luscious, extravagant, indulgent prose, with wandering sentences and atmospheric descriptions. The Restraint of Beasts follows an entirely different path: the sentences are short, the descriptions technical and basic, the dialogue brief, the narrative utterly deadpan. The style is part of the effect, though, and in that sense it's one of the novel's strengths: it's about repetition and boredom, and the style reflects that. Also, since it's in the first person, doing anything else would completely change the character of the narrator.

And character is something that's done consistently well, whether it's the narrator, Tam and Richie, or any of the bizarre extras, nearly all of whom are in some way deranged and quite often drunk. This is all done sparely and brilliantly: there's no over-long explanation of what someone is like and why - they just are. You pick up on the characters' traits, mannerisms and habits almost without noticing, as their quirks are rolled out in a few lines of dialogue, or a couple of brief descriptions of what they're doing.

The prose also has genuinely hilarious moments that leap out at you, entirely without warning. There were a couple of times when I managed to scare people on the tube with bursts of laughter. The comedy isn't signposted, and doesn't take the form of jokes. Instead, the humour is in the narrator's apparent (or ironic) obliviousness to sudden absurdities - he treats bizarre occurrences (which I shall not give away) in exactly the same way as hammering in a fence post. These moments are great fun, but the downside is that if you settle too deeply into the bland prose you can miss them entirely. Again, this fits the philosophy: life is ridiculous and amusing, but we don't always notice it, and we can't expect everything to have a neat reason and an explanation.

Cleverly done, then, but unsatisfying, and that's my issue with the book as a whole. Although the characters are neatly constructed, it makes a fair absurdist point, and there are some magnificently amusing set-pieces, I was still disappointed. The humour was fairly sporadic, and sometimes perhaps just too low-key for my simple mind. This, combined with the terse prose and the unresolved ending, left me sadly disappointed with the whole affair. I can see why some would love it, and I can understand the praise, but I'm just not the right reader. It's not you, Magnus, it's me.

An aside on this pseudo-reviewing lark: I'm not being specific enough. I need to get stuck into quotations and detailed comments on scenes. I need to give examples of where I think things are done well or badly. Yet this also needs to be done without giving anything away. It's a difficult little exercise, this. Still, I think I'm improving: this one is a bit more concise and structured than the last few.

Library fury

2010-05-22T15:33:00.002+01:00

I like libraries. I really do. They are like bookshops where nobody taps you on the shoulder if you accidentally walk out without paying. You can saunter round for hours, collecting books, trying to look clever, and when wander off happily without causing irreparable damage to your wallet. Sometimes they sell their spare stock at absurd prices (I picked up Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers the other week, and it cost me 15p. Spending that elsewhere I could have bought a tomato, or possibly a banana, if I was lucky and nipped round to a supermarket that wasn't on the middle-class guilt bandwagon (organic, fair trade fruit that chose to be picked, etc)), there are as many people wearing glasses as in the optician's next door, and you can peer at what other people are looking at, and have fun judging them for it.

So on the whole, they're great. There are, however, some minor downsides, usually involving shelving. I was planning on having a good-natured grumble about the science fiction/fantasy ghetto, the bizarre amounts spent on local history books that nobody ever looks at, and the occasional bursts of madness that seem to afflict whoever does the 'quick choice' bit in Putney library, where a few weeks ago I found Finnegan's Wake, probably the least suitable 'quick choice' ever, apart from whichever Derek Raymond book it was that made his publisher throw up on the manuscript.

However, while I was thinking about this, I realised that something much worse was going on - something actually rather unpleasant. Now I'm all a-bubble with righteous anger, and this seems like the easiest place to explain things.

You see, all the libraries near me (and I'm a bit of a library hussy - I flit, entirely faithlessly, from one to another as the whim and my burgeoning collection of London library cards takes me) have sections called 'Gay and lesbian writers' and 'Black writers'.

Huh?

This confuses me in so many ways. For a start, they seem to have named the shelves after the writers, rather than what they write. That means, presumably, that all the novelists who end up in the gay writers section are, themselves, gay, no matter what they write about, and that anyone who isn't gay won't be, again regardless of their work. So, say, Truman Capote would there, but Michael Chabon wouldn't. Yet if you read their books there are clearly stronger homosexual themes (whatever that means) in Chabon's work.

Then again, that paragraph itself is misleading, because of course you wouldn't find either of them in the gay writers section, and nor would you bump into Jeanette Wintersen, Sarah Waters, Colm Toibin or Alan Hollinghurst there. Because they're in 'fiction'. So according to the London library system, none of these lads and lasses, despite their personal lives and despite their books, are gay writers. Why? If you're going to have a 'gay writers' section, why would you not put gay writers in it? Is the point that these are gay writers with mainstream success, plaudits and critical adulation, who therefore shouldn't be hidden away in a corner which nobody goes to because nobody should have to out themselves in a public library?

That, of course, is another assumption: that anyone looking at the gay writers section must be gay. This would be ridiculous if you could reliably find brilliant writers there who happened to be gay, but as it stands, I, as a straight browser, assume that anyone I'm likely to be interested in reading will be in the 'fiction' section. As a result, I'm presumably missing out on some ace books because a librarian, somewhere along the line, has made the decision about who is or is not gay enough to be put on a separate shelf. What madness is this? Librarians, on the whole, are pretty wise people, but making them the official interpreters of gender issues seems a bit beyond their remit. Or anyone's, for that matter.

Perhaps 'black writers' will be more straightforward? Here your morally unsound shelf-stacker has an easier job. They don't need to delve into the author's private life or terms of self-definition - they can just look at a picture. Presumably there's some kind of racist colour chart that decides at what point you're black enough to go on the black shelves. Sorry Toni Morrison, you're just too darned white.

No, really. They take possibly the most famous black writer to date (alright, very arguable, but she's clearly pretty major) and put her in the generic fiction section. So who on earth is in the 'Black writers' corner? I have absolutely no idea, because again, I assume that if I want to read Zadie Smith, Octavia Butler (no, of course she isn't in the science fiction section - she's a black woman - how could she write sci-fi?) or Ben Okri I just go to 'fiction'.

Whichever way you look at it, this is offensive to the writers. A writer, trying to make a living from their work, might be pretty irritated at being dumped into an abandoned, weed-ridden corner of the library. This could leave gay writers and black writers in the bizarre situation of not wanting to be identified as gay or black, because otherwise their great book, which might have been defined as gay or black because it's about segregation of one kind or another, will end up being segregated. Welcome back, the 1950s.

Equally, an acclaimed, successful book about being gay or black by someone who happens to be gay or black (such as all the authors I've mentioned above) will end up in general fiction, losing any identification of it as a gay or black novel. The straight, white literary mainstream will claim anything it likes the look of, further obscuring the shelves set aside for gay writers and black writers. This means that being a gay writer or a black writer is made equivalent to being a bad writer, because if you were any good you'd be 'fiction'. What was that about our modern, liberal society?

Even if this were a noble intention, wouldn't it make more sense to put little labels on the books that fell into certain categories, and then put them all on the same alphabetical shelves? Surely it would take less effort to put little black spots or pink spots on certain books than to try to arrange them on an entirely separate set of shelves? Okay, they might get in a bit of trouble when they start sticking stars of David on the Jewish books...

And there's another point: why only black and gay? There are plenty of other minority groups that write, whether defined by ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, philosophy or anything else you can care to come up with. Why not match shelves to each of the protected categories under discrimination law? I'd particularly enjoy watching someone try to define a bookshelf of age-related literature. Or is that the large-print section?

Leaving aside sinister conspiracies about London libraries being run by crypto-fascists, there must be a reason for the distinctions made. I can see two possible explanations, neither of which are very pleasant.

First, perhaps these divisions are merely there so that people who enjoy reading books by gay writers and black writers can find others like them. If you find something you like, you can work your way down the shelves, presumably discovering more things you'll enjoy along the way. Fair enough, perhaps, but when you've already taken out all the novelists who've been co-opted by the mainstream, this reasoning starts to look a bit ropey. Worse, though, this assumes that because the books on these shelves are linked by origin, or by part of their subject-matter, they will be similar. This is, to put it bluntly, wrong. Will someone who likes Alan Hollinghurst automatically like Jeanette Wintersen? Equally, should someone who dislikes Ben Okri automatically discount any possibility of enjoying Zadie Smith?

The second possibility is rather more horrific: that it's somehow designed to protect mainstream readers from things they don't want to have to deal with. You know, like darkies and poofs. Whether this is the library telling its members that they won't be interested in certain books, or, even more unpleasantly, the members telling the library that they'd like all those 'other' books taken to one side, this is a pretty disturbing thought.

I'm sure this isn't the case. I'm not saying that south west London or its librarians are a bunch of racist homophobes. The real reason is almost certainly the first one I mentioned, which, although a bit iffy, isn't quite so nasty. However, like the interview advice brochures tell you, appearances do matter. Even if there's no malignance behind it, this bookshelf apartheid leaves an undercurrent of unease and a slew of unanswered questions. Why the separation? How is it defined? What does it say about the supposed progress that's being made against racism and homophobia?

Oh, and what happens if you're a black, gay writer? Does the library just grind to a halt, crashing like a computer that's just confused itself to death?

Sorry this is a bit disordered. Anyway, would definitely welcome comments on this - what justifications or objections have I missed out? Is this a fairly standard complaint that's already been done to death in the media? I'm fairly tempted to organise this into a proper article and get in touch with some right-on magazines, but I'd like to make sure I'm not being too much of a berk first.

Thoughts on Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space

2010-05-18T22:24:00.004+01:00

Science fiction is a very exciting thing. Just ask the BBC after a Doctor Who Christmas special. The thing is, there's a dashed lot of it, and it comes in all sorts of hotly debated shapes and subgenres. At one end you have the grim, comparatively realist dystopian style that wins literary plaudits and tends to get a lot of librarians insisting that there's nothing sci-fi about it at all, because there aren't any aliens or spaceships. See 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, Farenheit 451 and so on. Typically it will be the future, but although there'll be slightly fancier televisions and doors will be complicated, the world will be recognisable. The speculative part comes from the absolute mess somebody has made of human society. You don't need to bring in galactic ghouls to make the next century look a bit manky.

Then, right at the opposite end of the scale you have big, noisy space opera, full of flashy bits of technology and creepy stuff hiding behind stars: things that go bump in the universe. Star Wars as opposed to Blade Runner. It's a bit glittery and spangly, but also kind of cool. There can be spaceships with unfeasibly big engines, beasties with more limbs than strictly necessary, and it's not unheard of for planets to explode. For a long time this side of sci-fi consisted almost exclusively of complete tosh, but recently it's been dragging itself back into the limelight. I did have a theory about how this was chiefly due to Scotland (Iain M Banks, Ken McLeod, some others I haven't read (yet)), but I've just found out that Alastair Reynolds, despite his name, is Welsh, which scuppers that plan.

Space opera

First, this isn't quite my bag, as far as futuristic ramblings go. I tend to prefer to remain earth-bound (or at least earth-like-alternative-world-bound) because often it's easier to make good literature out of something recognisable. The tendency is for a wilder, more distant future to make its characters less believable (because they have mechanical limbs and computers in their brains), more shallow (because they tend to give expository speeches explaining to the reader just why their ship can go faster than light), and, crucially, less emotionally resonant (to use a vague term), because their motivations are more obscure. We don't recognise their societies, so we don't recognise their humanity.

Obviously this is generalisation, and the point is that good space opera transcends this. Probably the best example is Iain M Banks' magnificent Look to Windward, which manages to take a furry three-legged giant alien and an incomprehensibly clever computer and make them into tragic, psychologically scarred figures that reflect on cultural (and Cultural) imperialism and military interventionism. In other words, the sort of thing you can drag out the pompous lit-crit words for.

Also, sometimes I just really feel like reading something with a bit of astronomy knocking about in the background. That's what brought me to Revelation Space, which I will now actually talk about. Promise.

Revelation Space

On the whole, it's good, but it hasn't turned my view of literature or genre or spaceships inside out. There are three separate narratives: one follows Dan Sylveste, monomaniac archaeologist/scientist with a thing for dead alien cultures; the second tracks Ana Khouri, token assassin (they must have a good union - there really are far too many of them in sci-fi and fantasy) manipulated into trying to bump someone off; and the third deals with Ilia Volyova, one of the three not-terribly-friendly bods in charge of the lighthugger (which roughly translates as 'big fuck-off spaceship') Nostalgia For Infinity.

These three segments are gradually bound together by some galactic mysteries involving a buried alien culture, the Amarantin, which was wiped out by something that's actually described as 'The Event'. Ouch. Not so snazzy so far, is it?

Fine things

Occasional grubby old tropes aside, though, the plot and setting hold together well. There is a constant barrage of surprises and tricks, and it manages to gradually reveal plenty of clever, unexpected ideas without resorting to a single big twist or too many cheap tricks (although there are a few clumsy parts where the characters know things but hold them back solely to surprise the reader later on). The title feels pretty appropriate.

As an added bonus, the various cosmic oddities and mysteries are pretty darn convincing, as well as strange and fascinating. There's science behind the fantasy, but it's unobtrusive and interesting, rather than equation-packed showing off (see Neal Stephenson, Anathem). The book's pretty good at dealing with the cultural and historical elements of its futuristic society, too. When presenting something bizarre like the melding plague, or the hermetics (two of my favourite bits of background), Mr Reynolds is happy to mention them briefly and let the reader work out the details for themselves. This avoids having to dump in pages of dreary expository material, allowing characters to treat their world as if they really live in it (we don't go around constantly explaining the meaning of things we take for granted, do we?), and also engages the reader with the world. This is a clever approach.

So the plotting and structure are pretty hot stuff, overall. The three arcs join together in a satisfying and entertaining way, and the prose is fairly rock and roll, too. There are some splendidly atmopsheric scenes and settings, my favourites being inside the Nostalgia for Infinity (not a pretty starship - think The Nostromo from Alien), the surface of Resurgam, and Chasm City. All of these manage to combine the recognisable and the unrecognisable, and that makes them intriguing.

Wonky bits

Sadly, there is some ropey characterisation. The shonkiest bit is the alleged love between Sylveste and his wife, Pascale. They have a couple of conversations about their work, then suddenly they're deeply in love and getting married. Similarly, there are a few minor crew members on the lighthugger who became fairly interchangeable, and ultimately only seemed to exist to be bumped off in interesting ways.

Occasional over-long explanations, particularly of space itself and the movements of planets and systems. It was sometimes murky and confusing, but I suppose that's the universe for you. Having said that, some of it did end up being quite deviously plot-relevant, so it's hard to be too critical. Interesting thing to think about in writing, though - how can a setting of such near-infinite vastness be described in a way that feels relevant to human characters and readers?

Concepts and themes and so on

Revelation Space is part of a series, and I enjoyed it enough to be willing to check out some of the others. I wasn't stunned by its amazingness, but I enjoyed it a great deal, and that's enough for me. After all, the first Iain M Banks Culture book is eclipsed by the later ones, so that might be the case here, too.

I keep mentioning Iain M Banks, and not just because he's the space opera dude I am most familiar with. I also bring up his work because it is an intriguing contrast with what I've seen so far of Alistair Reynolds' creation. The Culture is pretty high-concept: to put it flippantly, utopian communists run the universe. You can think of each book as throwing a new challenge at the ideal society and seeing how it deals with it.

In comparison, I'm not sure how much there is a Big Theme behind Revelation Space. One emerges near the end (the Fermi paradox), and I'm interested in seeing how important it is to the rest of the series.

Also, here, far from the shiny AI-driven merriment of the Culture, things are a bit more of a mess. Human society is splintered, divided, and often at the whim of more powerful forces it doesn't really understand. Many of the fabulous bits of technology the characters employ are in some way turned against them. I really liked the way this was done, actually - it was often fairly subtle, but it works as a pleasing commentary on the way we, as a species and as individuals, are both strengthened and weakened by gadgetry. This is a major preoccupation of sci-fi (should the techno-wizardry be the cause of or the solution to the problems faced by the characters?), and Revelation Space deals with it jolly well.

So yeah, good stuff.

London Bye Ta Ta

2010-05-16T16:15:00.003+01:00

After many months of worrying, changing my mind, filling in forms, editing, re-editing, accidentally surrendering my British citizenship, and being by turns wildly, exciteably optimistic and glass-is-pretty-much-empty-really, Eeyore-is-my-role-model pessimistic, I have now received an offer from Manchester to rush off to the northern reaches to study for an MA in creative writing. This means I will get to spend a year:

Telling people I'm a writer.
Being a student again.
Not being in London.
Pretending to be a minor character in Wonder Boys.

Also being fundamentally impoverished, but let's not mention that...

Basically, huzzah.

However, this has got me pondering. You see, one difficult part of applying (apart from getting my citizenship back, which seemed to involve more forms than a Japanese civil service exam) was deciding that a creative writing MA was definitely a worthwhile thing to do.

This was partly a result of all the usual MA nonsense about interrupting a career, being able to afford anything to eat that isn't made mostly of cardboard, and finding a new job afterwards. However, this being creative writing, there was another question too: what's the point? An impressive number of people have spent an equally impressive amount of time declaring that these courses are a big, fat waste of time, money and effort. Ask Madame Google, and she'll show you little but mildly sarcastic newspaper articles.

Since I'm about to accept a place on one of these contentious MAs, I of course am pretty sure these doubters are mad, bitter and wrong. Possibly fundamentally evil, too.

A few standard objections seem to pop up. Two are that you can't teach writing, and by extension that an MA will give you nothing you couldn't gain from taking a year off work to lock yourself in a tower with a typewriter, a bottle of whisky and a shedload of paper.

I disagree with both of these. Sometimes these claims are based on an assumption that great writing has no structure or boundaries, and is purely a product of an individual's guiding genius. But if people are happy enough to review books and say what makes them good or bad, can't similar thinking be applied to books that haven't been written yet? Criticism is a route to improvement, and an MA gives a structured environment and regular source for that criticism, broader than what you'd get from asking a couple of friends to read your work.

It certainly isn't about saying demanding that everyone write in the same way to produce the same kind of MA-approved good book. Even if you want to subvert the traditions, knowing them helps. Knowledge is never a limitation: being told 'X improves characterisation' doesn't mean you have to do it, but it can't hurt to have it in mind.

Anyway, let's face it, there's more to this than keeping a journal under the mattress - there's publication to lust after. If you're writing for nobody but your cat and your imaginery friends, it's fine to ignore any advice and carve your own trail through the written word, but if you want to ever become published, surely it will help to know what other people think? And to have that kind of input from a combination of keen, intelligent, fellow students, keen, intelligent, published tutors, and a host of visiting authors, agents and publishers sounds pretty good to me.

I agree that lessons can't create genius and can't do a lot with somebody hopelessly inept. However, anyone who's accepted for a course will be at least reasonably decent. To say that this kind of fairly competent person cannot be improved or taught anything by a combination of structure, practice and tuition (by people who know what they're doing because they have written, you know, like, books and stuff) strikes me as a little arrogant. Sure, if I were some kind of hyper-literary mega-god of words, I wouldn't be considering this - I'd be slouched in a chair at Penguin now, naming my terms. As it is, though, I'm mediocre, and would like to be better. I think a degree can help with this.

I've also bumped into the argument that if you're any good you'll end up published anyway. I don't find this terribly likely, just on sheer statistics. Look at the size of slush piles, the number of proto-writers around, and the number of people who actually manage even to get agents, let alone end up on shelves in bookshops people actually spend money in. There are bound to be fine writers who die undiscovered. And if an MA can help one or two of them come to light, surely they've succeeded?

What's more, there's encouragement to think about. It's easy to become disillusioned when you're halfway through a novel and you're the only one who's seen any of it. It's easy to panic, lose faith and give up, and an MA can help people with this by providing direction, feedback, the knowledge that there's a purpose to what you're writing, and the reassurance that people are taking you seriously and giving time to read, consider and respond to your words.

But sod all that. I'm doing it because it will be fun, because I love writing, and because even if I never manage to come up with anything publishable I can't think of a more entertaining way to spend a year.

(Okay, I admit that all I've done here is borrow a couple of the shoddier arguments against creative writing MAs and then feel awfully clever for cutting them down. Let me have my fun, alright?)

Thoughts on Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow

2010-05-11T22:17:00.005+01:00

Right-ho, I’ve just finished Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, and if I'm going to begin commenting on what I read, this seems like a sensible place to start. It’s a Japanese novel written in the 1960s, bound up with conflicts between tradition and change in Japan in the 1910s. It’s slow, gentle, delicate, detailed and packed with symbolism and metaphor. Oh, and there’s loads of scenery. I mean it: don’t read this if you have a morbid fear of trees.

At the heart of the tale is the love affair beween Kiyoaki, son of a rising, new-money family, and Satoko, daughter of more retro parents, with a fiercely traditional attitude and fading levels of cash. The progress of the story is fairly irrelevant: you can probably work out the main structure of the plot from this one-sentence description, with some mild uncertainty about whether anyone will snuff it at the end. The novel is aware of this, and moves in circles around the affair, pursuing servants, families and friends as much as the protagonists.

I think on the whole I liked this approach: true, it reduced the emotional impact of the central story, but there are some fascinatingly flawed side characters who deserve the detail lavished upon them. The two servants, Tadeshina and Iinuma, and the two Siamese princes, are all elaborately constructed and entirely convincing, but sadly none of them are treated to proper conclusions - they just vanish from the narrative (possibly because this is the first book in a series of four).

More important than these four is Honda, Kiyoaki’s best friend. He’s the intellectual heart of the novel, as he reflects on the philosophical, religious and legal ideas he bumps into as he struggles through his last years at school. Partly he’s an obvious opposite to Kiyoaki (one emotion, one logic, blah blah), but the characteristics they share are subtly expressed (they’re both withdrawn, and prone to massive bouts of introspection that, if I’m honest, are sometimes quite wearisome. There were times when I wanted to give Kiyoaki a good slap), so their friendship, while nearly always described in the thoughts of one character at a time rather than shown in dialogue, feels convincing.

The lack of dialogue and direct activity is pretty gosh-darn noticeable. Anyone would think the quotation mark button had fallen off our Mishima's typewriter. The narrative is perfectly happy to describe somebody’s mental state and character, but not necessarily to demonstrate it. One of the cheesy bits of advice given to anyone who wants to have a pop at writing is ‘show, don’t tell’, and anyone who clings to that will despise the way this is written. In recent years I’ve mostly been reading modern Anglophone novels, so I’m used to much more dialogue, much more action, and being left to interpret motivation for myself rather than being told it directly (this sounds like a loopy sweeping statement, but it makes sense as a comparison to the way Spring Snow is written).

This isn’t a criticism. None of the characters have any release from their internal conflicts: they are all forced into loneliness by the way their society works. Sometimes this is physical and literal isolation (the princes at school, the convent, Tadeshina’s sick room), but often it is a mental barrier – an unwillingness to expose true thoughts because damnit, that’s not the done thing. The most obvious comparison for me was The Remains of the Day (and Kazuo Ishiguro, as if it's not obvious from the name, has a Japanese family, even if he has lived in Britain since the age of six): a fiercely constrained society with no emotional outlets, in the middle of massive cultural change (Westernisation in Spring Snow, the Second World War in The Remains of the Day). With this background, it makes perfect sense for Spring Snow to focus so much on the characters’ minds rather than their actions.

As mentioned, it’s not all internal description: there’s all that scenery, too. Even in translation the prose appeals to me greatly: it ebbs and flows, and revels in its descriptions. The elaborate metaphors are actually useful rather than the author showing off. They’re often used to show how Kiyoaki looks at the world and sees it reflecting his own woes. There are striking scenes in gardens and lakes, and there’s plenty of blossoming of trees and ripening of fruit, just as the lovers settle down to their own ripening and blooming, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Okay, that doesn’t sound subtle, but it works because the weather, flora and fauna are the setting: there is almost no urban activity. The only exception is a wonderful scene near the end, and I’m afraid this will be a little spoilertastic, where Kiyoaki finally sets out on his own to track down Satoko, who has sequestered herself in a convent. Just as Kiyoaki is about to walk away from his private school, we finally see the city: smokestacks, factories, barbed wire. This is the modern world that the aristocracy have been pretending they aren’t part of. Then Kiyoaki says goodbye to Honda. He doesn’t give an extravagant speech, but simply says ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you.’ Rebellion in action accompanied by rebellion in speech. Score.

They key word throughout is ‘elegance’, applied constantly to Kiyoaki and Satoko’s pa, the Count. The word is both a compliment and a criticism, and the novel withholds judgment. Sometimes it leads to both beautiful, measured manners, and an occasionally attractive, almost heroic, self-denial and restraint (the elegant Count is much more sympathetic than the furious, interfering Marquis). However, at other times it leads to paralysis – an unwillingness or inability to act that dooms Kiyoaki and will probably ruin the Count’s family. The vigorous western lifestyle of the Marquis gets things done, and it is the only thing that comes close to saving anyone, but it is also demanding and aggressive.

Having said that the novel withholds judgment, I think it comes down on the side of elegance, not because of the values its characters espouse, but because of the way it’s written and structured. The novel’s story is a product of the beautiful but crippling effects of elegant behaviour, and it is told in a similar way: slow, restrained and careful.

Speaking of restraint, I need to learn some: this ended up being much longer than I anticipated, probably because the novel blossoms when you let your mind rest upon it. I like it more now I’ve written this than I did when I read the final page. Spring Snow is not a rip-roaring read (and it isn’t meant to be), but it struck me as magnificently suited to study and contemplation. Part of me would enjoy re-reading it and tearing apart all the layers of metaphor, digging in to the philosophical background (there’s some complicated stuff about Buddhism in there which went right over my head, but this is turned around on one occasion when the character the lecture is pointed at ignores most of it, too). Another part of me would rather pick up the next book on my shelf. And that chunk of my brain is winning.

Overall, I can’t decide quite how much I liked Spring Snow. It’s brilliant in places, and there are some truely lovely passages (the idyllic scenes by the beach-house, the boating trip, Kiyoaki’s departure, the last journey to the temple near the end of the book). However, it did leave me slightly cold, whereas I was hoping and expecting to be left in tears at the cruelty of the world and the societies we construct within it. Some of this might be due to the book being the start of a series, so since I have absolutely no knowledge of where the remaining three books go I am probably missing the point at least a little.

Oh well, that turned into a review after all, didn’t it? Damn, blast and buggery. I'm learning, alright?

ADDITION:

I'm also trying to learn about how to interact on this internet thingumy, so here are some links:

Shawn Rider - interesting social background. Looks at the characters as representatives of facets of East and West.

The Notes Taken - witty, concise and recent view of the book with a bit of insight into the rest of the series. Note to self: be more like this, next time.

Plans for the blog (aka self-absorbed tat)

2010-05-11T22:09:00.000+01:00

Do you ever read a book, then realise about a month later that you can barely remember anything about it, or differentiate it from the last half-dozen things you’ve read? I’m bumping into this far too often, and I find it a bit depressing, since it leaves me feeling that a lot of that reading time is meaningless. Yes, it’s fun at the time, and every so often a book will really manage to jam it crampons into the rock-face of my clunky brain, but I’d really like to feel that I’m absorbing something from what I read.

That’s the background behind this little mid-week post: I’m going to attempt to make a few notes about everything I plough through. These will probably be less like reviews and more like general thoughts on what I thought worked about each book: it will be about trying to work out how good writing happens, not about assigning arbitrary numbers of stars to books, then giving away the ending.

(Mentioning star ratings, does anyone know where they came from? I want to know whose bright idea it was to judge things based on between one and five massive balls of blazing nuclear fire. Okay, stars are pretty, but I don’t think they hold strong opinions about art.)

Anyway, in a moment I'm going to plonk the first of these pseudo-reviews on here. I know it will mostly be a long, impenetrable ramble, but these are mostly for my own benefit, and a blog just seems like a sensible way to organise them.

The thousand authors of Foyles

2010-05-08T10:32:00.005+01:00

The other day I went to see the generally rather ace Mr David Mitchell at Foyles. By David Mitchell, I don't mean the modern voice of sarcasm from Mitchell and Webb, but the modern voice of, er, voices: the scribbler of Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas and BlackSwanGreen (although I haven't read this last one, because I tend to hide from things that are 'semi-autobiographical', which is the literary equivalent of the cinematic warning sign 'based on a true story'. Special exemption for Empire of the Sun, though).

For those unfamiliar with this deeply clever and unreasonably talented fellow, he tends to write novels built from fragmented but interlocking parts, in which themes, places and characters saunter in and out of focus. This leads to magnificent variety, with plenty of different places and periods, from dystopian futures to Victorian pasts, and it's all carried off equally (very) well.

(As an aside, I also like him because he's one of the growing number of authors who combine serious literary talent and critical appeal (two Booker nominations, for example) with a willingness to muck about with genres: he clearly digs science fiction. See also Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Michael Chabon, for starters. There's definitely going to be a future post on this.)

Anyway, the talk. All three of the novels I've read spend some time dealing with seeing Japan from the outside, particularly number9dream. The new book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, continues this theme. It's about the interaction between Dutch traders and Japan in the 18th century, and I haven't read it yet (bookshop hardbacks are expensive!), so I can't really say anything more about it. Sounds good though.

The talk, however, I can mumble about. Mitchell started off quiet and a little worried, spending long silences thinking about his answers to the Foyles interviewer's questions. Pretty soon, however, he got into the swing of things, basically seeming to be an exceedingly bright, pleasant and witty chap. This particularly came out during the audience questions, when he really talked to the questioners, rather than just responding to their queries and moving swiftly on. When someone asked him what authors he liked, he turned it into a conversation rather than a list, insisting on asking them the same question back.

Illuminating comments on being a writer, being an outsider, and lots about the new book, which I really want to read. He was suitably abashed by the Foyles bod's extravagant (and justified) praise, and pleasingly amusing yet bewildered when talking about the recent academic conference held about his work.

If his tour takes him round your way (whoever you are) he's worth a look/listen. The friend I went with enjoyed it, even though he hadn't read any David Mitchell books. Even if you've missed the tour, check out the books - he's a fine author, and one I recommend heartily. Cloud Atlas is probably a sensible starting place, despite the Richard and Judy sticker you might find plastered to the cover.

Putting the 're' in 'revival'.

2010-05-08T10:24:00.003+01:00

I really am going to do my best to use this as a proper, roaming, rambling weblog, probably with a focus on words and the people who do cruel and unusual things with them.

And this time I mean it.

Ambitions are like poorly planned house extensions: they ruin you, and even if you do get them finished, they never look quite like you intended. Yet somehow, it still feels worthwhile.