The Blackwater Lightship

The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Tóbín

This is a tender and careful book, probing gently into the shells wherein three generations of a family have housed their buried pains and unresolved emotions.

The catalyst for this exploration is the news that Declan, brother of Helen and child of Lily wants to go to his granny Dora's house to get away from the hospital for a while. He is dying of AIDS but hasn't told his family and has relied on his good friends Paul and Larry, who have nursed him through his illness until now.

As well as the immanent loss of Declan, the book focusses on earlier losses, particularly the early death of Helen and Declan's father, Lily's husband. The repercussions of this are still twisting their lives into uncomfortable shapes. On the surface Lily and Helen are successful professionals but emotionally, they are fractured and brittle. "When my father died, half my world collapsed, but I did not know this had happened. It was as though half my face had been blown away and I kept talking and smiling, thinking that it had not happened, or that it would grow back." Things have been so bad between them that Lily was not asked to her daughter's wedding nor has she met her son in law nor grandchildren.

Another World

Another World - Pat Barker

This book would make a great Graphic Novel. It is full of arresting and immediate images that are central to the plot and repeated visual motifs. It is the story of a family; psychology professor Nick and his daughter Miranda,  Nick's partner Fran and her son Gareth, Nick and Fran's "shared children": Jasper and his unborn sibling; and Nick's Grandfather Geordie.

The books masterfully builds a feeling of awful anticipation and a vertiginous sense of the anxieties of modern life: "like everyone else he lives in the shadows of monstrosities. Peter Sutcliffe's bearded face, the number plate of a house in Cromwell Street, three figures smudged on a video surveillance screen, an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead,  eager for the atrocity to come."

Exiles on Asperus

Exiles on Asperus - John Wyndham

Aahh, some good old fashioned Boy's Own tales; ray guns and alien races; life on Mars and Venus and elsewhere; the future foretold. This is a collection of three stories from Day of the Triffids author John Wyndham. Two, Exiles on Asperus and The Venus Adventure, from the early thirties and the other, No Place Like Earth, from 1951.

The stories all look askance at the human race, using the horrors perpetrated in the name of colonialism as a model for how we will behave in space. The alien races are all far more moral than they are depicted. In Exiles on Asperus, Sen-Su, leader of the Martian revolution says: "They have made quite a bogy of me on Earth; I assure you they exaggerate. It has been Governmental policy to malign me - Governments have to create thorough-going villains. In private life we should call them liars, but in public life they are propagandists."

Ghost Light

Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

"Ghost light. An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays."

Molly Allgood was engaged to John Millington Synge when he died. She was an actress in the Abbey and was the first actress to play the iconic role of Pegeen Mike in Synge's masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, playing to an angry rioting crowd incensed by this portrayal of themselves. We begin this book with Molly living in a "hungry room", her neighbours largely Irish navvies, her company largely poured from bottles and "the scuttle of the past out of cupboards.". It is almost a return to her girlhood over a junkshop in Mary Street in the infamous tenements of Dublin.

Molly's final residence is like Yeat's "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" and she swims among her memories, which are dominated by her years with Synge. Synge was a Protestant from a landowning family and almost twenty years older than Molly. The gulf between them was large and their relationship (in this novel) was not looked kindly upon by Synge's partners in the Abbey, Yeats and Lady Gregory, nor Synge's widowed mother. O'Connor imagines them meeting on the train to Bray, not acknowledging each other until they thought themselves safe from being seen by those who knew them, to avoid scandal.

The Double

The Double - Jose Saramago

"an algebraic equation with people's faces where there should have been letters."

This is a book soaked in Mathematics. Indeed it reminded me forcefully of an occasion in my schooldays when I was asked to come to the blackboard and write out the proof of a theorem we were supposed to have learnt. The theorem was nice and concise but I hadn't learnt it. I may not even have looked at it and I had far more entertaining things to listen to in the classroom than the teacher. So I had to start from scratch and I filled the blackboard twice, following a number of hunches that brought me nowhere, before finally arriving at the proof. This was, of course, very amusing to the teacher.

Staying with half digested maths, it is my understanding that one of the many ideas in quantum mechanics is that anything that can happen, will happen. In this case the plot of The Double is not that farfetched. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a history teacher who is suffering from mild depression is advised to watch a certain film by "his colleague, the Mathematics teacher." He watches the video and finds it unremarkable and as cliched as its title "The Race is to the Swift."

The Centauri Device

The Centauri Device - M John Harrison

This is a strange and interesting novel. Written in a style which seems to try to meld Chandler and Burroughs it has a dreamlike ambiance while telling a straightforward enough Pirate tale full of ships, bo'suns and ports; albeit in space, and on the 400th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

John Truck is the son of the last pureblooded Centaurian, and as such he is the only one who can operate the Centauri device of the title. This device has been discovered by Grishkin, the leader of the major religion of the time, the Openers, who have windows in their bodies to reveal their innards. The device is also wanted by the Israeli's (IWG) and the Arabs (UASR), the conflict between whom has led to what's left of Earth being split between them, their conflict continuing amoung the stars.

The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G.Farrell

I haven't laughed out loud at a book so much for quite a while. What began as a series of low civilised chuckles to myself ended up with quite a few loud guffaws and extended periods where laughter bubbled up from my stomach like carbon dioxide through soda water. I then had to sheepishly mumble to my partner that I was laughing at some particularly gory scenes of dismemberment.

The novel tells the story of an uprising in an isolated province in India which leads to an extended siege of the residence of the Collector, the chief bureaucrat in the province.

I feel obliged at this point to say that this review contains some spoilers although I feel that they will not in any way spoil the enjoyment to be derived from the book.

"Poetry?"

Pomes
I have been contributing the odd poem to one of my online reading groups this year and thought I'd gather some together here to give everyone who reads this a chance to point and laugh.

Knees

I unwound the bandages
and flinched
You were unwinding
Like a spring
gone loose

The years wind around me
Like a torn cloth

The Eye

The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov

"A thing I had long suspected - the world's absurdity - became obvious to me."

The Eye is an early (1930) novel from Nabokov which he translated from the original Russian in the mid sixties. In his foreword he talks of the difficulties faced in translating the title.

"The Russian title of this book is SOGLYADATAY (in traditional transliteration), pronounced 'Sugly-dart-eye', with the accent on the penultimate. It is an ancient military term meaning 'spy' or 'watcher', neither of which extends as flexibly as the Russian word. After toying with 'emissary' or 'gladiator', I gave up trying to blend sound and sense, and contented myself with matching the 'eye' on the end of the long stalk."

The book is set in Berlin in 1924-25 amoung the Russian emigre community but Nabokov doesn't try to make any political point - saying - "they might just as well have been Norwegians in Naples or Ambracians in Ambridge." The nature of emigrant communities, where disparate people are thrown together by the simple fact of their nationality is evident in the book, however. 

Palace Walk

Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk is considered by many to be Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's masterpiece. It is the first part of a trilogy of novels which tell the saga of one family in Cairo, and through their stories the wider story of Egypt in the 20th Century.  It explores power and it uses and abuses in the domestic, social and political arenas.

At the heart of the book is the charming but despotic father Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. His family consists of his wife Amina, three sons ( Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal) and two daughters (Khadija and Aisha). His eldest son, Yashin, is from a previous marriage which is the first sign of a crack in his self image. The narrative voice is interesting, flexible enough to reflect the self image of the characters within an ostensibly omniscient voice. This allows for the deployment of weapons grade irony, especially in the descriptions of Al-Sayyid and Yashin.

Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico.

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico - Javier Marias

Language is a dangerous commodity. How we use it can determine our fate. It is a vessel for memory. It can be used not just to decide what happens, but also what happened. So when it is decided that Elvis never went to Mexico to shoot some scenes from Fun in Acupulco, so it is. This however, threatens the very being of our narrator, for whom his time in Mexico with Elvis was a lifechanging experience.

Musicians All Time Top Tens

Some more All Time Top Tens from the archives of Smash Hits. With thanks to Like Punk Never Happened.

Just click on the image to link to Youtube playlists.

Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

I didn't have any idea what to expect from this book but it certainly wasn't the missing link between P G Wodehouse and Mervyn Peake. That is however, what I got.

The book opens with a foreword dedicated to "Anthony Pookworthy, Esq., A.B.S., L.L.R." Gibbons bewails the years she has spent as a journalist "learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences."  Now, to "achieve literature and favourable reviews" she must learn "to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible."   His "books are not ... funny. they are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen." It is clear that she finds them laughable and that Pookworthy represents a type of author who is to be wickedly lampooned in what is to come.

John Peel Top Ten 1981

John Peel's All Time Top Ten 1981.
Click on the image for a Youtube playlist of the songs.


Taken from the very great blog Like Punk Never Happened, which simply uploads editions of Smash Hits from thirty years ago. Simple but giving me hours of browsing pleasure. I had a subscription for years and used to love collecting the magazine in the local newsagent and seeing my surname in the top corner.

At the time there was a lot of crossover between Smash Hits and John Peel. More than one would imagine. Check it out.

Can't wait until it gets to my plea for penpals, which got around two thousand replies. One day we got an actual sack full of post delivered to our house. Wish I had them still. I could scan one every day and run a complementary blog.

The Hothouse by the East River

The Hothouse by the East River - Muriel Spark

This is an odd book. A couple (Paul and Elsa) live in an old overheated apartment looking out on the East River. Their talk is obtuse, disconnected. She looks out the window while talking to him and there is something wrong with the orientation of her shadow. "He sees her shadow cast on the curtain, not on the floor where it should be according to the position of the setting sun from the window bay behind her, cross town to the West Side. He sees her shadow, as he has seen it many times before, cast once more unnaturally. Although he has expected it, he turns away his head at the sight."

The Good Earth

The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck

A E Housman's poem that gives James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover its name could just as easily provide an epigraph for this.
"Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey's over
There'll be time enough for sleep."

This is a sweeping tale set in China, almost a fable, although underpinned with startling pictures of reality. It tells of a rural family and their struggles to survive and even prosper through good times and bad. It brought to mind a mixture of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, although not quite as political as the first nor tragic as the second.

Blood's a Rover

Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy

"Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content."

This is a study of, and exercise in, obsessions, compulsions and persistence. Sometimes it's hard to separate Ellroy's persona and history from his characters. Certainly Donald Crutchfield, the character who ties this book together shares peccadilloes with the author. He is a 'peeper' who has stolen women's lingerie. He has a missing mother who he searches for. He is also the narrator, him and his paper trail.
(Ellroy's mother was killed when he was a child and he did time for peeping/stealing women's lingerie.)
The book opens with a brutal heist, in the description of which are scattered a few very biblical imprecations to "Mark it now". This is the King James version of history, delivered in a declamatory style all Ellroy's own. Short "staccato™" sentences that borrow from police reports and gossip columns constantly invite you to join the dots and create a labyrinthine plot that takes in everything from the long decline of J Edgar Hoover to the mystical power of emeralds in Haitian voodoo (traveling from one to the other on (Howard) Hughes Air in the company of law ENFORCERS and lawbreakers a plenty).  They also take in the assassinations of the Kennedy's and King. Indeed all Ellroy's work can be seen to revolve about the murder of his mother and the murder of the American Dream in the guise of the Kennedys and King.

Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland


"Because if it's not Love
Then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb,
the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together
Nature is a language - can't you read ?
Nature is a language - can't you read ?
So, ask me, ask me, ask me,
Ask me, ask me, ask me"
The Smiths - Ask


This is an odd book. Firstly, it's got the oddly distancing use of Smiths' lyrics in sentences to no obvious effect. Coupland has said that this was "a little salute to those points in my life when I was melting down to soundtracks provided by British gloom rockers." It seems little more than a gimmick, although it does act as a metafictional brake on the potential gaucherie of some episodes. (and it's fun, in a trainspottery kind of way).

Dubliners

Dubliners - James Joyce

In an newly persuasive argument against optical character recognition software here is a twenty five year old college essay on Joyce's Dubliners, a book so good it will even survive reading this. 

Enjoy...?

Dubliners is a book with a moral purpose. Joyce described it as 'a chapter in the moral history of my country'.  He saw himself as 'Stephen Hero', subversively fighting the paralysis endemic in his mother city.

However, he presents his moral guidance differently in Dubliners than in Stephen Hero or Portrait of the Artist . . . Rather than having a central character fight an epic battle with the paralysis surrounding

him, he shows pictures of the paralysed, and the aura which envelopes them. Of the three weapons of Daedalus, 'silence, exile and cunning', it is silence that is most telling in Dubliners. The characters are silent in the face of epiphany, silent in their failure to change. Joyce's own apparent silence also permeates the book, he doesn't appear to guide you, but in such a closely structured and controlled atmosphere, didactic comment is completely unnecessary.

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides is a mosaic of seventies cultural references, from movies to music to the spread of Dutch Elm disease, the World Wildlife Fund and sexual experimentation in suburbia... in this detritus one thing remains standing, either the legs of a giant statue or the last two Elm trees, stripped of their bark. A plaque beneath them reads "I am Donny Osmonde, King of Kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and my hair."
(with abject apologies to Percy Shelley)
On the surface this is the story of five sisters who kill themselves. We know this right from the start. But under the surface this is many things; an elegy for lost youth, an exploration of sexual fantasies, a gloss on seventies culture, a lament for meaning, a conjuration...
It is also the story of the narrators, a bunch of neighbourhood boys who have watched, fascinated, as the Lisbon girls grew up across the road from their tree house, from which they would watch them. They are now middle aged men and are still fascinated by the girls and their untimely deaths. The voice has been compared to that of a Greek chorus but it seems to me to be more that of a single person hiding behind the plural, and one who is not entirely reliable.