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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 1847490131
| 9781847490131
| 3.77
| 135,018
| 1883
| Jul 27, 2007
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In one of Manny's 1,682 reviews - no, I can't remember which one** - he says that it must have been incredibly exciting being an avid reader of modern...more
In one of Manny's 1,682 reviews - no, I can't remember which one** - he says that it must have been incredibly exciting being an avid reader of modern novels in the 1880s and 1890s. Not only were they churning out great classics at a rate of knots, they were inventing whole genres - Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Picture of Dorian Gray, HG Wells - and Treasure Island is one of those, a novel which invented a whole a-harr talk like a pirate genre. Stevenson's prose is quite magical, he absolutely convinced me with his descriptions of winds and seas and gunnels and jibs and booms and mizzenmasts and fo'c'sles (it's okay, you can print the whole word - forecastle - there - the printer won't charge you any more) and all of that. Plus, some of the ripest dialogue anywhere - "If that ain't to your fancy, some of my hands being rough, and having old scores, on account of hazing, then you can stay here, you can. We'll divide stores with you, man for man; and I'll give my affy-davy as before to speak the first ship I sight, and send 'em here to pick you up... Refuse that, and you've seen the last of me but musket-balls." "There!" he cried. "That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your blockhose like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thinder, laugh! Before an hour's out ye'll laugh on the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones.  Cap'n Flint says : As well as a ripping yarn, it's also a nifty dissection of the concept of being a "gentleman" which you may take sociologically, politically or psychologically, as suits ye best, ye lubbers. Squaaawk! Pieces of eight! A tot of rum would go down a treat! Skwawwwk! **Update : I found a previous note I'd already written so I can confirm that it was Manny's review of A Rebours where he says : It must have been so exciting to be a novelist in the second half of the nineteenth century. You weren't limited to just creating a novel; if you were talented, you could create a whole new kind of novel. http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... 1883 : Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson 1885 : Germinal : Emile Zola 1886 : The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde : R L Stephenson 1891 : The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde, 1891 1892 : The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes : Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1895 : The Time Machine : H G Wells 1897 : Dracula : Bram Stoker 1898 : The Turn of the Screw : Henry James 1898 : The War of the Worlds – H G Wells (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jun 09, 2013
| Jun 18, 2013
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Jun 09, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1908800062
| 9781908800060
| 4.12
| 24
| Aug 01, 2012
| Aug 02, 2012
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This one particular paedophile priest, like so many of them, their crimes already known to their monsignors and bishops, was transferred to a poor are...more
This one particular paedophile priest, like so many of them, their crimes already known to their monsignors and bishops, was transferred to a poor area of Louisiana (Sister Julianne explains things, page 272 this place is what is known in our Church as a benevolent diocese, meaning that out of our bishop’s goodness we will ordain men or accept transfers of priests who some other dioceses might deem unfit. There is a high level of tolerance here for conduct which would not be tolerated anywhere else.) and carried on his Standard Operating Procedure of setting up a team of 7-10 year old altar boys and having them round for regular sleepovers at his house. In the early 80s, no one thought that was anything untoward. Then some of these boys revealed what was going on during the sleepovers, the details of which, you may be glad to know, only appear on three pages of this 565 page novel. But it’s not a novel as such, it’s a non-fiction novel and details exactly what the author did in the huge case which finished him in the law business. The only thing changed here is the names. So this is the Executioner’s Song of priest abuse. It’s meticulous. The only pages in here which don’t ring true are the infrequent scenes of family life which are trite and mawkish and sound like they’re from some damned airport novel, sorry Ray and Ray’s editors! But this ain’t no airport novel. No. Anyway, the Catholic Church in the form of the bishop and his lawyers pounced on these six boys and their families and paid them off and sealed the settlements, meaning that the media never got to hear about them. Job done. Then eleven more victims emerged a few months later, in the same parish, in summer 1984. When Doves Cry by Prince was number one at the time. Touch if you will my stomach Feel how it trembles inside You've got the butterflies all tied up Don't make me chase you Well of course the Bishop thought he could do the same with these new cases, buy them all off, except one family appeared to distrust the church so much that they went to the local DA and the DA then wished to meet with the priest’s lawyer and he didn’t have one because up to then these things had all been done between the Bishop’s lawyer and the families, the priest wasn’t involved at all, no criminal charges were made at all. So Ray Mouton, being a hotshot local brief of repute, was hired. The whole entire idea from beginning to last of the priests and bishops was the keep the damn lid on all of this stuff, for there isn’t any sin worse than bringing the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church into disrepute. Shag twentynine seven-year-old boys, and we will admonish you and sigh and hear your confession and tell you not to do it again and send you off to another parish where both you and I know you will immediately do it again – that’s one thing; but letting the outside world know about such matters, well that is a whole other thing and if you even should breathe one word about it the church will crush your living soul, it will eat your eyes. Once he figured out what was going on, Ray Mouton thought that this was wrong. Indeed, he came to the wholly outrageous conclusion that covering up, aiding and abetting all these crimes was the larger scandal, and that the bishops and vicar generals and monsignors should be arraigned alongside the pervert priests. His views, once they became known to the clerics, were not welcome. So having been hired by the Catholic Church he then went to war with them. Naturally at first they just threatened to fire his ass – we hired you, we can fire you! – but no, they couldn’t, ha ha, because the pervert priest was his client and only he could fire Ray, and he wasn’t going to, because Ray was telling him he could avoid the expected life sentence and Ray could get him a 20 year stretch in a mental hospital. So the priest did not wish to fire Ray and Ray was able to run amok with this horrendous scandal. Pick the moral bones out of that miserable soup if you can. Ray found allies along the way. News of the affair made its way to the Holy See, the very Pope himself got involved, to the horror of the Pope’s number two and all round fixer Cardinal Hans Kruger (“it was widely believed that Hans Kruger was only one funeral away from the papacy”). Here the whole thing kicks up a gear and becomes really interesting, as if it wasn’t already. This Kruger character is clearly none other than a version of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger who later became Pope Benedict XVI, and in this non-fiction novel he is portrayed as the vicious attack dog of the Vatican, willing to exert any pressure to stop abuse scandals from reaching the press. It’s a breathtaking hatchet job. My jaw was on the floor. What emerges in this relentless, exhausting legal procedural is a very piquant clash between secular and religious mentalities. The response of the Church to the child victim appears to have been to offer confession (because what they had done was a sin! Don’t forget that!) prayer and a cheque. The response of the outside world was to offer counselling and therapy. Both were sincerely believed by each side to be the best way to heal the child. We are now so secularised that offering confession and prayer to a sex abuse victim seems like another form of abuse; but these religious people were sincere, they really thought that was how to help the victim. What also emerges is that either Mouton begins to lose his bearings or that we still cringe away from accepting this kind of reality. But as we have seen scandal after scandal, pederast priest after pederast priest, in this last decade, I’m thinking Mouton is probably not that wrong when he writes, in a moment of despair, after a whirlwind tour of Catholic America, on page 369 : Six months earlier I had been convinced that I faced absolute evil in the form of a single aberrant Catholic priest who had sexually defiled seventeen children, and a vicar general and a bishop who covered up his crimes. Now the church appeared to me as lethal and morally dead as any criminal enterprise on earth. Based on the information I had from the dioceses I’d visited, I believe there had to be five to ten thousand sex-abuser priests in the United States… And it was only logical to assume a similar situation existed in every other significantly Catholic country in the world. This therefore is not a novel likely to appeal to many people. It reports on an important part of a larger picture. I believe that we are living through a period when formerly unspeakable things are now being spoken about. And that has got to be good. While all this awful stuff comes to light, things look wretched and depressing; but for now this is the way it has to be. Better will come. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. Luke 12, 2-3 (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| May 31, 2013
| Jun 03, 2013
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May 31, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 3.74
| 804
| Jan 03, 2012
| Jan 03, 2012
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There’s a rising tide of weirdness, you see it in movies (Being John Malkovich, City of Lost Children, Love Exposure, I Heart Huckabees), you hear it...more
There’s a rising tide of weirdness, you see it in movies (Being John Malkovich, City of Lost Children, Love Exposure, I Heart Huckabees), you hear it in music (Six Organs of Admittance, Animal Collective) and of course we see it onrushing into the wonderful world of modern fiction too. Me, I go only so far. I like jazz, for instance, when I can discern the vestiges of the melody the guy is improvising upon, when there’s the merest mental toehold left in the cacophony, it’s 99% wildness but there’s still that 1% my mind can cling to with one bent-back fingernail. It’s the same with fiction, the merest ghost of a rumour of a photocopy of a plot, and that’s okay. If my mind can’t believe there’s any melody left or any plot at all, then I freefall into softly tumbling fearfulness; as soon as I can find a tree branch to cling to, I make a polite excuse and leave. There’s a great science fiction story called Mr Boy by James Patrick Kelly from 1990 which is 23 years ago now. In this charming story Mr Boy is a 25 year old rich guy but he’s decided to get biologically “stunted” so he remains physically 12 years old. His best friend has been “tweaked” and now looks like a 12 foot dinosaur. His mother, for a couple of decades now, got herself genetically modified into a small scale replica of the Statue of Liberty – still as big as a house. Mr Boy lives in a spacious apartment inside his mother. Actual science fiction has been doing this kind of crazy ass stuff a long time and still is – check out Bruce Sterling, for instance (I love him). Also great absurdist short story satires about America and its possible futures are not hard to come by. From the fecund womb of Donald Barthelme with some pre-birth oofle-dusting from Jorge Luis Borges, you have Alissa Nutting, George Saunders and a whole host ramping around. And there are novels too - Blueprints of the Afterlife fits right next to Let the Dog Drive, White Noise, My Elvis Blackout, Infinite Jest, God is Dead, and very numerous others. Deadpan surreal future-America satire is what all these are, in their different ways. And now we have a whole genre dedicated to being weirder than everyone else called bizarre fiction (The Haunted Vagina, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, They Had Goat Heads, and so on and on - I've not read any of those yet). Can we also mention Rabelais here – his Gargantua and Pantagruel is bizarro fiction written in the 1530s. So, Blueprints has some intense competition. Blueprints is pretty weird, as you have heard by now. Ryan Boudinot is out there frolicking at the edge of coherence, but let us not get carried away. I did enjoy Mr Boudinot’s zest, his phrasemaking and his willingness to have a go. He does boldly plunge. For instance : “At this point he may want to start dismembering you. Most likely this will begin with your fingers and toes and move on up the extremities. You are expected to react with appropriate terror and beg for your life.” Stella. “I can do that.” Henrietta. “Then he will likely decapitate you. Please, at this point, if you could, feign death.” Or The apartment was on the fifth floor of a tree-ringed, green-built, post-FUS building, with windows overlooking the retinal-rape neon of a takeout Szechuan hole-in-the-wall. That’s RB’s style, right there. It therefore seems a shame that he lapses so frequently into dialogue which can only be describes as fifth hand crap : Squid said, “You guys just need to know it’s not safe for you to be digging into all this shit. Just leave it alone and walk away.” “We’re all in danger, dude. I’m putting myself on the line just talking to you.” Also, alas, he badly needs a lame-comedy detector. If he has one the batteries must have conked. One of his main characters is Neethan F Jordan. His sections are largely satires of future-celebrity and TV culture. The target was obvious, the humour was crude and cartoony, and 30 Rock already skewers celebs and tv and all of that brilliantly. Also, here’s another (minor) moan. When Hollywood used to do historical drama, they got the costumes reasonably authentic-looking but the hairstyles of the actresses were always glaringly contemporary; in Blueprints when anyone plays music it’s always 100-plus-years old music, like Guns ‘n’ Roses or The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – yeah, probably the very stuff our author grew up listening to. Well, it’s his book, but it didn’t seem likely that people from the age after the age of FUS would be listening to “albums” by acts like that. Anyway, why should I be bothering about abrogations of verisimilitude in such a novel as this, which uses as its main plot device the “and …and…and” of a fairytale dreamscape… and then I was in a field, and my aunt said to me…and then we were being eaten by George W Bush… In fact RB anticipates my own complaint right there on page 228 : She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscure purposes. I don’t really want to put the boot into this book, it was colourful and there were a lot of bells and twinkly lights and there were some cute little doors which you could open and there were people inside who waved at you, but…it’s comedy science fiction. Like Christian death metal, not the world’s best genre. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| May 03, 2013
| May 11, 2013
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May 03, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 1933372060
| 9781933372068
| 4.14
| 1,072
| 1941
| Jan 01, 2006
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Just because I mostly hated reading this doesn’t mean I can’t give it 4 stars. There are two movies I saw recently (both recommended), Rosetta, a Belg...more
Just because I mostly hated reading this doesn’t mean I can’t give it 4 stars. There are two movies I saw recently (both recommended), Rosetta, a Belgian movie, and Keane, an American indie. Both of them are completely claustrophobic, the camera is jammed up against the main character all the time, we’re in their faces or hanging over their shoulders the whole time, there might be ten seconds here or there where Rosetta or Keane aren’t in the shot, but that will be because we’re looking through their eyes. Hangover Square is like that, we're squashed up close and personal with big goofy dozy daft alcoholic George Harvey Bone who is besotted, I mean quite utterly gaga, with sometime actress and fulltime casually-vicious alcoholic dropdead gorgeous dimwit Netta Longdon (in my mind played by Helena Bonham Carter but maybe that’s just me - do you think we could get her?). George hangs around with Netta and her admirers, none of them have got any jobs or money, they eke and sponge, eke and sponge. The whole plot – if that is the word - of this thing for 98% of the whole book can be summed up in 2:37 by Frank and Nancy Sinatra: I know I stand in line until you think you have the time to spend an evening with me And if we go someplace to dance, I know that there's a chance you won't be leaving with me And afterwards we drop into a quiet little place and have a drink or two And then I go and spoil it all, by saying somethin' stupid like "I love you" I hope you've never been in a situation like that. Well I got quite impatient, this novel was hammering the same nails in page after page, another round of drinks, another round of humiliations heaped upon poor old George. On and on. MAYBE WHAT THIS NOVEL IS ABOUT : LOOKSISM If it’s not about a very particular social milieu (Earl’s Court seediness, 1939 – the war approaches) or mid-level alcoholism, or mental illness, this novel is about the grim truths of looksism. The only think which Netta has going is her looks, and we are given to understand that she’s a total wow, it’s not just George that thinks so. We have our noses shoved into the ineluctable caste system of looksism, which divides the human race into those who have looks and those who can only look. Human beauty, beloved, adored, feared even, lusted after – the 9s go out with the 9s, the 7s with the 7s, it’s a universal rule, except that the ugly men have discovered that if they make enough money then 4s can go out with 8s or even 9s. But do looks make you happy? We who are without them fervently hope they don’t and then feel mean for thinking such thoughts. Maybe that’s why the myth of Marilyn is so cherished – there was a fabulous looker who was one mixed up shook up girl. The sufferings of George Harvey Bone in his complete prostration before Netta’s beauty reminded me hatefully of periods in my own life I would be happy to have removed by the device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ugh. This novel grinds on and on and on, you get hypnotised, towards an inevitable denouement which is pure pathos, so sad and strong and true. If you like bleak, and who doesn’t, you’ll find it here. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 14, 2013
| Apr 18, 2013
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Mar 24, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0802135781
| 9780802135780
| 3.82
| 7,287
| 1989
| Aug 10, 1998
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Date 15 January 23rd January Time 19:00 – 20.15 Location : The Box Excerpt from interview with P Bryant Detective Munch : Thing is, my literary friend, yo...more Date 15 January 23rd January Time 19:00 – 20.15 Location : The Box Excerpt from interview with P Bryant Detective Munch : Thing is, my literary friend, you got no proof. PB : Proof? Det Munch : Anyone can invent an identity and claim to have read like a zillion books and then post up fake reviews. Anyone. I could pay 15 year olds to do it. PB : Well, so what? That’s the internet for you. Who cares? Det Pembleton : Who cares? Did you hear that John? Who cares? We care. Let me explain a little. This Goodreads thing, it used to be nothing much, a few book geeks with no social life, who gave a tinker’s damn one way or the other. But now, now’s different. Det Munch : Now you have like 20 million people on this site. Now it’s big. Now you get mentions in Fortune magazine. You know Fortune? That’s like when rich people notice. Have you heard of rich people? Yeah. When they notice, it’s important.  Det Pembleton : So we see that you reviewed this Jeanette Winterson novel here, er, “Sexing The Cherry”, and awarded it a whole two stars, I mean, come on buddy, where’s your proof that you even read this damn thing? PB : It was years ago. There’s no proof. You just have to take my word. Det Munch : As a man of honour? PB : Well, er, I probably wouldn’t quite use those words. Det Munch : Well, let’s see if we can figure this thing out. May I direct your attention to these three mug shots. Take your time. Tell us which one is Jeanette Winterson. He takes photos of Jeanette Winterson, Sara Waters and Ellen Degeneres and spreads them on the table. PB : Er – this doesn’t prove anything. Det Pembleton : Not in itself. Let’s say it’s an…indicator. PB stabs blindly at the photo of Ellen Degenares. Det Pembleton : Did you see that, Detective Munch? The interviewee has indicated the photo of Ellen Degeneres who is an American television personality and not an English novelist.  Det Munch : I did see that, Frank. I take that to be … indicative. PB : Anyhow, how did I get here? You guys, you’re Baltimore murder cops. I seen you in that show. Det Munch : We’re on secondment. You’re right, this fake reviewing crime isn’t murder - except in the sense of murdering a writer’s reputation with fake reviews and fake ratings and general fake fakery. You do realise that your fake reviews get Google hits? This is not some nerdy game. This is real life. PB : The last thing I remember I was at home – I heard a hissing noise… it was a kind of gas… coming through my front door keyhole…and I woke up here. I’ve read about this… this is called extraordinary rendition… Det Pembleton : Well, could be extraordinary to you, but not to us. Come on, let’s quit the amusing back and forth – did you really read this novel? PB : Yes! Years ago! Det Munch : And what did you think of it? PB : It was weird and phantasmagorical! Det Munch: Much like her other one The Passion which you also “read” ? PB: Yes – no – yes. Different. But similar. Oh, I don’t know. Det Pembleton : John, let’s leave Mr Bryant to think things over for a minute or so. They leave The Box and join the Goodreads editorial staff who have been observing the interview through the two way mirror. Det Pembleton : He’ll break. They all do, eventually. (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 10, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1447200357
| 9781447200352
| 4.10
| 482
| Feb 05, 1973
| Feb 01, 2013
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This was a really difficult book to read. Because it was quite short, the strong glue the printers used meant that it wouldn’t open fully unless I was...more This was a really difficult book to read. Because it was quite short, the strong glue the printers used meant that it wouldn’t open fully unless I was going to break the spine, which I was loath to do as it’s a brand new copy (unusually for me - I prefer second hand paperbacks, and if there’s marginalia in them so much the better, it’s like stalking the intimate moments of a previous reader. I believe I am not alone in this secret pleasure). So I was forever peering down a waterfall of text disappearing into the dubious central spinal crevice or up the spout of right hand type emerging from the same depths. I doubt this was the effect B S Johnson had in mind. But being the metafiction poster boy he was, he may have appreciated it. BSJ finished this novel in March 1972 – the bulk of it was written in 30 days - and committed suicide by cutting his wrists in the bath in November 1973, so this was his last published novel before his life and mind began to unravel, and you can see if you peer beneath the facetiousness, smirks and self-congratulation which pepper the surface of this novel that a story about a youth who embarks on a private war against established society during which over 20,000 people die, who we would now call a terrorist, indicates surely a form of wish-fulfilment fantasy revenge is going on here, and that BSJ was by no means the happy and contented boho avantist. Not even slightly. This is a slender black comedy which writhes in anguish. Actually, the metafictional stuff was mild and consisted of the author making asides about the fact that we’re reading a novel – ”Christie,” I warned him, “it does not seem to me possible to take this novel much further. I’m sorry.” I’m not sure why BSJ thought this kind of thing was worth doing when Tristram Shandy had done it all and more in the 1760s, not to mention Tom Jones, in which Fielding muses directly to the reader in between chapters about what he should do with his characters, and tries to figure out what the reader would most like to see happen to them – that’s pretty meta if you ask me. And umpteen other examples between the 18th century and 1972. The effect this has is to make the novel not a novel but a diagram of a novel (the plot is a sketch, the characters are thin to the point of emaciation), into which the author wanders and offers comments. And the comments are despairing. I got the feeling that he thought the novel was the only thing worth writing, because it’s a big statement, but he didn’t have any faith in either it or himself to make any statement worth getting out of bed for. There’s an emptiness here, a series of gestures, a sense of complete futility. The end of the novel is a shrug – hey, what the heck. Emoticon with wavy live mouth. Given all of that I was surprised to find out there was a movie of this novel http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213561/ Here’s a song about BSJ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bexd18... This novel gets the Goodreads Big Love.There are various great reviews of it,which I recommend. I did not fall in love, as you see. I think I like BS Johnson more than I like his novels, judging from the two I’ve read and the delightful film he made Fat Man on a Beach (which now seems to been been removed from youtube, grrr.) But don’t let me stop you. He’s definitely worth your time. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jun 03, 2013
| Jun 07, 2013
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Feb 20, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0615612091
| 9780615612096
| 4.10
| 40
| Feb 04, 2010
| Mar 05, 2012
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Only seven days, one week ago it was when skanking home alone in the bitterest of March winds I thought I caught a glimpse of the notorious Arthur Gra...more
Only seven days, one week ago it was when skanking home alone in the bitterest of March winds I thought I caught a glimpse of the notorious Arthur Graham as I passed the reeking alley which leads to the King Billy public house, where no one goes except they who have to. He was hunched up against the wall lighting one cigarette off the end of its predecessor. I turned back in time to see him slither into the King Billy itself. Not being in possession of a loaded pistol or two fists of iron, it was folly therefore to pursue the scumbag into the bowels of the worst pub in Sneinton (the second worst area in Nottingham) but I felt I could not refrain. The sighs of uncounted readers were hissing me onward. Don’t let the bastard escape, they cooed. So close now, so close, they mewed. I shoved the peeling door open and was almost felled by the rank stench of Billydom, the collective murk of the generations of pimps, child molesters, smackheads, crackheads, whackheads, tax gatherers, the halt, the lickspittle and the younger sisters thereof. Not an eye that wasn’t bloodshot. Not a single area of untattooed flesh. Not a fresh face in the whole bedizened roomful. I shovelled aside some limp bundles I took to be several less robust patrons and leaned forward at the bar. “Did you see Arthur Graham come in here just now?” “What’s that, sunshine? Are you police? You don’t look like police but the police don’t look like police these days.” “No, I’m not police. Look.” I showed him my not-police ID. It was a small plastic card with an old photo of me endorsed with the words “I hereby certify the card holder is not employed in any capacity by the police force of Great Britain. “ Signed by the Chief Superintendent of the Met. “Well okay, what you want anyhow? Who’s Arthur Graham?” “This guy” I slapped the usual photo of him on the bar.  “Hmm” said the bartender, “such a handsome devil would be noticed anywhere.” He pointed towards the gents toilets. I squeezed through the heaving mass and stepped round several 12 year olds who were openly fixing up just inside the toilet door. I checked the stalls. Two transvestites, one straight looking office worker, clearly a client, and nothing else except smeared walls and graffiti promising the usual curt versions of paradise. But wait. What was that poking from the bowl in stall number five. A tail… an Arthurian tail, squiggling frantically. I seized this green, glistening, supple muscle. I tried to play the rowdy dowdy do on his scales but he was strong. Not able to haul the Grahamian beast from where he was lodged, I instead gave him a push and clung on. There was a dreadful sucking and slithering and as I looked back I saw the top of the toilet bowl receding, Arthur was pulling me down down down into the coils of piping, through the vast Victorian maze of sewers, down we went at a fierce pace as he thrashed his magnificent tail and as I clung on, riding the beast to who knows where as the detritus of Nottingham flushed around us, the filth, the disastrous dinners, the unwanted pets, the copies of Real Life Lolitas, the broken hearts, the broken arses (and their contents), the promises not worth the paper they were written on, the old songs which were the best, the harried looks, the despairing sex, the fruitless afternoons, the tissues and fissures of ordinary abandonment, the childproofed overdoses of everyday sorrow, the debouched drugs, the contact lenses, the future tenses, the used condoms, the caterwaulings, the cupidity and the lost phone numbers, it was like the excremental version of whirling to Oz on a tornado, but where whirled this strange author-reader crossbreed? We were violently disgorged in what I first took to be the Sargasso Sea but quickly realised was London Docklands. My long tail wriggled sinuously through the tin cans, body parts and rusted supermarket trolleys. My golden slitted eyes regarded the ruined Canary Wharf skyscrapers with mordant pleasure. “So this is what it’s all about, Mr Graham,” I lisped. I had not mastered the tongue yet. It is quite a trick. “Yes, “ he said. “Is it not delightful? Let us get jobs as arbitrageurs and then join a band –“ “I suppose it has to be Whitesnake –“ “sleep with William Burroughs –“ “can’t it be Donna Tartt? No? Edna O’Brien in 1966?” “and wake up in the year 3123…” “You know, “ I said, “this is as good a Friday night as I’ve had in a long time” (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 21, 2013
| Mar 22, 2013
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Jan 29, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0151009988
| 9780151009985
| 3.76
| 75,566
| 1925
| Oct 28, 2002
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THE TERMINATOR 2 OF DOILEYS I can see why people hate Mrs-Dalloway-the-book (there are a fair few this-is-so-boring-I-lit-myself-on-fire kind of one/tw...more THE TERMINATOR 2 OF DOILEYS I can see why people hate Mrs-Dalloway-the-book (there are a fair few this-is-so-boring-I-lit-myself-on-fire kind of one/two star reviews) because Mrs Dalloway-the-book is the Terminator 2 of doileys, ribbons, and fetching hats, the Die Hard 4 of a sunny day in London, 1923, the Apocalypto of curtains and place mats and memories of moonlight boating parties; and the Transformers of wondering if you married the right person. You have to get into Mrs Woolf’s style, which is a nimsywimsymimsy breathless-hush exalted stream of consciousness thing, all the sentences, if that’s what they are, make zigzags like mad flies, they each contain at least 29 commas, the pages zag randomly or not from one character’s brain to another (did you ever see Slacker? Like that, but more British), and as usual in these high falutin affairs, there’s zero story. You want a story? Lowbrow oik! Oh, okay, she’s having a party, and a guy is having problems from shellshock, and then she has the party and people come, rich types. End. Don’t look for anything else. STUCK UP SELF-ADMIRING TORY COW I can also see why you’d hate Mrs Dalloway herself, too, stuck-up self-admiring Tory cow. For the first 50 pages I was really hating on her doileys and her oh-gosh-I-was-so-clever-to-marry-the-right-man untrammelled egotism. Oh, little me, and all of this sparkly stuff, how lucky and deserving I am! She’s more than a little repulsive. But of course not to the people in her life, they’re all like oh Clarissa, let me fondle your doileys. (Except one, hah! But she’s ugly as sin, and a religious nutjob, so, you know, those sorry types are bound not to be in love with Clarissa. )  [not a good picture - Mrs D would think this was VULGAR] Mrs Woolf winds her famous slippery metaphysical twistical delirious poetical lyrical ecstatic style through the minds of around six main characters who orbit each other during this one June day, a solar system of social engagement. What you have going on is 1923-style 360 degree feedback appraisals! Yes, that intolerable oppressive management tool of the 21st century is right here, as all the characters relentlessly judge each other and are judged in turn, and most, even dear Clarissa, come in for some industrial strength sneering by their nearest and dearest, they all condescend and look down upon each other, and then they flip and start making googoo eyes, it’s all a bit emotionally high-strung and vapid. Anyway this lot are my class enemy (they haven’t gone away) (but also they did create 90% of the great art, or pay the artists to create it, so I am a bit conflicted about the upper class) - but I was kind of hoping there would be a Russian communist with a bomb to blow them all to buggery when they all got to the party but it’s not that sort of novel. Instead it’s actually THE TAO OF WOOLF The warp and the weft, the weep and the woof, life itself, never so well expressed – here’s Clarissa: She feared time itself, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced, how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl. That’s it – that’s this novel ONLY FOUR STARS - HUH? I have to admit that quite a bit of the brain-delving and soul-surfing (and there is nothing here which isn’t) made no literal sense to me, I just could not follow what was being said & would love to ask a major Dalloway fan exactly what this or that passage was on about. So it does - towards the end - slightly turn into exquisite Woolfian background music. It is for that reason I cannot grant the elusive fifth star. THE WANDERING ROCKS One year before Mrs D, Joyce published Ulysses, and VW had a copy. One of the chapters in Ulysses is The Wandering Rocks in which several characters peregrinate through Dublin, and Joyce streams their consciousnesses, jumping from person to person. And of course, like Ulysses, Mrs D happens all on one day. And Bloomsday and Dallowday are set in capital cities in the month of June. Other than that, VW’s version of the interior monologue is completely utterly different. DAVID BOWIE IMPLIED At one point a random young woman down in London for a job thinks she’ll remember this day, her first day in the big city. Fifty years from now she’ll still remember it, she thinks. So it being 1923 in the novel, that means she’ll be remembering it in June 1973 while Life on Mars by David Bowie or Skweeze Me Pleeze Me by Slade plays from a nearby radio. There’s an odd thought.  WOOLFISH GRIN VW is even, rarely, funny - a young man falls for his English tutor : He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. (less) | Notes are private!
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Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread. Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy; t...more Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread. Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Psalm 53. ****** I cannot be the only reader of Bad News who by page 20 had already cast the gold-medallist of supercilious contempt Richard E Grant of Withnail and I  as Patrick Melrose, the ghastly rich 22 year old English junkie. As soon as young Melrose stares into the room, his eyes like slits, his pallor of the grave, his disdain strong enough to support a family of five, and says "I don't fucking believe it" Richard E Grant's freezing upper-class tones are in your head to the last page. Which is a good thing. Sample Withnail dialogue: Withnail: [on the way to the car] At some point or another I want to stop and get hold of a child. Marwood: What do you want a child for? Withnail: To tutor it in the ways of righteousness, and procure some uncontaminated urine. Later Withnail: [seeing a road sign reading "ACCIDENT BLACK SPOT. DRIVE WITH EXTREME CARE"] Look at that, accident black spot! These aren't accidents! They're throwing themselves into the road gladly! Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness! Sample Melrose observation: Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling in the gutter in his wake. Later at a restaurant : "Would you care for a dessert, sir?" A rather bizarre question. How was he supposed to "care for" a dessert? Did he have to visit it on Sundays? Send it a Christmas card? This is a black hole junkie memoir presented as a novel, three days in the life, where Patrick's dad has died in New York and he has to go and collect the body and get it cremated. Patrick has had a difficult relationship with his father. He's lugging a box full of his father's ashes around New York and a thought suddenly strikes him: Patrick realised that it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit or insulted. These early experiences have soured his demeanor: He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people. It was utterly disgusting. Patrick is always alone, especially when he's with people. There is no other in this novel. Only I. It's the Story of I, the Story of an I, a junkie I, the delirious whirl of fixes and highs and rushes and comedowns, and hold on, aren't we bored of all that? But great writing is never the what, only the how. Not what you are talking about, but how. As I read this deliciously disgusting stuff a song sang itself in my ear : I want to tell you. My head is filled with things to say. But when you're near, all those things they seem to. Slip away. Actually that's the precise opposite of Patrick. He doesn't want to tell anyone. He wishes, like a previous champion hater, that the human race had only one neck and he had his hands round it. Except he'd never do that, he'd be nodding out in a bath and nearly drowning. There would be someone unconscious in the bedroom but he wouldn't remember who it was or that they were there. Patrick is so rich he has three Faberge eggs with his crispy bacon, he flies to New York on Concorde, he shacks up at a five star hotel and he goes scoring in Alphabet City just for some fun colour contrast. Cue missed main vein, horrific black arm bulging, fever in the scum brown bowl, sort of thing. Patrick the dreadful junkie considers himself superior to some others he knows: At least he wasn't fixing in his groin. Gouging around unsuccessfully among those elusive veins could make one question the whole intravenous method of absorbing drugs. Yes, I imagine it would. There are way too many memoirs of chemical misbehaviour already in print, tiresome tales of debauch, debouch and degradation and who needs another? – my own picks to click would be Wonderland Avenue by Danny Sugerman (the shower scene which has more blood than the one in Hitchcock's Psycho is indelible, my dears, indelible) Junky by Billy Burroughs Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – stop what you're doing and read that one next! You already did? Okay! Fear and Lothing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson All comedies, all very funny, you have to laugh. And all sort of true. So, I can't sell you Bad News as anything other than another fierce example of why many thoughtful people have concluded that the only decent thing left for the human race to do is to get off Planet Earth now, just leave, don't look back, give the place back to the voles and the meerkats and the manatees and the pottos and the aardvarks and the Tasmanian devils and the golden tamarins  and the trapdoor spiders and all those creatures not cursed with the self-consciousness which is the glory and the horror of humans and which makes a Dachau for every cathedral and a Tuol Sleng for every symphony, the it seems to me inseparable glory and horror, to think you can have one without the other is utopian. I knock a star off for a long passage which is a blatant steal from the Circe chapter of Ulysses and for some really crass caricatures of rich Americans, come on St Aubyn, you don't need to do that, but otherwise, if you like the blackest of comedy, yes. Onward to the third Melrose novel. 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Jan 22, 2013
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THE BRITISH CLASS SYSTEM At the top there is the Monarchy and the aristocracy. They're all still there, no one has gone away. The 14th Duke of Banffshi...more THE BRITISH CLASS SYSTEM At the top there is the Monarchy and the aristocracy. They're all still there, no one has gone away. The 14th Duke of Banffshire and all the scurvy crew. The only good news is - they're not allowed to hunt foxes any more ! Yay - one and a half cheers for democracy! So that's the Upper Class. Next step down is the complicated Middle Class which is divided into three : Upper middle : these are your professions, of course. Judges, lawyers, bankers, etc. There was a radio interview I heard recently, with a Member of Parliament. He was talking anonymously about the need to increase MPs' pay. The trouble is, you can't talk about MPs' pay in public because the public hate us, and think we are paid a lot. But really, he said, you don't want Members of Parliament who think that £65,000 ($104,000) is a lot of money. Well, of course you don't. (So that's me out!) The upper middle class are toffs and go to public (= private) schools. They're all in the Tory party except a few who thought they'd take over the Labour Party too. The middle middle class is people with careers. The women in the middle middle go crazy trying to "have it all" without the nannies that the upper middle get automatically. The lower middle are teachers and librarians and policemen and other lowly types who just do a job, it couldn't be called a career. It's the middle middles who have careers. There's an annoying political cliche constantly used here which is "the squeezed middle". Here they are, in the middle. Next step down is the Working Class - ah, let's celebrate working class values, like getting drunk and and abusing people and playing darts and hating foreigners. (A reference to London Fields!) This class is divided into two : The Respectable Working Class. These have got jobs and get up at ungodly hours to go to them, even when it's really cold. They all love sport and telly but they don't go to the pub so much any more. Pubs are closing right left and centre. They all go to Spain for their summer holiday. They have such a laugh. The Unrespectable Working Class, also known as The Underclass. Oh what problem they are! They don't have jobs. They could if they wanted to, but they don't want to, thangyewveryfookinmuch. So all the immigrants from Eastern Europe do those jobs (the worst jobs). They like to take giant amounts of drugs and sling mattresses into the front yard. They wheel and deal and commit wholesale benefit fraud. They are our trailer trash, except they don't live in trailers. They don't have families. They have weird accidental tribal aggregations - so in one house there will be a woman, her step dad, his girlfriend, that girlfriend's kids, three of the actual woman's kids, the others being in care, an occasional boyfriend, two half brothers, their girlfriends, you get the picture. Now, this is the British class system, but I think it is very similar everywhere you go, with the exception of the Upper Class. Most countries sliced off the heads of their aristocracy in a rush of joyful democratic emotion some centuries ago. So, my problem with London Fields, which was exactly the same problem as I had with White Teeth, which I also gave up, even though both novels are very well written, is that I don't like what happens when upper middle class writers write about working class characters. They write about them as comedy. They can't help it. It's always comedy. Often very black comedy, as here. To upper middle class writers, the working class is always funny. *** Postscript : they tell me class mobility has practically ground to a halt in the last decade, and I can believe it. It was always impossible to ascend to the Upper Class, you had to shoe King Henry II's horse in 1311 or something. You can rise up the middle class if you're mighty smart and ambitious. And you can go to university and lurch from the respectable working class to the lower middle class, as I did. That's about it. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 01, 1998
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I don't know what I was quite expecting here. It's a psychological horror story with a lot of comic relief, in the form of the endless witty paradoxes...more
I don't know what I was quite expecting here. It's a psychological horror story with a lot of comic relief, in the form of the endless witty paradoxes. After page 30 you are thinking that if Lord Henry makes just one more crack you're going to knock his monocle off his family crest and grind it underfoot. Oscar often clearly thinks he's being hilarious with his wit with a capital W – and maybe it's me, but Oscar Wilde often sounds like a parody of Oscar Wilde, like in the Monty Python sketch WHISTLER: Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss. (gasps) THE PRINCE OF WALES: What? WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's. OSCAR WILDE: I, um, I, ah, I merely meant, Your Majesty, that, ah, you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark. THE PRINCE OF WALES: Oh, ho-ho, very good. But of course, some of it is very good stuff : The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. The fact was, one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband. One of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies but are thoroughly disliked by their friends. But his character Lord Henry goes on and on with the wit and the aphorisms She is a peacock in everything but beauty…she tried to found a salon and only succeeded in opening a restaurant…. One can't stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. And you get a lot of guff about women No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society. (that last one reminds me of the weird quote from Captain Beefheart – "There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers". Oh, how rude of me – Oscar, allow me to introduce Captain Beefheart.  Captain Beefheart, may I present Mr Oscar Wilde – I believe you may have heard the name.  )Then there's the necessarily undeclared but pretty open gayness. How the two older men worship this young Adonis Dorian – they openly salivate! - and how he reciprocates too. He says to Lord Henry 30 minutes after meeting him : I feel I must come with you. Do let me. And you will promise to talk to me all the time? No one talks so wonderfully as you do. What a flirt. I don't think boys talk to each other like this anymore. They're a little more discreet these days. So as the story saunters along, and at a couple of points you think there never will be a story, the banter and the brittle conversations die away and Dorian, his portrait miraculously ageing instead of him, realises he can "sin" without consequence. He turns into a vicious voluptuary, a promiscuous profligate, an effulguent epicurean and a licentious libertine. In time the word gets round, and society reacts with the strongest possible disapproval : He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club… and it was said that on one occasion when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. That would cut a fellow to the very quick, though, wouldn't it. What would be the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Both Dorian and the novel turn strange. You might think that the life of a young handsome sensualist would consist of orgies and opium, roofies and deflorations, and maybe a black mass thrown in for kicks, with goats and orphans, but you would be wrong. Dorian plunges into a life of strange obsessions – for ten pages we get elaborate lists of a) perfumes, b) jewels, c) tapestries, and d) world music – yes, that came as a surprise to me too : He used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes So WOMAD then.  Dorian collects instruments like the furuparis, human bone flutes, sonorous green jaspers, the clarin, the teponazali, some yotl-bells and a Stratocaster made from the skulls of Tibetan lamas. No, I made up the last one. But this is a real quote : "he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments". I was kind of disappointed. Is this really debauchery? I don't think Ozzy Osbourne would recognise it as such. With the change of gear in the book, we find that Oscar can come out with some quite extraordinary sentences. Here is a favourite : There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Oscar's solitary novel is a gothic tale of a man who came to think that he could commit sin without consequence. And he couldn't. It's either curiously conservative – God will smite you down, there's no escape, and nor should there be – or it's a coded message of revolution : the idle rich have got it coming to them. I think Oscar became a convert to some form of socialism round about the time he wrote his novel, so I'm going with the latter interpretation. It suits me. I think there are fifty shades of Dorian Gray even now cashing in their half million dollar bonuses and thinking that they'll be young and invulnerable forever. But vengeance will come like a thief in the night. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1897535325
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| 3.56
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| Oct 15, 2010
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This is such a prettily designed little book of sudden appalling death, exploding skulls, pitchforks in legs and geysers of viscera incarnadine that I...more
This is such a prettily designed little book of sudden appalling death, exploding skulls, pitchforks in legs and geysers of viscera incarnadine that I just had to take a step back. Anvil Press of Vancouver are probably not expecting to sell millions of this book, all due respect, yet they make it look great, feel great, they use quality paper and they include lots of gorgeous grungy photos throughout. Meanwhile, the latest Stephen King comes out with a crap cover and looks and feels like any other indistinguishable unit of production. I enjoyed SK's 700 page monster and Tony Burgess's 91-page sliver but I know which one I'm going to keep on my shelves. Let's hear it for small publishers. They've got soul. Well, I say I enjoyed this, but maybe not quite the right word. This is an early Cronenberg movie like Shivers or Rabid, or maybe Romero's The Crazies, rewritten in an amphetamine rush by someone overdosing on Omensetter's Luck, Annie Proulx and 30 modern poets who I don't know because I never read modern poetry. The face is what Joseph expects. Roman numerals on the hour marker and a complete non-numerated minute track. It is framed in a hinge brass bezel that sits snugly in a wood bezel. Beneath this he sees less. The pendulum assembly with its brass manta, stops, and springs. He is aware of the mighty and gold lenticular bob as it is, a genital to say and a genital to watch. Page 58 Genital? One review on GR says that this was a bad book because all the chapters are the same – a bunch of random people are in their houses or somewhere and a bunch of random people come up and slaughter them. This is like complaining that Dracula has too many vampires in it. Also, moaning that you never get to find out why the entire population of the small rural Canadian town of Ravenna wishes to slaughter by all possible means the entire population of the small rural Canadian town of Collingswood is not the point. Or the point is that there is no point. As Van Morrison says in one of his most philosophically profound songs, "there's no why, there just is". The light in the room has shifted, the sun is going down. The top of the compost pile will know this, but further down, there may be no evidence of nightfall whatsoever. Here things are combined, here microbial night is the same march of heat as the day. Heat generated by the mouths of billions of things and their bright haunches bearing down to fecalize a thick, wet bottomless world. A world as vast and airless inside as it is across its face and even out from itself, everything, lightless and touching, a solid contiguity of inside and outside, of trace and deep heart. Purple beets are at home here. Heavy smouldering soups. Lettuce fance and frilly raspberries are now heavy snot mines. A magic tinsel interior. Haunches? Well, I will be so bold as to say that you don't get that kind of stuff in most horror novels. And yes, I might say to Tony Burgess that he can get awfully high falutin just before a slug rips someone's abdomen in two. His trick is a familiar avanty-gardy one of giving you the intimate details of a scene but withholding the context so you're always scrabbling around to figure out what's happening, where we are now, and who are these people. But now I'm starting to complain about vampires in Dracula. There's one chapter which is truly fantastic and is just a 5 page vignette called "The Entertainment District". It's impossible to figure out who is the first person voice, it's kind of like the voice of death itself if death was a ten year old girl, or something like that, I dunno, but it could be the most brilliant thing I read all year. Very weird and pretty much wonderful. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1620504765
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Here's a self-published novella all about the near future when robots have made 50% of the workforce redundant and terrorists are fighting back agains...more
Here's a self-published novella all about the near future when robots have made 50% of the workforce redundant and terrorists are fighting back against Big Robotics and politicians are being assassinated and – yes, it's that topia we all call dys. This little book got a five star review from Bird Brian but I have to respectfully disagree with my friend Brian in this case, a thing I earnestly strive to avoid under normal circumstances. Jason Mallory's ideas are a little wild 'n'crazy (manmade viruses are unleashed to cull the human population because from the rich guy's point of view there's a lot of surplus population especially in South America) but nothing we haven't come across in a trillion good, bad and ugly science fiction stories. But that's okay – I even agree with some of his notions about the rich of the Western world, as I said in my review of The Privileges. That is not the problem. Thing is, how can I put this delicately – er – er – I can't! – Mr Mallory is not that good at the actual thing of writing itself, the thing where you pluck these tired old used-up old threadbare English words out of the ether and place them adjacently on the page or screen and mysteriously make the magic that crackles those sexy synapses in the brainial lobes of your lovely readers such that their little toes curl and they want to read more and they are having what they call a good time. I note that Mr Mallory has written another self-published book, called For Joy and Wisdom, in which he recounts his adventures and thoughts he had whilst skateboarding round Europe. Check out those goodreads reviews! Every one says "I was looking forward to this, but by page 20 I was hating it – this guy is hopeless - one star". Okay, there are some two star reviews because some people are much nicer than me. From page 44 – a presidential candidate is making a speech : America has been swayed. Swayed by a system that had once served it well, but which has now breed a beast without a leash, (the assassin in the back balcony begins to piece together his rifle), one which we must now bite down on and overcome [yes, bite down on that beast!] Just as the people have equal votes, so to should they have equal shares of the robotic labor force, and thus equal votes for what their shares work to produce. This check-and-balance will keep the people directed as a democracy, as opposed to subject to the direction of a private interest controlling most of our labor. As robots have become cost effective over humans… (and on like that for a couple of pages) Complaining at length about a self-published novella feels like strangling a kitten and it's only three days before Christmas too. Have I no heart? Apparently not. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 4.22
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Marco Polo : Now I shall tell you of the beautiful city of Nottingham where the buildings are made mostly of blue glass, onyx and sausagemeat. The men...more Marco Polo : Now I shall tell you of the beautiful city of Nottingham where the buildings are made mostly of blue glass, onyx and sausagemeat. The men of the city trade in fur, spices and photographs of each other with their respective spouses. All the men have large phalluses, sometimes so large they must cut pieces out of the tops of their front doors before they can exit their houses in the morning. This is a city of dreamers and anthropophagi, of astronomers and chess players, all with the largest of phalluses. The women of the city are the most voluptuous and lively. They wear clothes. Many times I have observed them gambolling and performing handsprings for sheer joy of being in Nottingham. The dogs of Nottingham are all sly and well-read. They play canasta and billiards mostly, but also trade junk bonds and enjoy swapping photographs of the men of Nottingham with their respective spouses. But describing the cats of Nottingham will tax me to the very limit of my powers, O mighty Lord - Kublai Khan : One moment, Sr. Polo. You will see the sun is high. I must now bathe in Turkish Delight and oxtail soup. We will recommence in the cool of the evening. Marco Polo : I await your pleasure, my Lord. Kublai Khan to his chief fixer the Grand Weirdo of All The Kingdoms : Later this afternoon I wish you to tell Sr Marco I have died. (less) | Notes are private!
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As you know, Mr Phillips, a portly middle aged accountant, the quintessence of dullness, has been made redundant the previous Friday but hasn't got th...more
As you know, Mr Phillips, a portly middle aged accountant, the quintessence of dullness, has been made redundant the previous Friday but hasn't got the nerve up to tell his family, and this is now Monday, so he toddles off as if going to work as usual, and spends the whole day pootling around in London and thinking stuff. That's it. That's all of it. Mr Phillips is the new Leopold Bloom for sure. The cast of his thoughts, the somewhat curious musings on this and that, are exactly like our Leopold but they're spelled out in complete sentences instead of the staccato stream of conciousness Joyce does. And like Poldy, Mr Phillips is an all-round decent bloke who thinks wistfully about sex at times. E.g. he muses about the number of topless and nude models there must be to supply the magazines and newspapers (note for non British readers : there are national "newspapers" such as the Sport and the Daily Star which publish nude photographs of girls every day – this might be a thing peculiar to Britain, I'm not sure) : So assume, again super-conservatively, at least twenty-five magazines coming out every week, with say ten girls per issue each, which is 25 x 10 = 250 naked girls per week times 52 is 50 times 250 is 12500 plus 2 times 250 is 500 = 13000. When you add the newspaper figure this gives a very very conservative estimate of 3744 plus 13000 = 16744, which is the number of British women happy to take their clothes off for money per annum. … 17000 people would be a town one and a half times the size of St Ives where they took their first holiday after Martin was born I think Mr P doesn't take into account the probable non-Britishness of some of these models, but more pertinently, the likelihood that a number of them will surely do multiple sessions for the various mags, so the numbers are probably overstated. But anyway, we take his comical point. The novel is set in 1995, before the internet got going properly - imagine his frantic calculations now – It appears that the entire female population of the Ukraine between the ages of 18 and 30 are naked all the time. No, that can't be right! And there are various comments on non-sexual matters which are quite nice, such as We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did (which I'd be glad if it was true but am not sure it is) but really, this novel is a rather thin margherita pizza you know. There's absolutely no pepperoni, anchovies, ground beef, mushrooms, or olives. Not even any Parmesan cheese. Pootling around, going to London places, thinking slightly dull, slightly melancholic thoughts. If his brain was on the radio you'd be flipping the dial. I may point out that none other than Germaine Greer thinks it's a masterpiece (blurb on the front) and none other than Zadie Smith wishes she'd written it (blurb on the front) and the mighty London Review of Books says Exceptionally funny and often astoundingly intelligent… a contemporary Tristram Shandy And mere I can only flap my mouth and say a) no, it's not; b) no, it's not; and c) no, it's really really not. Two and a half stars.(less) | Notes are private!
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Dec 10, 2012
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| 190315510X
| 9781903155103
| 3.97
| 3,934
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This sweet little cute little naughty little novel from 1938, with its nudity, its cocaine and its multiple sexual partners (all before page 20) unfor...more
This sweet little cute little naughty little novel from 1938, with its nudity, its cocaine and its multiple sexual partners (all before page 20) unfortunately throws me into the old quandary which goes – what if you're in the middle of a grand evening with some of your best pals and you're as happy as Larry, whoever he was, having a great time, and then one of them out of the blue makes a racist remark? What do you do? Stop the party? Denounce your friend? Turn a lovely evening into a memorable horror-show about which people will wince for years? I was motoring through this book and thinking it was kind of a British counterpart to Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – well, actually, it was The Monkees to Anita Loos' Beatles, but still good fun, as The Monkees are, when Miss Pettigrew on page 162 offers some advice to Miss LaFosse, who is trying to choose between two suitors : "Now the first one, he was kind too," said Miss Pettigrew earnestly, "but well, my dear. I wouldn't advise marrying him. I don't like to jump to conclusions but I think there was a little Jew in him. He wasn't quite English. And, well, I do think when it comes to marriage it's safer to stick with your own nationality." "Certainly," said Miss LaFosse, demurely. Oh yes, that came 12 pages after this – here's one of the suitors speaking : "Now Delysia's a little devil and there's times I could flay her alive, and obviously she needs a little physical correction, but I'm the only right man to do it." So, at what point do you shrug and say well, this is before all that political correctness, so you have to – er, roll with the punches (ooh that doesn't sound right) – er, I mean you have to give them a bit of leeway, er don't you? The past is another country and all that? Well, I didn't leave the party, I finished the book, there were no embarassing scenes, but I don't think me and Winifred Watson will be meeting up again any time soon. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 25, 2012
| Nov 27, 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
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| 0141031824
| 9780141031828
| 3.94
| 5,103
| Feb 12, 2008
| May 01, 2009
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What does it take to abandon a 711 page novel on page 458? After all there are only – er – 253 more pages to go. Finish it! No…! The thing is, I bough...more
What does it take to abandon a 711 page novel on page 458? After all there are only – er – 253 more pages to go. Finish it! No…! The thing is, I bought a bookcase this week – ah, how beautiful it is. Not one of those damned filthy flat-packs, no. This one was carpentered by doughty craftsmen and delivered in one piece to my very door. So now I have all my unread books collected together in one room. My God – there are so many of them. Frankly I had no idea. I think I have been going mouseclick crazy. And most of these are from Amazon, which is not, as I thought it was, a benign organisation which provides work for marginal people in the Brazilian rainforest at all, it's a giant enterprise which has the morals of a praying mantis ("Amazon.co.uk, the British division of the firm, is under scrutiny by UK tax authorities for its affairs over a six-year period, beginning in 2004…Amazon.co.uk’s latest accounts reveal that it did not pay a single penny of British corporation tax in either 2010 or 2011"). And that's the problem – it's so easy to start riffing on bookcases and Amazon and corporate responsibility and other random subjects, every stand-up comedian does this, and Steve Toltz is a stand-up comedian masquerading as a novelist. As such, he's okay. Not bad. But he uses all his best one-liners in the first 200 pages. For example : The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present. These days, when a war is on, "heroism" seems to mean "attendance". Flowers really are lovely but not lovely enough to excuse the suffocating volume of paintings and poems inspired by them while there are still next to no paintings and poems of children throwing themselves off cliffs. I love that "next to no". You can see it's all a bit on the sour, mordant, deflating side – all right, this entire book is COMPLETELY on the sour, mordant, depressing side - because this is largely a comedy of sorts about mental illness, depression, anxiety and the like. The story is really fake, a silly cartoony not-meant-to-be-believable series of plot-like lunges all about a kid with problems growing up with his father who has even more problems and a presumed-dead uncle who had the most problems of the lot. None of the characters have the least appearance of life, they are manic stick-figures inhabited by the author's incessant, bellicose, blaring riffing on all the standard young male stand-up comic targets – school, drugs, lack of sex, fathers, police, school – when the comedy gives out, you get faux philosophising for a few pages. A Fraction of the Whole is just so blokeish, and as many readers point out, all the main characters, the son, the father, the uncle, speak in exactly the same maximum-volume voice. Which is the voice of Steve Toltz. I gave up when the character of Reynold Hobbs came along. This is a Rupert Murdoch stand-in – "the richest man in Australia". I couldn't take another 200 pages of sidesplitting savage satire of rich bastards. I checked my side. There was not the merest trace of a split. I checked the other. Nope. I looked at my new bookcase (which fills the room with the sweet aroma of varnish and wood). It sang its siren song. Three stars for the 458 pages I read. You can't deny the manic energy of Steve Toltz' desire to write a lot. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 07, 2012
| Nov 17, 2012
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Nov 07, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1926851110
| 9781926851112
| 3.27
| 266
| Apr 14, 2011
| May 03, 2011
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Yes oh all right huh no...no, surely - oh I see, no I don't see – what? All of them? Who's – oh yes. No! he would not do that. Ow, that must have – ge...more Yes oh all right huh no...no, surely - oh I see, no I don't see – what? All of them? Who's – oh yes. No! he would not do that. Ow, that must have – get him! No, her, not him. Ulp ergh. Too gynaecological! Dead Ringers meets Deliverance meets The Thing? Ha ha. What's this? God? God? Ridiculous. Author gone mad. This is the perfect Christmas present for your maiden aunt – the one you hope will die soon and leave you her house. Might speed up the process. Eurgh, I did not need that. Oh – aargh – maaa urgh. Ulp ulp mulp pulp gulp. Funny how they often have spindly little legs. I just ate dinner. Yech yech. Still God. Amazing gross, how sweet the sound that saved a retch like me. Ha ha, this is mad. It's driving me mad. Does this make any sense? At all? Oh yeah like that would happen. Enter a crowd of peasants. Christmas peasants! I've seen episodes of Tellytubbies that had more comprehensible plots. Come on, where's the spaceship? Get outta here. This is just like a Doctor Who story with no Doctor Who and a lot more ick. Get me outta here. Preposterous! Poppycock! Creepy preposterous gynaecological poppycock with reeking fluids that is. Correct name for this novel : EWWWTOPIA (less) | Notes are private!
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| Dec 15, 2012
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Oct 25, 2012
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| 3.77
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I read this in one insomniac go (last night), it was like eating a whole box of chocolate coated scorpions, crunch crunch, their little exoskeletons s...more
I read this in one insomniac go (last night), it was like eating a whole box of chocolate coated scorpions, crunch crunch, their little exoskeletons shattering on my palate and the poison flooding all my internal organs and me saying mmm-mmm, more please. How Edward St Aubyn managed to dodge my book radar for so long is a mystery, I may have to complain to the shop where I bought it. He's deliciously horrible and horribly delicious. Essentially this is book one of a five-book tone poem of steady focussed hatred directed against his own upper class family and (as I understand it, in later books) himself. And of course the English upper class at large. In interviews he states that the five Melrose novels are all based on his own life. One interviewer mentioned that he has an older sister who never appears in the books – he said "It's the highest compliment I can pay her". Ha, yes, I see his point. So you may see these novels as the misery memoir-as-art. This first one is set in the early 1970s when Edward/Patrick Melrose was five years old. The cast is small : three couples, one boy, one servant. (And a tree-frog and some ants). Although I did enjoy this small forceful geyser of gracefully described viciousness and I will be reading the others, I did wonder if once more my theory of what novels do was proved again – novels describe the many ways in which human beings are dreadful to each other. That's all. And this one does exactly that. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 24, 2012
| Nov 25, 2012
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Oct 01, 2012
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| 0316178322
| 9780316178327
| 3.93
| 5,310
| 2011
| 2011
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THE PALE KING I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!” (I...more THE PALE KING I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!” (In this poem by John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a symbol of the Internal Revenue Service.) * Well, it's an appropriate day to be reviewing The Pale King. Look at today's news headlines, here in the UK. They couldn't be duller! Plans announced to end confusion over complex domestic fuel tariffs EU heads agree on new bank supervision rules Ministers criticise banking regulators over RBS purchase of ABN Amro Okay! Let's go. Right there on page one, alright, page 3 actually if you're pedantic, and if you're not pedantic then please stay FAR away from this novel, which is a full-throttle celebration of pedantry, amongst many other things, and doesn't have a plot, which I know many readers hanker for, is this : invaginate volunteer beans What a lovely phrase. Come on, let's have a few more – on page 5 : A staggering girl underhanding you nuts (that's a description of a stewardess on a very small plane!). Another one, a bit longer : The birds at dusk and the smell of snapped pine and a younger one's cinnamon gum. The shimmying motions resemble those of a car travelling at high speeds along a bad road, making the Buick's static aspect dreamy and freighted with something like romance or death in the gaze of the girls who squat at the copse's risen edge, appearing dyadic and eyes half again as wideand solemn, watching for the sometime passage of a limb's pale shape past a window (once a bare foot flat against it and itself atremble), moving incrementally forward and down each night in the week before true spring, soundlessly daring one anotherto go get up close to the heaving car and see in, which the only one who finally does sothen sees naught but her own wide eyes reflected as from inside the glass comes a cry she knows too well, which wakes her again each time across the trailer's cardboard wall. I could copy pages of this stuff out with pleasure, about 25% of the book is like that, but we must get on. Hustle, bustle. One thing novels do, which they've always done, and it might be not one thing but the thing, is drag in enormous chunks of human experience for our contemplation, to try to make some kind of sense of. They set you behind the eyes of a multiplicity of characters, who usually aren't like ourselves at all except in a you are me and we are all together kind of way, and The Pale King is no exception, it is dragging in the subject of stultifyingly tedious deskwork for our edification, which actually means, since also, there is nothing you could mistake for a plot even if you have really poor eyesight and the characters fade in and out randomly, that The Pale King is more like our own lives than a lot of other novels where you get things actually happening and outcomes and motivations made clear and exciting events like kissing and policemen and all that. We will always need novels because we will always need to compare realities, yours with mine and theirs, and because we need to counteract our own technologically-induced solipsism, which you might say is an odd thing to say, since non-readers think of readers as somewhat on the introverted-solipsistic side, but you are not alone when reading, you are the opposite, you're right inside someone else's thought, an intimate relationship you hardly get anywhere else. What you're reading really is what the author thought. But otherwise The Pale King does pretty much the opposite of all other novels, it's about all the stuff novelists avoid like the plague, it revels in boring technical jargon, it bathes you in excruciating detail, people say shit like "Here they get standard kicks from Martinsburg, plust ESTs, plus exam requests from CID. They do fats that St Louis doesn't even bother to open they're so fat. They do contract work for Corporate Audit when a CA goes multiyear. The whole thing's almost Phillygrade." I will be frank – if you take the 25% of this novel which isn't like that, isn't all about the hapless wigglers, is about, instead, the bizarre story of the boy who wished to press his lips to every part of his own body (he begins this task by giving himself a spinal injury), or chapter 8 (early life of Toni Ware), all this other non-IRS stuff, what you have there is the beginning of one of the all time great American novels. But that is not the novel DFW wanted to write. Unfortunately for me! He wanted to write this one, or some approximation thereof, since it's unfinished. Reading and reviewing TPK is a double problem, the same one posed by the monologues of Spalding Gray (which also revel in run-on sentences and "tornadic" presentation; and both witty brilliant men bursting with life and ideas in their art, and suffering chronic depression in their life and presenting us with this painful conundrum) plus the other one you get from Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone and Dickens' Edwin Drood. You just don't know if some sections were first drafts which he would have fixed. One character, for instance, repeats the phrase "Type of thing" so many times it becomes enraging and puerile. But maybe that was his intended effect. And maybe he would have rewritten that section. Another instance is chapter 46, a 60 page conversation between a devastatingly beautiful woman and a complete dork. To steal a line from that well-known sitcom Friends (!I know!), it's not that this chapter is bad, it's that it's so bad it makes me want to push my finger through my eye into my brain and swirl it around. So yes, there are multiple problems with this document called The Pale King. If I didn't know that DFW intended his novel to be "a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens" (DFW quoted by the editor) then I'd be describing the whole thing as like watching a big beautiful bird with a broken wing making numerous painful attempts to get airborne but always crashing back and trying again. Just when you think the novel has found the take-off point, it stops and reboots. I only found one single bad review of this novel, in the Washington Post, which was saying its publication was merely a cynical cash-in, and unworthy. I disagree. But I also disagree with the reviewers who find traces of grand themes and big points here. I don't think Wallace got that far. It seems this thing would have needed to be another thousand-pager. It's possible he WAS going to make such points as that government bureaucracy is actually a bastion against chaos and not the enemy it is knee-jerkily scapegoated as; that there was a battle for the soul of the IRS going on in the 1980s; and that this battle was joined by IRS wigglers who had curious and very mild super-powers (two such people are mentioned); or that Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting. And surely we are getting close to some kind of declaration of intent in the following great quote from a substitute lecturer : I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic...gentlemen: here is a truth : enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is...No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it, no one is interested. And later, on p 438 : It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. (Note – I have seen that given as the explanation for Stalin's mysterious ascent in the Bolshevik party. None of the other revolutionaries could be bothered with the bureaucratic grinding involved in actually running the party, but he could – nicknamed Stone-arse for his ability to sit at his desk for hours. He could have been a great wiggler.) So – this could have been a towering novel but what we actually have is a hotch-potch. There are stretches of insanely tiresome dialogues, there are beautiful vignettes, there is deadpan satire and there are really long sentences. Do I recommend it? Well…. You know, what can I say except Invaginate volunteer beans! ***************************************** Some previous notes which can now be ignored. Half-way! A Guardian review of TPK said : . There's a wonderful 100-page monologue in the middle of the book describing a man's quasi-religious awakening from slacker "wastoid" to the high calling of accountancy, after an accidental encounter with a Jesuit teacher. There's a stunning passage about men on a work break: they're just standing outside talking about nothing in particular, but the few pages nail a condition of bleak office-life vacancy with definitive accuracy. Alas, I didn't find the 100 page monologue wonderful (except for little tiny bits) or the work break chapter stunning. What I did find is that our author by the use of multi-layered irony is able to have his cake and eat it too. In the 100 page monologue the at-that-point unnamed Chris Fogle grinds on and on about several tedious topics in awful and improbable detail (unless he's the reincarnantion of Funes the Memorious, which maybe he is) - his father's dress sense, his recreational drug intake, blah blah - all punctuated with the phrase "I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well" at frequent intervals. His locutions are clumsy, no raconteur is he, a depressing kind of guy with an autistic-spectrum tendency to geek out for pages and pages about IRS procedures and other similar stuff. Then, in the next but one chapter, the fake David Foster Wallace pops up in the by now not unexpected post-modern way and complains about the previous chapter! I'm not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every last fact and thing in photorealist detail. The human mind doesn't work that way and everybody knows it...At the same time I'm not going to waste time noodling about every last gap and imprecision in my own memory, a prime cautionary example of which is "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle's vocational soliloquy "DFW" then calls Chris Fogle a "maundering grandstander" and I'd have to agree with that. It's not by any means all grim, of course, but the bits where I'm perking up and exclaiming "wow this guy can really write" are few and far between. ************** First 100 pages - progress report ! I'm getting the very strong impression that DFW was a writer of immense gifts and brains who never really found his thing, his field, whatever you call it, so he ended up writing about any thing he happened to trip over (the non fiction) and then two giant anti-novels - this one's acknowledged "subject" is dull jobs which is a kind of admission of defeat which he then turns into a demonstration of virtuosity - look, I can even write great stuff about boredom. But this can also look like flailing about - this is called a(n unfinished) novel by default, because it's not anything else particularly; but so far it's actually a collection of disconnected DFW writings, some of which are about the IRS and some not. Every chapter in this book so far is in a different style, a different tangent, like a collection of unrelated short stories or riffs. So far it's different and not too difficult. Interestingly, the hardest chapter was far and away the best. Maybe the rest of the book will tie all this disparateness together but since it was unfinished I'm thinking not. But we will see! (My cat just poked his head round my monitor and looked at me with an expression which said "are you sure about all this?" No, Hatter, i'm not! *** Smites brow, emits blasphemy - I just realised I have my own IRS story although as I'm English my run-in is with HM (=Her Majesty's) Revenue & Customs. PB's STUPID STORY 18 months ago I noticed mysterious amounts were appearing in my current account. Regularly. Every week! They came from the tax office and they were tax credits. I hadn't applied for any tax credits. So I phoned them up. They said "We can't stop it unless we know what account these monies SHOULD be paid into and we won't know that until someone complains." I said well, what are you going to do? they said, we'll be in touch. So - last month I got a letter through the post saying oh, remember all that dough we paid you by mistake, well now we want it back. Total of money paid to me which shouldn't have been : £4026 ($6493). Well it wasn't my money so i hadn't spent it so I can pay it back but you know, I'm a little peeved with their casual maladministrative ways and who's to know that if I send the idiots a cheque they might lose it or cash it and stick it in the wrong account. ********** MY UNFINISHED SYMPATHY Am I really doing this? I feel like a boxer in his corner being checked over by my trainer, checking my mouthguard, checking my gloves, checking if I feel okay – do you feel okay? Yeah boss – are you gonna get this bastard? Yeah boss – well lemme hear you say it – yeah boss YEAH BOSS – that's better, what are you gonna do to this sucker? I'm gonna read it, boss, READ IT – yeah, that's right, you's the champ you know that – yeah boss Well in spite of my previous run-ins with this much-loved author I do feel all right about The Pale King because a) as I understand it, it's about really crushingly tedious jobs, so that sounds like something I can relate to on a hormonal level because my job is crunching and titivating databases for clinical trials and dealing with frazzled/frantic nurses on the phone, most of whom have English as their second language, who are calling up because our fucking IVR system has broken again and they have 10 patients waiting very impatiently for it to start working again so they can get their meds and get out the clinic door to their actual jobs, though bless them they don't say exactly that; so it's a job that marries extreme dullness with extreme anxiety – just like the IRS b) I peeked at the opening sentence and it was astonishingly lovely, that's a very good sign c) I just read a blistering attack on DFW by none other than BEE, yeah Mr Easton Ellis; so that kind of inspired me on the principal that my enemy's enemy is my friend d) it's unfinished – so that at the end of it I can say "well, clearly, he didn't have time to cement everything in place so there are many incoherencies here and frankly it's all a bit incomprehensible and I couldn't make head nor tail of it but that's not because of me, no, it's because it's unfinished, see?" So here we go. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 19, 2012
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Sep 28, 2012
| Paperback
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| 178033169X
| 9781780331690
| 3.46
| 721
| 2012
| Sep 01, 2012
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THE HANGDANGLE OF THE APPENDAGE Here is another Modern Victorian escapade in which all the fetid pustules of scabbiness are left in – indeed, lovingly...more THE HANGDANGLE OF THE APPENDAGE Here is another Modern Victorian escapade in which all the fetid pustules of scabbiness are left in – indeed, lovingly preserved and appreciated – by the wheedlywise eyebrow-hoisting elbow-jogging don’t miss-that, take-a-look-down-here Cook’s tour guide of a self-consciously 21st century author, which means that every so often Lynn Shepherd will give us comments like It is as if a switch has been flicked – an analogy which is at least thirty years away, by the way Or He thinks no more of owning a gun than of taking laudanum when he has a toothache, though both would brand him as a dangerous delinquent now Or even It will not surprise you to find that this part of London is not much frequented by the idly inquisitive (though Charles Dickens himself will make almost exactly this journey in a few months’ time). Michel Faber in his totally wonderful Crimson Petal and the White brings this possibly-a-little-too-cute technique to a fine frosted Christmascakey mix which is delicious to lick right off of your fingers, I positively deliquesce at the memory. But Lynn Shepherd is like an earnest toiler, she dances not, she ploughs on, no pirouettes but a great deal of plottish barging about. And then there is the matter of the dialogue. Dialogue that never emitted forth out of any human mouth except the suborned orifices of actors, who had an excuse, they were paid, they had no other job in the offing. Look : Tulkinghorn (for it is he) : You are interfering in matters you cannot possibly understand. Charles Maddox : Oh but I do. I understand a good deal more than you realize. Reader (for it is I) : Groan… Young Charles appears to have a keen eye for a well-turned cliché – a few pages later we have him saying : You’ll have to try harder than that, Bucket. You can’t pin this one on me. [Audience of goodreaders : Oh yes he can! Charles Maddox (swinging round, breaking the fourth wall, realising he’s in a pantomime) : Oh no he can’t!] Well, we do know that this novel is a kind of riff or spin on Bleak House, and I am sure you can find equally horrible stuff in that brilliant novel, but still, do we have to have foisted upon us the poor dying sweeper Jo who says a lot of stuff like : I’ve been a-chivvied and a-worried and a-chivvied but now I is moved on as fur as I ever can go and can’t move on no furder. It’s time fur me to go down to that there berryin-ground. Let me lay there quiet wiv him and not be chivvied no more. ( I had to mop up my tears with large-sized teatowels at this point, and wring them out in the bath.) Actually our author is upfront about her sources - her novel, she explains in the acknowledgement section, takes place in the "space between" Bleak House and The Woman in White, and has more than a helping of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor stirred in. Well, I like to poke my appendage into the oily scum of any available Victorian aperture along with the best of you, of that you may be assured, but Tom All-Alone's (retitled The Solitary House for American readers because, you know, they just don't get Dickens references over there) was more like a funfair ghost train than reimagined Dickens. Lots of things went BOO, lots of icky stuff went whizzing by your left ear, spiders and skellybobs hangdangled down in your hair, EW!, and we all went WOO! and came out into the ordinary autumn daylight and found we were still alive and didn't remember too much. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Sep 19, 2012
| Sep 27, 2012
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Sep 19, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0307378721
| 9780307378729
| 3.54
| 642
| Feb 01, 2012
| Feb 21, 2012
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It has to be borne in mind that Nixon and his pal Kissinger were the war criminals who ordered the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, the secret bombing...more
It has to be borne in mind that Nixon and his pal Kissinger were the war criminals who ordered the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia (not secret to the Cambodians but they were under strict instructions to keep quiet about it) and the napalming of men, women and children in those grim countries in that far-off time. It has to be borne in mind because otherwise you find yourself getting to like Nixon. He suffers so very much! He’s the best villain. He’s like the roly-poly toy in budgerigar cages, you give him a peck and he rolls backwards and then bobs right back up again. So you peck him again. And he crashed and burned so spectacularly! Talk about ups and downs - November 1972 – wins re-election in a truly spectacular fashion – he got 18 million more votes than McGovern, he won FORTY-NINE states – and 21 months later he resigned before he was impeached. Fantastic. And for those 21 months he was twisting, burning, frothing, moaning, groaning, grinning, winning, losing, bruising, sinning, beginning, not mending but ending, not waving but drowning, muttering, gurning, toiling, roiling, boiling (it was hot), gambling, shambling, nocturnally and conversationally rambling, aiding and abetting, deeply regretting, thinking, drinking, listening to tapes of himself listening to tapes of himself, cursing, rehearsing, he was maudlin, mawkish, hawkish, defiant, furious, curious, self-deprecating, awkward, always awkward, sheepish, he was besmirched, confident, craven, lonely, garrulous, drooling (when in hospital), fooling (no one but himself), mewling, he was lamenting and he was dementing. He was the dark and brilliant bucketful of American pain. Thomas Mallon gets hold of Watergate and fondles all the details and lays them out before you, his offhand insights and westwingish dialogue are just the ticket (for instance – post- resignation, Nixon is writing a book about foreign policy – "It would display the kind of expertise people were willing to concede to him, they way they'd admit the bird man of Alcatraz did have a way with canaries"), but I was kind of a bit huh like did I miss something or what because there seem to be some pretty big things that just like glide by peripherally, I mean I would have thought it warranted a whole scene to itself when Nixon first thought – you know what? I might have to actually really resign over this. You don't get that. There's not much angst. The bit players take the lion's share. See Rose Mary Woods erase that tape! All singing and dancing! See Howard Hunt skulk! See some batty old dame ramble on about Roosevelt! Hotchamachacha! Twenty-three skidoo! Look in vain for Woodward & Bernstein – they ain't nowhere except three namechecks. And Deep Throat is just a dubious movie, which Pat Nixon will never see. We hope. I bet you wouldn't have guessed that Alexander Haig (see him twinkle!) gets the best jokes : "Good news, Mr president! The Chesapeake and potomac telephone Company says the penalty for a person's recording phone calls without telling the other party is limited to removal of the violator's equipment. And considering the importance of maintaining phone service at the White House, they've agreed to waive that." And later, visiting Nixon in hospital : "Viral pneumonia, no complications – finally something around here without complications!" This is a 4 star novel brought down to three, I'm very sorry to say, by Mr Mallon's insistence on spending too many pages on a couple of the dullest parts of the whole tangle – octogenarian soirees and the Howard Hunt/Fred LaRue/Clarine Lander thing was yawnsome, all the time I wanted to jump into HR Haldeman's closet and overhear his bedroom conversations, all of that. And then, you might have thought that the gruesome Watergate revelations would have provoked some great blazing stand-up rows amongst the cast of characters, but according to Mr Mallon, you'd be wrong. His novel drives all the president's men around in a big airconditioned Rolls Royce, you can hardly hear any of the disagreeable offstage booing. It's all pretty quiet. The Watergate scandal shows the success and the failure of American politics – the system allowed a morally bankrupt politician to reach the very top, twice, but then found him out and destroyed him. That was an American success. Then again, he was destroyed because of a third-rate comedy-capers chickenshit burglary, and not because he ordered the killing of thousands of civilians in a couple of Asian countries. And that was an American failure. (less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 09, 2012
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| 1741753597
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| 3.07
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| Oct 11, 2008
| Oct 11, 2008
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Thank you Christos Tsiolkas... you finally made my mind up for me and I have flung your horrid novel away from me in a graceless convulsion which mixe...more
Thank you Christos Tsiolkas... you finally made my mind up for me and I have flung your horrid novel away from me in a graceless convulsion which mixed repulsion and depression in equal parts, with a dash of glee. Because for many pages I was desperately seeking a casus belli. Something I could put my finger on. I was a closet Slap-hater at this point. I couldn't quite admit the horror of this novel to myself. I needed to find something definite, a line in the print where I could say thus far and no farther On and on I read. And finally one such moment arrived on page 225. The scene is the grimy household of Rosie and Gary and their son Hugo who is somewhere between three and four years of age. Hugo is the slapee of the story. Now one of the things about Hugo is that he's still suckling at his mother's breast, which everyone thinks is a bit gross, because he's nearly four, you know, and I was agreeing with this since every single time Hugo hove into view he was like a nipple-seeking missile aiming straight at his mum's brassiere and we would get another description of the act and everyone's reaction to the act. Every time. So now here on p225 we have Gary, the sex-starved husband, wrestling with his young son for control of the breasts She was feeding Hugo on the couch when Gary walked back into the room... He came and stood over them. He watched his son suck contentedly from Rose's tit. 'I want some of that.' Rosie frowned. 'Don't Gaz.' 'I do. i want some of your boobie.' Hugo dropped his nipple and looked mutinously at his father. 'No. It's mine.' 'No. it isn't,' Hugo looked at her for encouragement. 'Whose boobies are they? 'They belong to all of us,' she said, laughing. Then the atmosphere turns nasty and Gary and the kid begin to squabble viciously about the breasts. At this point I murmered "Thank you, Christos! At last! I knew you had it in you!" , placed the novel down upon my reading desk and prepared for the traditional flinging at wall ceremony. ***************** PREVIOUSLY ON "PAUL BRYANT READS 'THE SLAP'" P 150! - The thing is, I have seven - seven! books I really actually do want to read coming my way very soon. I hear the tramp tramp tramp of the feet of several burly postmen. This book - not so much. But you know the feeling when you walk out of the shop and you get home and you just don't remember stuffing the two packs of sausages, three packs of wafer-thin Wiltshire ham and two small jars of marmite down your kecks? So here I am on p 150. I don't know how I got here or how I'm going to get out of this geyser of Ozzie soapsuds. Can there really be another 330 pages to go?  The Shangri-Las : PB, is that a bestseller you got there? Uh-huh? Gee, it must be great reading it all day. By the way, where'd you get it? Pb (dressed in black leather, channelling Mary Weiss) : I met it in the Sainsbury store – 60% off. You get the picture? Shangs : Yes, we see Pb : That's when I became… A reader of The Slap. My friends were always putting it down Shangs : Down, down Only good for the beach they said with a frown Shangs : Frown, frown They told me it was bad And I knew I'd been had I'm sorry I started it – reader of The Slap The page 100 decision – to continue or to not continue, that is the question. Well, what about this blurb on the back? This is bugging me - This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. Is that even grammatical? I would have thought EITHER This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who sees it happen OR This event reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it No need for the "happen". The "happen" is otiose. So the blurb writer can't write. But... I dunno. Maybe I'll continue. It's so long. These modern writers, they must get paid by the word. Never mind the quality, feel the width. *** On Goodreads they all stop and stare They can't hide the sneers but I don't care I think I've become a – Reader of The Slap (motorbike noises, fade) (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 08, 2012
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Sep 08, 2012
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| 0670025488
| 3.71
| 2,232
| Sep 27, 2012
| Sep 27, 2012
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- You know you were making all these little beeping chortly noises when you were reading this one but then you went quiet and just sort of grunted and...more
- You know you were making all these little beeping chortly noises when you were reading this one but then you went quiet and just sort of grunted and ground your teeth. - I do not do that! - Well, what went wrong? - Hmmm (grinds teeth, grunts). - Well did you like it? - That’s too hard to answer. - Well did you like some of it? - The first 300 pages were brilliant blast of pure diamond black comedy. - And then? - I think it jumped the shark. - Jumped the what? - The shark. It’s an expression. - ? - Meaning that in striving for a sudden left-turn into outrageous satire it found itself being so silly it made you have to re-evaluate all the stuff you’d read up to that point which you’d been thinking was great. - Are you referring to George in the privatised prison with the Israeli agent? - Yes – I thought you hadn’t read this? - I haven’t , that was just a good guess. - So then I think she clambered back over the shark and got back on track – - That’s a horribly clunky metaphor you know – - But then came something which was nearly as bad. - And that was? - Well clearly, AM Homes had gone on holiday to South Africa and had a pretty good time, and she just typed up her “what I did on my holidays” essay and shoved it straight into her novel, 40 pages of it! It was so blatant, she just sprinkled a few of her characters’ names in there to pretend it was them doing it. It was like in The Privileges which starts off as another great little novel but then wham, you get a 40 page essay about the Outsider Art market shoved right in the middle. Aren’t these things supposed to be done with a certain amount of subtlety? I mean, look at Lolita – that road trip, all those crummy motels, you can tell a lot of Nabokov's own American travelling went into that section, but it's an essential part of Lolita, it's not bolted on. This South African holiday is in here because she went there and thought it would make a cool thing for her characters to do. It's a bit crass. - You don't know that. Anyway, so what if you're right? You can do what you want in a novel these days, look at Bartleby & Co. - That’s not a novel, it’s an essay everyone politely pretends is a novel. - And you get all these infodumps in Jonathan Franzen. - I call him Jonathan Frankenzen. - It’s still not funny and what does that even mean? - But even then that’s not the problem. It's not even the problem that the eleven year old girl and 12 year old boy talk like 16 year olds. - Okay, what is the problem? - well, the story begins with a 20 page helterskelter of horror and then takes the next 440 pages to reassemble the ingredients into such an apotheosis of family values, inclusiveness and loving-kindness that might have made even Walt Disney throw up into his lucky bag. By the last page I would not have been surprised if Bambi and Thumper appeared to serenade the family's Thanksgiving dinner with Memories are Made of This. May We Be Forgiven is a story about a family which is smashed to bits by the violence of the father and reassembled in a new way by the father’s brother who turns out to be some kind of genius of human relationships. And also a babe magnet, which strained credulity, since he's a middle-aged history prof. - maybe he looks like George Clooney - women fall for him and require immediate sex from him every fifty pages or so - Maybe that’s an accurate picture of suburban American life if you're a hot history professor - I mean, when one lady gets gently rebuffed, she immediately suggests a threeway with the prof and his girlfriend as a consolation prize for her! Is that normal? Is that what people do? I don't think so! Of course, I have lived quite a sheltered life. But anyway, these characters, the ones who are left alive after the first 20 pages – they're so cute. Ech! I'm sorry, this makes me sound terrible - No more than usual - but all these well-meaning stereotypes, look at them – it's as if Todd Solenz directed the first half of this novel then Alan Alda got him fired and took over – - Right, so you liked the miserable bit but you didn't like the part where everyone gets better and cheers up. I get it - - the feisty old Chinese couple, the goofy demented but cute old Jewish couple, the cute latino boy, the cute dog, the cute cat who has iddy cutey kittens - You know, it must be hard to be slaving away on a novel for three or four years and then some jackass on the internet gets all mealymouthed and sniffy about it - Jackass? - Comparatively speaking - Oh it's okay, no chance of hurting A M Homes' feelings. I don’t think these novelists notice us, we can say what we like. It would be like hammerhead sharks noticing the plankton. - back to sharks now... why hammerhead? - I love hammerhead sharks. - I bet hammerhead sharks eat plankton - Yeah but they don't read what the planckton says about them on Goodreads before they do - Well, what if a – er – starfish read it and told them about it? - A starfish? (less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 28, 2012
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| 0811206408
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| 3.82
| 164
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| Dec 12, 1976
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Nauseating. Also, insufferable. Also, bad. A pompous egomaniac finds out that his best friend has been shagging his 24 year old daughter. And same fri...more
Nauseating. Also, insufferable. Also, bad. A pompous egomaniac finds out that his best friend has been shagging his 24 year old daughter. And same friend had a previous affair with this unnamed guy's wife. This recent discovery has incensed the unnamed husband and father to the point that he picks up friend Henri and daughter Chantal – they're all French - in his new car one evening then proceeds to drive through the countryside at increasingly alarming speeds and informs them in the transcendently tiresome monologue which is the whole novel that he intends to crash the car into a sturdy farm building he has already picked out, killing all three of them. Well, you know, that's bit strong isn't it? Bit of an over-reaction? Also bound to fail since after only about 50 pages we readers know that Chantal and Henri will be bored to death long before the crash. But this whole scenario is a little tough on poor Chantal don't you think? Would even an egomaniac think of murdering his own daughter in a fit of pique? I think not. The answer is that this novel is nothing to do with real life. It turns out that it's actually some kind of tribute/homage to Albert Camus. This may well be the truth. What I know about Albert Camus could be written on the back of a postage stamp and you would still have room for most of the New Testament. I was instead thinking it was some kind Crash ripoff – J G Ballard's masterpiece was written only three years before this thing. So as this novel prattled along (the speed the car was travelling being directly disproportionate to the slow grinding tedious sneery supercilious raised-French-eyebrow anecdotes, moral cheeseparings and elliptical crapness), I was fervently hoping that Chantal would rise up from her foetal position on the back seat, fetch out a length of chicken wire from her chichi handbag and garotte this old fucker a la Peter Clemente's treatment of Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather. Yes, that would probably have precipitated a fatal accident too, but maybe, just before it all went black, the droning noise would have stopped for a few blissful seconds.(less)
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Aug 25, 2012
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| 0876900856
| 9780876900857
| 3.38
| 8
| Jan 01, 1970
| 1972
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You can file this one with the many other Christ allegories & parables like Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock or Only Begotten Daughter by James...more
You can file this one with the many other Christ allegories & parables like Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock or Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow or The Sparrow by Mary Dora Russell, there are a lot of them and this is another. It's tiny and wee and obscure. I did not know this writer. Maybe we should form a rediscovered author group on GR. Mine would be H A Manhood from the 1930s, completely forgotten but I think brilliant. (More on him later). Then again this reminded me also of movies like Porcile and Theorem by Pasolini and, indeed, Weekend by Godard - all from the same period as this book (around 1970). Naturally, all this Christ stuff ends badly. Neither God nor the avant garde would have it any other way. That's because they think that they themselves, as artists, are perpetually being crucified by public indifference or hostility by the pharisees of conventional taste and the centurions of the status quo. Some of them get to come back from the dead though, which I take to be a heartening sign.(less) | Notes are private!
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Jul 29, 2012
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| 0747562733
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| 4.07
| 3,466
| May 19, 1992
| Apr 21, 2003
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Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli are discussing the suspect they've just brought in. He's an author who's accused of recklessly wasting readers'...more
Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli are discussing the suspect they've just brought in. He's an author who's accused of recklessly wasting readers' time. That's something that'll get you 3 to 5 in New Jersey and up to 10 in New York where they take reading more seriously. The suspect is an oldish Jewish guy who's currently in the interrogation room looking bored. The charges relate to three long novels published between 1992 and 2008, Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life. Together these add up to 1732 pages. Small print pages. They can hurt your eyes. The detectives are perplexed. - I'm telling you this is the guy. - This is the guy? This skinny white mope? - What's the problem, he even says he's Richard Price. He admits it. We got his driver's licence, we got that woman who ID'd him – - That one who says she's some kind of fan? - She got a book signed by this guy. She waited in line for him to sign it. This is big in some people's world. A guy writes his name in a book. It's big. - I could write Richard Price on any damn book you want. Here, give me one, I show you. This is just some sad fuck who has the same name, you know it, I know it. You seriously telling me an old Jewish guy can write thousands a pages a authentic black dialogue not to mention taking the reader on a tour of the whole inner city experience, the crack trade, the slingers, their apartments, their families, their mothers, how you step on an ounce, I mean exactly how, what these gangbangers wear, what they spend their dough on, who they wake up with, colour of their damn mother's underpants, a whole tour of black spaces – fast food joints, churches, jail visiting rooms, - and people – stone killers, outsize wheelerdealers, oily preachers, angsty thin wore down mothers, this white Jewish guy does all that? Nah. Toss him. - Mazilli, you're going on appearances. In fact I now perceive, the scales have fallen from my fucking eyes, that you're one of those racist cops I have heard of. You think the perp who did Clockers has had to be black himself. You gonna tell me next that white boys can't sing the blues. You never heard of Dusty Springfield, the Righteous Brothers, never heard of Eric Clapton… - I got no idea who those people are. But okay, it'll make you happy, let's do this Richard Price, see if it's our Richard Price. He shrugs. They open the door to the interview room. EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD PRICE, 10 AUGUST 2012 Klein : Way I see it, Richard, we're about the only friends you got right now. Price : Yeah, with respect, it's my constitutional right to doubt that. Look, I'll make it simple - I wrote all those novels, all of them. Sure I did. And there's more you don't even know about. I could show you where to find em. I could take you there. But I never wasted any damn reader's time. That's God damned defamation. Who's sayin this shit? Klein : Okay Richard, I'll make it simple for you. What you have here in each of these long novels are slight tales cranked up to elephantine proportions like, you know, supersize me. Each one concerns a simple plotline – who shot Darryl Adams? why is this guy confessing to it when he didn't do it? Or what happened when this lady's car got carjacked and her baby was in it? And in the end, after 700 pages, the solution, resolution, what have you, comes down to a banal twist of circumstance, a common misapprehension, oh I shoulda realised back on page 120 that this actually meant that and not that, blah blah, and certainly nothing which warrants slogging the reader through these interminable pages. Your damn long novels are monstrous sledgehammers cracking itty tiny nuts. You're wasting readers' time. Mazilli : And you're a one trick pony, Price. These three books? They're essentially the same thing. Read one, why read another one? Price : I want to call my lawyer. Klein : Now why'd you wanna do that, we were getting along like a house on fire. Price : Lawyer. Now! *** Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli continue their conversation outside the interview room. - Now do you believe me? - Okay, he's our Richard Price. What do I know from modern crime literature anyways. - We lost him. - Yeah. We did. But he wasn't gonna cop for it. He really doesn't think he's wasted anbody's time. 1700 pages… - Although, to be fair, he is very good on the power certain individuals hold over others in the drug underworld. - True that, but not just there, your Rodney Little figure in Clockers could be encountered in any school playground, any local political party, he's the bully we all fear. And yet how hard is that fear to explain to outsiders? They'll say – why didn't you just walk away and keep walking? He is excellent on showing all of that. Do you remember how he has Rodney Little explain to Strike how if he, Rodney, takes a hundred dollar bill and nails it onto a tree on JFK and leaves it there, after a year it'll still be there, whereas if Strike did the same, what do you think would happen? That's cause people know who Rodney Little is. - Also, he's brilliant in showing throughout Clockers the vapourous risings and fallings of all these visions of a life outside the clocker ghetto that Strike keeps imagining for himself – all these alternatives, they rise up like chimera and fade away when the next cruel ineluctability crashes into his life and they leave but not one trace. - So what ya think – four stars? - No, three. I coulda watched six ball games, time it took me to get through this damn Clockers. (less) | Notes are private!
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Jul 16, 2012
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| 0811216985
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| 4.03
| 927
| 2000
| May 23, 2007
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According to Enrique Vila-Matas there's a Literature of the No which doesn't exist but is still very important. Well, there's also a Reviewer of the N...more According to Enrique Vila-Matas there's a Literature of the No which doesn't exist but is still very important. Well, there's also a Reviewer of the No and it's me, and I say NO to this maundering waffly postmodern excuse. In order to say YES to this book you need to enjoy a) many many many references to writers you will never have heard of unless you are a student of second-division European literature. Do these names show up on your radar? Bobi Bazlen Marcel Schwob Gustav Janouch Clement Cadou Felipe Alfau Jacob von Gunten Ernesto Hernando Busten Barbey D'Aurevilly b) oh also, just to add to the fun, some of them might be made up. Obscure Hungarian novelists who didn't write much for thirtyfive years – and might not exist! yay. My pulses were racing. c) you have to enjoy passages of which there are many like this : And the point is, as Blanchot says, what he was searching for, the source of all writing, that space where he could write, that light which ought to be circumscribed, in space, demanded of him and confirmed in him dispositions which made him unsuitable for any ordinary literary work or distracted him from the same. or Julio Ramon Ribeyro – a Peruvian writer, Walserian in his discretion. Always harboured the suspicion, which turned into conviction, that there is a series of books which form part of the history of the No, though they may not exist. These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason*, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. (*perhaps to borrow a cup of sugar) This book is a straight-up wannabeBorges, and I can appreciate that because Borges is a great writer, so who wouldn't, if they have something of the total book geek about them, wish to emulate the old omniscience. This book even starts from a good place, because I'm a great fan of Herman Melville's great story Bartleby. But the idea of the Literature of the No just falls apart like a badly stitched Frankenstein experiment. These writers who declined to write – most of the time it wasn't because of some grand philosophical gesture : "I could write, but writing, it is now impossible, in this modern world, after [atrocity of your choice]", not some dramatic Duchampian abandonment of art for chess or revolution. It was because they took to drink or had a brain injury or discovered sex or went round the twist and were shut up in asylums or disappeared in Mexican water or Guinean jungles or they had a career change and became full time acrobats or chemical plant executives. Or ran out of inspiration. So, you know, who cares about these mopes? My dear friends, give this one a miss and try instead Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges and Bartleby by Herman Melville (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 14, 2012
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Jul 04, 2012
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| 0553816993
| 9780553816990
| 3.97
| 2,248
| 2001
| 2005
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In this ugly story about depravity, child murder and florid insanity we follow your standard flawed rule-breaking detective hero for the most part, bu...more
In this ugly story about depravity, child murder and florid insanity we follow your standard flawed rule-breaking detective hero for the most part, but dive off into other narratives when the author feels like it, so the tangled tale comes across hectically, chaotically, but with a propulsion that doesn't slacken for all of its 480 pages. If you can take the punishment, it's harrowing but good stuff. I read crime fiction every once in a while to be reminded of a whole other literary discipline. Whereas, as we know, one sentence from the great literary prose stylists is as recognisable as DNA, you would be hard pressed to spot an entire paragraph from Mo Hayder in a police line-up. She's brisk, she never dawdles (perhaps dawdling about is what you do if you have a prose style) but she's virtually anonymous. But what this (and other) crime novels have to do if they're any good is orchestrate. I think she's very good at that. If you write about crime there are a few difficult challenges. Variations of your characters and your situations will likely have appeared in a great many novels already – the snitches, the girlfriends, the wives, the cynicism, the luck, the methods, the violence, the cars, the drugs, the forensics, the plots & the cops & the robbers, blah blah blah, we've seen it and read it all before. You have to get over the essential cliched nature of crime itself. So that's the push. On the other hand, us citizens like to have a ringside seat and see a great set-up and a cathartic denoument where the bad guys get what's coming oof smack in the kisser. So there's the pull. And the author orchestrates all these elements - the chaos, resembling the way life is, is illusory, which we as readers know, because the author actually understands all these puzzling bizarre elements and where they will fit and how they come to explain. The author carves the Rosetta Stone then breaks it into pieces and throws the pieces around wildly. I pretty much hated one major character here, DCI Daniella Sounness, who calls herself an "old dyke" and whose dykishness gets hammered home way too much, along with her Scottish dialect. This was having your gay character walk around with a neon sign saying "SYMPATHETIC GAY CHARACTER". I thought the damaged girlfriend of the troubled cop was slightly annoying too, but apparently this is book 2 of a series and her story is all of book one, so I'll give her a pass. The villains were genuinely horrible. The entire story was as lurid as it gets but for some reason – I think it was Mo Hayder's great skill – didn't topple over into implausibility, although I see that some other reviewers thought it did. So yeah, 3.5 stars. Recommended - if you can take it. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 2012
| Jul 08, 2012
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Jul 01, 2012
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