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The Stories Of William Sansom
by William Sansom

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China in Ten Words
by Hua Yu

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Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Ablutions. Patrick DeWitt
by Patrick deWitt

read in June, 2013

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Another one from my local library. I picked this up because I knew the author’s name from his more recent novel ‘The Sisters Brothers’, which is one of those books that has been almost too well-received to really attract my attention. The blurb on th...more Another one from my local library. I picked this up because I knew the author’s name from his more recent novel ‘The Sisters Brothers’, which is one of those books that has been almost too well-received to really attract my attention. The blurb on the back and the cover photo promote this as a noir-ish tale of romantic, poetic degradation in the great American tradition of Bukowski and Kerouac and the like. But then I opened it and read a few pages at random and I found that it is actually something different entirely.

The first unusual thing about it is the repeated use of the second-person singular (‘you’) in the present tense as the principle narrative perspective: so rather than ‘he had bad teeth and his breath was poor’, it’s always ‘you have bad breath and your breath is poor’, and so on. To begin with, the novel mostly occurs as a series of very brief scene-setting vignettes – some little more than long paragraphs, while others might go on for a couple of pages – many frequently beginning with the word ‘Discuss’. This seems to reference the book’s subtitle, ‘Notes for a Novel’, as though these were actually notes that the author had made about their own life in preparation for an autobiographical story which perhaps never came.

Or perhaps this is that story. The description at the very end of my edition mentions that the author previously worked as ‘a labourer, a clerk, a dishwasher and a bartender’ – and after I noticed that, I found it extremely tempting to impose a biographical reading on this text. And then I inevitably started wondering which parts of it are true and which parts were embellished or altered. Obviously it’s impossible for the casual reader to make such judgments, but I do think there is a dark heart at the centre of this novel which lies in the personal experience of the author. There are moments here which are so relentless in their unpleasantness that they could only be imagined by someone who has actually experienced them, or something like them.

The narrator of 'Ablutions' works in a dive bar in Hollywood. He is not a particularly nice person. He becomes an alcoholic within the opening pages, just like virtually everyone else in this sad, strange book. He deliberately plies certain clients with free drinks in order to punish them, to ruin their lives. He knows that something is wrong with him but shows no signs of being inclined to change his ways. His wife leaves him. He starts skimming the till, and making dangerous enemies.

All of this is delivered in a composed and careful style that is totally at odds with the lifestyle of the protagonist. To put it another way, you couldn’t write as well as this if you were actually drunk. It’s often quite funny in a very dry, dark way. Quite often it reminded me of some of those David Foster Wallace stories (like those in ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’) which held some terrible aspect at an authorial distance while analyzing it from a variety of different angles.

You could almost call it a horror novel; there’s almost nothing redeeming in this book. I say ‘almost’ because there are a few brighter moments later on which didn’t seem to work quite as well as those brilliant introductory passages – the bit where the narrator goes on his little road trip to the South and falls briefly in love with a local barmaid, for example. But the problems of reconciling something called ‘Notes for a Novel’ with the requirements of the novelistic form are to some degree inevitable, and especially in any work of weird fiction which defines itself by a certain degree of nihilism.(less)

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The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games
by Jesper Juul

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Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Occupied City
by David Peace

read in June, 2013

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David Peace is a novelist who occupies an odd space in British literature -- he’s popular enough to receive mentions in the press, and some of his books (the Red Riding trilogy) have been adapted for TV – yet for all that he occupies a radical and ch...more

Patrick rated a book 3 of 5 stars

NW
by Zadie Smith

read in June, 2013

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I like Zadie Smith. I haven’t read ‘On Beauty’, but I enjoyed ‘White Teeth’ when I read it (a very long time ago). I always like her essays and short fiction, and I picked this up on Kindle after enjoying an excerpt in the New Yorker. And it’s good....more I like Zadie Smith. I haven’t read ‘On Beauty’, but I enjoyed ‘White Teeth’ when I read it (a very long time ago). I always like her essays and short fiction, and I picked this up on Kindle after enjoying an excerpt in the New Yorker. And it’s good. Occasionally puzzling, somewhat inconsistent, not without its flaws; but taken as a whole it’s extremely enjoyable. It’s very much what critics call ‘readable’, which I always take to mean I liked it while I was reading it, but I don’t think I’ll remember much about it this time next year.

The novel is split into three broad sections: the first follows Leah and her boyfriend Michel, whose lives are shaken when Leah is tricked out of a small sum of money by a troubled local girl. The second part of the book describes a few days in the life of Felix, a recovering addict and a man of limited means – he buys a car from a rich boy in Soho and carries on an affair with Annie, an older woman who was once a moderately successful actress. The third section – probably the longest and is arguably the most distinctive – follows the life of Keisha Blake, her childhood friendship with Leah, and her career all through school, university and her training as a barrister (during which she changes her name to Natalie).

The portrayal of London feels right, and is what I liked best of all about the book. It’s richest in the first section, Leah’s narrative, which at once reminded me of the more realistic early chapters in ‘Ulysses’ with fragments of thoughts and spoken sentences without speech marks all intermingling to create a complex and compelling impressionistic sense of place. I did wonder how a reader from elsewhere might encounter this, and how easy they might find it to read – I found myself picking up all the references quite easily, but I can imagine this section seeming as impenetrable to a foreigner as we now find the plethora of specificities at work in Joyce’s Dublin difficult and strange.

But NW isn’t a difficult novel in the same way. There is a base level of realism at work here, and the author is free and easy with the passage of time – particularly in Keisha’s sections, which are broken up into very short chapters which sometimes summarise long stretches of time in only a few sentences. So even if you aren't sure what is going on at any one point in time, that doesn't really matter because something else will be along in a moment, and not everything is all that important to the story anyway.

There are elements in the depiction of London that don’t really work. Because this is a novel with ambitions beyond simply telling a story – because it has also to be a Big Book with themes and ideas and politics regarding the State of the Nation – some sequences have a box-ticking quality in their descriptions of the city. There’s a brief dinner party, for example, which seems to only have been added (in typically novelistic fashion) to show up the prejudices and peccadilloes of its upper middle-class attendees.

And there’s this kind of stuff, rich in the author’s own voice, which comes across less as something they wanted to write and more like something they felt ought to be in there:

‘Security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees, Tudor, Modernist, post-war, pre-war, stone pineapples, stone eagles. Face east and dream of Regent’s Park, of St John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a second language. Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Centre of England opposite the Queen’s Arms. Walk down the middle of this, you referee, you!’

It’s not that this is wrong or bad writing – it just doesn’t really add anything to the stories of Leah and Keisha and Felix. it’s the kind of superficial summary of social inequality I’d expect from a newspaper columnist.

Class and race are key themes in the book. Its big question is: how can people from similar backgrounds come to very different end points in life? Good themes and a good question. It’s not one that necessarily requires an answer. But the author is convinced at least that they know what the answer is not: it’s not to do with the current ideology of our government. The idea that deliberate choices and personal ambition/motivation determines the success of both individuals and families. That stuff is out – and, in my opinion, rightly so.

So what does determine our lives? I don’t really know what this book has to say on the matter. It raises it and then it's gone. ‘It’s complicated’ is the clearest message we can hope for – that, and our inability to ever really escape our origins. This dilemma is embodied in Keisha, who struggles to be accepted by her community at home once she becomes Natalie the successful lawyer. Hers is probably the most absorbing section of the whole book. But it really has nothing to do at all with Felix or Leah. And the conclusion – which I won’t spoil – struck me as a step too far, lurching off in a very weird direction which isn’t really hinted in the rest of the text.

It’s annoying, really, that books like this have to be novelistic. By this I mean that their publishers and audiences expect them to be a certain length and possess a certain weight. It’s not enough for them to tell a story; they must also be about something. And I think this is where NW ultimately comes unstuck. It isn’t really that State of the Nation book at all - it would have worked much better as a series of three or four separate instalments or novellas. But that's not really something you can sell, I suppose.(less)

Patrick and 4 other people liked Kevin O'Donnell's review of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now:

" Gave up on this midway through the second chapter, which is actually more than a third through the whole thing. I almost never quit books. (Perhaps because I am too selective up front?) This one, however, I gladly spurn.

First 100 pages were okay b... " Read more of this review »

Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré

read in May, 2013

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This was my first experience of John Le Carré. I picked it up from the library and devoured it in two sittings, mostly while getting sunburnt in the garden over this bank holiday weekend. It’s that kind of a book. The story has that great virtue of b...more This was my first experience of John Le Carré. I picked it up from the library and devoured it in two sittings, mostly while getting sunburnt in the garden over this bank holiday weekend. It’s that kind of a book. The story has that great virtue of being both highly specific with regards to its historical and political context, while also possessing a universal quality which makes it applicable to the way in which people relate to institutions in our own time.

The plot concerns Alec Leamas, a veteran of the British secret service who seems to fall upon hard times after one of his double agents is killed while crossing the Berlin Wall. He leaves his job, and though he finds a girlfriend, he has a hard time adapting to civilian life, and is briefly imprisoned after attacking a greengrocer in an (apparently) unprovoked incident. it’s not long before he finds himself approached by spies working for the other side who want to know all about his old networks – Leamas goes along with them, but his complicity is limited, and it soon turns out that he might be playing a long game of his own.

The author’s style is smooth throughout – it’s quippy but sturdy stuff, and has aged much better than some of the other thriller writers of the sixties. It’s more atmospheric than a Len Deighton or a Nevil Shute, and far more intriguing than anything by Ian Fleming. I don’t think he could be called a ‘great’ stylist, but that isn’t always necessary in fiction – at the actual art of telling a story, Le Carré is clearly a master craftsman.

Different authors do different things by ‘telling a story’, and in this case it really means the strategic display and concealment of information to/from the reader. For a spy, Alec Leamas does very little outright lying to his audience, and neither does the author. The effect is akin to an illusion on stage: you feel like you are seeing everything, that you’ve been given all the information you need to know at any one time – so you feel involved without being confused, and yet you still don’t fully understand everything that is going on. Thus the compulsion to read further and further until your skin turns red and peeling in the sun.

I find John Le Carré’s politics interesting. I know they have been much commented on, so I won’t bother to summarise his approach here, but this book does seem to exemplify the profound moral ambiguity at the heart of his world. The only defense mustered in favour of the appalling activities carried out by the British secret services is that they do what they must in order that innocent people can go about their daily lives in peace. Yet this is undermined by the notion that it might just be another idealogical delusion, one in which Western society has trapped itself since the Second World War – a kind of psychological malaise not dissimilar to the way in which Leamas finds that the habits of the spy have gone beyond self-deception and actually merged into his private life:

‘The man who lives a part, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of expertise, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a confidence trickster, a play-actor or a gambler can return from his performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent enjoys no such relief. For him, deception is first a matter of self-defence. He must protect himself not only from without but from within, and against the most natural of impulses; though he earns a fortune, his role may forbid him the purchase of a razor; though he be erudite, it can befall him to mumble nothing but banalities; though he be an affectionate husband and father, he must under all circumstances withhold himself from those in whom he should naturally confide.’

Just as the logic of the security state incorporates itself into our daily lives until it can no longer be safely extracted, the man and the spy have become indistinguishable.(less)

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Patrick is currently reading The Stories Of William Sansom by William Sansom	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 17, 2013 02:32am
Patrick is currently reading China in Ten Words by Hua Yu	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 17, 2013 02:31am
Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars Ablutions. Patrick DeWitt by Patrick deWitt read in June, 2013	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Another one from my local library. I picked this up because I knew the author’s name from his more recent novel ‘The Sisters Brothers’, which is one of those books that has been almost too well-received to really attract my attention. The blurb on th...more
Jun 16, 2013 08:11am · see review
Patrick wants to read The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games by Jesper Juul	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 12, 2013 02:50pm
Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars Occupied City by David Peace read in June, 2013	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
David Peace is a novelist who occupies an odd space in British literature -- he’s popular enough to receive mentions in the press, and some of his books (the Red Riding trilogy) have been adapted for TV – yet for all that he occupies a radical and ch...more
Jun 09, 2013 08:10am · see review
Patrick rated a book 3 of 5 stars NW by Zadie Smith read in June, 2013	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I like Zadie Smith. I haven’t read ‘On Beauty’, but I enjoyed ‘White Teeth’ when I read it (a very long time ago). I always like her essays and short fiction, and I picked this up on Kindle after enjoying an excerpt in the New Yorker. And it’s good....more
Jun 02, 2013 10:04am · see review
Patrick and 4 other people liked Kevin O'Donnell's review of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now: " Gave up on this midway through the second chapter, which is actually more than a third through the whole thing. I almost never quit books. (Perhaps because I am too selective up front?) This one, however, I gladly spurn. First 100 pages were okay b... " Read more of this review »
May 30, 2013 01:12am · see review
Patrick rated a book 4 of 5 stars The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré read in May, 2013	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This was my first experience of John Le Carré. I picked it up from the library and devoured it in two sittings, mostly while getting sunburnt in the garden over this bank holiday weekend. It’s that kind of a book. The story has that great virtue of b...more
May 27, 2013 08:56am · see review

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