Michael Johnston's Blog, page 18

Review of Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Of the several Wolfe books I’ve read, two in particular stand out. The Electric Kool Acid Test (1968) came as shock to the system, mine, and almost everyone else’s. The stylistic juxtaposition of stream of (chemically altered) consciousness and journalism was a mind-bending experience. (I admit too that, a few years later, I wasn’t altogether happy that my son found and read it.) Twenty years later, Wolfe gave us the Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) which came out just as capitalist greed was being pronounced good for us by our political rulers in the US and UK, and by our real masters and manipulators in the financial world. Bonfire may have taken its title from Savonarola and Florence 500 years earlier but the book reads as a contemporary roman à clef with its principal characters being a WASP, a Jew, a Brit and a Black. Wolfe originally wrote the book as a Charles Dickens style serial which helped to add chapter-by-chapter tension to the tale. Set in New York, its themes are race, class, politics and greed. An ear for demotic talk and an eye for how people walk, such as the ‘pimp roll’ that was fashionable among young black street-wise men, helps to imprint the story on our minds and give it much apparent verisimilitude. A further 25 years on and, like many from the America’s chilly North-East, the story moves south to Florida and is set in present-day Miami. Wolfe’s third remarkable book is Back to Blood. [London: Jonathan Cape, 2012]

America, more than many other nations, is supposed to be a melting pot but the sub-tropical sun seems rather to have hardened the various groups and ethnicities in terms of place and attitude. One large and growing group is made up of asylum-seeking Cubans, more arriving daily, and their American-born descendants, who tend to live in their own sectors of town, speak Spanish as their first language and look down on gringos and negroes with equal contempt, despise Haitians and have no contact with Russians, except perhaps working as their gardeners, housemaids and drivers. As they put it, “We een Mee-AH-mee Now.” Once again, it’s race, class, politics, greed and the ever fashionable pimp roll; but this time in a warmer climate. This time the archetypal WASP is Edward T Topping IV, the editor of the Miami Herald and the prologue opens as he and his formidable wife, driving her green car, are being cheated of their intended parking space outside a crowded fashionable night spot by a Ferrari 403 driven, expertly, by a glamorous Cuban girl sporting illuminated stiletto heels. She and the wife have a glorious slanging match; the wife in angry CAPITAL LETTER ENGLISH, the Cuban in italicised, extremely crude and vivid Spanish; but both might as well be deaf since neither is really listening to or understanding the other in this battle of the classes. Wolfe is already capturing the multi-stranded thought levels and speech of his characters, shortening everyone’s fuse and setting the scene. Wolfe has an ear for the language, speech and sound patterns of the different groups and, in this new book, conveys the innermost thoughts of characters as the scene unfolds around them by bracketing them in six colons. In Chapter 1, the sound of a police launch racing through choppy water adds a random beat to the narrative.

“SMACK the Safe Boat bounces airborne comes down again SMACK on another swell and SMACK bounces airborne with emergency horns police Crazy Lights exploding SMACK in a demented sequence on the roof SMACK but officer Nestor Camacho’s fellow SMACK cops here in the cockpit the two fat SMACK americanos they love this stuff they love it love driving the boat SMACK throttle wide open forty-five miles an hour against the wind SMACK bouncing bouncing its shallow aluminium hull SMACK from swell SMACK to swell SMACK to swell SMACK towards the mouth of Biscayne Bay to “see about the man on top of the mast” SMACK “up near the Rickenbacker Causeway.”

The story proper begins with muscular, Cuban police officer Nestor Camacho in that police launch speeding to the scene of an incident where a would-be illegal immigrant has taken refuge of a sort at the very top of a tall mast on a sailing ship. The mast-top is within sight and hailing distance of the Rickenbacker Causeway where a crowd of Cubans is yelling encouragement to their compatriot. Ordered by his americano Sergeant to bring him down, Camacho is strong enough to pull himself seventy feet up a rope, catch and hold the immigrant between his powerful legs and then bring both of them to safety, swinging hand over hand down the cable running from mast to bowsprit. For this he is hailed in the English language Herald as a superhuman hero, saving a poor man’s life, but is castigated by its Spanish edition El Nuevo Herald for preventing one of his fellow Cubans from setting just one foot on dry land and thus qualifying for asylum. Worse, he is renounced by his own extended family for the deed, for which his African American police Chief rewards him with a medal of valour.

Politics then comes rushing in because the Mayor of Miami is Cuban and wants Camacho moved out of sight and maybe even demoted to allay the backlash against City Hall. The Chief moves him to other work where he takes part in a raid on drug dealers using a child-minding group as cover. Camacho has to use his strength and skill again to save the life of another Sergeant being throttled by a huge Afro-American dealer, unaware that the scene and the language used in the heat of the encounter is being videoed by someone’s Smartphone and posted on YouTube within minutes.

Now we have a race issue since the entire African American community already believes that the largely Cuban police force is out to get them. The Mayor insists on another move and even threatens the Chief with dismissal. Then the story introduces greed, both for money and for sex. Nestor Camacho’s beautiful Cuban girl-friend, Magdalena the nurse, is two-timing him with her employer, a sex-addiction psychiatrist, Dr Norman Lewis, who is cloaking his own addiction to sex and pornography under the guise of research.

And finally, in this scene-setting, there is the young Ivy League newspaper reporter with the implausible name of John Smith, a beautiful young and very light-skinned Haitian girl, Ghislaine, with a social conscience, and a stupendously wealthy Russian oligarch, Korolyov, who has just hit the headlines for donating an estimated seventy million dollars worth of modern art to the not long established Miami Art Museum which has been duly renamed the Korolyov Museum of Art in his honour. And there is John Smith telling Edward T Topping IV, and an enthusiastic backer of Korolyov, that “for a start, the Kandinskys and Maleviches are fakes.” And we are only at page 108 of the total 704.

How the lives of these and other sundry characters intersect and affect each other is what drives the book which might, on the very surface, seem to be about art forgery but, underneath Wolfe’s surface paint, the underlying themes writ large on the book’s wide canvas are, as ever, race, class, politics and greed. At this point, however, it has to be said that the characterisations, the internal thoughts and the pattern of narrative, heavy with italics, peppered with exclamation marks and puffed up with anger or frustration can begin to feel repetitious and, as compared with Bonfire this is not such a good novel. That said, I enjoyed it even if I’ll probably not read it twice.

Wolfe not only has a particular gift for language in a literary sense but is also keeps on showing us how able he is to render the vocabulary and accent of each character. Ghislaine’s young brother explains a point to his friend adding the phatic expression, “Nome sayin’, bro’?” and speaks in Haitian Creole deliberately to upset his very Francophile father. And to add to the aural impact Wolfe often renders various accents phonetically to point up their sounds although his ‘Russian’ is a bit too much of a parody.

“No problem, Dr Lewis. Just take her on over there by Harvey on your way out. Jes taker on ovair by Harvey on ya way ayot. His voice got on Magdalena’s nerves. ::::::There has never been a Latino named Harvey, either.::::::”

The story’s piquant and fascinating conclusion is worth reading right through to book just to get to but some of it is uphill! On the overwhelming evidence of this book, the geriatric Tom Wolfe has lost little of his own élan vital. Verdict 7 out 10.

Best Books of 2012: 12 of 12

Here is the twelfth and last of my own best reads of 2012 and as soon as I have posted this I am off for lunch at Boodles, the second oldest gentlemen’s club in the world they say. I am invited there to discuss a book that needs writing, starting in 2014. Plan ahead!

My final book of last year is from the past, so far back that it seems like another world. It’s by the author of the famous play Journey’s End for which its author is best known. The Hopkins Manuscript by R C Sherriff, published in 1939, is an apocalyptic but very witty novel, somewhat after the style of H G Wells, but seemingly narrated by someone as innocent and naïve as the Mr Pooter in Diary of a Nobody. The end of the world is forecast when scientists realise that the moon is slowly but surely falling out of its orbit and will collide with the earth but seek to keep it a secret for fear of creating alarm and despondency. [In those days, secrets were kept if the Establishment did not want the news to spread: think about the King and Mrs Wallis Simpson.] The story, however, seems to come from millennia into the future. Mr Hopkins’s manuscript has come, according to the spoof foreword from ‘the Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa’, and is sadly all that survives from that distant, prehistoric period when, apparently, life and civilisation flourished in what is now a barbaric and desolate Europe. After all that I have been reading recently about forgeries and fakes, it is not surprising to be reminded just how easily uncorroborated accounts of earlier events can become accepted as the Ur-text. The book is very good fun to read and I’m very glad to have stumbled over it, thought not in Addis Ababa. You will need to get this from second-hand booksellers. Verdict 6 out of 10

This was the final blog about books read in 2012. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: 11 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day over twelve days, and today it is number eleven which was a ‘challenging’ book. Please comment on my crit and offer me your own best reads of the year.

There are few novels that prompt me to keep a dictionary handy but whenever this author writes, and especially when he is at the top of his form, Will Self writes such novels. Umbrella is a fascinating experiment in High Modernism. And there is no hint that this is pastiche: it’s the real thing and a challenging read from end to end but, to me, incredibly satisfying. Like Mantel’s book listed by me yesterday, it was on the 2012 Man Booker short list and would have been a worthy winner if there had been a tie with Hilary Mantel.

The novel’s epigram is in fact taken from Joyce’s Ulysses: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella” and it would be fair to say that Umbrella does for Friern Barnet what James Joyce did for Dublin although Self’s story may extend over a longer time period: I’d need to check whether the several flashes back and forward actually alter the time frame but life, though not this book, is short. In one continuous narrative, uninterrupted by any chapter breaks and moving through different times and narrative streams without warning, it recounts the reflections and observations of, inter alia, the psychiatrist Dr Zak Busner, and his sometime patient Audrey Death, to whom he administered L-Dopa. The story has echoes of Awakenings by Oliver Sacks that translated so well to the screen but these parallels only heighten the emotional intensity of the story, given that one can predict how the experiments will turn out. As psychiatrists will understand, the umbrella of the title becomes at different stages a penis and a syringe, as well as a means of keeping off the rain. In a similar pseudo-Freudian vain both Joyce’s and Self’s book titles start with U. Was that deliberate? I confidently predict the novel will be on several university syllabi before the end of 2013. Verdict 9 out of 10

Look out for my final book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: 10 of 12

This was a book which, curiously, I was very glad to read but gladder still to have read after I wrote my own novel Rembrandt Sings which is about art forgery and a few other things besides. If I had read the book first I would have been influenced by it, which is fine in a way, but the biggest tribute my own book has been paid is by one of the main characters in book ten who said my novel gave “a remarkable insight into the work of an art forger”. It seems I was getting it right as Provenance confirms.

Provenance by Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo is an art-related, detective story but every word of it is the detailed account of how a self-deluding fantasist, John Drewe, enlisted the, at first, unwitting help of an accomplished painter, John Myatt, who, in a harsh world for creators, had not yet managed to make a sufficiently rewarding impact with his own work. Together, they generated a series of wonderfully realised forgeries, but it was Drewe’s schmoose that enabled him to gain access to and then to falsify the archive records that helped to establish their provenance. With the crucial credibility of provenance they passed them off in front of supposed experts and supposedly sophisticated auction houses and, for a moment until Drewe panicked, get away with gifting some to the Tate Gallery. The non-aesthetic and non-artistic reasons why the fakes, made from house paints and K-Y jelly which were all Myatt could afford at the time, were not discovered sooner had more to do with the marks’ greed and their wish for the ‘discoveries’ to be genuine, and hence vastly more profitable. However, one persistent archivist and author, the director of the Giacometti Association and editor of his catalogue raisonné, kept up her fight to discredit some of the paintings and was eventually proven right.

Despite being convicted and jailed Drewe, the fantasist, still probably believes all his own contradictory stories he brought out while, ‘Walter-Mitty-like’ he conducted his own defence. The whole affair is recounted with the excitement of a detective story.

John Myatt, has now gone on to make a reasonable living as the painter of acknowledged ‘genuine’ fakes and, in fact, it was he who painted the cover illustration for my own novel Rembrandt Sings.

The American edition of this story is called Provenance but it has now been released in the UK entitled The Con Man. I prefer the original title. Verdict 8.5 out of 10

Best Books of 2012: 9 of 12

In my 2012 list of best reads of the year, I’ve reached number 9, which is Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. For Mantel fans, who are many, this was eagerly awaited and, for those who enjoyed Wolf Hall, it was the sort of sequel we had all hoped for. Justifiably, it won its author a second Booker Prize and set readers wondering not only when the promised third volume will appear but whether Mantel might even win again. (My bookmaker is not taking bets.) You can find extended reviews elsewhere so I am concentrating on my views.

The book is both a delight but it is also challenge to the reader’s concentration. We are reading the innermost thoughts of Cromwell; seeing the life of the times through his eyes. The pace is in part sustained by the very effective use of the historic present tense in which to recount Thomas Cromwell’s version of the story from the point of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon until the death of Anne Boleyn. This may not be the easiest of reads but for many it is the most rewarding. Verdict 10 out of 10

Quoting Burns

Way back in the 1950s I was a freelance reporter for a BBC Radio Scotland programme called “Scope” presented by, interestingly, an architect called Michael Laird. My job was to go off somewhere and ask people in the street some daft questions. The programme then edited the answers into an amusing collage and I banked a cheque for four guineas, (£4.20 in today’s debased coinage).

Around this time there was a move to have a plaque put up in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey but some doubted that the character of the poet was elevated enough to merit the honour. We were gey toffe-nosed in those days. I roamed the streets of Selkirk asking innocent citizens if they thought it was a good idea. In the main, they did, despite some reservations.

Then I asked if they liked Burns’s poetry. Everybody everybody said they did. Some even said they were very, very fond of it. So I asked them all if they could quote some of the man’s work.

Of those who could, everyone, yes absolutely everyone said, “My love is like a red, red rose ….” and came to a halt. It must all mean something but, to this day, I’m not sure what.

Best Books of 2012: 8 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day over twelve days if my best reads in 2012. As ever, the year was one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. Today it’s non-fiction with a couple of connected events as a bonus. Do please comment and offer me your own best reads of the year.

Now all roads lead to France: the last years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis is the first prose work by one poet recounting beautifully the final years of another; yet another poet, who was slaughtered in the Great War. We all remember ‘Adlestrop‘, but Thomas might never have become a poet and remained an insightful literary critic and hack prose writer if it had not been for his friendship with Robert Frost whose work he greatly admired. Frost in turn was responsible for encouraging Thomas to begin writing verse and, once started in 1914, for the next three years he produced a steady stream of image-packed poetry that still manages to use language as straightforwardly as does Frost.

Hollis’s picture of Thomas has both light and shade. Like Wordsworth, Thomas was an obsessive walker but he may have been using his hikes as a means of walking out on his problems with family life. Like many driven men, Thomas was selfish, even cruel at times to his nearest and most dear. His decision to volunteer, after agonising internal debate, was so impulsive that he only told his wife after the event. So, we have a flawed character, always more interesting to read about than a saint, and an almost flawless poet whose work deserves rediscovery if you do not know it well already.

And now, Nick Dear has written the play The Dark Earth and the Light Sky which premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2012 and draws on the Hollis account and other sources for a profoundly moving play. Read the book and, if possible, see the play, then read his poetry. Verdict 10 out of 10

Look out for the ninth book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Stop Press: Recommendation – read this

Tom Wolfe, BACK TO BLOOD [London: Jonathan Cape, 2012] Buy this now and look for my review in ten days time.

Best Books of 2012: 7 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day, over twelve days, of the top 12 out of last year’s reading. Today we have reached #7 and it is a big book, so much so that in a short blog there is no point in trying to summarise the story.. As ever, last year was one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press. Please comment and offer your own best reads of the year.

Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman. The translator of this substantial book, Robert Chandler, relates how Tolstoy’s War and Peace was the only book that Grossman felt able to read during the long and brutal siege of Stalingrad and clearly the author’s choice of a similar form of title is not a coincidence.

This is a book where the publishing story is almost as exciting as the book itself. It almost never appeared in print, and its author did not live to see its current success. The BBC cleared every slot of its drama schedule for a whole week in 2012 to broadcast a massive adaptation of the novel but unless one happened to be a bedridden insomniac it was impossible to follow in that medium.

Life and Fate and its panoramic account of the seige of Stalingrad is not a book to come at without some preparation and I recommend the article by Chandler in Prospect magazine as a start but one needs to read the novel’s introduction in the Vintage Classics edition too. Once that’s done, read through, and keep your bookmark in the long list of characters at the back of the book so as to refresh your memory of who’s who as you follow the story. Finally, like the BBC, clear your diary and set to. If you have a large hole in next year’s reading plan, this can magnificently fill it for you. Verdict 7.5 out of 10

Look out for the eighth book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: Blog 6 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day, over twelve days, of my booker’s dozen best reads last year. As ever, the year has been one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. A major personal discovery was the writing of an American writer. Richard Ford wrote the sixth of my twelve choices.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford came to my attention while listening to Radio 4’s Book Programme, when Mariella Frostrup interviewed Ford about his latest novel, Canada and a few days later when I heard him give a lively talk to the Royal Society of Literature. “The Sportswriter” is the first of his Frank Bascombe trilogy.

The narrator, Bascombe, is both introspective and self-deprecating: not an untypical combination. As the book blurb tells us, “he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage.” It is this capacity to dream in very poetic prose that carries the reader along while preserving our empathy with Frank Bascombe, who once wrote a book of short stories but never finished his novel, leading to his becoming a sportswriter.  Bascombe comes over as the laureate of the American suburbs and an American Proust in the sense that his entire full-length novel takes place over one Easter weekend in and around fictional Haddam, New Jersey. Bascombe is aware of his faults, his problems and his unfulfilled potential but (like almost everyone reading the book) he is unable to take the decisive action that would alter the drifting course of his life. The novel’s language is a joy: the story meanders as the narrator’s introspective mind wanders but never finishes up in an oxbow, always returning the reader to the main flow. I am already reading, with great enjoyment, the next of the trilogy, “Independence Day”, which is another account of an action- and inaction-filled long weekend in July. Verdict on The Sportswriter 7.5 out of 10

Look out for my seventh book tomorrow. Happy reading!