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Sons and Lovers

A shit book cover, yesterday.

As part of my lifelong project to become well-read before the end of it, I read Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence.  I had not read any Lawrence before, so I thought I perhaps ought to.  In the sixties, what with the Lady Chatterley trial and the Ken Russell film of Women in Love, reading Lawrence was quite the done thing.  These days, you don’t see it happening so much (although I’m sure it still happens behind closed doors), and you can read Cormac McCarthy and people will still think you’re clever.

While Lady Chatterley’s Lover is his most famous work due its one-time illegal naughtiness, I am reliably informed that it’s nowhere near his best.  Sons and Lovers is considered his first masterwork, on the other hand, and so seemed a good place to start.  To be honest, it wasn’t what I was expecting.  Although, like much of his writing, the book does concern itself with sex, Lawrence had yet to achieve the level of frankness he would later become notorious for.  Rude encounters are instead buried halfway through long dense paragraphs, conveyed in the delicate phrasing that getting published in 1913 no doubt required.

The story itself is pretty simple.  Young man Paul Morel grows up in a mining community near Nottingham where no one says anything nice to anybody ever, but finds he cannot give himself fully to one woman because of his feelings of belonging to his mother.  All rather Freudian, obviously, and also a bit Norman Bates, although Morel’s mother at least has the decency to actually be alive.

The work is also rather obviously semi-autobiographical, with the telltale signs of seemingly superfluous details lingered over, and events one would draw attention to if making things up mysteriously skimmed (I, of course, would never lower myself to such a thing).

We get a real sense of the past being a ‘foreign country’, as L.P. Hartley put it.  With its temperance societies and expected church attendance, the turn-of-the-century working-class mining community is a long way away from anything that it’s possible to know in Britain today.  It takes a fantastically long time for Morel to work out he even ought to be having sex, and even longer to realise he’s having it with the wrong person.  A process that takes years then would take a feral fifteen year old a weekend now.

For a landmark work of modernism, I was surprised by how ‘Victorian’ the language at first appeared to be.  Adverbs fly everywhere with abandon, and if it reminded me of anything, it was the writing of Arnold Bennett, who was exactly the sort of author, according to the Official History of Literature, that Lawrence was meant to have overtaken.

The difference between the two, however, is in the psychology.  In a novel such as The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett shows how the differing temperaments of two sisters take them down separate paths towards different experiences.  In Sons and Lovers, however, experience (notably that of the mother/son relationship) defines temperament.  In Bennett, characters are born.  In Lawrence, they are made (These days, now we’ve replaced Freudian analysis with theories of the mind that actually make some sort of sense, characters are more or less both born and made).

Overall, I found Sons and Lovers admirable in its sense of purpose and thoroughness in exploring its subject.  It is the ultimate Oedipus Complex novel, in the same way you’re not likely to get a book more about what whaling than Moby-Dick.  It is, however, a pretty severe read.  I couldn’t really say that I  have any warm feelings towards it.

But then, it’s not really a novel for now.  Today, we’re all too keenly aware of how we’re connected to things.  Banks screw up, and we feel the pinch in our pockets.  Our government’s foreign policy decisions increase the level of risk at home.  Lawrence intentionally kept the bigger social picture out of Sons and Lovers, choosing instead to concentrate on analysing the purely personal.  You need calmer times for a novel like that.  Maybe I should have read it in the nineties.

The Shuffle

A while back, I wrote a lot of short stories. At first, I was writing them simply to experiment with voices, styles and genres, and see how far I could push myself. After I’d come up with a few, however, it became clear that something bigger was emerging. The stories began to link thematically, and together became a body of work called The Shuffle.

In The Shuffle, connections are made only to fall apart. Order and randomness fight it out for control. The supernatural rubs up against the banal. Some stories are as meticulous as I can make them, while others are left deliberately loose. One’s nearly as long as a short story can be. Another is just one paragraph. It’s a patchwork quilt, as stitched together by a colour-blind lunatic who may or may not have gotten hold of some dangerous hallucinogens.

This summer, I am presenting short stories from The Shuffle on this blog. There’s a catch, however. Once a story has been up for a week, it gets deleted and replaced by the next one.  This is partly so my blog doesn’t get clogged up with short stories, but also hopefully to lend a sense of occasion and urgency to it all.

Why not print out and keep them in a ring-bind folder?

Winter Wonders

The Godlike Genius of Nicholas Fisk

Nicholas Fisk, smoking a pipe, ages ago.

After my recent miserable experience reading Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, compounded by the traumatic memory of the time I found myself in a locked room with only a JK Rowling novel for company, I asked myself the question, ‘Why do people like this shit?  Surely everyone’s just being silly and got it wrong.  I remember children’s books being loads better than this when I was young.’

A children’s author I particularly remembered liking was science fiction writer Nicholas Fisk.  His books still haunted me.  Their concepts, as much as I could recall them, seemed pretty mind-blowing even after all this time.

I resolved to re-purchase all the books of his I remembered reading to see if they were indeed as good as I thought they were then.  If so, I would make it my mission to tackle Rowling/Pullman worship at every turn, and erect statues of Nicholas Fisk outside all the branches of Waterstones in the land.

Now out-of-print, the books popped through my letterbox one at a time as they arrived from various online retailers.  Excitingly, they all had the covers that I remembered them having, and some of them were the same print runs. I was even tempted to renew my membership of the Puffin Club using the coupon at the back.  Anyway, I began to read.

Space Hostages (1967) is the story of a group of kids who are sent into space by a deranged RAF pilot, hoping to save them from nuclear war.  It’s pretty darn exciting stuff, powered along by some excellent characterisation as the brainy kid and the school bully seek to win control of the spacecraft and stop them flying into the sun.  It’s also notable for having a black main character, a rare thing in British kid’s fiction back then.

Trillions (1971) tells a less coherent story, but contains a central idea which is great.  An alien race arrives on Earth that consists of tiny compatible elements.  They fit together and build structures for mysterious purposes.  It’s not often that aliens in kid’s books are truly alien, but they are here.

Grinny (1973) is, I think, Fisk’s most popular book.  In it, an alien robot infiltrates a family in the form of an elderly relative in order to gain information about Earth prior to an invasion.  I’m pretty sure they read this to us in school.  There’s a paragraph about dogs ‘mounting’ that I think they might have skipped over though.

Robot Revolt (1981) features a charismatic religious cult leader who buys a robot servant that, in league with the leader’s children, ultimately seeks to overthrow him.  The sci-fi aspects are a bit ordinary here, but the sheer scariness of the religion more than makes up for that.

On the Flip Side (1983) is the most interesting for me.  A strange, ambiguous tale of communication with animals and parallel dimensions, it contains some pretty harrowing descriptions of society collapsing as animals go mad and inter-dimensional beings invade.  One paragraph in particular, in which a girl telepathically communicates with her dog has stayed with me over the quarter of a century since I read it:

Yes, Duff could still fill her with loves she never felt of her own accord.  The trouble was that these heartfelt loves became sickly and left a taste.  ‘Fondest mistress, worshipful young mistress – I love you, and you love me.’ Followed, of course, by the inevitable anxious question – ‘You do, don’t you?’

Coming back to them, I can see that Fisk’s books do have notable flaws.  Although he will invariably root the stories in a child’s viewpoint, they will often get too big, and the sympathetic protagonist’s perspective will get lost amongst various scientist and military types (this is perhaps why I remember the earlier chapters the best).  Also, his conclusions sometimes feel arbitrary, and in his earlier books, girls are not presented well, interested only in attention and being like the kids on telly, while younger children are possessed by a strange logic incomprehensible from the outside.

Having said that, the books are imaginative, original, haunting and challenging, encouraging children to think about science and the role it plays in the world they are growing up in.  So, all things considered, is Fisk a better writer than Rowling and Pullman?  For me, yes he is. I am off to erect my first statue in his honour.

Don’t Be Such a Russell, Steven.

Budget cuts have no effect on the new series of Doctor Who.

On the eve of a general election that has the potential to change the nature of British democracy forever, my thoughts naturally turn to the latest series of Doctor Who.

This series is notable, of course, for being the first since the resurrection of the programme in 2005 not to have Russell T. Davies at the helm as Head Writer and Executive Producer, and the baton passing instead to Steven Moffat.

This change was anticipated with some excitement by many fans because, although the Russell T. Davies era had many strengths, with some cracking stories, ideas and characters, the flaws were far from negligible, and inescapably the result of Davies’ storytelling style and attitude to narrative.

As Head Writer, Davies was responsible for a significant number of the episodes himself, as well as dictating the overall story arc.  The problem was that, of the excellent team of writers that he had assembled, Davies was by far the weakest.  Consequently, watching Doctor Who was often a bit like buying a Rolling Stones album only to find all of Side One having been written by Bill Wyman.

At the end of a Davies story, myself and many others would be left with the sense of violated trust.  It was as if we had placed ourselves in the hands of someone who’d promised he wouldn’t let us fall, only to be dropped from a great height.  Basic tenets of storytelling were ignored.  Leading characters would become weirdly passive, just because it suited the story for them to be that way.  Meanwhile, the character of Donna (played by Catherine Tate) had her memory wiped, meaning that all the development in her that we had followed over the preceding weeks was rendered irrelevant.  Ultimately, storytelling is all about watching people change through experience.  You mess with that, and you’re effectively sticking two fingers up at your audience.

Alongside all this, the Davies era became increasingly turgid, with David Tennant’s Doctor  so weighted down with the pain of his responsibility and guilt to the point that he was just a chore to be around, repeatedly dwelling on the same problems week in, week out.  The promise of Moffat, and with him a new Doctor, Matt Smith, seemed to be just what was needed.

Moffat came with an impressive CV.  He’d been behind the landmark teen series Press Gang, the good-if-you’re-into-that-sort-of-thing ‘British Friends’, Coupling, and the excellent horror reimagining of Jekyll, as well as some of the very best Who episodes of the Davies era.  And in many ways, his version of Who doesn’t disappoint.  The first episode felt very fresh indeed, and even the weakest story since hasn’t felt like a kick in the shins in the way that bad Davies often did.

Hand on heart, however, I don’t think I can say that he’s quite managed to provide the programme with the new direction that I and other fans deep down know it needs.  There are still some lingering issues that mar otherwise perfectly decent stories, and stop Doctor Who from all it can be.

Here are the things I feel need addressing.

1) Action set-pieces.  The series introduced the Doctor with him hanging out of a malfunctioning Tardis as it flew over London.  CGI now allows the BBC to stage scenes that would once have only ever featured in Hollywood movies.  This diminishes the character.  The key to the Doctor is that he is absolutely unique in the world of fiction.  If you can imagine anybody else doing the things he does, then the programme is not being true to itself.  You could have had a similar scene with Inspector Gadget or any other madcap character who uses technology.  Doctor Who is not Inspector Gadget.

2.  The Doctor’s awareness of his own legend.  At the end of the first episode, the Doctor scares off the alien menace by informing it of his past victories.  This is tiresome.  The charm of the Doctor Who universe used to be its very lack of coherence.  Although, logically, news of the Doctor should precede him, the fact that it didn’t meant that he always served as an unexpected factor thrown into a situation.  The bad guys should win, but don’t, because the Doctor turns up.  Take away this, and you just have another fantasy adventure series with a load of intertwining strands like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (good though that was).  Doctor Who needs to protect its boundaries, and maintain what is unique about it.

3. Wasting good ideas in too-short stories.  Both the second and third episodes of this series suffered from this.  ’The Beast Below’ had a fascinating future Britain on a spaceship, the intricacies of which were never explained (Why, for instance, were the fairground heads in the cases there in the first place).  ’Victory of the Daleks’ meanwhile completely threw away its brilliant idea of the Daleks fighting for Britain in WWII.  This could have run over three episodes, with the audience waiting and waiting for the Daleks to turn bad, then all hell breaking loose when they finally do.  Instead, they revealed their evil intentions almost immediately, and the episode just ended up looking rather silly.  The audience needs to be trusted to wait for things.  And if they don’t know how to wait, Doctor Who needs to teach them.  Waiting was what much of the original series was all about, to its credit.

4. Overarching storylines crippling standalone stories.  In this weeks’ ‘Flesh and Stone’, returning villains the Weeping Angels would not have been defeated had the crack in time from episode one appeared and ate them.  This was not the story we were promised.  We were meant to be watching the Doctor defeating them using his own ingenuity.  Instead he just manouvres them into place and feeds them to the metanarrative (Even though this episode was popular, I think it was a mistake to bring back the Weeping Angels.  They would survive in the memory better if their only appearance was in the classic ‘Blink’.  There was nothing gained by elaboration.)

5. Companions fancying the Doctor.  Amy Pond’s efforts to seduce the Doctor at the end of this week’s episode were beyond painful, and not in a good way.  Doctor Who is, at heart, a children’s programme, even though it’s audience contains a healthy slab of adults, as it always has.  If it forgets it’s a children’s programme, however, it instantly stops working.

The companions, even though they are adults, are stand-ins for the child viewer, who can imagine themselves travelling through time and space with the Doctor, who is always in some way a manifestation of the original ‘grandfather’ Doctor of William Hartnell.  Unless they’re downright freaks, kids don’t fancy their grandfather, however dapper objectively they think he might look.  Instinct should tell them he’s off-limits.  Again, although it doesn’t make sense that the Doctor’s companions become weirdly asexual as soon as they step on board the Tardis, it’s another thing that makes Doctor Who itself.  If you mess with it, then the programme becomes just like other programmes, at which point it stops being interesting.  There’s no point deconstructing something if all you’re left with are a bunch of broken parts that don’t fit together anymore.

6. No Adric.  I was very upset by Adric ‘dying’ in 1982, and have never fully accepted it.  I don’t believe he’s really dead, and should be brought back forthwith, complete with his star badge he got for being really good at maths.

With all these elements fixed, I firmly believe that Doctor Who will transcend Chocky’s Children to become the best science-fiction show EVER.  Make it so.

I Got the Asperger’s

We are as gods. Bow down and worship us, puny humans.

Recently I got official confirmation of something that I’ve pretty much known for quite a long time.  That is, I have the Autistic Spectrum Condition called Asperger’s Syndrome.

I’m not particularly big on posting personal details on the internet, as you can attract all sorts of idiots that way (I, for instance, have never publicly revealed the existence of my miniature Schnauzer, Poppy, and don’t intend to) but feel like making a little statement about this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I think it’s a relevant context for understanding my writing, both published and yet-to-be-published, and if I waited for everyone to figure it out for themselves it would take bloody forever (although someone’s already cracked the code).

Secondly, it seems to me that the more that’s found out about Asperger’s, the clearer it is that the ways in which it can manifest itself can be quite subtle (although the effect it has on someone’s life, positive or negative, is rarely if ever negligible).  The internet is rife with rumours that public figures like Woody Allen, Al Gore, Steven Spielberg and Prince have Asperger’s or a related condition, but if any ever get a diagnosis, they choose not to reveal it (give or take a Ladyhawke or two).

So I suppose the point I’m making is that the reality of Asperger’s goes beyond the current basic public understanding of it.  Many of us aren’t maths geniuses, and we’re not necessarily being socially inappropriate on public transport (although I reserve the right to do so at any time).  Asperger’s logic can be an integral part of creative thought and artistic expression.  You can also be a good friend, partner, parent, family member.  It’s a difference that contains within it many variations.

Now some of the more mean-spirited out there might look up from their Daily Mail and say, ‘Oh, everybody’s got Asperger’s these days.  You’re just trying to be fashionable and get away with stuff, like that hacker bloke.’

My response to this would be, firstly, ‘fuck off’.

My second response would be that Asperger’s Syndrome has only been available as an official diagnosis in the UK for less than 20 years, and has only entered the public consciousness relatively recently.  Consequently, there are many thousands of people out there of all ages who have gone through their entire lives knowing something’s not quite ‘right’ but are only now stumbling upon a framework for understanding themselves that makes sense.  That’s why it seems that ‘everybody’s got it’ at the moment.

Anyway, there’s a few more things I have to say about the matter, but I shall save them for another time.  Until then, I shall be doing really complicated sums in my head whilst behaving inappropriately on public transport.

The Island

It was a Christmas present.

Despite being an absolutely enormous hit, there’s something about Victoria Hislop’s The Island that no one seems to have noticed. This being, that it’s completely barking bad. This perhaps shouldn’t come as much as a shock, winner as it was by the Richard and Judy Summer Read Competition. After all, their viewers have yet to notice that Richard Madeley is also completely barking mad.

It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a book, with the history of the Spinalonga leper colony off of Crete in the middle years of the last century brutally welded on to a family melodrama beach-read involving sibling rivalry, adultery and, oh yes, leprosy. Also thrown into the mix is a bit of World War II and a truly ludicrous framing device in which a twenty-something woman seeks to resolve her romantic dilemma by seeking inspiration through the uncovering of her family’s secret leper past.

There’s a lot wrong with The Island. The plot, which is just about visible if you stand at a distance, often builds to anti-climaxes, such as a rampaging mob who plan to attack the leper colony, only to be talked out of it. They threaten to come back, but don’t. So that’s all right then.

Hislop, meanwhile, has a tin ear for a beautiful phrase, so we’re confronted with sentences like this (and on page one too), ‘How different that would make it from the ancient palaces and sites she had spent the past few weeks, months – even years – visiting.’ She’s been visiting the sites for years. That’s the information that needs to be conveyed, so why bring weeks and months into it? Oh dear.

The characters are flat, good or bad simply because they are, and what motivations they have are laid out for the reader the moment that they become a factor in the story. I don’t think there’s a single thing inferred, or left open to interpretation in the entire book. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that Hislop thinks her readers might be a bit thick.

Despite all this, however, the sheer ridiculousness of the exercise means that The Island isn’t an unlikable book. It’s not really a story about characters so much as one about a community, although I’m not sure that it knows this. In a way, it reminded me of John Cowper Powys’s Weymouth Sands, an even stranger book written by a very strange man.

Indeed, I can’t help wishing that rather than being the work of a travel journalist wife of a well-connected media type, The Island was written by a dotty lady resident of a bed and breakfast on Eastbourne seafront. It isn’t, but one can dream.

Help Me With My Evil Plan

The other week, presumably in an effort to clear the floor dedicated to housing unsold copies of my books at their Pimlico headquarters, Random House sent me yet another box of the trade paperback edition of my first novel, Hound Dog.

I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ve already got one box in the cellar, and there are only so many copies I can try to force through hamster-resembling Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather’s window. I’m beginning to think she’s not interested. Even though I thoughtfully inscribe each one ‘We Shood B 2Getha’ in my own blood. I mean, what’s a guy got to do these days??!!

Anyway, what I’m going to do with the books (Sarah Teather issue is unresolved) is this. If you email me your address, I will send you a SIGNED copy. If you have not read it already, you have my permission to do so. Then, however, you must redistribute in an interesting manner. But here’s the thing. I want photographic evidence of its re-homing, which I can post here on the blog.

For instance, if you were to give it to The Really Wild Show’s Terry Nutkins, it’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, I gave it to Terry Nutkins’. You have to send a photograph of the book being placed in Terry Nutkins’s hand. Whether or not Terry Nutkins is chained up naked in your spare room when this occurs is entirely up to you.

So, just to reiterate: Step 1. Email me. Step 2. Receive book. Step 3. Read book (optional). Step 4. Re-home book AND photographically document this happening. Step 5. Email me photograph, in full knowledge that I’ll piss all over your copyright and reproduce it here.

Well, what are you waiting for? Hop to it, before they send me another box!

Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton died. He was in a band called Big Star, who were around in the early 70s but didn’t sell many records, and were probably my favourite band when I was seventeen.

I was having trouble negotiating everyday teenage life with an undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition, and their music, listened to on second or third generation tape copies, made perfect sense to me. Their three albums, which would be classified as power-pop, although they transcend any easy definition, seemed to form a perfect trilogy. The first, #1 Record, is optimistic and sunny. It represented for me the life I hoped to attain, but curiously couldn’t get to, due to some mysterious blocks in my head. The second, Radio City, is rawer and more ragged, with Chilton’s co-leader, Chris Bell having departed. Although it still had joyous moments, such as their iconic song September Gurls, a darkness had sunken in. It was as if a realisation that life was harsher and more cruel than they’d previously imagined had now taken hold.

The third album, known as Sister Lovers, or simply Third, and nearly a Chilton solo album in all but name, took this to an extreme. The songs had become strange, and sounded on the verge of falling apart, with gaps in the arrangements that produced a chilling effect. Nevertheless, there was never a descent into nihilism which, in 1993, was what I felt I was being offered by the grunge records someone of my generation was ‘meant’ to buy. Instead I clung to the cautious advice that Chilton offered: ‘Take care not to hurt yourself/Beware of the need for help/You might need too much/And people are such…’

On a wave of interest sparked by Teenage Fanclub and others claiming them as an influence, Chilton fronted a new version of Big Star that year. I saw them live, performing to an adoring audience.

I saw them perform again a couple of years ago, to a roomful of uninterested chattering London hipsters (who I hope are fucking pleased with themselves now), struggling with a bad mix. Now there’ll never be another chance.

Of course, I didn’t really know Alex Chilton, and from the trail of bad feeling he left behind him, I suspect we wouldn’t have got on at all. But when he died, it finally hit me just how important he was to me. I’d forgotten just how much of myself was embedded there, in old copied tapes from 1993.

Big Star on Spotify
#1 Record
Radio City
There are various different orders for the track-listing of Third/Sister Lovers, as the album was never officially sequenced. This is my own personal order that I find produces the most satisfying listen.

Northern Lights

Bag o’shite.

As research for something I’m working on that may rear its head relatively soon, or at some far point in the future, or perhaps never at all, I read the first volume in Philip Pullman’s His (‘n’ Hers) Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights.

Because so many people of genuine intelligence rate his work I was presuming that it would turn out to be rather good, and far superior to the clumsy stylings of J.K. Rowling (the latest in a longish line of children’s authors with barely passable literary skills that the general public nevertheless hold dear to their hearts. See also, J.R.R. Tolkien). Upon reading it, however, I found that I did not like it. No, I did not like it one bit.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Pullman is a great ideas man. I won’t go into what it’s all about because you probably know, and if you don’t there are people out there who can tell you with a great deal more enthusiasm than I can, but the parallel universe he creates is full of neat imaginative twists, with the familiar made to feel strange, and vice versa. The problem is that it’s dead on the page. Why?

Because he can’t write characters to save his life. He really doesn’t seem to have any real understanding of how human beings work. And without characters, you don’t have anything that can be accurately described as a novel (unless you’re Olaf Stapledon, who was a genius, which Pullman isn’t).

Take the protagonist, Lyra. Presumably, we’re meant to fall in love with this little girl. Only problem is, her main characteristic is that she lies a bit. That’s not enough to drag me through the novel, at least not without me kicking and screaming.

Often, Lyra simply forgets to react to things. Major changes of fortune, grand revelations, even deaths, are met with an eerie silence from Lyra. Occasionally she’s eventually provided with an oddly delayed reaction, but many times not.

Along the way, Lyra encounters various helpers who she becomes deeply attached to. They also become deeply attached to her. Presumably the reader is meant to get deeply attached to all of them. This is hard, as none of the good guys possess any quality, such as wit, charm or even mysteriousness that you can really hook your affections or at the very least, attention on to. Then, once a friend has been made, Lyra will invariably be separated from them and hardly think of them again until the plot demands it, which renders the alleged earlier affection somewhat suspect.

On a technical level, Pullman’s writing itself ensures that a deep identification with any character is impossible. We drift in and out of Lyra’s perspective and fleetingly into those of other characters. A lot of the time, we’re just hovering uncertainly outside the action, like a shy person at a party. Sometimes, we discover things as Lyra does and have access to her thoughts, but then it’ll turn out that Lyra’s been learning to master the use of a magical compass or something behind our backs, and suddenly knows more about what’s going on than we do. She then has to have a convenient explanatory conversation with someone before we can catch up. These are basic writing errors, and ones that Pullman’s nemesis from beyond the grave, C.S. Lewis, knew not to make (I think. I haven’t read him since I was eleven. I’d check, but it’s a bank holiday and the library’s closed. Maybe he did make them. I’m having a crisis of faith. Like Susan with her makeup in The Last Battle).

Ultimately, I couldn’t care less about any of it. It felt like the literary equivalent of The Phantom Menace, the first part of a saga that stretches out before you like a particularly unwelcome train journey involving multiple changes, because its first few chapters guarantee that at no point will the human element come into play. In fact, I preferred The Phantom Menace, because that, at least, had a Holby City cast member wearing a humorous uniform.

You heard me. I preferred The Phantom Menace. I do not say those words lightly.

He’s Faceman! He’s Columbo! He’s Facemambo!

Columbo                                       Faceman

The other day I went to Dirk Benedict play Columbo in Prescription: Murder at the Worthing Connaught Theatre. The play actually predates the series and was used as the basis for the pilot episode in which Peter Falk played the detective for the first time (although confusingly, the play is based on a previous TV one-off drama, in which Columbo was played by yet another actor).

Benedict was convincing in the role, perhaps wisely adding little of his own and essentially conjuring up the spirit of Falk (who, confusingly, isn’t dead, although he has dementia and can no longer remember being Columbo, which is surely the saddest fact in show-business not involving Alex Reid right now).

The production was cheap and cheerful (and nothing wrong with that), although the sets were excellent, convincingly conjuring up 60s Los Angeles with a minimum of elements. Some of the acting from the supporting cast was a bit creaky, with that ‘TALKING REALLY LOUDLY FOR NO REASON’ you used to get in Radio 4 dramas in the 80s, but I don’t know if the play would really have benefited from a more subtle approach.

Benedict smoked a real cigar, which you could smell and everything.

The audience was played by Victoria Wood and Julie Walters (Sample overheard comments following the murder scene: ‘I can see her breathing.’ ‘Well she’s not really dead.’).

Anyway, the show’s touring the country, and I recommend it.

Muscle Beach Party

Over the past year or so, the theme of what sort of books can be successfully be made into films has been touched on several times in this blog.  This begs the obvious counter-question, what sort of films can be made into books?  In order to answer this, I felt compelled to read the novelisation of the 1964 musical surfing comedy Muscle Beach Party starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, as adapted by Elsie Lee (A snip at 50p, actually worth at least £30).

Now, I don’t mind admitting I went in with low expectations.  A lighthearted romp involving sight-gags, musical numbers and characters painted with strokes so broad they may as well have used a roller do not seem like the ideal ingredients for a satisfying read.

How wrong I was.  As well as a gripping story about how a group of surfers stand up to a body-building club while a rich contessa attempts to make a gigolo out of their leader, this book has everything.

Social comment: ‘Her hand caught warmly in Frankie’s, Dee Dee wandered where he led, across the sands and away from the sounds of civilization, If you can call it that, she thought vaguely’.

The weight of history: ‘”Like maybe brains do count for more than brawn?” Dee Dee suggested.  ”Like maybe that’s what our pappies were proving against Mr. Hitler?”‘

Existentialism: ‘”Honey, the beach is free,” he said with soft intensity… ‘the surf keeps rolling, rolling, with a rhythm nothing can match – and your life’s your own as long as you keep looking up and riding the curl… Isn’t that enough?”‘

Indeed, I would say that Muscle Beach Party has so much scope, so much depth of insight, it is a candidate for the elusive Great American Novel, if not the best novel of the 20th Century.

I, of course, don’t mean this.  It’s a load of old shit.  It is, however, cheerful shit that wouldn’t utterly wreck your life if you were to read it.

What’s really interesting is the fact that occasionally, Elsie Lee does a little bit more than meet her brief of turning the script into prose.  There’s some genuine characterisation slipped in here and there, with some imagination employed in working out what lies behind the actions of these cardboard characters.  You get a sense that, at least over the weekend she was working on this thing, she actually cared about them.

And it’s what happens in that space between what she had to do and what she did do that you can see, in its most basic form, art occurring.  It’s the literary equivalent of the pretty pattern on an ancient pot, or the little joke sneaked in to a railway station announcement.  It didn’t really need to be there, it seemed, on a practical level.  But someone felt compelled to put it there anyway.  It’s the same urge that ultimately leads to Les Demoiselles D’Avignon and Ulysses.  It’s the reason why something as apparently defined by it’s function as Clifton Suspension Bridge also possesses it’s own peculiar beauty.  It’s art.  It’s hidden in the cheapest, shittest, most cynical products of humankind.  It’s all around us.

(For more on the ‘Beach Party’ films, of which Muscle Beach Party is the second, see this interesting article).

Where Has All the White Dog-Shit Gone?

You may have heard this question asked before. For some reason, the white dog-shit of our youth has disappeared. Experts say that it is due to things such as less calcium in dog food and the like, but the truth is something a bit stranger. The truth is…

Well, you might have seen him, the man, if you’ve ever had reason to stroll down a residential street in the early hours of the morning. There he’ll be, at the end of the road, bent over, picking something off the pavement, it seems, and putting it in his sack.

He won’t let you get too close, though. Move in his direction, and he’ll disappear into the night, as if hidden pathways open up just for him between the hedges and the garden walls.

Except… once someone did get close, by accident. It was broad daylight, and they saw him walking along the street and, as he spotted his treasure on the ground, it was almost as if he could not help himself from bending down and scooping it up for his sack. Then, looking from side to side like a surprised animal and seeing he had been observed, he scampered down the street.

The person who saw him do this said, some years later, whatever you do, don’t follow him. Don’t follow him to the house. And whatever you do, don’t walk up the uneven path to the door, and do not ring the doorbell.

And if you were to do any of these things, absolutely don’t wait for him to answer, and listen to him speak in a little voice through the crack of the door, inviting you in for tea, and biscuits.

If you should find yourself in his living room, then, amongst the furniture that looks a bit too puffy, the carpet that is strangely crunchy under your feet, and the bookcases stuffed with books that feel as if they’re ready to fly through the air at any moment, if you should find yourself there… whatever you do, whatever you do, don’t breathe in through your nose.

And when he comes in from the kitchen shakily holding a tray with a teapot, two cups on saucers, a milk jug and a biscuit tin on it, as you see that the walls themselves are lumpy, and from every direction there comes a buzzing, a buzzing as if something is trapped and is desperate to get out, whatever you do… whatever you do…

But there’s nothing you can do, now, except run.  He pours the tea, and adds the milk and he says in his squeak of a voice, ‘would you like a biscuit?’, and his little hand reaches for the tin. It buzzes too, and before you can say no, his bony fingers slip away the lid…

Money

A number of years ago, Martin Amis had some dental work done.  For reasons I’ve never got my head around, this seemed to turn a sizable chunk of the literary establishment against him.  Consequently, being a man incapable of independent thought, I have followed this party line faithfully and never read any of his books, instead walking straight past them in the library, murmuring, ‘fucking straight-toother’ under my breath as I went.

All that changed this month, when I decided to experiment with free will for the first time in my life, and read something by him.  Naturally, I let others choose which one I read, and a straw poll revealed Money, his novel from 1984 to be the firm favourite.

Upon finishing it, I am convinced of three things:

1) Kirk Douglas demanded that Martin Amis write a  scene for him in which he could display his genitals in Saturn 3, a film for which Amis wrote the (rubbish) screenplay.

2) Turgid U2 stadium anthem ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ is inspired by a line from this book (At one point, the protagonist John Self heads for a part of New York ‘where the streets have names’).  All the dates fit.  If it’s a coincidence, I’ll eat my licorice hat.

3) Grossly unfair though it undoubtedly is, it’s virtually impossible to discuss Amis jr. at this stage of his career without mentioning his father, Kingsley (unless you haven’t read any of his father’s books, in which case it’s very easy).

The reason for this is that, at least at first, Money reads like a pumped-up hyper version of precisely the sort of book his father (and J.P. Donleavey, and the young Iris Murdoch) used to write in the 50s.  It’s essentially picaresque, with the overweight and over-sexed John Self meandering his way around a very loose plot as he tries to get a Hollywood film made, all the while experiencing and observing the seemingly magical properties of money.

As the book goes on, however, it reveals itself to be a rather different beast, with ‘Martin Amis’ turning up as a character, and takes a distinctly Post-Modern turn which at first feels like a distraction, but by the end is probably the most interesting thing about it.

Did I like it?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  I wasn’t particularly taken with the narrative style, which blends the colloquial English that a real life John Self would use with a bloated vocabulary that he most certainly would not. Also, for quite long periods the book and its main character seemed to be trapped in a cycle of narrative tics (have unlikely sex, observe effect of money, make fun of Hollywood types, have unlikely sex again) that really wore me down, but every so often it would spark into life with some astute observations and the odd good joke.

The problem, I think, is that unlike his father, Amis isn’t a natural wit, or at least doesn’t allow himself to be on paper that often.  Unfortunately, to pull off a meandering picaresque story, you’ve got to charm the reader in order for them to follow your deviations.  But maybe it’s just me, although, well, obviously not just me. In the aftermath of Anna Ford’s slightly weird recent public attack on Amis, in which she accused him of using Christopher Hitchen’s head as a bong in front of her goddaughter or something, it was startling just how many people used it as an opportunity to state they found his work unreadable. Some people such as John Niven here, however, are very much charmed by Amis jr’s style in this book.  But then, different people are charmed by different things.  This is why the world isn’t one great big wife-swapping party.

Also, I found the ease with which Self obtains sex, despite his limitations in the various fields through which men generally manage to obtain it, a stretch of credulity too far.  Although I usually tend to give this sort of novel the benefit of the doubt, and believe that it depicts a sexist world rather than being sexist in and of itself, when you have to revise your understanding of everything you know about the opposite sex in order to accommodate the internal workings of the story, alarm bells tend to ring.  As a very similar argument could perhaps be made of my own novel Hound Dog, however, I shall conveniently stop pursuing this point any further.

In fact, I found that there were numerous similarities to my novel Hound Dog, both in terms of the main character and certain avenues that the plot goes down, which I will not reveal here in case I simultaneously ruin both novels for people who haven’t read them (though really, what are you doing, not having read Hound Dog?  Go and read it this instant!).  Amis and myself must have tapped into the same mythical archetype, although I can’t find any mention of the ‘fat, wanking hero figure’ in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Perhaps he’s the thousandth and first face.

Anyway, Money wasn’t really my kind of book, probably because I’ve already written one a bit like it, but I sort of got something out of it, I guess. Probably. Anyway, there’s a version on telly soon so I’ll watch that I reckon.

Nick Cave

I saw Nick Cave once, in the old Borders bookshop in Brighton’s Churchill Square. I didn’t realise it was him at first. He was standing with his back up against some books in an alcove. Then, when a rather stiff-looking man walked past, he leapt out.

‘Look at my red right hand!’ he shouted. ‘Look at my red right hand!’

The man jumped, and let out an undignified yelp, before walking away as fast as he could, shaking his head and muttering.

Nick crept back into the alcove. I could see it was him now, his features familiar despite the startling hair-loss of recent years and the carefully-shaped beard that had yet to be revealed to the public. I could also see that he did indeed have a red right hand. At least, it had been haphazardly coloured-in red, in what seemed like felt tip.

A young, pretty woman walked past the alcove. Nick jumped out again.

‘Look at my red right hand!’ he said, waving it in the woman’s face. ‘The devil made it red, you know!’

The woman screamed as Nick flung himself backwards against the books, knocking several from the shelf as he pretended to be strangled by the red hand, and fighting it off with the other. He then fell to the floor, kicking more books as he went.

A store security man soon stood over him, trying to get his attention.

Nick just looked up as he writhed about, meanwhile kicking the security man in the back of the knee.

‘Stop it!’ He gasped. ‘Stop the hand. It’s killing me!’

The security man looked about, as if embarrassed.

‘Not again,’ I’m sure I heard him mutter.

Then he reached down, effortlessly grabbed the hand from around Nick’s neck by the wrist, and banged it several times against a hardback book of astronomy with little force.

He dropped the hand, and it fell to the floor.

‘Think it’s time for you to leave now, sir,’ said the security man.

‘Ow,’ said Nick, rubbing the limp red right hand. ‘That hurt.’

‘Come on, now,’ said the security man, lifting him up from the floor.

‘That really hurt,’ said Nick, as he was led away.

Degrees of Separation

EJ Norman

For some time now, I’ve been writing or co-writing lyrics for electropop artist EJ Norman, and now you can hear the cream of our work on the free-to-download album ‘Degrees of Separation.’

Although many musicians have been drawing on the synth-pop of the eighties as inspiration recently, EJ and I have chosen to focus on the aspects that figures such as Little Boots and La Roux tend to ignore – pathos, melodrama, and storytelling, whilst trying to avoid simple pastiche.  The resulting tracks, I feel, describe a world in which relationships are managed through mobile phone conversations in the stairwells of open plan offices, and lives become ordered and maintained, rather than lived.

Anyway, I’m immensely proud of the whole thing, and you can download the tracks here, as well as listen to them in streaming audio, along with a printable cover.

Hope you like it.

The Dreamers

The Dreamers (2003) was the best film from Bernardo Bertolucci for some time. After years of making high-class tat like Stealing Beauty (a sort of prototype Mamma Mia!, only with Liv Tyler’s breasts occupying the space where Benny and Bjorn’s songs would eventually go), he finally came up with something that recaptured the genuine eroticism of Last Tango In Paris and the sense of purpose of The Last Emperor.

The Dreamers told the story of a young American staying in Paris with a pair of cinephile siblings, a brother and sister caught up in a near-incestuous relationship, and getting caught up in their private games, as the riots of May 1968 occur without their noticing. It’s a very intense, sexy film indeed. I mean, you can see everything.

The script is by film critic and novelist Gilbert Adair, who adapted his own novel, The Holy Innocents (1988). He also reworked this novel (which he was unhappy with and bravely fended off offers of film adaptations for some years) to coincide with the release of the movie. It is this reworked version, now also called The Dreamers, what I have read and done a review of here.

The basic concept is brilliant, but I have to say it shines through much more in its film incarnation. The problem is that stylistically Adair is quite a showy writer, and draws attention away from the story he’s trying to tell with needless flourishes that aren’t really that clever anyway. When you’ve got naked incestuous cinema-obsessives wandering around a Parisian apartment in your novel, you really don’t need lines like ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness as a swimming pool may be located next-door to a church.’ The film, on the other hand, is all situation, as all good films should be, and much more powerful for it.

Again, Bunuel’s claim that only bad books can be made into good films comes to mind here. Not that The Dreamers is a bad book so much, just that it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with its being a book at all. It tries too hard to be a novel, or at least feel like one, and is all the less of a novel for it.

Indeed, it is this very awkwardness in novels those that act as source material for the best film adaptations often share. Good books can be made into good films, but they are usually good in a solid, dependable way, rather than being truly excellent. A film like A Room With A View may win Oscars, but how many people now enjoy it purely as a film? It’s a beautiful illustration of a great novel, but ultimately still an illustration.Vertigo Psycho, The Godfather and Jaws, on the other hand are, to varying degrees, based on decent but minor books, and are major, wholly filmic, achievements.

Towards the end, the novel actually gets the upper hand on the movie, as the characters descend into levels of squalor the film doesn’t show (to its detriment, I feel) before breaking out of their isolation and descending into the riots. The move to the outside is more convincing here, although ultimately I still don’t buy it. The three of them are ultimately voyeurs, their own private games the closest they can believably get to engaging with the world. They may watch the riots from the window as a spectacle, but they would never join in with them. Then they would wait for the film version, and admire the director’s technique, before going back home to the impenetrable isolation of their own company.

EDIT: I’ve done some thinking about the difference between novels and films, and have come to the conclusion that while good novels explore character by putting them in a situation, good films explore a situation via the characters within it. This is why genre fiction novels so rarely achieve absolute greatness, because they are ultimately more about situation than character, and thus don’t play to the strengths of the medium. The best films, however, often are genre pictures, for the same reason.

I can’t think of any exceptions to this, and I’m not interested in hearing any, because I like my rule and don’t want it to not be true. So if you know any, just say them to yourself quietly, so I can’t hear. Thank you.

Inconvenient Music Club: Electric Café

Kraftwerk’s 1986 album, Electric Café, is where it’s widely considered to begin going wrong for the legendary electronic music group. After a run of classic, innovative albums from 1975′s Autobahn to Computer World in 1981, Electric Café was believed to reveal that the trailblazers had fallen behind the pack, overtaken by the very acts they influenced such as the Human League and New Order, and rendered redundant by the incorporation of their electro-industrial rhythms into hip-hop. Electric Café, perhaps, is the sound of a once-fearless group losing its confidence. For most music fans, this is where the story ends. In the world of Inconvenient Music, however, it’s exactly where we start paying attention.

Side one consists of a suite of three inter-related tracks, Boing Boom Tschak, Techno Pop, and Musique Non-Stop. Skeletally sparse, and not overly melodic, the tracks could be seen as a blueprint for much of the dance music of the following decade. Except that they never quite ‘kick in’ the way you assume they’re supposed to. There’s no real build and release of tension. They just sort of hover uncertainly, as if they know there’s something they should be doing, but can’t quite work out how to do it.

On one level, it’s just the sound of music not working, but on another it’s quite revealing. It’s as if Kraftwerk had indeed seen the future, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to sign up to it, at least, not yet. They would correct this ‘fault’ on their 1990 self-remix album The Mix, in which the three tracks were condensed into one mighty piece, Music Non-Stop, that does exactly what dance music’s supposed to do, thrillingly. It’s an improvement in that it’s ‘better’ music, but without the strange hesitating mood of the original elements, it’s perhaps less interesting.

Side two opens with the elegant pop of The Telephone Call, which could easily sit on the earlier Computer World, if it were not for the fact that whereas the songs on that album presented (albeit with typical Kraftwerkian irony) a world of harmony between man and device, in which social interaction is eased through developments in information technology, The Telephone Call depicts these as means of non-communication, with calls being redirected to the mocking sound of an answering machine message, and the physical distance of the relationship only too apparent.

The song that follows, Sex Object, is one of the more baffling entries in the Kraftwerk songbook. ‘I don’t want to be your sex object,’ sings main-man/machine Hutter, ‘Have some feeling and respect’. It verges on the laughable, with a group that had previously only concerned themselves with the love of machines suddenly turning their attention to physical relationships. The curiously nonsynthetic-sounding slap bass, meanwhile, suggests that they’d lost their bearings completely. The track’s ‘wrongness’, however, once again adds to its meaning. It’s the sound of a crack in a flawless surface, as a group who had until then sung in seeming praise of their eventual dehumanisation turn against the idea and make a plea for individuality.

The album ends with the title-track, Electric Café, a pleasing enough return to the streamlined electronic constructions of side one, leaving the listener in what sounds like a prediction of the existence of internet cafes. We now all live in the Electric Café, Kraftwerk seem to be suggesting, with social interaction simultaneously eased and obstructed by the devices we use to achieve it. The album’s re-branding as Techno Pop upon its rerelease earlier this year nearly deprives it of this layer of meaning.

Electric Cafe is the ultimate flawed gem, with the very things that stop it from working totally successfully being those which give it the depth and meaning that it does possess. Sometimes, imperfection is a work of art’s logical end-point.

Listen to Techno Pop (Electric Cafe) on Spotify.

The Mahābhārata

When Project: Well-ReadB4Dead (my randomised system for achieving a working knowledge of world literature before the age of ninety) threw up the ancient Indian epic The Mahābhārata, I found myself with a bit of a problem.  It’s long.  Very long.  So long, in fact, that if I were to read it in its entirety, I would have time for very little else before my ninetieth birthday.  Fortunately, the current Penguin Classics version, translated by John D. Smith, summarises a good two-thirds of the text so the reader can skip some of the less essential stuff and concentrate on the main story, leaving you with something that’s still very long, but not as long as some more recent Thomas Pynchon novels, and with probably less characters and a simpler story.

The epic tells of the battle between the heroic Pandavas, five not particularly-likable brothers with various superhuman attributes, and the hundred Kaurava brothers, who are the villains, and thus doomed to lose, despite there being a hundred of them.  Along the way, the story meanders this way and that, and encompasses many sub-stories that are told by various characters, as well as the spiritual instruction of the Bhagavadgītā.

Reading it is certainly a challenge.  There are long stretches where, even with the summarised sections, not an awful lot of interest happens.  Suddenly, however, the story will flare up in very imaginative ways indeed, with genders switching, gods revealing themselves in a fantastically trippy fashion, and mysterious rituals such as the Horse Sacrifice being performed.

What I find most interesting about works from this far back however (it is believed to have been written, and then added to, from the 8th C. BC to the 4th C. AD), is the way they swing from what could be called mythic storytelling, in which a people’s world and history is explained through narratives in a way that makes sense to them, and storytelling for its own sake, where deliberate use of tension and suspense is employed, sub-plots interact with the main story the way they’re meant to, and instead of things happening because they are the will of the gods, they occur because of human will and human action.

(This is the fundamental difference between The Iliad and The Odyssey, I think.  In the former, battles are often won or lost depending on whether a sacrifice pleased the gods.  In the latter, however, although Odysseus has help from Athena, much of the time he’s relying on his own wits.  Consequently, it feels a more ‘modern’ story.)

The Mahābhārata is explicitly concerned with this, as characters seek to understand what is ‘fate’ and must be, and what is the result of human desire.  Interestingly, and frustratingly, which events are determined as ‘fate’ aren’t consistent throughout the epic, and so a sinful action deserving of punishment in the afterlife halfway though the story is ‘what must be’ by the end.

Ultimately, the Mahābhārata pulls the modern reader in and pushes them away with about the same regularity as the more-famous ‘Bible’ by Moses, et al., but with less reasons provided for stoning people to death (There are also points of overlap, with a variant on the Noah story and that of Moses in the bull-rushes).  Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating read if you’re even remotely interested in the development of narrative technique throughout the ages.  7/10!