Year: 2011

KNOTS AND CROSSES by Ian Rankin

I’ve read a number of Ian Rankin’s crime novels, which are all set in Edinburgh and feature Detective John Rebus as the central character. When I say, a number, I mean a LARGE number, and all have been read for work.

They are not as totally rubbish as most crime fiction.

KNOTS AND CROSSES was in fact Rankin’s first Rebus novel, and it is therefore interesting to read it last. Apparently, according to the author, he was attempting to write a modern Jeckyll and Hyde, and not a genre crime novel at all. This is odd, as in some ways it couldn’t be more genre:

-its about the murder of little girls (yawn)
-it features a hard drinking detective (sigh)
-it gets stupidly personal at the end (please)

In other ways however, it’s not especially genre. Rebus has complex emotional issues, and a full inner life, for example. For a while you are even supposed to think that he might be the murderer. He has a family life, he has gross sex scenes – he has all sorts of fallabilities that the Rebus of the later books, the genre Rebus, really does not.

It’s as if the hard inner seed of a genre writer is in the book, and it wants out. Rankin was a Literature Phd when he wrote it, and you can see it; but the genre writer is there, just waiting to cut himself out of all his early grad student constraints.

THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz

“Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?”
(Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol 1, No 49, April 1966)

And so begins this wonderful novel. Followed by, bizarrely, an entire poem by Derek Walcott, an important Caribbean poet.

This gives you a kind of sense of what a seriously loopy book this is, verging wildly from the highly literary, to pop culture, from English to Spanish, from Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to contemporary New Jersey.

Oscar Wao is a fat guy who loves sci-fi to an unhealthy degree, and is permanently in hope of finding love with a lady. His story is intercut with that of his sister, who flees the US for their ancestral homeland of Dominican Republic, and with the stories of his grandfather and mother, and of what made them flee the DR (as he calls it) for America.

Oscar’s grandfather was tortured and murdered by the Trujillo regime, because he refused to offer his oldest daughter up freely to Trujillo to be raped. Oscar’s mother, the youngest daughter, was thus left an orphan. She grew up and was eventually forced to flee the DR after getting entangled in a stupid relationship with the husband of Trujillo’s sister. Oscar’s own story eventually leads him back to the DR, where he finally finds love (with an elderly prostitute) and is eventually murdered by her boyfriend’s heavies.

Actually as I write it out it sounds like rather a miserable and melodramatic tale. But so sparkling and irreverent is the voice of the novelist, so sure the comedy, so accurate the observation – especially of the world of fat dorks – that in fact the book is a non-stop delight.

I was particularly struck by how Diaz managed to mix together the many aspects of his life – first and third world, pop and literary culture – into one coherent identity. This is something I certainly can’t seem to achieve.

The poem that begins the novel, after talking about Derek Walcott’s varied backgrounds, ends:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”

PS. Zimbabwean? Want to feel a certain someone’s not that bad? Check out Trujillo’s dictatorship here. He eventually died in an assassination, but I must point out he had serious prostate problems too. . . Holding thumbs!

JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby

This little book begins in a toilet.

Duncan has dragged his girlfriend Annie to America on holiday to see the toilet because he is obsessed with the musician Tucker Crowe, who has not recorded any music in twenty years, retiring soon after a mysterious incident in this same toilet.

Duncan and Annie have been together for fifteen years. Annie is beginning to feel that, just as she initially drifted into the relationship, she ought now to drift out of it.

A new album of old Tucker Crowe material is released, and, primarily to irritate Duncan, Annie comments on it in an online forum of which he is an obsessive member. This impels Duncan to cheat on her and then sort of half-heartedly leave her. It also impels Tucker Crowe, astonishingly, to contact her, and say how much he appreciated her review.

Not very believably, she begins a correspondence with Crowe, who eventually visits her in England.

You may find that my plot summary there ends rather oddly, and the reason for that would be that the book itself ends oddly. It just sort of stutters to a close. I was left slightly confused as to what I was supposed to understand about the characters. Perhaps I just need to understand that Mr Hornby suddenly realized he had to get to the cleaners before they closed?

I enjoyed the presentation of the dangers of an easy relationship, and of finding yourself settling without ever making the decision to do so. I also really enjoyed the character of Duncan, who is a wonderfully believable 40-something music dork.

The whole book however was a bit like eating unsalted popcorn. It went down easy and was kind of fun, but didn’t leave much of a mark.

THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins (30th Anniversary Edition)

This book made a big splash when it was first published in the 1970s, and it is now in its 3rd edition.

Essentially, the book argues that evolution does not work on a family, group, or species level, but on the level of the gene.

Humanitarian feeling, by this measure, is not occasioned by a desire on the part of humans for humanity to survive, and it is certainly not (perish the thought) occasioned by some higher, non-biological feeling we might have (what! something non-biological, never!).

Dawkins takes us back to the primordial soup in which loose bits and pieces slowly formed molecules. The molecules which survived, were the molecules which were successful. They formed sacs to keep themselves safe, or learnt how to push chemicals away, or whatever. And slowly they developed into full organisms. However, the driver is still those early small organisms, which are now recognisable as DNA. So, for example, the DNA for two legs survived because giving a creatre two legs made that creature more likely to survive and thus produce DNA. We are, in Dawkins view, just robots created by our DNA to carry our DNA around and keep it safe.

I actually find this quite a believable theory. Though, why should we care what I think? I don’t know squat about biology.

He includes a very interesting section on how the basic rule of most religions – do as you would be done by – might have been shaped by evolution. More here if you’re interested.

Dawkins can’t bear religious fundamentalism, which is I find hilarious, because he is such a biological fundamentalist. He is so insistent on the whole nothing-beyond-biology argument, it gets a bit embarrassing. I think insisting loudly that there is not a god is just as silly as insisting loudly that there is one. You can really only weigh in on that one when you’re dead.

It does explain family feeling in an interesting way: in essence, his argument is that we protect members of our family because they share so much of our DNA. But where I struggled a bit was: we share like 99%of our genes with chimps. Surely therefore we should be conditioned to work for their survival too? But this is clearly not the case.

BILLY BROWN I’LL TELL YOUR MOTHER by Bill Brown

This is an autobiographical tale of growing up in the years immediately after the second World War.

Some aspects of it are quite interesting: the aspirational nature of council housing (that really bends the mind, today); the sense of community; the fun to be had in bombed out houses. It’s also an engaging and pleasant read, and you find yourself caring for the characters, and believing in their world.

In general however I have to confess I found it a tiny bit cheesy. Apparently, immediately after the war, no one ever had any complex or contradictory feelings, and no arguments were ever serious.

I suspect that it is perhaps read and loved by people who remember that time, and in particular perhaps by those who like to tut tut about today.

FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong

This book tells the story of Isadora Wing, who while at a conference with her second husband, the psychologist Bennett, falls madly in love with another psychologist, Adrian. She is confused about her feelings for Bennett, but certainly knows that she is bored and unfulfilled sexually, so she decides to run away with Adrian.

She and Adrian drive around Europe drunkenly and pointlessly, and the novel begins to move back in time. We learn about Isadora’s past relationships, with special emphasis on all the sex she was or wasn’t having. Eventually left on her own in Paris, Isadora has a sort of crisis of confidence regarding her inability to be by her self. She decides in the end to go to London to find Bennett, but the suggestion is very much that the most important peace that she has made is with herself, more than with any man.

Apparently this book was a massive bestseller when it first appeared in 1973 (it has since sold 12.5 million copies in 27 languages), and spoke in particular to women, who rejoiced in its sexual frankness and open discussion of female freedom.

Frankly, this response puzzles me a bit. I was kind of like: what? She doesn’t want to get married. She wants to have a career. She likes to have sex. I don’t really see the big deal.

But I guess that shows that we have come a long way since 1973, and that a lot of women before me had to fight a very long hard road, for me to be able to read this book, and find it simply puzzling.

It reminded me quite a lot of Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, another book about a woman’s valiant struggle, that now seems to me unimpressive. It’s also similar to THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK in it’s interest in psychiatry, in recounting dreams in detail (NB Authors: this is always boring), and in banging on in great detail about periods, as if no one’s ever written about them before. Which, maybe nobody had.

With all the sex stuff it also reminded me of the other old friend of this blog, Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER, but let’s not hold that against it.

Anyway, I admired the book. It’s impressively honest, the style is informal and fun, and the story compelling. It’s also rich with quotable quotes:

“Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

“Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were helplessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky.”

“ . . . in some fashionable sell-out profession like advertising . . .”

“All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”

Martin Amis, on it’s release, called it “horrible and embarrassing.” That’s also very much in it’s favour.

HARPERS January 2011

A lovely article about Ralph Waldo Emerson in my favourite magazine this month. Here’s a quote of his to put in your pipe:

Days . . “come and go like muffled & vague figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nohting, & if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away . . . I find no good lives. I would live well. I seem to be free to do so, yet I think with very little respect of my way of living; it is weak, partial, not full & not progressive. But I do not see any that suits me better. . . We are all dying of miscellany”

Or,even worse:

“After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning”

WHY IT STILL SUCKS TO BE A GIRL by George Eliot

Occasionally one comes across people (ie. morons) who think that feminism’s work is done, or that being a feminist is in some way an old fashioned notion.

These morons need to look at this: VIDA’S THE COUNT. Don’t bother with the text at the top, just look at the pie charts, and feel your mind boggle. It’s a comparison of the numbers of books reviewed in major magazines broken down by gender. For example, The Times Literary Supplement, in its wisdom, found 1075 male writers worthy of review, and just 378 female. Take that ladies.

Here’s another:

Meghan O’Rourke at Slade has an interesting take on all this, particularly as regards unconscious bias. She points out, in an interesting parallel, that once blind auditions were instituted for major orchestras, the recruitment of women went up – well, let’s see if you can guess how much:
a) Not at all
b) Only a teensy tiny bit
c) TENFOLD.

Yeah. Damn skippy.

See also the Franzenfreude debate, where there was much discussion around whether Jonathan Franzen FREEDOM would have been so celebrated, given its domestic setting, were it written by a woman.

What we have learnt from this is that when I become a famous author, I am so going to go by the name S.M NORMAN.