Tag: male writer

DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith

Here is an eerie story of the near-future.  Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies.  They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned.  The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned.  It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good.  Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage.  It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it.  Try this:

“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line.  He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.” 

One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged.  I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away.  A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc.  Various versions of daddy issues in other words.  But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized. 

THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

I’m apparently really into nautical non-fiction at the moment.  THE WAGER, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, and now THE WIDE WIDE SEA.  It’s the story of Captain Cook’s third and final (fatal) journey of exploration.  He was all set to retire too, and no one really understands why he decided to go ‘one last voyage,’ given he was already famous and rich.  How could he not see that there was virtually no way, narratively, this wasn’t going to go either tragic or disappointing?

The voyage had two goals, one to find the NorthWest Passage, and the other to return to this young man, Mai, to his home island of Tahiti.  This second part was pretty interesting.  Mai discovered guns at the business end – by being shot at -when the Europeans landed in Tahiti the first time. He was strongly, strongly in favour.  His family had been killed by their enemies on Bora-Bora, and this guy, clearly a total baller, decided to play the long game, i.e., befriend the Europeans, get them to take him to Europe, get European guns, and come back to use them on these bastards from Bora-Bora.  To understand his level of fury, let me tell you that apparently it was not uncommon for Bora-Borans to take the dead body of their enemies and “flatten the eviscerated corpse with clubs, then cut a hole through the abdomen, through which the triumphant warrior would insert his head to ‘wear’ his victim as a sort of macabre serape.”

Mai had been living in the UK for some years, mostly on country estates with the wealthy. He rarely visited towns, but when he did ‘the poverty and hunger he encountered while on brief visits to . . . upset him; he’d seen nothing like it in the land of tropical plenty that was Tahiti.”  He was admired for his quick learning of English, and his freedom with the language; ice was ‘stone water,’ a wasp that stung him was a ‘solider bird.’  One day when offered snuff he politely replied ‘No thank you, the nose not hungry.’    

When Cook finally drops him off, he struggles to reacclimatize of course, and the gun thing doesn’t really work out because the intra-island battles have moved on.  The author, bizarrely, says a bunch of stuff about how sorry he is for Mai, who he feels is ‘doomed . . . to a jumbled, deracinated existence,’  because he has moved around so much and seen so much.  Has this guy never been to London?  About half the population are from elsewhere and I don’t note us all  in despair at our jumbled lives.

I was interested to learn that Cook’s achievements were not just geographical but culinary. I knew scurvy was a bad disease, but did not realize that “ It was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition.” The causes of scurvy were not understood till the 1950s, but Cook dreamed up a diet for his sailors which prevented it – his first voyage was three years and they did not lose a single person to the illness, which made him famous and was a huge breakthrough for British imperialism.

Anyway, he ends up being killed by some locals on a beach in Hawaii.  An interesting story. 

THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff

It is rare, at least in English, to find a book written by someone who grew up really poor.  And it’s very rare for that book to be pre-1950.  Off the top of my head, I can think of LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD and MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS and that’s about it.  THE ROAD TO NAB END is one such.  It’s a memoir of a childhood in the early 1900s in Blackburn.  I had never heard of this Blackburn, but it was apparently a key starting point of the Industrial Revolution, especially in clothing manufacture.  Unfortunately for the author, the Revolution was running out of steam as he arrived, and his family were at the sharp end of it.  Try this:

“I think the damp worried me more than the cold.  There was nothing to stop it rising through the flagstones that covered the floor . . .  The washing hanging from the ceiling didn’t help either.  The cold was sometimes so severe it made us forget the damp.”

“All meals were our favourite meals,” he says at one point, a sentence I have thought of often in my revoltingly privileged life of restaurants and ‘standards’ about food. 

What makes it especially sad is that his parents moved to America in about 1910, and then, in a tragically poor piece of decision-making driven by homesickness, came back again, just in time for the father to be drafted into WWI and clothing manufacture to move to America.  Here is his grandma, when challenged about moving to the US:

“And don’t give me that old buck about love of country.  That kind of talk is for toffs.  You keep the country, I’ll take the money.  Frankly, I don’t care whether God saves our gracious king or not.  I’m tired of the whole rotten lot.” 

She certainly never came back, and ended her life rich and comfortable.

The presence of the WWI veterans is a particularly sad part of this book.  One lies babbling in a bed in the front garden of the house across the street for twenty years, presumably from shell shock or a head injury. 

It’s a clear, straightforward re-telling of a tough childhood, and it made me grateful for my cushy adulthood.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle

I’m afraid I couldn’t finish this one, despite its truly wonderful cover and the fact that the edition I have is one of my favourite kinds, falling apart and with brown pages.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI tells about the Japanese use of Allied soldiers and forced labour to build a railway in WWII, a terrible project that killed about twenty thousand people. This fictionalized version had a tight plot in this interesting setting, but it was just too silly for me. It’s very much a mid-century male fantasy of tough geniuses.

Boulle was a veteran of forced labour himself, and I would have liked to read a book about his actual experiences. Apparently life being what it is, he did write one, called MY RIVER KWAI, but it has not endured enough to even merit a Wikipedia entry, while this kind of trashy version sold in the millions. Well done to him: I see he was so poor he was practically homeless after the war, so I’m glad he made some money. He then went on to write a wildly different book – wait for it – it’s PLANET OF THE APES (!?!) so he certainly sorted himself out

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey

Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?

It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly.  There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful.  Try this:

“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains.  Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day.  I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”

Or this, about a bushfire:

“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “

Or this:

 “. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank.  These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”

It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully.  He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police.  He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success.  I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners.  A fantastic book.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann

I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go.  I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes.  The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann.  Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow).  He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE.  You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no.  As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.”  However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence.   My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”

I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs.  Poor guy.  He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe.  At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull.  Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc.  Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring.  But in any case, I had to quit.  One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today.  I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care. 

SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson

A memoir by a man who at 17 was groomed by his female teacher into a sexual relationship.  He does a fantastic, horrifying job of telling it very much from the perspective of his 17-year old self – how wonderful he found her, how frightened he was of her, and etc.  It must have been very hard to do, because from any adult perspective you can tell she is a strange and manipulative woman, delighted to find someone who will follow her creepy script for romance.  You can tell the author shares this adult perspective, as the post-script takes us to him at 35.  The detailed story ends at his prom, but then he tells us that he ends up getting married to her in his first year of University (in his home town, because ‘you can’t go to Oxford,’ she tells him, because then we’ll be separated); and having a baby in his second year; and another baby in his fourth.  Once he is capable of earning a wage, she never works again.  He hates his job and she convinces him it is his duty to stay with it.  Though he does not talk too much about it, the book absolutely aches with regret for the young years he lost.  What is particularly sad is how clear he makes it that many people – including people in the power structure of the school – who knew what was happening and ignored it, because it was inconvenient for them for it to be happening.  A complete heartbreaker of a story. 

THE INHERITORS by William Golding

Here is a book about the meeting of neanderthals and homo sapiens, told from the neanderthals perspective.  Unsurprisingly, our species does not come out of it looking good.   It really is incredible how our first instinct is to kill, and our second is to abduct.  You do feel sorry for these Neanderthals. 

The first part is the most successful, where you follow a band of 7 Neanderthals as they move from their winter to their summer locations.  There is an impressive inhabiting of a mind that (from our perspective) is sort of half-way there.  Then they meet the ‘bone-faced men,’ who surprise them by being bone-faced, and even more by existing, as the group had previously thought they were the only bipedals in the world. 

From very first meeting you know it is going to end badly for someone, with the Neanderthals watching with interest as ‘small straight twigs’ are thrown at them by the bone-faced men.  These are of course arrows, and it goes downhill from there.

I have to admit I gave up close to the end.  There was a very very long section in which the Neanderthals were watching the early humans go about daily life in a clearing.  I appreciate Golding was having fun sharing his research with us but I got bored.  However, that said, I still enjoyed it. 

PS: I learnt from the introduction – did you know Golding’s other book, LORD OF THE FLIES was widely rejected by agents while in draft?

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.

PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary

There are plenty of memoirs from people with daddy issues; here is one from someone with mummy issues. To give you a sense of the scale, please enjoy this section, which is where the book’s title comes from:

“In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.  . . You will go hungry to the end of your days.  Leftovers, cold tidbits, that’s what you will find in front of you at each new feast.   . . You will walk though the desert from mirage to mirage, and your thirst will remain such that you will become a drunkard, but each sweet gulp will only rekindle your longing for the one and only source. “

I have not Wikipedia-ed Gary, but I will be amazed if he has been married less than three times.  His mother is truly a titanic figure.  A penniless Jewish actress from Lithuania, she got pregnant outside of marriage, then drags herself and him across Eastern Europe for many years, determined that he will become a Frenchman, and not just a Frenchman, but a famous Frenchman in the best tradition of the nineteenth century novel: a famous artist (exact artform TBD), a decorated soldier, and a diplomat.  Incredibly, he is all those things, winning both the Prix Goncourt (best possible literary prize) and also the Croix De Guerre (major military medal). 

She is so sure of his destiny that I can only call her unhinged.  At one point, when the neighbours in their dodgy tenement in Poland get her in trouble with the landlord, she drags her son around to each one, haranguing them about how sorry they will be when this 9-year-old is an Ambassador.  Can you imagine: he has to go to school the next day with these people!  She is just utterly sure that his success will make up for all she has suffered.  He says:

“I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy . . “

There is much to enjoy outside his mother.  At one point, he gives a little girl he has a crush on three apples, without ever having spoken to her, and then:

“She accepted my surrender as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and announced: ‘Janeck ate his whole stamp collection for me.’

Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom.  In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves, and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age . . . I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled.  I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes!”

I can’t even get into his time in the WWII AirForce, it being utterly hair-raising as he lays out how all his friends die in various crashes.  He also gives this awful snippet of the red-light district in Marrakesh, where he says it was not unusual for women to be subjected to a hundred men a day; and that “sometimes a girl, half-hysterical from over-work or hashish, would rush naked, screaming, into the alley .”  This is haunting, and I can only hope he is exaggerating.

SPOILER ALERT.  All through his three years in the war, he gets undated letters from his mother.  After the liberation, he goes to see her as quickly as he can, so she can see he is returning a second lieutenant, with a medal, and a book deal (i.e, he has finally succeeded, her life has meaning, etc). He finds she has been dead almost all the three years, and spent the last days of her life writing him hundreds of letters that could be sent on, so he wouldn’t know she was gone.