The Second Coming

Having enjoyed Kill Your Friends, I continued on the John Niven trail, purchasing another two of his novels. First up was The Second Coming, published in 2011 and serving as a kind of bridge to Kill 'Em All, the sequel to Kill Your Friends. It mirrors Kill Your Friends' satirical take on modern society, but turns its eye particularly to religion, earning it a good deal more controversy and detractors - although not always for the right reasons.

The premise is straightforward enough - having created the world and everything in it, God keeps an eye on things up until the Renaissance and decides that mankind is doing well enough that He can afford a week's holiday. Returning from His fishing trip - which takes more like 300 years in Earth time - He's dismayed to see the state of the world, with all its wars, pollution, inequality and injustice. And worst of all are all the Christians - none of whom seem to be following His original, single ideal any more: "be nice". So He decides it's time to send His son and messenger back down to Earth for a bit to try and spread the word and just get people to be nicer to each other.

Enter Jesus, the book's main character, who hasn't been up to much since his last trip down here - and he's reluctant to return, after the treatment he got. But eventually he agrees to give it a try, and after being implanted into a virgin in rural America (God likes to do things by the book) he grows up to be a down-and-out musician in New York, helping recovering addicts and the homeless. But he feels that he needs a bigger platform to get his message out there, and by chance - or was it meant to be? - he sees that entering a TV talent show could be the key. It was at this point - having torn through the first third of the book, laughing out loud at regular intervals at its wittiness and inventiveness in depicting heaven and hell - that The Second Coming lost its way a bit for me. Because before the contest itself, we're forced to sit through a road trip across The States, meant to serve as character development for Jesus and his disciples but ultimately failing because none of them, save Jesus himself, had much character to develop in the first place. There's his bandmates Kris and Morgan, respectively the angel and demon on his shoulder, recovering addict Becky who I believe represents the Mary Magdalene figure, Vietnam veteran Bob whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word thanks to PTSD: there's nothing particularly original to be found, and their trip drags on without really adding anything.

Anyway, I bought this book with the promise of more Steven Stelfox, and fortunately he swoops in around the halfway point to salvage things. He's moved on a lot since the events of Kill Your Friends, now working in LA as the brains behind, and face of, American Pop Star - having become a very thinly-veiled caricature of Simon Cowell and doing very well at it. This leads to some of the more memorable passages as Jesus and Steven clash over Jesus's musical direction (Jesus favours organic indie music, Stelfox knows that that won't sell many records) and the general public start to consider that maybe this scruffy-looking chap claiming to be the legitimate son of God isn't as mad as he first seems. It probably says a lot about me that I liked Steven much more as a character than Jesus - or maybe it's just down to how Niven writes him in such a cleverly multifaceted way, creating a man who is, in theory, pure evil but who you can't help but respect just a little bit. Certainly, I felt as though, were Stelfox to come face to face with the Devil as depicted in this book, he'd stand a pretty good chance of talking his way out of hell.

And so Jesus gets his moment in the spotlight, and it's all he needs to gain a legitimate following, whereupon he moves to Texas to set up a commune. And so I started to lose my enthusiasm for the novel again, somehow caring less about the attempts of local religious figures and then the government to sabotage the potential utopia that Jesus is trying to create, the satirical points that Niven is making here feeling just a bit too obvious and unoriginal. He saves things again with the conclusion and an ending that was actually a lot less cynical than I was expecting, but the ultimate result is a flawed book that I felt missed a lot of potential. And that's without getting into the issues I had with its timeline - it's made clear that God has the power to play around with that kind of thing, but still - and Niven's use of language. I've never had an issue with profanity in a book before but it's so overdone and overused here that it does detract from the prose a lot.

The Second Coming does a lot right, and makes a lot of good points, but there are just a few too many issues for it to be a truly great book. That being said, the world would benefit a lot if everyone would follow Jesus's advice and "be nice" more often.

3/5

Jesus's audition song, and not a bad choice at all.

Kill Your Friends

The variety goes on. This time I jumped to a book that was different even by my standards - the 2008 debut by Scottish author John Niven, Kill Your Friends. The novel caused quite a stir on release due to its graphic depictions of the music industry in the 1990s and its study of power and obsession - and I was pleased to find that its reputation was well deserved.

As the novel opens, it seems that our 27-year-old protagonist Steven Stelfox - one of those characters you should by rights hate, thanks to his casual, ingrained sexism, racism and bloody-minded attitude, but at the same time end up loving due to his charm, ability to rattle off memorable one liners and ultimately admirable ambition - is pretty on top of things. He has a hugely overpaid job developing artists for a record label, an office to himself and a nice pad in Notting Hill. But Steven wants more - he won't be happy, in fact, until he reaches the very top of his game. And he knows that to do so will involve driving all of his rivals out. Kill Your Friends details Steven's journey through 1997 as he goes to ever more extreme lengths to make sure this happens - even extortion and murder aren't off the cards.

Look up basically any review of this book and the writer will quickly turn to comparisons with Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. And this review is no exception, because the similarities are obvious - the protagonist's internal monologue throwing an aggressive eye over his surroundings, the business meetings where everyone acts nice but are really out to destroy each other, and the prevailing satirical commentary on how we have created a society where psychopathy is just about the only way to make it to the top. But Niven does approach it all from a much more British - or perhaps English - angle: his character's seething disdain for the working class, for example, coming more from a point of institutionalised elitism rather than capitalist insularity. Likewise the violence is dialled down hugely in comparison: while American Psycho positively revels in it, Kill Your Friends drops in just a couple of scenes where necessary, just to remind us not to get too attracted to Stelfox's life choices.

And while we're talking about Brett Easton Ellis, I personally found a lot of parallels with his other famous work, Less Than Zero. Because Steven Stelfox ultimately sits somewhere between Patrick Bateman and Clay - while on the outside he may be a confident, ruthless young man, he freely admits that he's never really in control of his career or life, it only taking one bad signing or risky decision gone bad to end a career. And then there's the endless whirl of drink, drugs and partying that can only ever take its toll on a young mind, becoming less and less fun yet somehow more and more necessary and, just like in Less Than Zero, leading nowhere good for the purposeless young people who choose this lifestyle. Most sobering of all is that Steven actually does manage to break out of this cycle, realising that to rest on your laurels is to admit defeat and taking his plotting to the next level.

It all sounds very dark. But Kill Your Friends, on balance, is more of a comedy - albeit a very black and satirical one. It's an irreverent look at British society and culture, and a reminder of just how odd things were back then - we elected a Labour Prime Minister who spent millions on travel and entertainment in his first year in office while simultaneously cutting social benefits (a strategy that makes him a "top lad" in Steven's book), experienced a very un-British public outpouring of emotion following the death of Princess Diana, the two biggest songs of the year were a twenty-five year old Elton John track and the Teletubbies theme tune, Radiohead came out with an album that everyone hated but is now considered one of the best of all time, and Oasis came out with an album that everyone loved but is now considered pretty poor. And the final message is clear enough - deep down, all we really want is to make a bit of cash.

Kill Your Friends got me into Niven in a big way - enough to acquire its sequel and another of his novels, which will be the next two things I read.

4.5/5

And for the record, Be Here Now is nowhere near as bad as people say it is.

Furnace

A while back, I was looking to expand my fiction collection into areas in which previously I had not had much experience. A big one was horror in all its forms - from the gothic classics to modern cult works. I took NPR's semi-exhaustive list of the 100 best horror novels and stories of all time as my springboard - a list much debated in terms of its quality and completeness, but as I said this was uncharted territory for me, and so pretty much any source would do.

And so one book that caught my attention was Furnace. A collection of short stories by Alaskan writer Livia Llewellyn, I couldn't help but be drawn to the way the compilers over at NPR could talk about everything around it so enthusiastically, and yet seem to shy away from this one - ending with a simple warning: "read with care".

And they weren't wrong. Furnace certainly provided some of the darkest, most out-there writing I've ever come across. It actually doesn't get off to a great start; Panopticon is by far the least readable story of them all, an impenetrable mess of obscure prose with an unsatisfying build up - something about urban decay, I think? - and a conclusion that leaves more questions than answers. But once you get past that, there are some real masterpieces of the medium to be found. Llewellyn draws on the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk and most of all the queen of the genre, Angela Carter, as she weaves a host of confusing, spacey tales that remind us that the scariest thing of all is the unknown. Wasp & Snake reads like an Aesop's fable for the future, with a stern reminder of the importance of integrity. In the Court of King Cupressaceae, 1982 is cosmic horror at its bizarre best, and Allochthon at its most desolately heartbreaking. Better still were the stories that leaned to the side of comedy: Stabilimentum takes an amusing look at the things going on in the world that would be better left unexplored, The Last, Clean, Bright Summer twists Lovecraftian monster fiction into the perspective of a teenage girl - pagan birthing rituals are, like, so embarrassing - and my personal favourite It Feels Better Biting Down provided some genuine laughs as a pair of possibly supernaturally gifted twins bicker over who gets to keep their extra fingers, and whether they should tell their parents about the monstrous being they seem to be morphing into - after all, they're about to be called in for dinner. Lastly comes a much more straightforward piece of romantic fiction, from earlier in Llewellyn's career: The Unattainable recounts a chance meeting that turns into the satisfaction that a woman has spent her life searching for, but then finds herself needing more. It seems a bit incongruous, but is arguably the best written of the lot.

So there's plenty of diversity in the writing here, and in its themes and inspiration - but there are a few elements that link everything together. One is sex - unavoidable and in-your-face in every story, but still a lot more tasteful than you might imagine, and only occasionally tipping over into the territory of sleaze or shock factor. Llewellyn is certainly adept at moulding her prose style so as to transform the act into a primal, almost spiritual event. It's also worth noting that all of the protagonists here are female, and all interesting, well-developed characters - something lacking in a lot of what I read, but perhaps not in horror writing in general, which could be a reason to seek out more in this vein. And lastly, hanging in the background of everything here, is the dust and decay of America - of towns forgotten but still inhabited, of the vast expanses of emptiness, and of the lurking tide of nature always ready to reclaim what has never properly been taken away.

All in all it's an interestingly inconsistent, impressively written set of short stories that provided me with a fresh perspective on a field of literature not really on my radar - and I had to admire Furnace for that.

4/5

Earthy, eerie musings by a woman from the corner of the world? I'd go for this:

Manuscript Found in Accra

It's an odd game, translation. Give ten translators the same sentence and you can almost guarantee you'll end up with ten different translations - all of which may be perfectly valid. Because a big part of translating is interpretation of the text, deciding what the original writer would have wanted, but also understanding how your reader would want it to be reproduced. It was during my MA that I learned that Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho had been elevated from airport paperback-tier in his native country to a literary figure of world renown thanks largely to a very capable set of English translations that rendered his words far more highbrow than they had ever been in Portuguese. So it was that, despite my increasing proficiency in Portuguese, I thought that it might be best to start his back catalogue in English.

Manuscript Found in Accra is one book by Coelho that perhaps didn't need any help. While I can see that the translator may have had opportunity to make the prose more poetic or, dare I say it, biblical, in nature, it can't obscure the fact that the ideas on show here are certainly worthy of praise in their own right.

Following a brief contextual introduction that lays out what the book actually is - supposedly a set of parchments found in the Middle East in the early 20th Century - the majority is given over to the speeches of a mysterious figure known only as "The Copt" - a man of apparently Greek origin who finds himself in Jerusalem in 1099 AD, called on as a source of advice by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike as the Crusaders gather outside the walls of the city.

The book takes a loose call-and-response form, as members of the crowd ask The Copt about various topics and he answers at length. His speeches deal with things such as beauty, love, anxiety, the future... nothing that hasn't really been done before and in ways that seem lifted straight from the world's religious texts a lot of the time. A few select quotes should sum up:

"And to those who believe that adventures are dangerous I say, Try routine: that kills you far more quickly."

"What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace."

"The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back."

But as trite as it may have been a lot of the time, it's hard to criticise Manuscript Found in Accra, simply for the fact that it's worth being reminded of these simple truths from time to time - less is more, as it were.

So while the book didn't change my life, it did help me take a step back and remind me that a lot of the answers in life are things that we've always known deep down, and that humanity could probably gain a lot by falling back on them.

4/5

Otherwise summarised like this:

Passport to Magonia

Every now and then, there comes a time when you need to wander off the beaten track for a bit; a time when you need to read a book about aliens and fairies and other worlds and questions of what came before us and what will come next and what, if anything, it all means.

So, aliens. Do they exist? I mean, probably. Just based on probability it seems reasonable that somewhere out there in the universe - it is quite big after all - some sort of life has managed to arise somewhere other than Planet Earth. But have aliens come among us? Has an extraterrestrial race developed the technology and the desire to master intergalactic travel, the ability to appear in a form that we can comprehend, and then come to steal some chickens off a farmer in rural Mexico? Well, that seems a lot less likely, and personally I don't believe contact has ever been made. But there are a lot of people out there who do believe - and a not insignificant number who claim to have seen or even been directly contacted by beings not of this world. So what's going on?

In Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallée has a pretty decent stab at finding an answer to that question. Published in 1968, the book received its fair share of criticism on release: from the scientific community who took offence at the idea that anyone would suggest that such a topic merited serious scientific discussion, but, more surprisingly, also from the increasingly established ufology community. The thing is, the thinking at the time was that the sudden increase in activity post-World War II was a direct result of humanity's foray into nuclear warfare - a higher power keeping an eye on us, so to speak (and it is undeniable that the flying-saucer-with-flashing-lights-and-little-green-men type of reports have come exclusively post-1945). But Vallée goes down a different path, suggesting that such incidents aren't evidence of extraterrestrial life at all, but instead a continuation of a much older idea, one that has permeated virtually every culture on Earth since before recorded history.

His theories do make a lot of sense - having recounted a handful of the most prominent UFO and alien abduction cases, he draws a pretty evident conclusion: that effectively no two reports have any single detail in common. From the physical description of the flying crafts themselves to the appearance and actions of the occupants that sometimes emerge from them, there is nothing but inconsistency. Some aliens are huge, some dwarf-like, some speak French, some English, some Spanish, some another, indecipherable language. Some don't speak at all but communicate telepathically. Some creatures are here to collect plants, seemingly on a mission of scientific exploration, some mutilate cows, some just sort of stand around and then disappear when people get too close. So clearly, if these are truly aliens, we are being bombarded from hundreds of different planets and the chances of wider contact being established should be almost a certainty. Vallée proposes a different approach, and drags up stories from the past showing parallels - and here the consistencies do start to add up - between reports of close encounters from the 20th Century and those of fairies, goblins and angels of centuries past. He demonstrates similarities between contact stories - from the ability of these beings to "freeze" humans, to their generally benevolent intentions, to witnesses' reports of lost time. There's also the fact that alien technology seems to be advancing at a similar rate to our own, and that almost any given culture has a similar legend somewhere in its history - and that reporters do tend to frame things in their own cultural context. Essentially, people see what they want to see - but they do seem to be seeing something. And what lends all this weight is that Vallée emphasises throughout that none of this should be taken as irrefutable evidence of the supernatural, or the extraterrestrial. He goes out of his way to shoot down the "ancient aliens" theory by stating that any stories or relics that may appear to be evidence from that time can be dismissed as exaggerations or simply made up. And moving forward, he says that reports of fairies or aliens aren't necessarily any more true. But the sheer weight of material cannot be disputed: whatever the reason, there is something within humanity's consciousness that, throughout the ages, has resulted in people seeing things that they cannot explain, and that a serious, scientific investigation of the phenomenon could reveal some fundamental truths about humanity.

The second half of the book is given over to a compendium of a huge range of "flying saucer" reports since the mid-19th Century. This I found less interesting; it did, however, confirm how global these sightings are, and the wild discrepancies in accounts - craft range from half a metre to a hundred metres across, and aliens from 30 centimetres to 4 metres tall - it just can't all be the same thing. And a lot can be explained away by the usual means: experimental aircraft, weather balloons, owls, hallucinations or just plain old storytelling. But the volume of reports, the range of witnesses, some of whom really have nothing to gain, and the occasional, intriguing similarity, all add up to a curious read.

Passport to Magonia is completely unlike anything I have read, but it's not without its flaws. A lot of Vallée's sources are questionable at best, although to his credit he does admit this; The Flying Saucer Review may be a legitimate publication but it's far from a neutral one. And he does damage his credibility somewhat with a tendency to sensationalise - sometimes even resorting to outlandish 60s-style clickbait within his own chapters. Several phrases along the lines of "after reading this account, I'm sure the reader will be amazed" left a lot to be desired.

Half a century on, I wonder if Vallée would have written a very different book today. In a much smaller world where everyone can get video evidence at a moment's notice, we're still not really any closer to finding out the truth; but it all seems a little less plausible. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel he had something resembling a point here, and that there are indeed aspects of human nature that haven't been adequately explored.

4.5/5

Then again it was the 1960s, so maybe everyone was just on drugs.

Fast Philosophy

Why do I read? Well, a big reason I forced myself back into the habit just over two years ago was because I felt that there were a lot of areas of knowledge out there that I had left untouched. And so over the past two weeks, I went from 0 to 100 in lightning speed on a subject that I had barely any concept of before: philosophy.

Fast Philosophy is a collaboration between  British-German writer Adam Fletcher and plain-German writer Lukas Egger, promising to cover the entirety of western philosophy in one hundred short, accessible mini-essays - with humour thrown in too. It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I'll start by getting one thing out of the way - this book isn't particularly funny. I know humour is subjective and means different things to different people, but 99% of the jokes that are shoehorned into the chapters of Fast Philosophy are derivative, unoriginal or just plain predictable. This I found to be quite distracting at times, albeit not to the extent of getting in the way of the point of the book. And there were a handful of genuinely good one-liners lurking in there as well - "with great power comes big power bills" is one that has stuck in my mind.

But to disparage on this count is to ignore the actual purpose of the book; and as an accessible crash-course in the key themes of philosophy from its inception to the present day, it does a fantastic job. Starting, as one should, with the Greeks, moving through the Romans (with their extremes of stoicism and hedonism) and the soul-searching Germans to some of the problems and paradoxes currently occupying the world's thinkers. The likes of Confucius, Bertrand Russell and even David Foster Wallace get a look-in. Given that the fundamental questions of our existence - ethics, logic, God - are covered, as well as quite a bit that's not generally seen until degree level, the learning curve was steep, but everything was set out so neatly and concisely that I never struggled to keep up. All in all, a huge amount of information is conveyed in a very short space of time, but I quickly got into the flow of it, and my performance on the end-of-book quiz - 25 out of 30 - suggests that most of it stayed in too.

It is testament to the authors' skill that they are able to summarise so well and so clearly. Yes, it's limited, but I do now feel as though I have a solid basic knowledge of a topic on which I was previously very much under-informed.

4/5

And this goes even faster:

Crime and Punishment

Another year, another essential novel ticked off the list. It has become my aim to start each new year of my life with a book that I really should have read by now, no matter how long a read. 2019 kicked off 150 years in the past, with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a seminal work in that vast ocean of Russian literature so unexplored by me.

I was actually not unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's works going into it, having read a short story collection, you guessed it, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. Two stuck in my mind: White Nights and its heartbreaking depictions of loneliness, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a nihilistic examination into human nature. Crime and Punishment is quite substantially longer and more developed, but manages to draw on similar themes.

Written after the author had returned from exile in Siberia, the novel follows the misfortunes of Rodion Raskolnikov (or is it Rodya? Every character has at least two names used interchangeably, which took some getting used to) as he grapples with the turmoil of his own mind. Initially suffering from delusions of grandeur, he convinces himself that murder for the purpose of stealing money could be the catalyst that gets him out of his impoverished student life and on the way to the fame and fortune that he deserves. But having committed the titular crime, the resulting guilt and anxiety send him into a nervous breakdown as he fears capture and debates whether to confess. With the room of a full novel to breathe, Dostoevsky's prose finds opportunity to wander and the result is an often excruciating, relentless cascade of inner monologues. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide or something to prove in the claustrophobic yet impersonal city of St. Petersburg.

If this all sounds a bit heavy, well, it was a lot of the time; after all, we're dealing with some serious subject matter. But it's kept afloat by the writing. Thanks to an adventurous translation (I couldn't help but smile at characters threatening to "brain" each other), it's still an easier read than most of what was written around that time - looking at you, Dickens - and Dostoevsky ramps up the sensationalism and plot twists throughout. The dialogue is just brilliant at times ("you trashy Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline" is my line of the year already), we're treated to probably the best account of the hangover-induced "fear" ever committed to paper, and the series of love triangles, blackmailing and subterfuge that make up the secondary plots are worthy of kitchen sink drama.

And if all this sounds fun, well, it was a lot of the time. But I couldn't help feeling that there was something about this book that held me back from fully enjoying or appreciating it. It dawned on me about two-thirds of the way through, in fact: this is a novel about a time in a place that I will never truly be able to identify with. It's Russia, in all its grim glory: arrogance and alcoholism, poverty and pretension, hunger and God, political engagement and the revolutionary spirit. Crime and punishment - punishment being the very real threat of hard labour in Siberia. Communism, communism, communism - although it was still 50 years or so from becoming a reality, the foundations are clear to see in the ideas of many of the characters. It's an existence that I, in my detached house in the comfortable Anglo-sphere, will never have to endure. And unfortunately, while I was able to appreciate Crime and Punishment as a great piece of writing, there was always that detachment.

I won't give up on the Russian classics just yet - there's a lot out there and Anna Karenina beckons - but Crime and Punishment didn't quite top the list.

4/5

WITH RUSSIA FROM LOVE