As another year of commitment to expanding my reading horizons drew to a close, I was in the mood for something light - and a sci-fi comedy about comedy itself by one of comedy's greats seemed like a safe bet. I wasn't really aware of Eric Idle as a novelist, but was certainly familiar with his work as a writer, and as he was responsible for a lot of the more memorable moments in Monty Python's rather mixed history, I went into The Road to Mars with reasonably high expectations.
The Road to Mars operates on three levels. Most of all, it is a space-bound adventure reminiscent of the classic science fiction of the 50s and 60s, following two stand-up comedians as they venture through the Solar System trying to make a name for themselves but ultimately becoming embroiled in an interplanetary terrorist plot. They encounter a host of bizarre characters on the way and, like a lot of good sci-fi, the world(s) that develop around them serve to reflect satirically back on our own. At the same time, Idle uses the duo's android secretary Carlton as a mouthpiece to expound on his own theories on comedy's place in human nature - what actually counts as comedy, why we feel the need to laugh, and whether we should at all - as the robot breaks unprecedented ground by attempting to understand emotion in an academic thesis. The third strand follows a scholar decades after the main events who discovers Carlton's manuscript and attempts to pass it off as his own.
As much as the main plot is compelling, Carlton's theories are genuinely profound and the scholar's journey from adaptation to outright plagiarism is amusing to anyone who has written an essay, the result is a book that feels somehow both bloated and incomplete. Idle crams an awful lot of characters into just over 300 pages, some of them more memorable than others but all with detailed motivations, to the extent that the actual plot is a lot more complicated than it needed to be, and hard to follow at times; the ending also feels rushed and doesn't really do the build-up justice. The passages set further on in the future seemed almost like an afterthought, and a tougher editing process might have removed them altogether. But while the writing lacked the thick-and-fast humour of the likes of Life of Brian, there were still a lot of enjoyable set pieces and one-liners to be found, and as a sci-fi reader it was fun to take in a comedic reinterpretation of the cornerstones of the genre (Asimov, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke spring most immediately to mind) by a writer who is clearly a fan himself.
But really these points pale into insignificance when taken alongside Idle's dissertation on comedy that runs in and out of the plot proper. He goes deep - from discussions on the evolutionary foundations of laughter to cultural variations in comedy, by way of why people end up becoming comedians and why society feels a need for them. There are some moments that give real pause for thought, but best of all is Carlton's "unified theory of comedy" - the idea that, while gravity is the force that allows the universe to exist, by nature it must be counterbalanced by its opposite: levity. Not only does it make sense as a concept, I can't help but feel that a lesser writer would have shied away from actually resolving the robot's search for the answer.
So while The Road to Mars tries to do and be too much at once, it does succeed in a lot of ways, and Idle has to be applauded for that.
4/5
Eric Idle is the second author since I started doing this to perform the song linked to his book - the first being Stephen Hawking with a song by... Eric Idle. Funny how the universe lines up like that.
Another month, another work of classic science fiction ticked off the increasingly stable list. This time, it was Jack London's 1908 (a fact I only learned while researching this post - I guessed it had been written around 20 years later - and one that has given me a new perspective on the book) dystopian novel The Iron Heel.
London sets the book up in the form of a personal account written by an aristocratic woman, Avis, at the turn of the century who falls for an aspiring socialist politician, Ernest Everard - both romantically and for his ideas. This is framed in turn in the perspective of a 27th-century historian who has discovered the manuscript, and is interpreting it in the context of a world where humanity has finally got its collective act together and eradicated social inequality. As sci-fi goes, it's fairly soft, and for the majority it felt a lot more like a political manifesto by London and a speculative prediction of future conflicts.
The book starts slowly, as Ernest sets out his ideology in lengthy detail, always having an answer to any attempts to discredit his plans by the upper class company he finds himself a part of. There's something to be said for his idealistic vision of humanity as one, cooperating for the greater good and sharing wealth rather than a handful of monopolies hoarding it; but at the same time there's just something slightly irritating about the way London has written this character as a kind of socialist superman, immune to criticism and blessed with 20:20 vision for the future. Anyway, Avis is sold on what he says after witnessing first-hand the ways in which the capitalist system of America has failed so many of the working class, and decides to support him in his assault on the political system. When a number of Socialist Party politicians are elected to the senate but then arrested by The Man, the movement becomes a revolution as Avis and Ernest lead the increasingly aggressive charge against the government. The government fights back to protect their own interests (and money) and civil war ensues; at first largely covert, but then increasingly violent. We finally get some actual action in the last couple of chapters, a wonderfully surreal street battle in Chicago between government mercenaries, revolutionary agents and the chaotic blunt force of the rioting underclass.
All in all, I wasn't hugely impressed by this book. It's not long by any standards, but it certainly felt like it - London's writing plodding along as he pontificates through his mouthpiece of Ernest at great length. The futuristic footnotes serve more to interrupt the narrative than to complement it and the ending, while perhaps realistic, was a huge letdown. But as I said earlier, the fact that this was written so long ago does change things - with the hindsight of two world wars and a global economic collapse, it's likely London would have produced a very different book even ten years further down the line.
And it's not as if it's not relevant at all today: in fact, it feels like we're even further away from successfully breaking down the system of corporate influence and self-interest that keeps the poor poor and makes the rich increasingly richer - and that all of the problems that go along with that are far from being solved.
It had been a few months since I'd read any non-fiction, and so as the long winter nights started to draw closer and the weather finally started to take a turn for the worse, I decided to take a look at a book that would put those issues in perspective.
The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail is journalist Tim Moore's account of his utterly insane - but ultimately successful - attempt to cycle the length of EuroVelo's EV13 cycling route, better known as the Iron Curtain Trail. Starting at the top of Norway in the depths of winter and emerging in Turkey months later, having ridden 9000km through 19 countries, Moore documents his trip in agonising detail.
There's a lot crammed in to around 350 pages here - from the woeful inadequacy of Moore's bike (built in East Germany in the 1980s for short-distance use), to the tremendous physical and mental strain that such an undertaking entails, to the vast shadow of recent history that still looms over the entire region. Moore chooses to focus principally on the latter, and while his tales of dealing with murderous lorry drivers, aggressive dogs and the perils of saying the wrong thing in the wrong place never wear thin, it is his assessment of the successes and eventual failings of communism and the way this has affected the people, culture and even physical appearance of Eastern Europe into the present day that elevate this above your standard travel journal.
The obvious comparison is Bill Bryson, and while Tim Moore does come close to emulating that style of humour, there's more to be said for this book. Moore does a wonderful job of relaying the maddening tedium and frustration of slogging through Finnish snow for hours on end, and the strangely comparable feeling of slogging up and down Balkan mountains in brain-melting heat. He also has a knack for capturing the essence of a people - from the resolutely serious Finns to the surprisingly laid-back Serbs by way of Germans who live up to every stereotype - and the way in which nearly all of them are friendly and welcoming to a stranger in a way that is much rarer in the West. And he makes sure to put the national moods of the present in their proper historical context. It was these passages that I found most interesting of all - for instance, how the Finnish army held off the Russians for over a year at the start of World War II despite being outnumbered effectively ten to one, or how Romania is still yet to recover from Nicolae Ceausescu's utterly hopeless economic policies. While he does not hesitate to criticise the effects of communism on the area based on a solid foundation of growing up in '70s and '80s Britain, there are moments where he admits there were positives, and in fact seems to have reconsidered his position by the end of the book having met so many people who aren't necessarily any better off today.
All in all, while The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold works on its own as an entertaining yarn about Europe's toughest road trip, it goes much deeper as an analysis of just how varied and perhaps divided the continent still is.
4/5
A bicycle can be many things, even a musical instrument...
As Halloween approaches, I thought I'd go vaguely thematic and expand my reading within the classic horror canon. Something that shouldn't take too long, as a lot of the new collection I have since acquired clocks in at well under 100 pages - including Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan. And as Stephen King has described it as "maybe the best horror story in the English language", the top of the pile seemed like a good place to start.
Machen wrote the story in parts through the 1890s, which perhaps explains its rather disjointed structure - jumping forward years at a time following a brilliant opening scene where an eccentric - dare I say it, mad - gentleman scientist performs an experiment on one of his servants that allows her to witness the spirit world before rendering her insensible. This first chapter sold the book to me with its melodramatic gothic tone; which is a shame because the rest of the novella, written after the opening had already been published, didn't really follow on. Instead we are treated to a series of episodes, firstly detailing the scientist's companion Clarke's obsession with the Devil, then a meeting between Clarke's friend Villiers and an old acquaintance who has been ruined by a marriage to a woman who he claims destroyed his soul. It is this latter thread that fills the remainder of the 70-odd pages, as it emerges that this woman has made quite an impression on everyone who has met her. Then, as various young aristocrats are found dead by their own hand, Clarke and Villiers start to join the dots and realise that this woman may not even be a woman at all...
The ending does do a reasonable job of rounding everything up, and I found Machen's writing style extremely entertaining: overflowing with Victorian poeticism without tipping over into the hyperbole that makes the likes of Dickens such a chore to read for me, and ultimately bordering on genius after the state of The '86 Fix. But overall I felt The Great God Pan had too much of a tendency to drift from the points it was trying to make, falling for the classic horror writing trap of "this thing was so horrific words cannot describe it" but then knocking down even the idea of this otherness with a pair of omnipotent protagonists who deduce and then solve all the problems presented to them without a second thought.
All in all, though, this was a fun little book that delved into some genuinely esoteric themes. And most of all I found it an almost comforting throwback to a bygone age, of a London society where everyone knew each other's affairs and where the biggest fear really was the Devil and his ability to tempt the innocent. A very English Devil too - as per the Bible, but with his roots much further back in the pagan tradition. No jump scares or gore, but The Great God Pan did manage to deliver the chills in its own way.
4/5
This caused just as much of a stir in the late 1800s, and for much the same reasons.
I had been feeling as though my reading was getting a bit serious lately, so decided to dive as far down the intellectual spectrum as my collection allowed. But I went too far, much too far...
Keith A. Pearson's The '86 Fix is, on paper, exactly my kind of book - a sci-fi comedy escapade in which a middle aged man is transported back in time to his teenage years and is given 48 hours to preemptively-with-hindsight right the mistakes he made at the time and hopefully end up much happier and more successful in future - distancing himself from the school bully who is about to fire him, preventing an unhappy marriage and perhaps even saving lives. And yes, it is all of the above things, but Pearson manages to obscure what should be an interesting (if not hugely original) concept behind walls of atrocious writing.
Maybe I'm elitist, maybe I'm spoiled by having had the opportunity to read a lot of classic literature, maybe I should have tried harder to put the issue to one side, but this is a relentlessly badly-written book. The protagonist, Craig Pelling, sees fit to spell out his every thought and emotion, relevant or not, explains his life in painstaking detail and describes his teenage mistakes to the extent that the solutions he eventually comes up with - and it's not until a ludicrous 50% of the way through the book that he actually travels back in time - are predictable long before they happen. What should be easy prose drags drearily on (at one point we are treated to a description of putting on trousers that essentially amounts to "I put my right leg in one hole. Then I put my left leg in the other hole."), there isn't a single likeable character to be found, and while the action taking place in the past is slightly more compelling, Pearson fills the second half with further events that hadn't even been hinted at before, leading to a cut-and-shut plot that then comes abruptly to a halt in a somewhat rushed manner. All in all, it made the likes of Nick Spalding read like Oscar Wilde - low-rent, easy-reading comedy can be done well in the right hands.
Couple that with endless forced references to '80s Britain - it's set 5 years before I was born and I've never heard of the likes of Texas Bars or Quarto soft drink, so they can't have left that much of a mark on the nation - and The '86 Fix was a book that I just couldn't get on with. And yet I finished it, so have to give Pearson some credit in terms of just about keeping the action rolling along. There was the occasional humorous moment or memorable one-liner, and Pearson does do a good job of portraying a character who knows his flaws and can't help but dwell on them. I hate to admit it, but the ending did leave me wanting closure, so I will probably slog through the sequel at some point in future.
As much as I enjoyed Blood Meridian, I felt the need to follow it with something slightly less heart-stoppingly brutal. Kazuo Ishiguro's short(ish) story collection Nocturnes seemed just right - selling itself as "five stories of music and nightfall" it sounded about as relaxing as reading gets.
I should have known better. I read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and found it a hugely uncomfortable experience - a truly insidious exercise in drip-feeding the reader with information and implications about the disturbing world its characters live in, and the realisation that they know something is wrong with it but don't know why, and choose to accept it anyway.
While Nocturnes is much more grounded in reality, all of these things are still present. The five stories are really variations on a theme, all dealing with potential unfulfilled, opportunities missed and marriages falling apart. Ishiguro again leads the reader into his situations slowly, which of course makes things worse - it's much more painful to have things torn apart bit by bit than to see them shattered. The result is a thought-provoking but ultimately melancholy set of stories, and things aren't helped by the fact that all of them are left largely unresolved.
But that's not to say that there's nothing to enjoy here - as both a music lover and a musician I appreciated the way in which Ishiguro fixated on the release that music can provide, as well as how it can easily become an obsession for those who see it as the only thing for them. And of course it's well written, with the occasional touch of gentle humour and the feeling that, for all misfortune that befalls his characters, the author does feel some empathy towards them.
Since discovering how broad the field of literature really is around the age of 16, I have always been on the lookout for books that challenge me, both as a reader and in terms of my view of the world. Often touted among the most important writers of the late modernist era, a foray into the works of Cormac McCarthy was long overdue. Cited by many as his best work, Blood Meridian was the obvious choice.
Make no mistake, this is a spectacularly brilliant piece of writing. McCarthy adapts the supposedly true (but almost certainly exaggerated) journal of Samuel Chamberlain, a former soldier who rode with a band of outlaws in the mid-19th Century, adding in a fictional anti-hero protagonist ("the kid") and presumably augmenting still further the real-life John Glanton, the gang's ruthless leader, and Judge Holden, a mysterious figure who travels with them. But more than that, Blood Meridian is a treatise on human nature, the birth of America, and notions of good and evil.
The violence in this book is relentless. From the very start, the kid finds himself stumbling from one violent encounter to the next, beginning with bar fights and working his way up to riding with Glanton's crew for the majority of the book as they tear through the southwestern states destroying everything and everyone in their path. But for all the scalpings and massacres, headshots and hangings, not once does McCarthy set out to shock or appal with his prose or plot; he merely reports as a passive bystander, his characters bearing unfeeling witness to the atrocities before them - be they perpetrated by the characters themselves or merely a reminder of the myriad other tragic stories that are occurring elsewhere in this brutal world. It must be said that the quality of life in that area at that time was actually a lot better than what we are shown here, but McCarthy still provides a stark reminder of how comfortable we have become in the modern world, and perhaps how far we have yet to go.
The prose is relentless, plodding along without a single superfluous word like a mule through the desert - or perhaps like a vulture circling its prey. I don't think I have ever read a book so focused on maintaining its writing style, as bleak and barren as the worlds that McCarthy describes, and, in so being, as unfathomable and alien as well. The kid may be the main character, but we are not provided with so much as an interior monologue - in fact, entire chapters go by where he is not mentioned at all. Glanton is likewise a singular character, motivated only by his own personal gain, not afraid to kill with no questions asked and indiscriminate in the frontier justice that he and his men dish out. Far more intriguing, however, is the Judge: a man as bizarre in appearance as he is in character. Standing over seven foot tall, entirely hairless and possessing the strength to wield a cannon with his bare hands, he is also an expert linguist, chemist, philosopher, musician and naturalist. As the plot wears on, he begins to expand more on his world view, hinting at a supernatural background as he pontificates on the nature of the universe, extraterrestrial life and the origins of man. It's quite possible that he is meant to be an incarnation of Satan himself, or perhaps a combination of God and Satan, as he serves as judge, jury and executioner throughout - or perhaps he is merely a man driven increasingly mad by the death and carnage around him.
I thought that, in Infinite Jest, I had read the most thought-provoking book I would see for a long time, but Blood Meridian is right up there with it, in a much more convenient and satisfying package. This is a fascinating study into humanity's violent upbringing, the nature of man (or perhaps, more accurately, of men), and the huge questions of existence, belief and perception.
Faced with the prospect of an eight-hour flight recently, I thought it might be wise to take some reading material that would keep me occupied for a decent amount of time. Stefan Zweig's 1942 novella Chess seemed like a solid bet - an intriguing-sounding study into obsession, memory and isolation that would also bring me back to the German-language fiction that I had been neglecting since my degree. And while I was finished with the book in just over an hour, it certainly kept my mind working for much longer.
Chess opens with the story of a chess prodigy, Mirko Czentovic, discovered in rural Eastern Europe, who learns the game after watching his father play and becomes world champion only a decade later. Our narrator, with an amateur interest in the game, happens to find himself sharing a cruise ship with the grandmaster and does his best to lure him into a game. He first manages to gather a group of fellow enthusiasts who are eager to join forces against the champion. Not forgetting his impoverished upbringing, or perhaps due to simple greed, Czentovic agrees only upon payment to take the group on, and wins the first game easily. The second game appears to be heading the same way until a voice pipes up from the crowd, advising the players and eventually leading Czentovic into checkmate. Amazed that the world champion could have been beaten by a complete unknown, the narrator tracks down the man, and learns his identity - a wealthy Austrian monarchist who had been kept as a political prisoner by the Nazis until quite recently. It was during this time, in solitary confinement in a hotel room, that he became an expert on chess - managing one day to steal a book laying out various historic games, he saw his only escape from insanity would be to play out each game, and then to learn them. Soon he tires of the games in the book and begins to play against himself, his personality gradually splitting into black and white as he becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to beat himself. The result is a mental breakdown that turns out to be his salvation as he is moved to a sanitorium and then released.
The length of the summary above is testament to the quality of Zweig's narrative - despite weighing in at just over 70 pages, there are very few moments in Chess that can be dispensed with without losing part of what the book is actually about. Zweig writes in a clear and concise style, saying precisely what he needs to say in exploring the depths of the human mind and the dangers of being alone with one's thoughts - as the prisoner rematches against Czentovic, it becomes clear that his fanaticism has done him more harm than good. Yet as cold and grim as all this sounds, Chess was not an unenjoyable read, an interesting insight into a time now almost forgotten and an exercise in how what could have been a good novel turned out better as a drum-tight novella.
4/5
As inappropriate as it may be for such weighty subject matter, I couldn't think of anything but this...
As is natural for any middle-class white man growing up in rural England, I have long been a fan of hip-hop, basketball, Spike Lee films and many other aspects of black American culture. Perhaps it's precisely because it's all so far removed from my own experience that I find it all so engaging and intriguing, perhaps it's the varying depths to it, or maybe it's because it all just sounds so fun. In any case, I'm fairly sure I would be considered one of the Caucasians on the outside looking in that Paul Beatty takes aim at in 1996's The White Boy Shuffle.
Primarily a poet, Beatty's debut novel is a paradoxically rambling yet tight coming-of-age tale tracking the exploits of one Gunnar Kaufmann, an obscenely gifted young black man growing up in 1980s Los Angeles. Gunnar introduces himself by way of his ancestry, a procession of shameless servants to the white man, from the man who accidentally kicked off the War of Independence to the ballet-composing great-great-great grandfather who voluntarily subjected himself to slavery, to Gunnar's own estranged father now working as a sketch artist for the LAPD. Gunnar himself grows up in an affluent neighbourhood in Southern California, up until the point his mother decides his experience thus far hasn't been "black" enough and promptly relocates the family to an entirely non-white area of the city, named The Hillside here but likely based on Compton. At first, Gunnar struggles to fit in in pretty much any way, but gradually learns to make the most of what he has. It's here that the book really kicks off, introducing a host of colourful characters and plot lines. Gunnar discovers a God-given talent for basketball despite never having played before, joins the city's most hopeless gang (The Gun Totin' Hooligans, hopeless because, despite their name, they refuse to carry guns) and by way of friend Nicholas is introduced to jazz and intellectualism. For all the success basketball brings him, he discovers his true talent is poetry, and begins spray painting his work on the neighbourhood walls.
This all makes for an entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud read - made all the more enjoyable by Beatty's exceptionally good prose style. His background in poetry is clear to see, the words veritably tumbling off the page in a flurry of alliteration, assonance and wordplay, and the poems he creates for Gunnar are worthy of a collection in their own right.
But as fun as all this sounds, The White Boy Shuffle is not without its heavier moments, especially as it moves into the final third. Accepting a scholarship to Boston University, Gunnar becomes increasingly disillusioned with the classmates and academics who worship his every move just because of his colour, the black student groups who defeat their own object with their rabid exceptionalism, and the feeling that none of it matters anyway. His trips around the country to play basketball with Nicholas become less fun as the white crowds continue to turn on him, he can't attend class for fear of being mobbed, and despite his best efforts to shun the attention of the black student groups, he ends up becoming a cult leader to them anyway. Once Nicholas commits suicide, Gunnar heads with his Japanese mail-order wife back to LA to establish a commune for minorities, ultimately turning his back on the world and daring the government to drop a nuclear bomb on the city to solve the issue once and for all.
Beatty tackles some truly weighty themes: hypocrisy on all sides, the inherent racism and classism that pervades American society and the fundamental ineffectiveness of idealism, and satirises them all with little mercy. The White Boy Shuffle is a million miles removed from any life I'll ever know, but it certainly made me understand a bit better why being black in America is quite so hard. Beatty's concluding verse sums it up in all its painful simplicity:
Like the Reverend King I too "have a dream" but when I wake up I forget it and remember I'm running late for work.
4.5/5
Twenty years on and Kendrick Lamar is still having to say all the same things.
Every now and then, I like to read something completely different. And it doesn't get much more "different" than Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the personal account of Colonel Jim Corbett about his exploits in tracking the tigers and leopards posing a threat to the citizens of Northern India in the 1920s and 30s. Born and raised in the area, Corbett spent his childhood learning the ways of the jungle, and it was from this background that he came to be seen as the only man to be called on to help the local population, of whom an estimated 1200 were killed by various animals at the time.
I found Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and I am sure that this is as a result of its having been written in 1944, to be a book of bizarre contrasts. Corbett clearly possessed a talent for descriptive writing, and combined with his exceptional knowledge of the area's flora and fauna, creates a wonderfully vivid image of the jungles and valleys in which he stalks the tigers. He was also clearly a great lover of nature and is keen to stress that man should make great efforts to limit his impact upon it. All of which goes out of the window somewhat as he goes around shooting tigers, deer, birds and landing hundreds of fish. While his reasons for it were fair enough - to protect the lives of others, and for food - it did seem something of a contradiction to me. Likewise, in his interactions with the local population, Corbett describes their cultures and customs in a way that only someone who had put in the time and effort to understand and appreciate them could - but is more than happy to be waited on hand and foot whenever he reaches a village, and of course is clear on the point that the locals are incapable of sorting out their own problems with these animals. On balance though, Corbett takes care to describe the reasons that these tigers became dangerous to humans - always some form of injury or illness that rendered them unable to hunt their usual prey - and the fact he shows any respect to local culture at all is admirable given the historical context.
Otherwise, the book was an enjoyable enough read, despite some archaic language use and a liberal sprinkling of (what I assume to be) Pubjabi or Hindi loan words with little explanation. Corbett makes the hunts as much about the build up as the actual kills themselves, leading to some heart-stopping moments as he suddenly finds himself face to face with a man-eating tiger after days of tracking, or almost running out of time to find his quarry after six weeks in the wild and the prospect of letting down the locals weighing over him. He takes care to explain his tracking techniques, based on a staggering knowledge of the network of interactions between animal life in the region, and switches up narrative styles by including first-hand anecdotes by villagers who had survived encounters with the animals and official reports from the time. There are even some moments of (perhaps unintentional) humour, as Corbett drops in incidental details probably deserving of chapters in their own right. "That house was definitely haunted, but this isn't a book of ghost stories", and "at that point we were almost killed by a leopard but I'm talking about a tiger at the moment" were two highlights from this point of view.
Ultimately, Man-Eaters of Kumaon is an interesting throwback to a time when man and nature were still not quite on equal terms, a time when the British Empire was still very much in force in India, and an account from a man whose own story is often more interesting than those he is telling.
4/5
There was a whole range of songs I could have gone with here, but with apologies to Nelly Furtado I had to go with the one that reflected Corbett's prose style best. So many tigers...
It's fair to say that I've shown more of an interest in language than most over the course of my life. I wouldn't have ended up with an MA in translation and gone on to work in the field otherwise - and I wouldn't be looking to add more and more languages to my collection if that interest wasn't ongoing. Linguistics, however, is an area of language I haven't touched on much, despite being one that I find very interesting. As it turned out, David Crystal's A Little Book of Language, a crash course on the huge range of topics that fall under that umbrella, was a very good entry point.
Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on linguistics, but this particular book dials back the academic side of things, being presented for children. This meant that the style was simple, the content laid out in a straightforward manner, and everything backed up with plenty of practical examples. And as good as my technical knowledge of language - or rather languages - may be, I appreciated it for all of these things. As Crystal says, the study of language is perhaps the biggest field of study of all, and I'm sure I would have felt lost at least in some places had things not been spelled out so clearly.
That being said, there were moments where I wished that he had been a bit more direct. While the examples were useful, there were also a lot of them; at times too many for my liking for the sake of making what could be quite simple points. And the writing style as a whole came across at times like a grandfather rambling on to his grandchildren, whether they showed any interest or not.
Ultimately, though, there was a lot to enjoy here, and a lot to learn. For instance, how the majority of the world's languages have never been properly studied and mapped out, to the extent that we still have no idea how most languages outside of the Indo-European sphere relate to each other. Or that we probably never will, as one language is lost every couple of weeks. And how even languages that have been studied for centuries, like English, are far from being completely documented in terms of their every usage.
Best of all were the chapters on the very first stages of language - the ways in which parents adapt their speech patterns to pass language onto their children, who then go through a multitude of processes to form sound, combine sounds to form words, and then words to speak coherently. It seems like an impossible task when broken down that way, and I was left amazed that we ever managed to talk at all.
4/5
So I can only imagine the amount of brainpower that would go into something like this:
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been my favourite book since I first read it at the age of 17, and I have yet to come across anything since that matches it in terms of its combination of genuinely epic scope combined with microscopic attention to detail, and passage after passage that resonate even after multiple readings and a million times removed from the situation in which Heller found his inspiration.
So how can you create a sequel to perfection? Well, Heller tried, although it took him over 30 years, and the result, like a lot of sequels, is a long way short of what came before. Not to say that Closing Time is a bad book; far from it.
Set in 1994, it catches up with three of the more interesting characters from Catch-22 to survive World War II - protagonist Yossarian, who has made his fortune, started a family and is now faced for the second time with a genuine prospect of death; Milo Minderbinder, who, having expanded his trade empire into a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, is now trying to sell planes to the government; and the squadron chaplain, pursued by the FBI for his ability to produce tritium organically. Heller fills in the events in their lives since the war ended - and since the fate of all three was ambiguous at the end of Catch-22, it was actually quite nice to hear that things had been going relatively well. While it was slightly disappointing that Yossarian's solution to the titular catch had failed, it was necessary for the purposes of this book that he was still caught in it, and all three are provided with a certain amount of closure as to their problems in the first book.
That only accounts for half of the plot, however, the rest being given over to Sammy Singer, who appears in Catch-22 although I believe not by name, and his childhood friend Lew Rabinowitz, who served in the war as an infantryman. These parts I found harder to get through; their tales of working-class Jewish life in Coney Island almost impossible to identify with and the fact that Heller writes them in a much more conventional prose style to be very jarring with the rest of the book. There were some moments of poignancy but these were few and far between, and I had to wonder why Heller had decided to include this plot line at all.
But there was much to like elsewhere; more than enough, in fact, that I could enjoy the book as a whole. Heller's dialogue positively fizzes back and forth between characters, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines, and he finds room to slip in quite a few catch-22 scenarios for the present day. None of this is anything like on the level of Catch-22 itself, but he had an impossible act to follow in that respect. And indeed the book stands on its own at times as well, as Heller slices through late 20th-century consumerist excess, the everlasting obtuseness of military bureaucracy (the scenes where Milo pitches his new stealth bomber to a bickering group of government advisers are by far the best in the novel), and the it-couldn't-happen-could-it ludicrousness of American politics, as the book's unnamed president inadvertently brings about nuclear Armageddon by mistake while playing a video game.
So all in all, it's not a bad follow up to the best book of all time - in lots of ways a spiritual successor, in other ways trying to do something a bit different and for the most part succeeding at both. It's almost as funny, almost as sad, and way more bizarre - and given the bar that had been set for it, that's no mean achievement.
4/5
This is a book about the end, and the book itself states that this is the soundtrack to it. I can kind of see it.
A week's holiday requires some easy reading - and it doesn't get much easier than Nick Spalding. Having read a couple of his books, I consider myself a fan, and so it wasn't too much of a challenge to get through two more in a matter of days.
Life... With No Breaks was Spalding's debut, and actually his most interesting concept - could he write a fully fleshed book in 24 hours? Well, yes and no. Firstly because it took (slightly) longer than that, and secondly because the result isn't your average book. It's more of a conversation with the reader, as Spalding takes considerable time to introduce himself and recap why he has set himself this challenge. From there, though, it is an interesting and enjoyable read as he slides between topics nicely, bemoaning various aspects of modern British life and veritably churning out one-liners in the process. And he's not afraid to go deeper, touching on death, his divorce, previous failures in the literary sphere and the inevitable passage of time. I also found it a good indication of the origin of his writing style, which I have found inflexible in the past - it turns out his characters all talk like he does. All in all it's an interesting idea well executed.
Mad Love is a much more conventional rom-com novel that follows a man from London and a woman from California as a dating website, as a publicity stunt, singles them out for marriage based on the compatibility of their profiles. The prospect of £30,000 and a rent-free year in a penthouse flat is enough to convince Adam, a video game reviewer, and Jessica, a student in nutrition, to go through with it. The wedding itself is dealt with quickly, and the plot soon settles into a routine of arguments as it turns out their profiles may not have been entirely honest. Mad Love lacks, for the most part, the ingredients that got me into Spalding's other work - the laugh-out-loud moments, well-constructed scenes and memorable characters. The ending was predictable, and the dialogue just didn't quite work at times. But the book as a whole was saved by a moment of breathtaking sadness that proved that, if Spalding ever decides to write something serious, he would probably do a very good job.
All in all, I pretty much knew what to expect going in and both books delivered - lighter than air, capable of raising a smile, and a much-needed break before going back into the heavy stuff.
Life... With No Breaks - 3.5/5
Mad Love - 3/5
Life... With No Breaks seems to have anticipated a trend that has recently emerged in music of writing fully-formed songs in as little time as possible. This is the best combination of time/result:
It wasn't until around the age of 12 that I realised I was quite good at sports. Until then I had been limited to a few modest appearances for my school's lower rugby teams, and had been improving rapidly at swimming since the age of about five. But that year, I found myself picking up any sport I tried in PE with relative ease - hockey, basketball, softball and more. Even in the traditional schoolboy pursuits of football and cricket, where my prior lack of talent had led me to believe I wasn't an athlete, I started to find myself performing well above average. Fast forward ten years and after varying levels of success in athletics, squash, rugby, American football and swimming and water polo - often training in several of these at any one time - I found myself dropping back down to simply water polo. It was just the sport where I found it easiest to stay competitive at a high level: I enjoyed and relished the training in a way I no longer did for anything else. And not that I was exactly world class, but I have always wondered where that sudden change came from; whether any sporting talent had lain dormant since birth, or if simply sticking at it for long enough meant that I improved where others who hadn't put in the practice didn't.
In The Sports Gene, American writer and former collegiate middle distance runner David Epstein discusses this dichotomy at length. He begins, appropriately, with examples of both sides of the argument. Specifically, Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm who, despite his relatively small stature, had the fortune to grow up near one of Europe's premier indoor track and field facilities. From childhood, he devoted hours to the high jump, and peaked with a gold at the Athens Olympics. However, in the 2007 World Championships he was defeated by Donald Thomas, a Bahamian who had taken up the event only a year earlier on a bet. So, Epstein states, it is possible to succeed in sport through both relentless practice and by being genetically gifted. But it is the extent to which these might be linked that forms the bulk of the book, and by far its most interesting passages.
Epstein delves into a wide range of sports and scientific ideas, from the ability of elite level athletes to identify a game situation after being shown an image faster than the human brain should be able to process, to the fact that it might actually be arm length rather than height that fuels basketball success, onto the work in identifying genetic variation in humans that might pinpoint the area of sport where an individual might excel.
In essence this is a compendium of sports biology, but Epstein saves it from reading like a journal entry by his ability to spin a yarn. He introduces a host of eccentric characters in the field, from the Greek geneticist obsessed with mapping the genomes of Jamaican sprinters, to the American who travels to Kenya each year to hold distance running trials for academically gifted teenagers who have never run a race in their life. All of the teenagers belong to a single ethnic group, the Kalenjin, and nearly all of those selected go on to full athletic scholarships at American colleges. There is also a truly heartwarming story of a recovering drug addict from Alaska who went on to become the greatest sled dog racer of all time by identifying huskies with an innate desire to keep running and breeding that trait into a whole team. Epstein ends with his own travels in Finland speaking to the family of one of the country's greatest ever cross country skiers - quite a few of whom possess a genetic mutation increasing their red blood cell count to superhuman levels. I can't pretend to have understood all of the science, but it is presented so clearly and accessibly that I found myself learning a lot about the basic concepts.
There were a few issues, however. In making his work entertaining, Epstein has a habit of diverging into unnecessarily flowery prose at times, which I found slightly irritating. The science behind all of this remains largely a new branch and he is careful to remind the reader that the studies he mentions have either not been repeated or deal with such a specific group that they can't be considered representative of humanity as a whole. As he says, it is possible through gene mapping to identify about a billion people in the world who have absolutely no chance of making the Olympic 100m final - but the people themselves could already have told you that. I also feel that he missed a fairly obvious conclusion in that when the traits of physical suitability and an obsession with training coincide in an individual, you get athletes that transcend their sport - the Cristiano Ronaldos, Serena Williamses and Lebron Jameses of the world.
Ultimately, though, I found it absolutely fascinating that we may one day be able to discover the genetic keys to elite athletic ability, and this book was the ideal introduction into a very complex field. I was happy enough to take away the fact that my swimming ability might just be down to my relatively short legs - the same length, in fact, as Michael Phelps'. Never mind that he is four inches taller and blessed with the desire to spend eight hours a day in a pool...
4/5
Really this was just an opportunity to learn obscure facts about sports I don't usually follow.
Brace yourself, this could get long. Almost certainly not as long, though, as David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. It's not often that the mere size of a book becomes a talking point in itself, but weighing in at well over 1000 pages and including over 200 pages of footnotes to the main text and further end notes to those footnotes, the work has become infamous for being physically difficult to read. Stories have circulated of readers tearing it apart to make it more manageable, and it is recommended that three bookmarks are employed to keep track of its hugely complicated structure. I consider myself very fortunate to live in an age where technology has made such issues obsolete, but even tackling the book in Kindle form was a serious challenge - flicking into the final chapter and being faced with over 14 hours of reading still to go was a sobering moment indeed.
In his (excellent) introduction, Wallace's contemporary Dave Eggers discusses the idea of whether students of literature (crucially rather than fans of reading in general, although I consider myself a member of both groups) should feel a duty to read Infinite Jest. His conclusion is that they should, if only to witness the limits to which the medium can be stretched, and as someone who has set aside the time to listen to the entirety of The Constructus Corporation's three-and-a-half hour electronic-sci-fi-rap masterpiece The Ziggurat and to watch the entirety of the three-and-a-half hour redux cut of Apocalypse Now, this was enough to sell it to me.
At the end of last year I decided that this would be the only book I had to read in full this year, and while I finished it long before the "deadline" I was glad I had given myself room to breathe. Wallace's prose is more often than not treacle-slow, and while the reading certainly got easier as it went on I found it a bit of a slog throughout. He is also fond of repetition, and while characters making what is essentially the same point in different ways for up to 20 pages at a time was surprisingly entertaining, I found it had an almost hypnotic effect on me on occasion - there being effectively no point to get to, and often no conclusion then being found as the narrative swerved off into a completely different plot thread. His syntax, too, can be absolutely brutal at times, with paragraph-long sentences often requiring three or more reads in order to work out what was actually happening. And though all of this may seem critical, the writing is redeemed by Wallace's spectacular range of vocabulary and expression. It reminded me at times of avant-garde rap lyrics, with alliteration, assonance and internal rhymes cropping up all over the place to keep the words oozing along. I consider Oscar Wilde to be just about the pinnacle of English-language usage, and while Infinite Jest is completely incomparable, it was the best-written book I have read in a very long time.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a film. Specifically, one that is so absorbingly entertaining that anyone who watches it feels compelled to rewind and watch it again - and again and again until they expire from dehydration or starvation or the like. Meeting on a cliff in the American desert, a cross-dressing secret agent and a member of a wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist movement discuss, in great depth, possible weaponisation of the film. At a tennis academy in Boston, the son of the producer of this film, since dead by his own hand, goes through the trials of becoming a world-class sportsman and of being a teenager in America. Next to that academy, the residents of a halfway house for recovering addicts of various kinds go through their recovery process. And as the novel goes on, these three main plots begin to intersect. The above is a massive oversimplification, of course - Wallace creates a world in this book to a depth I have never seen before and will likely never see again. Characters who, in shorter works, would have been inconsequential or not even mentioned at all - the tennis academy janitor or a shop owner murdered by the Quebecois separatists, for example - are given rich, detailed back stories and sometimes even chapters of their own, where it seems the narrative is going to follow them in the long term, only to be dropped and often never heard of again. The overlapping of the plots happens slowly, insidiously, often through singular allusions by characters or the narrative that might be easily missed - indeed, I'm sure I missed the majority, and a re-read will be essential to truly appreciate the patchwork of stories that grows and then shrinks in elliptical form as the book reaches its eventual end.
As for the main plots, I most enjoyed the scenes at the academy; I suppose as the easiest to relate to. Young Hal Incandenza, precocious, studious, and just really, really good at tennis, is arguably one of two characters in the book to receive a comprehensive profile from Wallace, and as such his journey is enjoyable to follow as he tries to juggle school work, an exhausting athletic schedule, a creeping drug dependency and the host of bizarre characters he calls friends and superiors at the academy, all overshadowed by the still-fresh memories of the death of his father. While some readers complain that the tennis match scenes are too in-depth, I actually found myself wishing that Wallace had taken more time to dwell on them. A former talent himself, he manages to hit upon the idiosyncrasies that make the game one of the hardest of all - the essential mental and physical control and discipline required simply not to crack while being exposed as an individual under the gaze of all in an arena where the margin for error is truly microscopic. He manages to draw out an almost zen-like quality to the sport, a counterpoint to an increasingly hyperactive society.
The other two main threads were still both enjoyable in their way, and likewise contained some real truths about the nature of life, society and the human condition. In particular the story of Don Gately, the other fully-formed character, formerly hopelessly addicted to alcohol and painkillers but now sober and working as a warden at the halfway house, I found genuinely inspiring in terms of how a combination of a good soul and a solid work ethic were able to help him overcome an abusive childhood and his subsequent, almost inevitable, spiral into addiction and reckless behaviour. Similarly some of the exchanges between the two men undercover suggested to me that Wallace really did have answers to some of humanity's biggest questions.
This is reflected, too, in the world in which he sets his book. The events take place some time around the mid-00s, i.e. the not-too-distant future at the time of writing, and some of his observations have been shown to be eerily accurate. The general connectedness of society, working-class America's opiate problem and the trend of the biggest companies buying out all conceivable rivals were arguably predictable for someone with their finger on the pulse in the 90s. While Donald Trump wasn't (officially) an independent candidate, his rise to power on the back of a wave of anti-establishment reactionary voting seems a lot like that of Johnny Gentle, famous crooner, who heads up the book's government of the new US-Canadian-Mexican supernation; but that had arguably been seen before with the likes of Reagan and Carter. Less easy to explain, however, are visions of on-demand video services threatening the livelihood of network television, and technology that essentially amounts to Skype and Snapchat. To repeat, this was written in 1996, and Wallace himself claimed to have never used the internet until after publication. But rather than saying he possessed psychic powers or some inside line into the future of technology, I think this is more down to his spectacular ability to dissect human nature - we have these things now not because they are possible, but because we wanted them. Certainly, I won't be surprised in future if we see the names of years being sold to the highest bidder, or America dealing with its waste problem by catapulting rubbish into a huge pit on the Canadian border (in one of the book's less subtle metaphors).
The entry so far may seem like gushing to a certain extent, but I would like to balance that by adding that Infinite Jest is not without some sizeable flaws. Do I think it would have benefited hugely from a more aggressive editing process? Absolutely. And, love or hate the book as a whole, I am sure that nearly everyone who has made it to the end will have felt hugely disappointed with the way it halts abruptly in the middle of all of its plotlines, leaving just about everything unresolved. In fact, the ending was enough to bump it down a spot to number three on my all-time list, but ultimately I can still say with confidence that this is one of the best books I have ever read. I feel a greater appreciation of literature, my vocabulary has been expanded and I'd even go as far as to say as my world view has been altered. The next one is definitely going to be a bit lighter, though.
5/5
And you have to laugh, because what other choice have you got?
I have long been a fan of David Wong's writing. At a time of my life when I was spending far too much time browsing through the articles on cracked.com, I found that, while his content generally wasn't as interesting as some of their other columnists, he was probably the most talented as a writer, with an agile turn of phrase that elevated him above the crowd and suggested he could go on to achieve more.
So it's not too surprising that he has fostered a successful career as a novelist. His debut, John Dies at the End, was a well-deserved break-out hit, a thoroughly enjoyable horror romp through small-town America with a number of unexpected twists and some imaginative world building along the way. Its sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, took it all a step further, with a grander scope and clever interplay between two narrative viewpoints. Then came Fancy Suits and Futuristic Violence, still my favourite of his novels, an outstanding near-future sci-fi work blending action, comedy and social commentary.
So I was disappointed to conclude that his latest book missed the mark somewhat. Picking up from a few months after where Spiders left off, it finds the protagonist David, his best friend John, and girlfriend Amy still residing in their small town (location undisclosed for security reasons) and now working as something like freelance paranormal investigators. So when a child goes missing, they are called in to work out how she could have disappeared from her bedroom with no sign that anyone else had been there. Perhaps the fact she predicted her own kidnapping could have something to do with it too...
From there, the action unfolds from three perspectives as told alternately by the three protagonists, and I felt as though all of the book's shortcomings ultimately stem from this approach. It didn't help that I found all three characters much less likeable this time around, as David mopes from scene to scene, John's puerile exaggerations run out of steam and Amy's hand-wringing nervousness starts to grate very early on. And the plot is just a mess, as various monsters flit in and out, an Iraq veteran goes on the warpath, a biker gang pursue their kidnapped children and an inter-dimensional order attempts to control things. And while not enough attention is really given to any of these threads, creating a hyperactive story line, the narrative felt somehow ponderous. Without wishing to give too much away, the fact that David and John can see things for how they really are means that the actions of the other characters - their minds under the monsters' control - become frustrating and irritating. The parts told by Amy in particular do little to advance things as we already know she's not seeing the whole picture. The supporting cast are, as a consequence, underdeveloped. And I found the ending to be very weak, as hardly anything is resolved at all.
That's not to say that this book is a complete loss. The dialogue still snaps, the interactions between David and John in particular are at times genuinely funny, and Wong's imagination when it comes to creating supernatural beings really is unlike anything else I've come across. So while I don't think he's run out of ideas just yet, it would take something pretty special to keep this particular series going.
2.5/5
Here's some more supernatural, Midwestern hyperactivity:
